Steve Stewart-Williams || How the Mind and Culture Evolve

the podcast. Doctor Stuart Williams is the New Zealander who moved to Canada, then to Wales and then to Malaysia, where he is now an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus. His first book, Darwin, God and the Meaning of Life, was published in twenty ten and his latest book is called The Ape That Understood the Universe, How the Mind and Culture Evolved. Steve, great to chat with you today. Hi, Scott, how are

you doing. I'm pretty good. I'm pretty good. How are you, Yeah, I'm good. Thanks man. So I've been following your Twitter feed for a couple of years now. Oh great, yeah, and I've watched this sort of rise of doctor Steve Stewart Williams and the popularity. You've noticed that too, right, you've noticed that. You know, over the past couple of years you get a lot more likes than your posts. Yeah. Yeah, yes, it's sort of it's grown exponentially. Yeah, what do you

attribute to, uh my good looks? So it's just that one picture you put up on Twitter yourself. Yeah, that that was the turning point. I don't know, I don't know. I read quite a bit, and I guess I just got mental habit of funding bits and paces that jump out of me and that spot my interest. It's greenshotting them, putting them up things like that. Well, that's cool. Yeah,

your work really is broad. I mean you cover you're very interested in all of human nature and not just the nice bits, but it includes the nice bits but also the naughty bits of human nature as well. Right, And you know what we are we evolved as a as a whole species, and what we have in common with other animals. You start out your book, your new book, with this aliens challenge. You know, what would happen if an alien dropped in on a how to view our species,

particularly if the alien was from beetle guys three. Yeah, yeah, as the planet that you talked about there. So I thought that was the craft of this whole you know, imaginative scenario. And you know, I was cracking up. It's funny to view human I mean, it's what comedians do every day, right, they view humans. Yeah, from a planet perspective. But you got a chance to play with that as a scientist, you know. So do you want to talk a little about what these aliens would think of what

you refer to as us crazy meat robots. Yeah? Sure, So long story or short, I guess is that the aliens would they be quite puzzled by. So set it up. So, this is an alien that doesn't have male and female. It doesn't full love, it doesn't doesn't have families. It's cultural institutions that we do, such as religions and art and music things like that. So pretty much everything that we do and a lot of the stuff that's most central to our species and that we take most for granted,

just unfamiliar to this hypothetical alien. So it's puzzled by all that. I also highlight some of the ways in which our species is different than other animals. We should be sort of an additional layer of puzzlement for the aliens. And then I pivot to so I focus on some of the areas that I get into later in the book. So sex differences. Now this is an asexual alien, doesn't

have male female. So it's going to be puzzled initially by the fact that most humans are either male or female, and that the males and females differ in a number of ways. That differ physically, they also differ on average in a number of psychological ways. It's going to be puzzled by the fact that people fall in love. It's going to be puzzled by the fact that people who have fallen in love get upset if the person they're

in love with becomes involved with somebody else. Another thing that might puzzle the alien sign is the fact that we tend to channel parental care toward our own the offspring rather than just sort of any old offspring. Where we're quite selective and how we are and how we distribute parental care. The alien might say, why shouldn't we

just help everybody? It will be puzzled by how good we are to our relatives because the alien doesn't have family, but also how compared to most other animals, we're very good to non relatives as well. We often cooperate a lot with non relatives. That's some of the nice stuff. And then moving into the cultural sphere, it'd be puzzled by the fact that we have invisible beings that we

pray to. It'd be puzzled by the fact that we synchronize our behavior to different tones and things like that, and how we spend hours staring at flat screens and admiring splotches of color on canvas and all these other kind of odd cultural things that we do as well. You know, as I see this thought experiment, it actually makes me appreciate being human more and maybe had the

opposite effect. Oh no, maybe that was the But it's like there's an ironic effect there where I realized, like I start to feel empathy for the alien as being so lacking in fundamental humanity, do you know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's interesting because there are like humans that probably you know, you know, I always wonder like, what is it like if you were a bona fide psychopath, right, what would

the world look like? And it must feel for a lot of them, like why do people hug each other? Why do people love each other? Like they must not compute? Absolutely, Yeah, you see what I'm saying. So your thought experiment is real for some humans probably on this area. Yeah. I think it's a really good point. And I think with psychopaths we often think about the bad effects they have on other people. But I guess something else is that they're messing out on a lot of stuff, right that

the rest of us, you know, get to enjoy. Yeah. I've always been uh, just had compassion for like all variation, right, as long as they're not like killing me, you know, yeah, or anyone else really. But anyway, So it was funny and it was really quite profound, you know that opening a good way to start a book, by the way, you know it really it kind of hooks you in. You said something, you said, humans are strange fish, I mean, then you know, and then you talk a lot about

about how we're EPs? Are we are fish? Epe hybrid? What are we? Well? The way the aliens looking at it, so tetrapods, so mammals and reptiles and birds and amphibians were all the traditional way to say that we evolve from fish. But a lot of cladists would argue that actually, in a certain sense, it makes sense to say that we actually are fish. We belong to that clade. We're a sort of sub branch of this clade that we

call fish. That's not the everyday way to use the language, but it is maybe how the alien would see it. It wouldn't draw the distinction that we naturally do between fish that are in the water and at the land fish as the alien says it. So to the alien and Neil Schubn the paleontologists actually the same way. He

once said. I heard a talk where he said that when he looks at a picture of Einstein, so most people see they see a physicist, They see the guy that came up with equals mc squared, They see this genius. He said, what he sees is a crazy morphed out fish, because we're all from fish, and we're still in a certain sense a little reactionistic. Indeed. Indeed, yeah, so we are apes. We belong to that group, but apes belong to the fish group in this way of looking at it,

and yeah, that's how the aliens sort. I think it captures something true, which is that we do belong to that group. We are fish like in a number of ways. Our limbs from our arms are modified fins, for instance, and our jaws are modified what's the word girls, Yeah, modified girls, modified girls. Yeah, So that's the sense in which we're modified sort of morphed out fish. We're other stuff too, though I always thought of as fish as modified humans. Okay, so look, there are so many different

ways we can go here. I think that in order to really build up to the climax of your thesis, we should do this in steps. So let's start with a good grounding of the first meter of your book, which is evolutionary psychology, and then we'll get into why evolution is not enough. But let's start with evolutionary psychology. How does that singular perspective? How far does that take us in understanding human nature? It takes us quite a long way. So it's based on the sort of the

genes I view of evolution. So the basic idea is that natural selection creates organisms that are designed to pass on their genes. And the rationale for that is that, so if you mentioned that you were a gene and you had in fact on the organism in which you're sitting that caused it not to have offspring it and not to pass itself on, or if it did so less confidently than your neighbor, then you are going to

disappear from the gene pool. So the genes that stick around in the gene pool are the ones that have effects that mean that they will be passed on at a faster rate than competing versions of the same genes. And that applies to the body. That applies as well to the mind, certain sort of foundational aspects of the mind base. Yeah it doesn't stop it the neck, I'm afraid. Yeah, yeah, sorry to break it to you. Ah. So basic emotions like like fair For instance, fear sort of motivates behavior.

Motivates us to stare clear of danger, stare clear of the edge of the cliff, run away from the bear, whatever it is, and that leads us to survive, which gives us more opportunity to to have offspring and ultimately pass on our genes. Same sort of story for sexual desire that has has the same effect and obvious kind of way leads us to engage in behaviors that, in the absence of contraception as least result in offspring, parental love, same deal. We look after these little offspring once they're

pair on the scene. That's the basic kind of idea of evolutionary psych. Those examples I think probably reasonably uncontroversial. I think evolutionary psych though it takes a little further, it takes it to explain other aspects of human behavior that do push it into some more controversial borders. Pure

aquey when we're talking about the mind, indeed, exactly. Yeah, And you know, you go through a lot of pictions of evolution that are not as true and complex, don't fully capture the complexity of the matter, and you kind of work your way up. I thought that was really neat. So you talk about, you know, some people talk about, I think evolutions survival of the fittest, and that's not quite right, right, Yeah, I mean, it does tend to favor survival. You've got to survive in order to reproduce

and to look out to ken. But if you were to, for instance, that survive for a thousand years but never have any offspring, then the moment that you did finally die, well, your gene is going to go out of existence just as surely as if you'd survive for twenty seconds. So survival alone is not enough. So if you rule that out for a start, at the very least, you need to reproduce and have offspring. Okay, So then some people might think like, oh, well, then we're really just baby

making machines. You know, that's what the organisms are going for. Talk to me a little about that. Well, that's a step in the right direction, but it doesn't cover all adaptations. So one problem is, say you had a thousand babies. If none of those babies survive to adulthood, then again you're going to have as few genes go forward into the future as if you just had no offspring. So

you need to have babies that survive to have babies themselves. Basically, the number of ways you can do this one is it's just like a numbers game. A lot of species and lots of insects, for instance, just pump out fish, just pump out tons and tons and tons of offspring, most of which we don't make it and just a tiny minority do. The approach that mammals and birds take though, is they had many fewer offspring, but they invest a

lot more into each individual offspring. It's different parts of the same goal, but it's not just about producing offspring. It's about producing those offspring, bringing them those offspring to breeding age as well, and it's a further step in the right direction. Yeah, you know it just thought. Don't mean that, you know, I mean, I totally agree, Like humans are really strange in the animal kingdom and in so many ways. But one way is like we can

be evolutionarily losers and be human success stories. Yep, Like isn't that fascinating to think about? Like, you know, because when we get into these kinds of discussions, I think a lot of a lot of misunderstanding. You'd be the first one to say there are a lot of misunderstandings about evolutionary psychology. But there's this misunderstand that like, you know, people get so emotional about it when we talk about it from the Genesi perspective when we really shouldn't get that.

We're talking about like kind of like psychopath perspective that it exists, you know, you know, we want to understand it. It doesn't care about us. The organism, you know, the

Genei perspective doesn't care. It just wants to propagate itself in the future and in fact, we have this peculiar ability as a whole organism to override that to a certain extent, you know, not a limited freedom, but we have this amazing ability to say, you know what, I'm going to define success differently than you, mister gen or missus Gens. You know, do you know what I mean? I totally message gens who cares what they want? Right? Yeah, it's our goals and ambitions seem to come quite detached

from the evolutionary basis. That is fascinating, right, And so we might choose rather than having tons and tons of kids, we might decide instead that we want to devote ourselves to some other cause. Yeah, in a way that I think is quite unique to human beings. We do that, devote ourselves to creativity and then just jump in the gun. But you know, like producing works that live on through generations is also a form of cultural success. Right. So yeah,

so we're gonna get to that. We're gonna do that. Didn't mean to drop that just yet. Okay, So working our way up to the complexity of this, I'm gonna give you a statement and tell me if this will get you top marks. If I took a test in your class. Okay. Natural selection is all about inclusive fitness. Genes are selected if they enhance the inclusive fitness of their bearers. Adaptations are designed to maximize the organism's inclusive fitness and organisms taken as a whole, which I just

like that phrase, whole organism are inclusive fitness? Machine? Does that capture the complexity is more very very close? Yees, So you get a really good mark for that statement. So that's the next step beyond were before us plus or minus no I think as okay, maybe even an a maybe even okay. So it's not just about having offspring, right, that's what's called direct fitness. Inclusive fitness also includes what's called indirect fitness. So direct fitness is your personal reproductive success,

the number of offspring that you have. Indirect fitness is your contribution to the reproductive success of genetic relatives. And you need to add that on as well, add a bit more complexity, and then you get to the inclusive fitness perspective, which I think is an excellent account of most adaptations. So it includes survival adaptations for survival, adaptations for reproductive success, and also adaptations that increase the survival

and reproductive success are close relatives. Okay, so what would be the A plus the ALUs will the aplus have to go to a gene center perspective, You would have to go to a gene center perspective. So the inclusive fitness perspective basically talking about the organisms fitness in terms of you get selection for traits that maximize the organisms inclusive fitness, whereas the gene center view you get selection

for genes maximize their own fitness. And most of the time those two things are the same, So it's just two different ways of saying the same thing. There are cases though, where you have a gene that will be selected which does not actually enhance the inclusive fitness of its owners. An example would be like segregation distorted genes. So these are genes that so most genes, right, they've got fifty to fifty chants making it into a sperm

or into an egg. But segregation distorted genes are genes that have some kind of effect that means that they bias the coin flip, that they improve their chances they have a greater than fifty percent chance of getting into the gammy to the sperm or the egg now and doing that they either had no effect on the organism's inclusive fitness in some cases actually lower the organisms inclusive fitness, but they can nonetheless be selected just because they're good

for themselves. So in other words, this is an example that where the gene is getting selected but can't be explained in terms of inclusive fitness. So I think that sort of a case where the genes I view goes beyond inclusive fittaesus and because it can explain that case provides a more accurate view I think of what's going

on and the closest fitness. So you talk about how we're really rewriting our understanding of adaptations, what are some common misunderstandings of what an adaptation is and how are we writing that? Well, I think this kind of view changes the way we look at adaptations in a kind of interesting way. So, if you think of classic adaptations like the peacock's tail and effect, the peacock's tail is an adaptation designed to pass on the genes that give

rise to the peacocks tail. If you think of sharp teeth that the lion has, likewise, that's an adaptation designed to pass on those sharp teeth. And an individual organism. These things lead the peacock or lead the lion to

pass on all of their genes. But the genes that give rise to those traits that they're mixed and matched through the generations pretty much every other gene in the gene pool, and the only genes that they consistently benefit are the ones that actually give rise to those adaptations. So sort of ultimate effect is just to keep themselves in the gene point. So how does that rerate our understaning of adaptations? Well, what was the old view? Do

you know what I mean? Yeah, so the old view was from a more organism center view, so it was to enhanced inclusive fitness or the fitness of the organism and question. So, yeah, the peacocks tail is for the benefit of the peacock, for passing oxy genes to future progeny. It's turning that around. So the peacocks tail is instead for the benefit of the peacock, that the genes giving

rise to the peacocks tail. Okay, well that is interesting and it opens a windows what a group selection, right, and that is a very interesting form of selection that also takes us beyond this inclusive fitness only view. Right, So can you talk a little bit about group selection. I cande the group selection. It's kind of as a controversial idea in biology, and it has defenders and detractors. They're actually different versions of it. So one version it

doesn't actually take us beyond inclusive fitness theory. It's actually just another way of construing inclusive fitness fair enough. But a common view, though, is that it does go beyond. Some people argue David Sloan Wilson, for instance, argue that that as well as selection among individuals, you get selection

among different groups. So a group that does better, he argues, you can get selection for trades that actually make the individual that has those traits slightly worse off, if at the same time it makes the group in which that individual is operating perform better. So within groups, you have selection for traits that make the individual do better within that group, but then between groups you have selection for traits that make the group as a whole do better

compared to other groups. So it's inclusive fitness versus group beneficial traits. And does that actually happen? Yeah, I was going to ask, That's exactly what I was going to ask. Yeah, Now I'm not one hundred percent sure I would if you force me to take a side, I would put my money probably that it doesn't particularly happen. It could happen.

In principle, I think that group selection in the sense that it's something more than inclusive fitness, I think probably hasn't had any influence or much influence on our species or most others. I thinkably most of it's captured by inclosive fitness, you know. I mean this this gets us to altruism, doesn't it. And a real understanding of you know is everything you know the most diehard cynic you know, constance is like everything you do for others is really

just the end of the day ultimately selfish. And I actually really liked your nuanced distinction between altruism and selfishness. It was one of the most precise definitions I've seen in the whole literature. I mean, I've been reading this evolutionary psychology literature for more than a decade and I've never seen anyone pinpoint that. And it relates to some recent research I'm doing. So that's why I wanted to talk to you about it. Yeah, so you you make

a very good point. You say, well, sort of would occurred to me that altruisms. Now you sound like an all I was trying to do with your accent. That's sound like a passport. I know. It did all of a sudden like a queen, you know, queen mother. Okay, I won't do that again, but you know it will occurred to me that altruism. You're helping someone, but you're

getting intrinsic pleasure for it. And it made me think of like CONT's you know, kind of gourgical imperative, you know, like helping others as not as a means to an end, but as an end in itself. So I saw a great linkage there between what you said to const categorical imperative. I don't know if you thought about that, but it's in and then selfishness is well, you know, you're just helping someone as a means to solely benefit your own genome.

So this is a really really cool distinction. It links to and it really plays out and lots of you know, links to lots of things like. It even links to like And I always had to bring up Abraham as at least one scenary podcast chat because he really had so much figured out, even before evolush psychology. You know, he really understood a lot about human nature, and he really made the distinction between what he called be love being love, which is love for all human kind, and

getting intrinsic joy and pleasure in being loving. You know, that's what bee love is. It's being loving. You're not doing love, doing love so that you can X y Z right. Yeah, yeah, So the beg love is is that love for its own sake? Yes, that's what I was onto your altruism, yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, as opposed to love and altruism as a means to some other end. Yeah.

But then he also and this is where it links to recent research I'm working on, which I haven't talked about with anyone, but I thought it'd be fun to just improvisee you know, just riff and get your thoughts, you know, is that he also had this construct that

I'm trying to operationalize called healthy selfishness. So I have scales I just I'm working on this paper right now where I'm trying to empirically distinguish between unhealthy selfishness and healthy selfishness, and so even altruism aside, there's a form of selfishness where you're being selfish but it's not hurting anyone and it's benefiting you. And then there's sort of like psychopath type of selfishness, you know, like where it's

antagonistic and manipulately. Yeah, so you could actually be selfish as an end in itself as well and it not hurt anyone. So anyway, these are some distinctions I want put forward. I wanted to get your thoughts on what I just said, and he talked a little bit about how this relates to and maybe an emerging understanding of culture, the evolution of culture. I should say, yeah, yeah. First of all, I think go a bit to the cynics arguments.

With the cynics argue that we're not actually ever altruistic. It's never genuine altruism. It's always a means to some other end, whether that end is personal happiness or genetic propagation. I suppose I should say that. So I don't agree with the cynics on that. I do think that we are sometimes genuinely altruistic. H me too, by the way, Yeah, yeah, yeah, cool.

And I think, you know, people do sometimes think or they feel as if an evolutionary explanation for altruism kind of sucks the wind out of the sales of altruism and just renders it not real. And they treat it as if it unmasks altruism as actually being not real and ultimately just selfishness. I don't think that's true. I think one distinction I draw is between there are two

ways you can interpret it. Right, you could interpret it as at the approximate level, at that psychological level, we're actually selfish, and any altruistic act that we engage in, we actually full well know that we're actually doing it

for ourselves. And I think that's not true. I think sometimes we do have a secret, hidden motivations, but sometimes we just do care about other individuals and we help them just simply because we do care, you know, the occasional psychopath notwithstanding, I think most of us do that. And I guess Emmanuel Kant would come up there. He would argue that any truly good action you do purely out of a sense of duty, and not because you want to do it, you desire to do it, And

I disagree with that. Right, I think that the fact that that some people enjoy being altruistic doesn't imply that their altruism isn't real. I think the opfice is true. Really, I think that an altruistic person is somebody that does enjoy it being altruistic for its own sake, as opposed to to help achieve some other goal. You know. This relates to some other work I'm doing distinguishing pathological altruism from non pathological altruism empiricals. That seems like another distinction here.

That seems important because pathological altruism you don't enjoy. It's actually comes compulsive and you're not enjoying the helping. It's not spontaneously enjoyable. It's like any addiction. Right. That's interesting because we see some things that appear like altruism among humans that is really just like a compulsive need for self validation. In that sense, it is not an end

in itself. Do you know what I mean? Oh? Yeah, I tell you, And I guess it's probably worth distinguishing, right between whether altruism is adaptive in an evolutionary sense. That that's one question, and then a separate question would be whether it's adaptive in the everyday sense that we care about, right, and so, God, the sounds of a pathological altruism that's defined in terms of its effect on our wellbeing. Right, so, right, so who cares? Again? Who

cares about mister and missus gene? It doesn't matter if it's adaptive a mes sense, but in terms of how it affects the person, their well being, the well being of others around them. Yeah, that's right. So can you talk a little about why the evolutionary approach itself is not enough to understand such a weird species as Homo sapiens. Why do we need culture? Well, I think it's because

of culture that it's not enough. So somewhere along the line we sent to evolve that we evolved the capacity for culture, and I presume I think it's reasonable to say that that was because it was it was useful for us to have a bit of flexibility in our behavior, ability to acquire the behaviors that other people had figured out in the past, and to use tools and to prove the tools and so on and so on. So

that was sort of selected somewhere along the line. Once we have that flexibility, though, turned us into a kind of open system to a degree that's not true of other species. And so having put it in place. It kind of escaped the genetic leiche to quite a large extent. So there's a whole bunch of stuff that we do that can't be directly trest back to natural selection. It could be indirectly trest back and that we have this

capacity for flexible behavior and culture. But we have all these massive pedents of behavior and belief systems and institutions that evolve culturally rather than evolutionarily, And it came about through the evolution of means rather than the evolution of genes. So there's all sorts of weird stuff that we do which I don't think is explicable just from evolutionary psychology.

I totally agree with that. And you know, like culture enabling us to evolve things like language to the degree that it's evolved in us leading to consciousness, has given us this quirk where we have such flexibility and goal invention that doesn't exist among any other animal. I mean, we can have like my friend, my colleague Coliny Young, loves to say, like, well, where did like the motivation to be ski ball champion, you know, of the world,

Like setting that goal like cannot be directly explained. You know, one could say, well, it's tied to the self esteem a motive, Yes, but that misses the point that you've still created the content of a goal that cannot be directly linked to the natural selection process. Absolutely. Yeah, So I agree with that, and I really and by the way,

I like that you combine these two perspectives. It's not something you see all the time in discussions about evolutionary psychology, so or maybe even most of the you know, popular books on the topic. So I'm really appreciated you did that on the Psychology podcast. I trying to, you know, see linkages to things that interest me as well, and then we can kind of like come up with synthesis and integrations. I love. Is this exciting when that happens

in real time? Right? Yeah? I wrote a paper about ten years ago on how the big bang of cultural explosion that happened. People don't agree exactly. Was it twenty five thousand years ago? Was it forty thousand years ago? Okay? Yeah? The general trended says we go further back in time, yeah, right, yeah, and then Stephen Thinkers like made a good case for why it probably is even farther back. And yeah, but you know, really looking at the linkage between that cultural

explosion and creativity and human creativity. There was like zilt human creativity before that. Jeffrey Miller would say, well, our height of our creativity worth esthetic hand axes used to attract meats, which you do talk about in your book. You know what I mean. But I mean, like, let's compare like aesthetic hand axes for like two million years, you know, versus like what happened in this really short period of time where culture, you know, evolved and then

the capacities for creativity that came as a result. So I was wondering i'd be talking about culture. Have you thought about its linkages to understanding like how human creativity evolved has maybe separate from sexual selection? Yeah, I mean I do think creativity does. I don't have a strong view on how creativity evolved, but I don't think that as one hundred percent down to sexual selection. I don't know.

Creativity is so open ended, right, it can have effects that so many different domains, and it's useful for achieving any goal you care to name, from attracting a mate to being a skateboard champ or whatever it is, right activity, you can use that for any of those different goals. So I imagine that it was useful for all of them, and that selection what a favorite, a tendency to be able to creatively come up with good creative solutions to achieve whatever goals wanted to happen to have. Many of

wish to have office sort of evolutionary precedents. Right, So the desire to attract, to make, the desire to rise and status, that desire to just survived, look after your kids, all these kind of selection pressures. I think we're have favored it. Yeah, I like that, and it doesn't limit us to you know, well, where did creativity come from? It's either natural or sexual. We got nothing else, you know,

we have no other options. Well, you know, bringing in the cultural perspective does open us up to the idea that maybe certain plead on certain systems that we share with other animals, such as the general drive for exploration, for instance. I've been really interested in the drive for exploration is something that's not reductionistic to the meeting motive, because you know, seven year olds are explortive before pre puberty. There's great playfulness and create activity. I don't think Jeffrey's

model is quite complete there. When we're trying to understand a complete understanding. I think it partly explains it, and he's quite brilliant in his book, But if we really want to understand this phenomenon of human creativity and flexibility, which is exactly what you nailed, you know, there's kind of a more general drive as I see it, that we evolved that perhaps culture has really drawn out more

than it's done in like turtles. You know, there are very exportive turtles, but they haven't evolved the cultures kind of utilized it completely. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, indeed. So that's interesting, right, So what do you think what sort of selection pressures do you think favored the general exploratory,

playful kind of creativity that we have. I guess, like if Jeffrey was sitting here, I like to take other people's perspectives as well as my own, right, If he was sitting here, he'd like, well, come on, obviously, those who like were exportive to like take risks to get attract meats. To him, everything comes down to meats, you know, like everything, So he would probably say, like, well, the exportive drive originally evolved to attract meats, you know, but

we now use it for other things. But we could think of many, many reasons why exploration would have been important for fitness in lots of different things, you know, like even inclusive fitness. You know, even in altruism, there's lots of we don't have exist, yes, sorry, go on, looking after your kids, yeah, looking after your other relatives, Yeah, definitely.

And you know, just the fact that we conquered that was that drive that got us to travel to other continents, you know, to get out of Africa in the first place, right, you know, like we must have been impacting the course of human evolution even back then when we were you know, still when we weren't a single species, you know, when we were side by side with the Neanderthals, for instance, we probably outcompeted them and in part probably to our

sport of capacities, maybe also to our aggressive tendencies as well as we may have killed them. Unfortunately, we may have killed them, or we may have slept with all of their women. This is one of the theories, right, and then gene drift occurred. So anyway, look, I just love riffing you know, with you about this and really think about all these different things, and it is precisely the fact that you were bold enough to combine these two perspectives, that is what allowing me to riff on

this right now. So thank you. You know, it's like you open us up to a different kind of evolution, that is something that is it's fighting words to ever say uniquely human. Have you ever say that phrase among

an evolutionary psychologist? It they're fighting words. But I like to use the phrase uniquely developed because it doesn't get me in as much trouble if I say uniquely developed and we can agree that this kind of process you're talking about, like mimemic evolution, it's pretty uniquely developed among humans, right, isn't that a fair thing to say? I would say, yeah, there might be a touch of it, a little bit of it here and there in other spaces, but just

take it at a whole new level. I don't think there's any question about that, really. Yeah, So can you talk a little about mimemic evolution? How does it operate? You don't only rely on Dawkins, which was nice, and you make that clearer that you draw on a lot of different people who have studied this. But he was pretty you know, Richard Dawkins was pretty foundational. On talking about americavil should pep we talk about it a little bit. Yeah. Sure.

So the basic idea, basic meme theory idea is that so just in the same way that the genes that come to dominate in the gene pool are genes that have effects that cause them to stick around in the gene pool, So genes that are like selfish genes, genes that are good for themselves stick in the gene pool. Basically, Dawkins transplant that idea into the realm of culture. He said, you have cultural units, and he called those memes. He said,

which memes stick around? So the memes that are most likely to stick around are not necessarily the ones that are good for us, or often they are good for us, not necessarily the ones that are good for the groups in which those memes are found, although again often they are. But the bottom line is that to stick around, the memes that are going to be selected and that are going to come to the foreign of culture are going

to be those that are good for themselves. So selfish memes memes that have effects that keep them around in the culture. An example might be a meme that is good at grabbing your attention you notice it sticks in your mind, sticks in your memory. That's the first step.

The second step would be you have selection for memes that motivate people to pass them on in some way sort of an interesting idea that you want to tell your friend or that you want to impose on people, or some other kind of way that makes you not only notice and remember the idea but also then pass it on as well. Might be good for you, might be good for the group, but ultimately it just has

to be good for the meme itself. Do you ever like scratch your head when you see what some of these YouTube videos that go viral, like, do you as an evolutionary cultural appeal? Yeah? Do you really? Like? You're like, you know, have five billion views, and you're like, why did this evolve? This meme? Yeah? Why do you? And the funny thing is, exactly why did this one when when some other one? And why do people like watching this?

And I sometimes even have that effect when I'm enjoying watching it and I'm not even sure why, so why are you enjoying it? On Facebook? I often I must have been lingering quite often on cute kitten videos and cute puppy video and things like that, because I think if you get more and more of those these days, and why they're so appealing, that they are very, very epigling and contagious and despite you know, there's a bit of a waste of time. You know, you just pointed

something out that's actually really a good point. Is the algorithms we're creating allow us to custom tailor memes. They're like, oh, well, if you like this, we're gonna like throw one Joe Rogan video or whatever. And then I get five hundred thousand Jordan Peterson videos in my inbox every day in my life. It's like, wow, Like culture is imposing that. No, no, it's not imposing. The right word would be amplifying. Perhaps, you know, this interplay between our nature and what we

find attractive and then culture has this amazing ability. Culture is not innocent. You know some evolutionary psychologists or misconceptions of every psychology, right is that it's like we're talking about these context independent modules and that's the farthest thing from the truth. Right, Like culture can really play a huge role in bring out the worst or the best

in humans. Right, Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely absolutely, and we behave so differently, right, from culture to culture, even though we've got the same basic human nature. So common criticism of evolutionary site, I think, not a great one, not a fair one, is that it implies that stuff is just unchangeable. It says human nature is this and that's that. So, for example, if aggression is innate, humans are going to be aggressive and there's nothing we can do about it.

But different cultural contexts can bring that out to a greater or lesser degree. And we have seen like a massive decline and violence with the course of the decades and centuries and millennia. And that's a cultural difference, right, It's not a genetic difference. It's a cultural difference, but it's culture interacting with the same human nature, the same propensity for aggression. But it's just it's not inevitable that we behave aggressively or peacefully. And do you have this

beautiful section in your book. The feature is unwridden, I mean, technically it is written. I talked to check Carrol the physicist about this, like we all none of us know what it is, but those physical laws are wridden. But your point is I'm just being cheeky, but your point is very well taken. And you know, you say, as mimemic evolution picked up steam, humans were transformed. No longer were we devices designed solely to pass on our genes.

Suddenly believe became hybrid creatures, hybrid machines, maybe from an alien perspective, torn in between passing on our genes and passing on our memes. This vision of our species helps to explain much of what most puzzled the alien scientists, our moral systems, our religions, our art and music and science. Cultural evolution is the key to unraveling the deepest mysteries

of the human animal. You know, I got chills when I read that, and it really made me think of you know, you don't use this word in your book, but it seems like it's really ripe for integration with some research I do in positive psychologroon and just purpose. The need for human purpose, right, like, our ability to transcend ourselves in the sense that we can pass on ideas and help future generations and really impact future generations is something that makes us quite strange as well as

quite human. Just human yep, yeah, strange human in a really good way, potentially, right, yeah, absolutely, Okay, So I'm going to end here this podcast. Ask you some Twitter questions. Do you see my time? I said, ask Steve questions. Now, I'm not going to ask you the question you know some of those questions, but I will ask you the most thoughtful ones. Okay, you know which one I'm talking about that I'm not going to ask. I do you Okay? Now our audience is so curious. What do you say?

What do you say? No? The answer is no, okay, not even for twenty dollars. Okay, lot more than that, Okay, Okay. So Max Spialb, I hope I pronounce his name right. I'm not sure, he said. Since you wrote the ape that Understood the Universe, there's been a series of publications casting doubt on the good genes hypothesis. What do you make of these developments and do they fundamentally change or understanding of sexual selection? Yeah? So Max is a really

thoughtful crime and I definitely take those papers seriously. I can tell you that I'm a lot less confident in the good genes view of the evolution that made preferences than I used to be then it was a year ago or two or three years ago, a lot less confident. So, just to be clear, for the listeners. So the theory in question, it's so there are a number of Maine preferences that we have that seem to be products of evolution. They seem to reliably develop across different cultures, and the

question is why now. The good genes theory is the idea that the traits that we find attractive indicators are good genes. So that means like they're indicators that the person has a relatively low mutation load and indicators that the complement of genes that they have is resistant to the local pathogens. That's a good theory, it seems, though the recent evidence suggests that as good and logical theory as it might not be true for us, might not

be true for all traits. I guess I'm not quite on the fence yet, so I think I'm still this side of the fence through I think, if I had to bet, I think there's probably there probably is merit still to the good genes approach. I, like I said, I'm a lot less confident in it, and the evidence is now very mixed. So I don't think we're in the position we're throwing it away yet. But because it's

so max we should have been confident that it's correct them. Sure, a lot of people use that in terms of attraction understanding attraction and you know, what are the traits that males select for females in short term verus long term meeting and females males. But you know, again, there are all these like quirks where we depart from that, where we are deeply attracted to someone that might not actually

be attractive, you know, universally. You know when I say that, like at that, I'm saying, it's a fascinating thing that like, you know, we can also be unattracted to people who are attractive, you know, objective dye. And you know, I don't think that orangutangs have such nuance. You know, they may be less nuanced, maybe they are more just like you know, their genes are lighting up, you know that,

like that person has good genes. But we have this again, we're flexible, right and that's that's uh yeah, we yeah, with Facebook, and we're right. And I think you're right. I think peacocks as well. I think the peacock with the best tail. All the females seem to like that. It's not the case that they have these quirky, idiosyncratic tastes where some of them like this one, but then some of them like the one with a little lots

of colorful tale exactly right, right, so weird? I don't know, right, I mean, you never see one of the p hens saying like oh, I just think it's so like cute and charming, the how small that tale? You know? But among humans it's like we do. We're like we're like, oh, you know, like what's your fete? Like some of these people have like a fetish like red hair. Some people have vetual they're like a small nose, you know what I mean. Okay, let's move on. Trey Rose said, what's

his opinion his being you? This is you. What's your opinion on the evolutionary explanations for moral disgust? And do you think it's a separate phenomenon or a linguistic variant of aggression? That's an interesting question, isn't it? It is interesting.

I think probably that is not a separate thing. I think we've evolved discussed in certain kinds of contexts, such as for pathogen you know that's gone off and things like that that could toxins evolve discust in certain sexual contexts for close relatives, people that we grew up with. I think probably my guess is that moral disgust isn't

something that separately evolved. I tend to favor the idea that morality is primarily a product of culture and that it's just a bunch of stuff that we talk about, like we're trying to work out what's right and what's wrong and anything we're we're doing that we call that morality, But it's not a cohesive, evolutionary phenomenon. I think disgust feeds into that. It's one of the emotions that feeds into that kind of shapes our morality. But you know, you have a lot of people these days who argue

that we should extract discussed from the moral equation. So, for instance, when you're trying to evaluate the moral rightness or wrongness of gay marriage, for instance, some people influenced by their disgust toward same sex sex that feeds into their moral views on that topic. But a lot of people argue that it shouldn't. It's still morality though, right, So morality isn't necessarily closely tied to our instincts. Often it's not right. So we're naturally nepotistic, but we say

we shouldn't be. We naturally want to lash out of people who harm us in some way. Often we say that we shouldn't do that. So Mara does seem to have come disconnected from a lot of our instincts. I think, including disgust, really interesting. Thanks for the answer. We are in power. Ask the questions very near and dear to my heart, possible evolutionary explanations for autism other mental health conditions,

modern responses to these. I see near and dear in my heart because I'm really interested in how why things like ADHD evolved, autism, dyslexia. You know, what are some of the evolutionary basis for worrying difficulties and things? Yeah, so what do you think? I tend to think that

they're probably not adaptations these things. I think an evolutionary side perspective is really good at explaining stuff that we have in common with one another, whereas things like ADHD and autism and the like are relatively rare, and so I suspect that they're not adaptations. I don't think that they were craft by natural selection or favored by selection.

I think probably that's an example of a mistake that it's very easy to make with evolutionary thinking, which is just kind of overextending adaptation is reason and seat of applying it too broad lys, so it's really attempting a right. It's a very seductive kind of way to explain things. So it's very very easy to say this is an adaptation, that and this and the other thing, they're all adaptations.

I think probably it's not. I think one reason for that is I don't think that well, they're rare, for start, but also they tend to be associated with relatively low fertility, which seems unlikely as an adaptation. I think also that a stronger case has been made for other ways to

explain them. So in the case of autism, for instance, I think that it's like a big part of his genetic and a lot of the genes that contribute to autism are seen to be what are called denovo mutations, so relatively new mutations more product of mutation selection balance. So you have sort of new mutations coming into the gene pool, but selection is unable to take them out fasten, so you basically have a sort of low level of these these genes that increase the likelihood of autism developing

just a lower level kind of remains. Selection doesn't get rid of them as fast as they come into the gene pool. Perhaps some of schizophrenia. Yeah, I was just going to say. Jeffrey Moller wrote a really interesting article playing that logic to schizophrenia and arguing why these things might be fitness indicators of attractiveness, and arguing why extreme schizophrenia it might not be as attractive among humans, you know,

from a meeting perspective. But whether or not you grew with that argument, I think that it's an interesting extension of that to think about a way of framework for thinking about the evolution of lots of disorders. But there's a related idea about schizophrenia that I think is unproven but certainly possible, and that's that the genes that predispose people that are schizophrenia, those genes are found in people that don't develop schizophrenia. It might be associated with creativity.

Creativity exactly, Yeah, and the benefits of the creativity may outweigh the costs of occasional schizophrenia. Yeah. Keep them at the gene pool. Yeah, Yeah, Like schizotippy is very strongly correlated with the creativity just you know, full bull mental illness. It's hard to be creative when you're full blown. But yeah, these mild or forms, the relatives of people with full blow mental illness tend to be more creative than the

general population. Bipologist. That's right, that's right. I mean I've written papers yeah on that exactly. Are making that argument that these exist in our gene pool because of the benefits they confer to the relatives. That's been the argument. Yeah, what are your thoughts on ADHD? Well, that one I would link to the exploration drive you know we were

talking about earlier. You look at the d r D four you know, you look at the genes that were selected particularly associated with what we call I mean, EHD is just a label that in the school system we

put on these poor kids who want to conquer new countries. Yeah, they well, you know, it's like, can you do you know what I mean, It's like, can you imagine like we would probably put Christopher Columbus or well, maybe's not the best example, because that's not controversial, right he's yeah, but can you imagine putting that label on some of the earliest explorers of if they were in a school system, we probably would have said they have ADHD, you know,

because they don't want to sit still and possibly passively consume information. And so I think that is actually kind of a no brainer in a sense. You know, that label we put in there is that phenomena, and we're talking about the d r D four, you know, talking about the genes that code for proteins that lead, you know, to a phenotype of I want to move around and you know, see what's new, you know, and stimulation and in a more natural environment that would have been just

fine and dandy, right, Yeah, that would be problem. Yeah, it's kind of a They would make it a product of evolutionary mismatch. We're sticking these little little kids, these little primates into a completely unnatural setting. It's fine for some of them, or ok for some of them, but it's not suitable at all. Yeah, that's precisely. Yeah, I think that's what's going on there. So should we go in to Toby Wawson's question, do you know all these people?

By the way, are these all you like your friends? No? I know, Max, but okay, I think I know the rest. Okay, cool. Toby Lawson has ever psych become hand weavy catch all explanation for human treats. There should to be no explanation of underlying mechanism of how treats developed. That's b K commentary. I disagree with that. But anyway, just but okay, back to what he's saying, just x post fitting into sex selection.

I guess that's quite close for common criticism of evo psych which is that it's just a bunch of just so stories, right, and that we just sort of we have these handwave the explanations of here's a trade, let's try to explain it. Maybe it evolved for this purpose. You know, it's not just sexual selection, as there are

various other tools we had to explain it. I think that to be as fair as possible to the criticism, I do think that there are cases where we perhaps do accept adaptation of explanations on relatively flimsy evidence, and we should be hard on adaptation of explanations. But I think as a critique of the whole field, I think

that it's not a good critique. Actually, a ton of evidence and evolutionary psychology by now decades and decades, there are literally thousands of publications on all sorts of different explanations. Adaptation is explanations, but also eye product explanations mismatch explanations as well. So the evolutionary SSY like explanation for obesity

isn't an adaptationist explanation. It's a mismatch one that we're in novel environment where they have way too much food is too good and we just eat tons of them and so that creates obesity. It's it's not an adaptation. That's one of the best known evolutionary explanations. There's a ton of evidence. I think that evolutionary psyches have martials, So it's not just handwaving. Even if it's some of the explanations are not correct, but I really think it's

fair to say it's just handwaving. So I was trying to understand this person's question in particular because it seems like they wanted they're asking about human treats. So one way I interpret that question is like, how does evolution explain the existence of human variation in personality treats? Perhaps

or psychologically. Now, maybe I'm erry more in this person's question that this person really meant, But I was thinking that's interesting because I've seen some really interesting stories that I think are quite plausible that Daniel Nettle, you know, has come up with about the evolution of traits. And I don't see them as just just so stories because there isn't at least empirical evidence suggesting that they're trade offs on all parts of the continuum of each of

the Big five personality traits. For instance, like there's both benefits and disadvantages of being agreeable, you know, conscient disagreeable exactly, or extroverted or introverted exactly. It's a good idea. I think it's not just handy thing's made a good case. I think that because there are benefits and costs at both ends of the spectrum, the selection just naturally maintains a range of genes that create a range of individual differences and personality expression. Yeah, so we may may or

mayor may not answer this person's original intent of the questions. Okay, so last two which I've saved the grandiose ones, you know, is it Michael Shermer. Everybody knows Michael Shermer. Yeah, legend, legend this guy. Okay, so he says, who will eventually win in an epic battle between our better angels and our inner demons, time frames twenty twenty election, twenty fifty, climate change deadline for carbon emissions, twenty one hundred, population,

twenty two hundred, factory farming, anytime, nuclear war. So there's a great question, and I'm not sure I have a great answer for it. I find it very hard to figure out where we're going to go. And I've kind of bounced around in terms of whether I'm feeling optimistic or pessimistic, depending on if I've just been reading Michael Shermer or Pink or Ridley or you know, these rational optimists. I tend toward optimism, Dann what I hear? I think

this morning. I heard that Trump has just announced he wants to boost the nuclear arsenal, and then I'm feeling not quite so, I know, not quite so optimistic at all. But I should put my neck out and make some predictions rather than just sitting on the fence. So I'm going to say that I think got better angels are going to win. I think twenty twenty elections are going

to be kind of ugly. I don't think that the better angels are going to win then, but I think and I hope that we could solve the climate change problem. I don't think that's a completely impossible task, as daunting as it looks. What else was on the list SWEE climate carbon emissions. Well, that's similar to climate change. Yeah, population population was one of the factory farming population. I'm going to put my vote for optimism factory farming. I'm

going to put my vote for optimism as well. Definitely, I really hope that we managed to produce meat without nervous system what's called not factory meat but lab grown meat. That would be wonderful. It would be great, right, it would be be able to create meat without the suffering of a sentient being. Right. You know, humans seem to think like human suffering is only kind of suffering that matters. And yeah, it drives me nuts. You know that we

can't think beyond that. The fact that we are starting to think about other animals suffering. That kind of thing, I think is one of the great products of culture. You know, it's not instinctive, it's not natural, It's come from talking and thinking and it's a cultural phenomenon. Good. I love that. And you know, our capacity for perspective taking, I love that. Okay, last question, Christine Snyder Christine M. Snyder says, is everything going to be okay? Yes, it's

gonna be okay. Steve, thank you so much for the great work you do in public science communication as well as your research, and for being on the podcast today. Thanks very much, Scott, It's been a real pleasure for me too. Thanks for listening to the Psychology Podcast. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you'd like to react in some way to something you heard, I encourage you to join in the discussion at the Psychology podcast dot com. That's the Psychology Podcast dot com. Also, please add a

reading and review of the Psychology Podcast on iTunes. Thanks for being such a great supporter of the podcast, and tune in next time for more on the mind, brain behavior and creative fast Sometimes and