https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=Oh0d8D-dL8I

So what’s it like working with baboons, sir? I mean, they seem like a particularly dismal primate species. So what’s it been like spending the time out there in the baking sun, watching these pretty brutal animals go at each other for 30 years? They’re perfect. They’re perfect for what I study. My sort of roots as a scientist was as a stress physiologist and trying to understand what stress does to the brain. Not good things. What does stress do to vulnerability to mental illness? Not good things. What does stress do to your body? All sorts of stuff. What does it depends on who you are in your society and social rank and all of that. So in my lab, I spent forever studying the effects of stress on molecular biology of Neuron death and all that. But out in the field, it was, okay, trying to make sense of these baboons. Who’s got the rotten blood pressure? Who’s got the bad cholesterol levels? Who’s got the immune system that isn’t working? What does it have to do with their rank and patterns of social stress and patterns of affiliation and basically health, psychology and baboons? And why them? They were the perfect species to study because they’re out in the Serengeti, which was my field site, which is an amazing ecosystem. Like if you’re a baboon, you live in these 50 to 100 animals or so out in the savanna. Nobody messes with them. Once a year, a lion picks off someone. Most of the time, you can’t touch them with that. Infant mortality is lower than among the neighboring humans. You only spend three, four hours a day doing your day’s foraging. And what that means is you’ve got like eight, nine hours of free time every day to devote to generating psychological stress for everybody else. They’re exactly like us. None of us get ulcers because we’re like fighting for canned food items and bombed out supermarkets. We have this luxury of generating psychosocial stress because we’re westernized privileged humans. And baboons are one of the only other models out there because they’ve got my free time every day. And if you’re a baboon and you’re miserable, it’s because another baboon has worked very intentionally to bring that about. They’re all about psychosocial stress. They’re like bloody and tooth and claw has nothing to do with them. It’s all their chest, like awful to each other. They’re perfect models for westernized psychosocial stress. So they’re not nice guys. Like I did not grow to love a whole lot of them over the decades, but wow, they’re Machiavellian backstabbing and all their their highest calling in life is to make some other baboon miserable. Right, right. So communal psychopaths. So you did point out in your book that you studied a baboon troop where because of a historical accident, there was a plethora of females. And then that took a lot of the competition stress away from the males and they actually started to become more civilized. And so I have two questions about that. It’s like, why did the baboons take the psychopathic prick route on the evolutionary highway? And what does the fact that that even what does the fact that that’s modifiable? It’s quite strange, really, you know, that it’s modifiable. What does that have to say? Let’s say about free choice in the baboon world, about whether or not it’s necessary to organize your whole society on on the grounds of tit for tat psychopathy. It tells you it takes some pretty special, unique circumstances to jumpstart all the barriers to cooperation. Right, right. Looking at it, OK, you can have one person who’s willing to gamble an in-seat bit of vulnerability to see if somebody reciprocates, or you can have a founder effect of an inbred cooperating group, or you can have a whole bunch of ways of jumpstarting it. But then you get a totally quirky, unpredictable event, which was the thing that happened with my baboon troop. This was a troop my wife and I studied for years, and they had an ecological. Unprecedented disaster thing that happened at one point, there was an outbreak of tuberculosis not among my baboons, but among the neighboring baboons. One troop over, a troop that was living off of the garbage dump at a tourist launch, and which is where the tubercular, it was tuberculose, and you know, it takes Thomas Mann would have enough time to write hundreds of pages of a novel before TB kills somebody, TB kills a non-human primate in a couple of weeks. It’s like it’s wildfire in terms of how destructive it is. So you had this neighboring troop that had, you know, pig heaven, they had this garbage dump from a tourist launch, and every day a tractor came and dumped all the like leftover desserts and stuff from the tourist dinners and banquets. So they were living off of that. I actually did some studies on that troop and showed they got the starts of metabolic syndrome. They got elevated trance. They got borderline diabetes like, yeah, like us, the same, but they had better infant survival. The same pluses and minuses of like a westernized overly indulgent diet. But they had the greatest spot on earth, and every morning a subset of my guys would go over there to try to get the food, would go over there and have to fight their way in, in this like twice as many resident males there who were pissed at who’s this outsider coming in here. These were only the most aggressive males in my troop who were willing to go and spend their mornings trying to fight for the garbage next door. In addition, in the morning is when baboons do most of their like affiliatives, socializing, sitting there grooming each other. These are guys who not only were willing to fight for food, but it was a much higher priority to them than sitting around grooming somebody and being nice. Right, right, right, right. Socially affiliated, and they were the most aggressive. So they’re the ones who wound up getting killed by the TB. It wiped out about half the males and it wasn’t the high ranking 50%. It was the most aggressive, jerky, least socialized 50%, which some of them were high ranking, but some of them were like hyper androgenic jerky adolescent males who were like sending all day starting fights. They couldn’t finish. It wasn’t just the rank thing. You didn’t lose the dominant 50%. You lost the 50% with the aggressive, unsocialized personalities. And that left like a completely different cohort of males. It left you twice as many females as males for one thing, which you don’t normally see in a baboon troop. So all these females who suddenly had a whole lot to gain from not having baboons be the jerky, displacing aggression that characterizes them where they’re in a bad mood. And if you’re a smaller female, watch out. But most of all, the guys who were left were nice guys. They were socially affiliated. They didn’t take it out on someone smaller. They still competed for rank, but they weren’t displacing aggression on innocent bystanders that anywhere near the rate. And this brought in an entire new culture. Into the truth, which was great and totally amazing. And isn’t that cool? And what was also cool was stress hormone levels, which is what I was able to study. These guys were way down in them and their immune systems were working better. Yay, baboon utopia, all of that. So at that point, like sort of reality intergains. I couldn’t look at that truth for about a decade. Game park politics or whatever. But a decade later, I was finally able to get back to the truth. And it was the same culture, the same wonderful culture. Wow. Not every one of those. Well, so that’s another example in principle of how cooperation could initiate, right? Is that you could have a circumstance at one point where the real pricks get wiped out for some somewhat random reasons. And then you get a cooperative community starting. You know, I’ve also read, I don’t remember who wrote about this. Who suggested that over time, human beings, we really domesticated ourselves by using third party enforcers to wipe out most of the psychopathic males. And that also might have been a contributor to the initiation of something like a cooperative tit for tat reciprocating community.