The Biology of Good and Evil ｜ Frans de Waal ｜ EP 269 (7h7oqlG_FxE)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=7h7oqlG_FxE

So we could have a sex and gender split, as the political types insist, that’s also grounded in biological differences without making a categorical distinction. Absolutely. They always remain connected. The reason that we have genders and to have a duality of gender is because we have sexes. So people who say that gender is purely in our heads, is purely a society product, that’s an impossibility. I think if we were a cloning species, so we had no sexual reproduction, where we would all be identical, no one would have come up with the concept of gender. Hello everyone, I am really thrilled, even more than usual, because I’m usually thrilled with my guests, to be talking to Dr. Frans de Waal. Dr. de Waal is a Dutch-American biologist and primatologist known for his work on the behavior and social intelligence of our closest biological relatives. He is C.H. Candler Professor Emeritus at Emory University and Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Utrecht University. His scientific work has been published in hundreds of technical articles in journals such as Science, Nature, Scientific American, and Outlets specialized in animal behavior. I should point out that generally speaking in a scientist’s career, even a single publication in a journal such as Science or Nature can be the pinnacle of a career. To do that multiple times is pretty rare. So Dr. de Waal is a scientist who is in many ways in the league of his own. His popular books translated into more than 20 languages have made him one of the world’s most visible primatologists and scientists, I would say. His latest two books of many, and I’ll mention some others, are Mama’s Last Hug, Norton 2019 and Different Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist, which was published by Norton in 2022. He’s been elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, as well as the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2007, Time declared him one of the world’s 100 most influential people today. Now, I would also say that I’m particularly thrilled to be talking to Dr. de Waal because his work has had a real influence on my thought. Now, I’m not so sure how happy he might be about that, but he is one of the world’s deepest thinkers on a variety of important issues, perhaps most importantly, on the biological basis of morality, the development of morality and his work on the development of the moral sentiments, you might say, in chimpanzees and moral behavior. And his analysis of hierarchical behavior in chimpanzees and bonobos is, I think, revolutionary, not only biologically, but also philosophically. And that’s something he has delved into. I would say equally, that’s the case for his work on play and his work on gender. De Waal is one of the few people who have made a really solid case for a specifically sophisticated view of the construction, let’s say, of hierarchies in primates, which are often pilloried, say, with regards to chimpanzees as predicated on something like brute force and power. And the fact that De Waal has indicated quite clearly that that is insufficient, to say the least, view of the complexity of such hierarchical organization is work of tremendous importance, partly because it allows for the union in some real sense of is and ought. Because that’s an old philosophical conundrum. Can we derive an ought from an is? And the answer to that is not in any simple way. But the fact does remain that there are elements of social organization in our closest primate relatives that do shine some light on the biological foundations of ethics itself. His work on peacemaking among primates is also signally important in my estimation. I’ve read about seven of his books, Peacemaking Among Primates. I thought that was a great book. That was 1989. Chimpanzee Cultures, which he edited with Richard Wrangham, who is another guest on my show, another great primatologist. Good Nature, the Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals, another great book. Bonobo, The Forgotten Ape, an analysis of another very close relative of ours, biologically speaking, genetically speaking, who but as a chimp subtype in some sense or an ape subtype that organizes its social community quite differently than than chimpanzees. He wrote Mama’s Last Hug, as I mentioned before, Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us About Ourselves. Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are, which is another great book and most recently, Different Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist. I would highly recommend to all of those who are watching and listening that you pick up any or all of Dr. DeWall’s books. They’re extremely, they’re very straightforward. They’re easy to read. They’re deep. They’re well grounded in a multi-dimensional in the scientific literature in a multi-dimensional manner. I think he’s one of the world’s most important psychologists, even though that’s not his primary field. His books are a delight to read. He certainly influenced my thinking more than anyone else, with the exception of a handful of people like Joach Pinksepp, who’s done great work on similar grounds with rats in the realm of biology. So I’m so thrilled to have you on today. So thanks for a quick gushing and we’ll get to it. You’re welcome. Thanks for all the praise. Thanks for all the praise. Yeah, well, I mean, it’s it wasn’t praise, man. It’s the truth. Your work has been of unbelievable interest to me, especially on the, as I said, especially on the front of the development of morality. So maybe we could, you want to start with just maybe a little bit of bio and just tell everyone what you do, where and how you developed what you do. You said, for example, that you were influenced by Nico Tinbergen and maybe we could just go through the whole ethology background and make it personal. And then we’ll get to get down to brass tacks after that. Well, Nico Tinbergen was a Dutch ethologist. Ethologists are biologists who study behavior of animals, mostly naturalistic behavior. So that was a big difference with Skinner, let’s say, and the psychology who put rats in a box and let them press levers. The ethologists wanted to have natural behavior that they looked at. And Tinbergen was a Dutchman. I’m a Dutchman. I’m from the same school, basically, even though I’m not a direct student of his. And I was trained to observe animals. That’s mostly in the beginning of my career. That’s what I did. I observed animals, observed chimpanzees, bonobos, other animals. And then later, when I moved to the US in the 1980s, I moved first to Wisconsin and worked with monkeys there. And then I moved to Emory much 10 years later. I started to do experiments, behavioral experiments, not invasive studies, just a chimp would come out of a group into a room and do something on a touch screen or with a tool or whatever the experiment was. And so later I started to do more experimental approaches and got interested in very different behaviors, such as reconciliation after fights or empathy, how they respond to the distress of others. And so I developed ideas about cooperation and empathy in a time that people were still quite a bit focused on competition and aggression and violence, which was the early focus of ethology, really. Right. So there was this assumption that that was held long, I would say, across animal species that who organized themselves into a social community that the social hierarchy, which is almost an inevitable consequence of a community, was predicated on something like dominance. Hence the word dominance hierarchy. I had a graduate student, or he’s a colleague of mine now, but seven years ago, he told me that I should stop using the word dominance hierarchy. And I asked him why, because I use that phrase a lot. And he said, well, dominance is when you put a chain around someone’s neck and they’re naked and you and you can lead them around and you can get them to do anything you want. And our hierarchies, our functional hierarchies are not based on dominance. And then he said, and I think that that’s that idea is a consequence of the invasion of Marxist derived ideas in the physically into the biological domain. And like it really took me aback because I had used that term a lot. And I thought, oh, he’s really onto something there because I think our hierarchies when they’re functional are predicated on competence and reciprocity. And it’s only when they become pathological that they’re based on power. And then I came across your work, which, well, it was before that too. And you well, and I want would like you to talk about that. So let’s talk about the hierarchical, the social organization of chimpanzees on the male and female side and what you’ve observed. Yeah. So the dominance relationship is a two way street, you know, so it’s very hard to dominate a bunch of people who don’t want to be dominated or don’t want to be led. So it’s always you have the followers and the ones who are dominant. But the idea that dominance is purely based on coercion and power is, I think, simplistic. You need a party who wants to be dominated. And in order to be dominated, you need to give them certain things also. So the dominant is not purely coercive. It does happen. I call them usually bullies and we have them in human society, too. It does happen also in chimpanzee society that a male is just big and strong and and orders others around. That kind of males are not very popular. And the group is basically waiting for a challenger. And if a challenger comes up, then they’re going to support the challenger. They want to get rid of a male like that. Yeah, well, you one of the things that’s so revolutionary about that, I believe, on the philosophical front is that I think your work as well as pancepts with rats has shown that that kind of coercion and power actually constitutes a very unstable basis for social organization. And that if you engage in that, as you said, you’ll gain enemies. And that even happens at the animal level in some real sophisticated sense. And the probability that as you’ve also described. When you’re a bully and you have an off day, two of the two of your subordinates that you’re that you’ve bullied can do a pretty good job of tearing you into pieces. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So the the stable alpha male and most alpha males that I’ve known in chimpanzees, they they break up fights, they keep the peace, they defend the underdog. So they defend a juvenile against an adult or a female against a male. They are empathic, actually, they they reassure individuals who are distressed. And they can they can become extremely popular. So people always imagine that the alpha male must be frightening and that everyone is scared of them. There is a certain respect for them. So there is a certain fear involved. But they can be extremely popular. And so, yes, and that that’s that indication of stability, you know, because so this is one of the things that’s so key. Do you know about your panxeps work on with rats? I know, thanks. Yeah, okay. I knew him. Yeah. Okay. So you got a couple of years ago, but I knew him. Yeah, sure. So you know that he showed that if you repeatedly put juvenile males together to play that the larger rat can dominate the smaller rat with no problem. But if the larger rat doesn’t let the little rat win 30% of the time across repeated play bouts, then the little rat will stop playing. Yeah, and so surprised me. Yeah. Well, it’s so cool, you know, to see that alongside your work, because it it, it’s one of these indications, as far as I’m concerned that the rules that govern a single interaction, which might be that I can win by dominance are not the same rules that govern repeated interactions within a social context. And your work has done a lovely job of fleshing out the sophisticated complexity of behavior and attitude necessary even at the chimpanzee level, so that the troop remains stable, because you also described how when there’s violence between two males, say, vying for for status shift, and a better position that the entire troop gets agitated. And that part of the regulation of that male violence that can spiral out of control is actually distributed into the social community. Yes. So what happens is that it’s also in the way you become dominant, how do you reach the top position often in a in a chimps society that is with the support of others. And so I, I can become the alpha male, but I may have need one, one or two male supporters, I may need female support. And as a result, also, I need to be nice to my supporters, because if I’m not nice to them, they will stop supporting me. And my position is based on them. As a result, you can also get the smallest male can be the alpha male that happens sometimes in a chimpanzee group is the smallest male is the dominant male and you wonder how that happens, but that’s because he has supporters. It also means that a female can be very powerful, like I described in my previous book Mama’s Last Hug, Mama, the alpha female who was alpha for 40 years. And so she saw a lot of males come and go. And she was crucial in the alpha male business. And so if a male wanted to be the dominant male, he needed her support, because he had the support of all the females. And so it’s almost like a democratic system in that sense is that you need the support of others, and you need to keep your supporters happy. So it’s a very different. People have this one sided view which comes from the early baboon studies, I think they have this view of, of the male who dominates everyone and orders everyone around. But that’s really a simplistic view and it applies maybe to these baboons but certainly not to chimps and bonobos. Yeah, well that your work also highlights the crucial importance and multi species importance of something like the principle of reciprocity, right? And you use words like nice and empathic, which, and then you’ve justified that we can talk about that so-called anthropomorphism as we go along. But the idea that a stable society and also the also that the idea that the individuals that that make up that society are psychologically stable and that would be not too stressed, let’s say that that depends intrinsically on a degree of mutuality and reciprocity. That’s really a revolutionary idea to ground that in biology. Yeah, reciprocity is very important because the alpha male if he has a supporter who keeps him in that position, then he needs to give that supporter a lot of things. Otherwise, what would be in it for the supporter, you know? Well, what kind of things do you see the alpha doing in this more reciprocal sense? Well, the typical situation is that the alpha male is dependent on another male. He will let the other male mate with females, which is which is what dominance is really all about among the males is that access to females. And so he may be intolerant to every other male and keep them away from females. But his buddy who made him alpha, he let them meet with females because if he doesn’t, and this I’ve seen this happen. If he doesn’t, then his buddy will revolt and will stop supporting him. Right. So that that also indicates. So, you know, you might ask yourself why the instinct to allow for reciprocal dominance exists in human beings, given that access to mating privileges is such a crucial element of reproduction. But if part of that is, is that if we can make coalitions with our support superordinates, say, make coalitions, even though we’re not dominant and that ability to form coalitions upward is associated with sexual access because the dominant male chimps, they chase other males away from the females. Right. The females will mate. This is something that makes them different than human females. The females will mate with pretty much any male when they’re nesters, if I understand it properly. But the more dominant males will know. Is that wrong? Yeah, the females. There’s a big issue with female choice, as we call it. Females have preferences for certain males, and these preferences don’t need to correspond with the male hierarchy. And so we used to think that the dominant male would sire most offspring because we saw them. The dominant males mate more often than other males, but females do all sorts of things behind the bushes and at night. And so we now know from paternity testing that the dominant male is not always the one who has the most offspring. And that is because females have preferences, different preferences. Right. Would you say? Okay, so let me update myself in relationship to that. I understood my understanding of the primatology literature and insofar as it extended to humans was that human females were in some sense unique in the degree to which they exercised sexual choice with concealed ovulation and so forth. And that that was part of perhaps what drove our rapid departure away from chimpanzees, let’s say on the cognitive front. But you’re saying as well that choice in chimpanzee females, female choices plays a more important role than might have originally been predicted. I think it started with the birds. You know, we have monogamous birds, songbirds, male, female, and they have a nest with eggs. And we have always assumed that the male was the father of all these fertilized eggs. But now since paternity testing, this started in the 1970s. We know that if you look at the eggs, you very often find extra pair males in there. So different males who have made it with the female. Initially, the biologists assumed very Victorian type of assumption. They assumed that, of course, the female was probably raped by other males or something like that. But now we know that the females actively look for sex with other males. And so in the birth literature, it’s very well known and we distinguish social monogamy from genetic monogamy. And most of the monogamy that we see is social. It’s not necessarily genetic in the sense that the male is the father of all the offspring. And since then, we have now lots of studies on other animals, including the primates that we know, for example, a female chimpanzee. She mates with many more males than would be necessary to be fertilized. She mates with lots of males and she has certain preferences that we now learn about that it’s called female choice. And that’s a big literature on female behavior. So females have very often preferences that deviate from the male hierarchy. So let me let me push you on that a bit. So I looked at human studies and the correlation between sexual success and socioeconomic status for men in relationship to sexual success with women is about somewhere between point six and point seven, which is an unbelievably stunningly high correlation. It’s like it’s higher than the correlation between intelligence and academic performance, for example, which is maybe the second highest correlation of that sort. We know. And so but but that shows in human beings that the female preference and the male hierarchy are pretty tightly aligned. Do you how close are they aligned in chimps? And if they’re not aligned, what are the females looking for that that isn’t signaled by the hierarchical structure of the males? In humans, of course, the female preference has also to do with status and income in the sense of resources, which is not so much the case in chimpanzees, I would say, because they don’t have a nuclear family structure. Well, and they don’t obviously gather resources to say, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So we humans, we humans have a nuclear family structure. So the males are involved in the family and in caring for offspring, which is not really the case in bonobos and chimpanzees. And so the human female has a more complex picture in front of her, which includes maybe sexual preference, which may be based on the body or the appearance and so on. But it also is based on she also looks for resources. So I think it’s a more complex picture, probably. So I’m curious about that, too, because tell me what you think of this. It seems to me that although socioeconomic status and mating success in human males is very tightly associated that human females aren’t looking so much for status or even socioeconomic position. They’re using those as markers for the ability to generate resources and social status. And so because really what they want, and I think this is tied with your work on reciprocity and social skill in chimpanzees, what the human females really want is competence and generosity. And they use social status and resource acquisition as a marker for that. Yeah, that’s very well possible. I’m not so familiar with that human literature, but there is a big field now of female initiative, female choice, female sexuality. You know, biology started out pretty Victorian in the sense that female sexuality didn’t exist. Females were passive sexually. Males were active and had a sex drive, but females basically didn’t need it. That’s how the biologists thought about it. And all that thinking has changed. In my book on gender, I talk quite a bit about female sexuality and the size of the clitoris and so on, which is related to that seeking pleasure and so on. And I think it’s highly significant that we see that female chimpanzees and certainly female bonobos, they have quite a bit more sex than is necessary for strictly for reproduction. So they are very adventurous. And the female bonobo has a big clitoris, bigger than the human female. And the biggest one is in the dolphin, which is also a sexually adventurous species. So people are not paying attention to that, whereas we we went through a long period where female sexuality was basically ignored, was irrelevant. So in the bonobos, particularly the social organization differs from that of the chimp quite markedly, despite the close genetic association between the species. And the bonobos have often been portrayed as, well, let’s say hippie hippie chimps because it’s free love sex and in some sense, a more matriarchal social structure. So why do you think those differences emerged between those two subspecies? And and I know you’ve drawn lessons from both are that are they species or subspecies they can mate? So how are they technically defined? Well, we do we do call them species. They belong to the same genus. Bonobos are female dominated and the female dominance is a collective dominance. A single female cannot dominate a single male. If if you see at zoos that that happens sometimes that you see one male and one female bonobo, which is, of course, very atypical. But then the male is dominant. As soon as you add a second female, the females become dominant. It’s a collective dominance that they have high level of female solidarity, serviced by a lot of sex and grooming between the females. And why they have this different society, I think it’s made possible by the fact that the females can travel together. There is enough food in their forests and they don’t have competition from gorillas. They don’t live together with gorillas in the forest that they have more food available that allows the females to travel together. Actually, you mentioned Richard Wrangham. Some of these are these ecological ideas come from Richard Wrangham is that the female bonobo, they can stay together as a group. And that allows them to have this very powerful sisterhood. Whereas the female chimpanzees in their forest, they need to spread out in order to find enough food. And so that kind of bonding that happens in the in the bonobo is not really possible for them. Hmm. OK. So this is this. Sorry, go ahead. Yeah. And in captivity, because I’ve worked, of course, mostly in captivity, in large chimpanzee colonies in zoo settings. And then the female chimps, they are actually very powerful because then they’re all together. They’re forced to live together, of course. And then they develop some sort of sisterhood. It’s not as well developed as in the bonobo, but the power difference between males and females becomes very different in captivity. OK, well, this is a good segue into the sex and gender discussion. So in your book, The Difference, your new book, you distinguish as do the more radical political types now, sex and gender. And I was interested in that for a variety of reasons. So when I look at that issue, I look at it from the perspective of a personality psychologist. So I. The notion that sex itself is binary is fine with me, but the notion that there is something that might be conceptualized as gender, although I think that’s a bad term, is also, I think, reasonable because. Human beings vary substantially from individual to individual in terms of personality on the five cardinal dimensions of personality. And there are plenty of men who have a typical female personality structure and plenty of females that have a typical male personality structure. And then if you add to that variation in creativity, which which gives you a kind of fluidity of identity, it’s sort of a hallmark of creativity. Then the notion that there’s a gender that’s separate from sex starts to take on some validity. But I like to approach it from the personality dimension. I mean, men and women overlap quite a lot in their personality. So that’s why I think that’s entirely correct. I would say sex is divided. Biological sex is divided in mostly male and female. And there is an in-between category. But sex is based on genetics, on chromosomes, on genitals, on hormones. That’s what sex is. Gender is divided, better divided in masculine and feminine than in male and female. So I would say gender is masculine and feminine and everything in between. All sorts of combinations are possible. And gender is a much more flexible concept that was introduced. The origin of gender is John Monty, the sexologist, who introduced the term because he had noticed that there were people who were born with one sex, but in the course of their life felt they belonged to another sex. And so he felt he needed to have a term for that. And they only at the time they only had negative labels for these people like weird and queer and abnormal and whatever. And he wanted to have a more scientific and a friendly label for them. And that’s why he came up with the word gender. He was also the first one to to set up a gender clinic. So the word gender relates more to the cultural side, how we expect men and women to behave, the social norms that we have, the education that we give them. And so that’s the gender side. And the gender side is obviously much more flexible and much more fluid. So I want to I want to ask you about that, too, because you said that the gender side is more socialized. And, you know, I’m not I’m not so sure about that. I think this separation mean I’m not unsure about it either, because culture obviously matters. But, you know, a lot of the differences that you see from individual to individual are at least 60 percent biologically determined. So variation. So if you’re born, let’s say, as a male with a female temperament, so you’re high in agreeableness, empathy and you’re low in negative emotion, because that’s the typical female pattern. About 60 percent of the variance in that is attributable to genetic factors. So we could have a sex and gender split as as the as the political types insist. That’s also grounded in biological differences without making a categorical distinction. You know, say, yeah, so absolutely. They always remain connected. The reason that we have genders and to have a duality of gender is because we have sexes. So people who say that gender is purely in our heads is purely a society product. That’s an impossibility. I think if we were a cloning species, so we have no sexual reproduction where we would all be identical. No one would have come up with the concept of gender. So the concept of gender is related to sex. There is a certain independence between them, but they also remain joined at some point. And you’re right. It is never purely cultural. And you show that you show that in your book, because and I want to go into it in quite a bit of detail. So, for example, let’s start with this toy preference and differences in nurturing behavior. And so I’d like you to lay that out and then we could talk about that psychologically for a bit. Yes, it’s interesting if you look at the behavior of the young primates and children, human children, you see a lot of similarity there. And often people, of course, think that the toy preferences are socialized that we see. But I think there’s too much similarity with what we see in other primates. So young female primates, they are very fond of infants. They want to hold infants as soon as there’s a newborn baby and the mother arrives with it. They want to they surround her. There’s very few males are interested in that. But the young females want to get their hands on the on the on the infant. And in nature, we also know that they pick up logs and rocks and chimpanzees do. And the young females, they carry them around on their back, on their belly, as if they have a doll. If in captivity you give them a doll like a teddy bear, they will walk around with it and take care of it and be friendly with it. Whereas young males, they have a tendency to to take them apart, basically. And look what’s inside. And so the females have this very strong urge to hold infants. And the same thing has been found in human children, that girls are more interested in infants than boys are. And if you look at the young males, the young males have a higher energy level. This is also true for boys versus girls. They have a higher energy level. And what they love to do is roughhousing, mock fighting. That’s what they do the whole day, basically. They like to mock fight with each other, sometimes with adolescent males, just to test their strengths on them. And so rough and tumble play also in human children, much more typical of boys and of girls. And the segregation that we see in the playground between boys playing together and girls playing together probably comes to a large degree from the fact that the girls don’t like all this roughhousing that the boys are doing. That’s not their type of play. And so they stay away from them because it’s too rough for them. So I spent a lot of time looking at the play literature in children. So partly I worked with a team of investigators at Montreal who were interested in the origin of antisocial behavior. And this is partly what gave me a foray into your work, by the way. So the lead researcher there was Richard Trombley, who’s done a lot of great work on. Oh, I know his work. You know his work. Yeah, Trombley is great, man. And he was on this podcast, by the way, and I worked with him for 15 years, something like that. Didn’t he work with Fred Spreyer, who was also there? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So so he was interested in the origins of antisocial behavior and criminality mostly. And while we worked together, we kept pushing back the origin time in some sense of antisocial behavior until the age of two. And he had put about a bunch of interventions in place to try to modulate antisocial behavior. But it’s very, very persistent once it’s established, very difficult to to ameliorate. And so. There’s a subset of two year olds, about five percent of them, of the males, almost all male who bite, hit, kick and steal at the age of two. And most two year olds don’t. But a percentage do. And most of them are socialized by the age of four. And so that becomes either probably integrated into their personality rather than repressed. So maybe they’re more disagreeable from a personality perspective, highly probable. They’re more competitive. They’re blunter. But they get socialized. And one of the key questions is, you know, who socializes them? And my suspicions are, in many cases, it’s a father or a father equivalent. In any case, the ones who don’t get socialized, they aren’t popular with their peers. And humans get socialized primarily by their peers after age four. So they get to be little outcasts and then they’re bullies and then they’re juvenile delinquents. And then they’re criminals. That’s where the life course persistent criminals. That’s the population from which they’re derived. And so then we looked at what was socializing them. And the answer to that, which I thought was so cool and so great, was play. Both pretend play and rough and humble play. And Hank Sepp has done lovely work on rats with rough and humble play. Yeah, that’s the point that I make in my book is that the play behavior of the boys and of young male primates. It’s partly developing fighting skills. So it’s partly just like in the females, their interest in infants is a preparation for adult life when they will have offspring. And for the males, the play fighting is in the preparation for adult life in which they will have a lot of competition going. But another aspect, very important, is that they learn how to control their strengths. They learn how to be nice to others. They learn to release pressure once the other cannot stand it. So if you look at an adult male gorilla, for example, with his big fist on a baby gorilla, he could just with a little pressure, he could kill it. Because he’s incredibly strong. But, you know, adult male gorillas, they play with infants and they do very well with them. And that is because he has learned over a lifetime to control his physical strength. Right. And that’s that rough and tumble play is so important for that. Yeah, it’s embodied. Right. So one of the things I because I really got interested in rough and tumble play as a primary source of socialization of aggression is that. And also more than that, right, because it also underlies the spirit of reciprocity, I think, which is manifested in its purest sense in the spirit of play, because play is something that the participants have to engage in voluntarily. Yeah. And they have to enjoy it. And so this also relates very much to the gender relationship is that because we have a lot of trouble, of course, with men abusing women, men need to learn about their strengths, need to learn how to control it, need to learn when to hold back and when to use it. And play is an important factor in that. And so when I now hear I hear sometimes from people who have children that at schools, there is less recess time and less opportunity for physical contact because the teachers say that you shouldn’t be touching each other. They forbid it entirely. Any like my at my school, my kids school, the boys and the girls were forbidden to even pick up snow on the off chance that they would make a snowball. And so they just stopped the rough and tumble play of the males 100 percent. And Panksepp showed if you deprive male rats of play juveniles, they started they would play hyperactively when you gave them the chance and that you could use methylphenidate to suppress that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But the rough and tumble play is absolutely essential. It’s not just for developing fighting skills, which is part of it. But it’s also how males control themselves, how they because they become physically stronger than females. They need to have full control over their body. Right. And they well, I think they also learn, I think through rough and tumble play, kids also learn what hurts and what is what hurts them. Really. And so because when you rough and tumble, I’ve rough and tumble played with my kids a lot. I set up kind of a little wrestling ring made out of two couches pushed together. And one of the and they love it. Right. They’re so excited by it. But you tend to push the kids to their physical limits, right, because you twist their arms and you sort of toss them in the air. And and you’re engaged in this dance that’s an exploration of physical limitation. And so I think one of the things that play does and then Panksepp showed there was a student of his Tiffany Fields who massaged premature infants in the incubator and showed that she could rapidly radically facilitate their development. I think play also regulates emotion because it because it’s soothing and and it shows you it allows you to make a clear distinction between real threats and false threats and between physical situations that actually hurt and those that don’t. And that has to be done in an embodied sense. So the sort of funny thing that that happened to me is that I when I was a student, I worked with two young chimpanzees who love to play with me. So they were only five years old, but they were already much stronger than I was. You know, it develops much physically much stronger than even though they’re smaller, that’s physically stronger than I. And so I would often double play with them. And it was, you know, I would always lose because they have four hands and they can put you in a knot in a way that is impossible for me to get out of. And each time I would protest, I would say, oh, and let them know that this was they were going too far with me. They would be very worried. They would come around and they would look at my face and they would be looking very worried and a sort of like surprised that this this big fellow was so weak in their opinion, you know, and then they would slow down their play. And it would be very gentle for 10 minutes or so. It would be very gentle with me. So they calibrate it. Yeah. And that’s how play goes. Also in dogs play play is a is constantly measuring what is painful, what is not painful. And of course, the goal is to have fun. That’s the main goal. So that calibration is going on the whole time. Yeah. Right. Right. Right. Well, and that’s well. So, you know, P.J., who wrote a great jump, he wrote an absolutely stellar book on the development of of morality out of the spirit of play. It’s a great book. And, you know, he showed. So he also and this is germane to your work. He he made a technical case that any organization that’s based on the spirit spirit of voluntary reciprocity will over a reasonable period of time out compete any organization based on the spirit of compulsion. Because if you use force and compulsion, you have to waste energy and resources on the compulsion. Plus, you don’t optimally motivate. And so that’s another pointer to an intrinsic ethic of reciprocal cooperation. And I think that best. So one of the things I’ve been thinking about lately is the best rejoinder to the sort of postmodern and neo Marxist insistence that its power and dominance above all is that no, it’s not. Is that’s an aberration from the spirit of play, because if it’s if a society and any social interaction is optimally structured, then it moves out of it moves into the domain of voluntary play is mutually enjoyable, stays on the side of positive emotion. And it also involves this continual mutual collaboration, which which children start to seriously negotiate between the ages of two and four. Yeah, yeah. And so the what you mentioned is that socialization is mostly done by children by the peers. You know, that’s a very interesting thought, because in my discussion of gender, I noticed that many people saying that socialization is a one way street. The parents socialize their children. And I think parents overestimate their influence on children. I think children socialize themselves to a large degree, I call it self socialization. They look for adults models. It can be the mother can be the father can be somebody else. They look for adult models can also be imaginary models that they see on TV basically. Well, that’s the purpose of fiction as far as I can tell. Yeah, fiction puts up ritual models for emulation. Yeah. And so the children socialize themselves. And then in addition, they have all the peer influences on them. And so I think parents totally overestimate their effect on our research at Montreal basically indicated that the proper to imagine that the the the averaged parent, which would be sort of the consequence of a monogamous relationship, right? So to have insane people unite and produce one moderately sane person. And then that same person is a analog of the general social environment. And then the purpose of that same person on the socialization front is to help the children socialize. And so that’s that Yeah, that’s how it seems to be. And then, you know, you talked about this self socialization, you say, well, how can kids, you know, be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to self socialize and part of the answer to that is, if you don’t socialize your children in a manner they find enjoyable, let’s say in the spirit of play, I know some discipline is necessary, but in the spirit of play, the children will vociferously and continually object, right? They’ll cry, they they’ll be uncooperative, they certainly won’t be enthusiastic. And so there is a dynamic dance there right from the beginning, that that the child and I think this is also why by the way, you know, there’s all these studies showing that there’s a fair genetic influence on temperament, and there’s a pretty decent influence of non shared environment. But there’s hardly any influence of shared environment. And I think the reason for that isn’t so much that parents are irrelevant, but that good parents particularize the environment so much in response to their child’s temperament, that there isn’t a lot of overlap. Yeah, yeah. So in the other primates, we see the same thing we see that young females, they imitate their mother more than young males, young males. So for example, a recent study on orangutans in the forest found that daughters eat exactly the same foods as the moms, sons, they have a more variety in their diet. You know, there’s hundreds and hundreds of plants around and fruits around so they, they learn their diet from others. And so the sons, they learn it mostly from males and other individuals that they see around. There’s other studies on tool use, for example, that daughters copy exactly the tool technology that their mom uses. Sons, they have they they’re on their own with that and they develop their own tool technologies. And so in the primates, we see because they, you know, a chimpanzee adult when he’s 16. So there’s a very long learning period, we see that they self socialize by emulating individuals of their sex. And that means also that the concept of gender is applicable to them because they are also culturally influenced, they’re influenced by the behavior of adults around them. And that’s why I use the word gender also for the other primates. Okay, so I want to read something to you from your book. And then I want to discuss that for a second. This is from Deborah Bloom, you you cite her. My son Marcus passionately covets toy weaponry denied even so much as one lousy plastic pistol by his gun intolerant mother he is compensated by building armaments out of everything from clay to kitchen utensils. I watched him charge after the cat. Shooting shouting, shoot him with a toothbrush. And I found myself mentally throwing up my hands. Now, to me, that’s kind of amusing, but I didn’t really find it amusing. I actually found it really dark. Because the line of work that you’re pursuing, which shows quite clearly as does the personality literature on these topics that these toy preferences and behavioral differences are deeply grounded in biology. And they may be also be fostered culturally, but fundamentally, it’s the manifestation of an intrinsic mode of being an instinctual pattern. And this woman, this author says, you know, he’s she’s throwing up her hands because she can’t stop her son from being a boy. I don’t find that amusing. I find that actually quite horrifying. And, you know, the idea Yeah, that has to do with the desire of many parents to influence their children and to make them sort of gender neutral, and to have boys play with dolls and girls play with trucks. And of course, there are a few who will do that. But they’re trying to go against whatever the tendencies are. And they punish and they punish those tendencies, at least implicitly. And now, you know, if male ambition serves power and oppression, then you can understand why early manifestations of that might be worth punishing, especially if that was culturally, a cultural consequence. But if the fundamental male drive is something like reciprocity and competence and say aim, because I think that’s relevant to the use of weapons, then the punishing of that the viewing it as only serving power and oppression instead of competence and reciprocity. That’s an awful thing. And I think I’d like to know what you think about this. But you know, boys are not doing that well in school, and they’re all the way through kindergarten through university, they’re dropping out. And they’re also increasingly and interesting less interested in sexual activity of all sorts, even masturbation. And I think that it’s a consequence of of this attitude is like they’re punished for a male typical pattern of behavior that’s improperly associated with dominance right from day one. So yeah, boys are more often kicked out of school. That’s a that’s a big problem. And that has probably to do with the tendency of roughhousing and mock fighting, which they do all the time. And yeah, the way I look at that is that that’s a primate pattern, all the male primates like to do that mock fighting. And we at our schools in the West, we have decided to stop that and to to say you shouldn’t be touching. Yeah, you know, I worked with this guy named Dan always and he wrote a great book called bullying what it is and what we can do about a very straightforward guy kind of like a 50s engineering, he reduced the bullying incidents and associated alcoholism and criminality in Scandinavia, the whole in a number of countries by 50%. And he went into schools, he was really careful because he defined bullying very particularly. He said he didn’t associate it with rough and tumble play, for example, because he actually had a clue. He said, you know, you mentioned earlier that the reciprocal male alpha who’s competent breaks up unfair fights. Okay, so that’s what always did he went into schools and he said, Look, you can intervene in an incident of aggression when there’s a clear and inequitable power balance. So if a 12 year olds beating up an eight year old or two 10 year olds are picking on a 10 year old, and then he taught the kids, you can go tattle to a teacher which is otherwise forbidden, as all children know, and most of them are not. And so he said, if you can do that, and most adults should remember, you can, it’s your ethical responsibility to inform a person in authority, if you see violence with power imbalance. And then he taught the teachers and the parents the same thing is very narrow, narrow focus on a very specific form of aggressive behavior that wasn’t play. And no one’s paying any attention to it in North America, like even though it’s a stunning body of research, and the only body of research I know that shows a positive effect of the attempts to socially ameliorate antisocial behavior. But instead, we get this over reaction that includes all elements of play, rough and tumble play in particular. And it’s also why boys are medicated. If if bank step is right, they manifest this boisterous, rough and tumble play desire, and it’s disruptive in classrooms. And the the best trip quick trip out of that is an amphetamine, which suppresses play behavior. That’s what it does technically and biochemically. Yeah, it makes me think of I did a lot of studies of reconciliation behavior. So what happens after a fight? Who reconciles with whom and so on. And I actually males are quite good. Males are good at fighting, but also good at reconciling after fights. And in those studies of reconciliation behavior, there were some developmental psychologists who started looking at children. We did the studies on the primates who kiss and embrace after a fight, or sometimes have sex after fights, things like that. But they did studies in in human cultures. And what they found is that Japanese children reconcile a lot more than Western children after fights and are much better at conflict resolution. And the reason they gave this is not my study. But the reason they gave is that in Japan, the teachers don’t break up fights. Well, of course, except if they’re killing it’s out of it, right, right. They usually don’t break up fights. They let the kids fight. And if they think it needs to be interrupted or calm down, they sent another child, an older child, they sent an other child to mediate between them. So that’s so smart, because otherwise, too, you know, the kid that’s getting beat up is now vilified because a teacher had to intervene on his behalf. So now he was a bully victim to begin with, let’s say, and now he can’t even stand up for himself. And the teacher has to come to his aid. It’s a terrible status defeat for him. So so in the primates, of course, there is a lot of reconciliation, there’s also mediation and reconciliation. So older females who bring parties together sometimes. But they all learn in their lifetime how to fight and how to reconcile after fights. And I’m from a family of six boys, I may maybe my interest in conflict resolution was partly because as a boy in a boy family, you learn how to do these things. Well, you know, okay, so one of the things that psychologists like Jonathan Haidt has have commented on is this culture of fragility that we’ve produced, and emotional overreaction. And I think the comment you just made all those are germane to that, because we don’t know how many siblings or peers a child needs to be exposed to in order to become resilient and learn to engage in reconciliation. So you imagine the typical human family wouldn’t have had one child. Would have had multiple so they’d have to be strategizing and jockeying for attention in a way that didn’t cause undo tyranny and aggression. So first of all, we have lots of single child families or two child families, but single often, and then also to much older parents. And so if if the children are actually being socialized in large part, let’s say by their siblings in a more naturalistic human community, part of the reason for this emergent fragility is that they’re not going to be able to engage in reconciliation. And the reason for this emergent fragility could well be that they haven’t had to engage in, say that Japanese style of conflict that isn’t mediated by parents and they haven’t learned to, to reconcile I want to point out to the viewers and listeners to that Dr. DeWall’s work on reconciliation is also of groundbreaking importance as far as I’m concerned, because he put the other what the other shoe dropped with the work on reconciliation, because you can think, well, conflict is a terrible thing. Aggression is a terrible thing. And the aggressive males are power hungry and demonic and dominant. But you showed very clearly that the sophisticated males are experts at reconciliation. And sometimes that that expertise even exceeds that of the females. And all of that needs to be learned. So you need to provide learning opportunities. And if it’s not in a family, if the family has just one or two children, then you need to bring children together somehow in your neighborhood or in a school or you need to give them the opportunity to learn these things. And I think we are very good at removing these opportunities. And that’s partly or forbidding them even. Yeah, there’s partly a fear of competition. So for example, I’ve read in the psych in the psychology literature that they say that women have very good friendships, wonderful friendships, deep friendships and so on. But men, men are too competitive. Men are hierarchical and competitive rubbish. Yeah. And that’s what they say, even though many men have friends and enjoy the company of other men. But I think the confusing competition between men, this friendship is like you can only know how to integrate. I mean, men, male friendships that are optimized are competitive in the extreme often often on the basis of humor. Yeah, so they they confuse. They think it’s either competitive or friends and the combination of the two they cannot see. And I think for men for sure, that combination exists. Men can be rivals and competitors. And but but but half an hour later, they’re laughing with each other. Let me tell you a funny story. There was once a swimming trainer in the Netherlands who trained girls for swimming, swimming competition. And she switched to boys. And then I saw this interview with her in the newspaper. Why did you switch to boys? And she said, Well, if the girls on the team have a fight that starts in the early season, they will have that fight going for the whole season. It will not stop. If the if the boys have a fight, they drink in the evening, they drink a beer and the next day they don’t even remember the fight anymore, she says. And yeah, or they or they have a fight. And then they reconcile and the fight is over. So yeah, so I want to use that as a segue into something else you wrote, so we can talk about it. So I want to read something again that from different from the introduction, and I don’t know if you agreed with this or if you were just if you were saying it as a summary of someone else’s thought, but you said, it’s easy to see why male and female patterns of aggression are valued so differently, only the first creates trouble in societies. And so So let me riff on that for a sec and then turn it over to you. So I think this observation you made about the swim teams is extremely interesting because we studied male pattern aggressive behavior, which tends to involve physical violence and female pattern aggressive behavior in humans. And what the females do is gossip, backbite and destroy reputations. And the female anti social types are really, really good at that. And they’re vicious. And the thing that differentiates those right now. So in such a cardinal manner, in my estimation is that female aggression scales on the internet and male aggression does not. And so, you know, we know that the online world is vicious in a very particular way. And I think a big part of it is that it actually can’t be settled. So part of the reason that women have difficulty in conflict is because men can resort to fighting and that will produce an alteration in the it’ll produce a cessation of the conflict in a very real sense one way or another, right. But when women are embroiled in a conflict, well, they can’t fight physically And, and so they do get caught in this conundrum. So one of the problems that our society really wrestles with at the moment is that it’s very difficult to control untrammeled female pattern aggression. And so I think it is causing a tremendous amount of trouble and that that reputation damaging that a huge you just see that constantly on social media platforms. And so I don’t know if that was your thought or if it was a thought that you were summarizing, but I’m kind of curious about your thoughts about that. Yeah, so I make a distinction in my book between two ways of keeping the peace. One is peace making the other one is peacekeeping. The males in chimpanzees, the males are very good at peacemaking. They have a fight and then they get together, they kiss and embrace and then they groom each other. And they cycle through this all the time. It’s very, very easy process for them. And they have more fights than females. And I think what the females do, the females reconcile less when they have a fight, less often than the males. Because they have more trouble with that, I think. And what the females do is stay away from your rivals, stay away from fights, stay away from individuals that you’re likely to will ever. I call that peacekeeping. Is that they suppress aggression and they stay away from those. All right, so let’s look at that in the human case. So one of the biological temperamental differences that you see between men and women is that women are higher in negative emotion. That starts in puberty because boys and girls are the same and it doesn’t change throughout the life course and women are more agreeable. And so that combination, so agreeable people are conflict avoidant. Now, agreeableness is empathy and that’s supposed to be a cardinal virtue. But the downside of agreeableness and empathy is conflict avoidance. And so and if you add to that… Conflict avoidance is emotionally taxing. So I think… It’s also practically a problem because it means that if someone pushes on you that you have to negotiate with, you have to avoid or you won’t push back. And what the hell are you going to do on the negotiating front? If that’s the case, say at your workplace, you can’t avoid your boss. But the interesting thing is that both strategies are actually quite successful. We did a study of human behavior in the hospitals. We looked at operating rooms and we looked at how well men and women work together. And female cooperation is really highly developed. So female teams and not all female teams, but females on the team works very well. And so I think both sexes have a good strategy. One is to suppress conflict. The other one is to reconcile very easily. So they’re both good strategies and they’re both quite effective, but they’re totally different. So let me let me push you on that just for a sec then. So let’s take an optimal female cooperating group. See, the conundrum I think they run into, and I think this is the conundrum of compassion in general, is that that’s just fine until you throw a predator in. And so a group like that that’s actually made out of pure cooperators can work just fine. But if you throw in a woman who has antisocial personality, which would be manifested, say, as borderline personality disorder, which looks like the clinical equivalent of ASP and females. Or if you throw in a real predator, the co-op like what if the cooperators can’t avoid and they can’t oppose all they have left is to fall victim to the predator. And that’s why I think that women are in this weird evolutionary conundrum, because they have to find men who are disagreeable enough to stave off the real predators. But agreeable enough to be generous with their productive competence. Right. And so it’s this knife edge, you know, because a little too far in either direction is not good. So is there a flaw in my reasoning there with regards to the Achilles heel, let’s say, of female cooperative groups? No, I think it is true that we have always underestimated female competitiveness. So, you know, in the psychological literature, males were always called hierarchical and competitive and not females. And now we know that, you know, there’s plenty of female competition and there’s plenty of female hierarchies. Actually, the word pecking order comes from hens, not from roosters. And in the animal kingdom, lots of females have hierarchies, have alpha females and so on. So I think it’s important to point out always that female competition is maybe less physical, but it’s not it’s not absent. Well, it’s probably also not competition about exactly the same things. In your work on animal cognition, you use this term umwelt, which is like the implicit motivational environment in some sense that an animal might inhabit. And I’d like to talk about that in a bit. But men and women don’t compete within their own sexes for status in the same way. And so it’s easy for men to look at women and think, well, they’re not that competitive. It’s well, they’re not engaged in rough and tumble play or violent confrontation. But that doesn’t mean that the competition isn’t there. It’s just that. And it also may be that men aren’t subtle enough in some sense to see it. Now, let me let me tell you a funny story on that. This this was a scientist, a woman scientist in Finland who studied children at play in the in the playground. And she said, if you watch these children at the end of the day, you say that the boys had five times as many or six times as many fights as the girls. And that’s just from watching them. If she asked the kids at the end of the day, did you have a fight today? The boys and the girls had equal numbers, which means that the girl fights are just not visible. And she said, if a girl walks up to another girl and that girl turns around and walks away, they consider that a fight. Right. Well, that’s that’s very interesting. But of course, boys will boys will not consider that a fight. More needs to happen. Yeah. No, the boys are not the boys are not even astute enough in some sense to notice that. Yeah. You know, the the thing that the thing an antisocial girl will do is she’ll like an unfamiliar girl or even a familiar girl will approach a play group that’s already in formation, say, and the alpha female of the play group will say, we don’t have to play with you. And then and that’s devastating, right? Because it’s a real like cardinal inclusion, but there’s no physical aggression associated. And the girl who’s rejected will walk away crushed because she’s been put down as unacceptable socially. Yeah. And that all can happen, especially if the girl bully is sophisticated, you know, because then an adult can come in there and and call her on it. And she’ll say, oh, well, she’s just over sensitive. I didn’t really mean that at all. And and with a perfect facade of angelic innocence as well, which is the antisocial female types are very good at mimicking. These differences are so interesting. These these sex differences that we see in human behavior, but they’re not well documented. So recently I received a handbook on I think it’s developmental psychology or something like that. And I looked for gender in there because I was writing on gender and it was almost nothing on gender. So the play differences between boys and girls were not mentioned, but also the conflict differences that you now mentioned were not mentioned. It’s as if the psychologists have decided that that’s a too too sensitive as a topic to get into the sex differences of. I think part of it is, is that they actually don’t like the facts. So, for example, when I’ve been looking at personality differences between men and women and we did some of the cardinal work on that with the big five aspect scale. So the truth of the matter is, is that temperamental differences between men and women as so gender differences as measured by personality scales, which is the right way to measure it. They maximize in Scandinavia. So the more egalitarian the country, the bigger the gender differences, which is exactly the opposite of what the social constructionists would have predicted. Now, some gender differences decrease. So men and women are more likely to be in the workplace now than 40 years ago. But if you make an egalitarian society, you actually maximize gender differences, which is no one expected that. And it just flies in the face of this sort of Margaret Mead, early Margaret Mead like social constructionism. And then you add to that a couple. So that accounts that plus the difference in interest, which is relevant to your work. So girls are reliably more interested in people and boys reliably more interested in things. So that’s a dolls and cars or toy cars. And that also maximizes in the Scandinavian countries. It’s one standard deviation. The difference is the biggest personality difference between men and women that we know. And it accounts for a huge amount of the variance in occupational choice, like between, say, engineering and nursing, which would be the cardinal examples. And so the psychologists look at that and they think, oh, my God, that isn’t how we want it to be. And so they don’t talk about your work and they don’t talk about toy preference differences and they don’t talk about temperamental differences. It’s all like shunted under the carpet. So you mentioned Margaret Mead, who is often mentioned in the context of cultural construction of gender differences. But I reread her book, her book, Male and Female. And she has a whole section in there about what she calls universal differences between men and women. So she and in a later edition of her book, she said if she had to write it today, this was in the 1960s. Her book was, I think, published in the 50s. She said, if I would write it today, I would bring in more biology, the biology of the differences between men and women. And so one of the differences that she mentions is that men always want to accomplish something. They want to be better at something than other men or women. They feel that’s that’s their goal in life, so to speak. And she mentioned that as a universal thing in man. She mentions also, of course, the childbearing capacities of women and the interest in children of women and the interest of women in the well-being of others. And of themselves and their family. And so she mentions in that chapter quite a few things that I think are universal sex differences. Well, let’s say she was more open minded, I would say, than than than her followers in that regard. Well, so this this desire to be better at something. So let’s take that apart a bit in light of our discussion. If you’re cynical about that, you can say, well, that desire to be better at something is nothing but a manifestation of that power and dominance drive. Right. And so it’s to be discut competitive urges to be discouraged because it’s a zero sum game and one person always gains at the expense of another. But if you look at the even the animal literature in a sophisticated way, you think, wait a minute, competence is associated with hierarchical status. It’s very sophisticated. It’s a competition for competence, even among animals and even more so among human beings. And so that ambition that young boys manifest is can easily be manifested in the service of social goods. And furthermore, and this is the thing that’s so awful about it for me, is that that’s actually the primary thing that male humans have to offer females, which is, well, look, of course, I want to be better at something because I want to be differentiated economically and to be paid for something, you have to be better at it than others. Otherwise, no one will pay you. They’ll pay someone else. And so what I see happening to boys in our culture, and I’ve seen this with thousands of people, is that their ambition is being quelled because it’s associated unthinkingly with power. And that undermines their entire commitment to the social and the sexual and interpersonal enterprise. Mm hmm. Yeah, I think there is a bit of suppression of those tendencies. Yeah. So, OK, so maybe maybe we could move to if you don’t mind, to the animal cognitive front. You talked about cognitive ethology and and I’d like to get your thoughts on that, too. You wrote a book whose title I don’t remember precisely, but it’s something like Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? Yes, exactly. That’s exactly what I got it right. So let’s let’s walk through that a bit. And I would like if you would as well, this point that our perceptions and our thoughts are shaped by our morphology in some fundamental way. You make a nice example of gibbons, for example, and the fact that octopi and elephants and primates can be intelligent in a particular way because they have manipulable appendages, unlike, say, dolphins. So let me give give an example how we mismeasured the animals. So elephants, that was the question, do elephants use tools? So what people did is they take an elephant at the zoo, they put some food outside of the cage. You give the elephant sticks. And the elephant doesn’t do anything with the sticks. If you do the same experiment with a chimp, of course, he takes the stick and reaches the food and brings it close to him and then eats the food. So the chimp will use the stick to to get the food. The elephant didn’t do that. And the conclusion of that study was that elephants are not tool users. Then a couple of years later, another research team did a smart thing. They hung some food very high so that the elephant couldn’t reach it. And they put in his enclosure a bunch of boxes, wooden boxes. And what the elephant did is he would grab a box, bring it close to under the food, put it under the food and then stand on top of the box and reach the food. So he was using a tool clearly. The conclusion of that research team was that an elephant, the trunk, we think it’s like a hand, but the trunk is also a nose, of course. And if the trunk reaches for food, it needs to close itself when it grabs the food. And the elephant was not ready to close his nose while he was grabbing food. But if he could stand on boxes, that would that would work for him. And so we need to think in terms of the animal and its physical features. And that trunk is not an arm. It’s not the same thing. We need to start thinking like the animals and then we can solve a lot of these problems of their intelligence. Our appendages, in some sense, are primary tools. And so if you don’t give an animal a problem that it can solve with its primary set of tools, it’s obviously not going to be able to solve it. And so that also brings us into the issue of embodied perception. You know, because I read a great book called Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, which J.J. Gibson, which is man, that’s a classic book, something brilliant. And, you know, he his premise fundamentally is that we see with our hands in some real sense is that when we look at the world, we basically construe it as a set of grippable objects. Now, it’s more complex because we see walkable surfaces and climbable, you know, what would you call, climbable slopes and so forth. So it’s not just hands, but that our eyes function to map our hands onto the world. Yeah, I think it’s a brilliant book. And that’s why we understand a chimpanzee much better than an elephant or a dolphin. Yeah, a chimpanzee has hands and has binocular vision. So we are completely in tune with the chimpanzee and not in tune with an elephant or a giraffe or whatever it is. Right. And that understanding is a consequence, not so much of mutual misunderstanding, so to speak. It’s much more profound than that. It’s because our cognitive and perceptual architectures actually scaffolded off our morphology. If the morphology is different enough, we wouldn’t be able to understand the animal, even if we could communicate, because none of the presuppositions would be the same. I think E.O. Wilson, was it Wilson who said if we could speak with a lion, we’d have nothing to say to him, something like that. Or he might have said it about ants. I think it was Wittgenstein. Oh, OK. I know a number of people have made similar comments, but well, you also detail out the developing understanding of the gibbon hand and species specific face identification. Yeah, so the gibbon hand is interesting because the gibbon has almost no thumb. So it’s more like a hook. He hangs by the hand. And so when they tested tool use on the gibbon, the gibbons were not using tools at all. They never did anything until a smart investigator lifted the tools up a little because the gibbon cannot pick up something from the ground. And since the gibbon doesn’t live on the ground, he lives up in the trees. It doesn’t matter for the gibbon that he cannot do that. But in the experimental situations, they couldn’t pick up the tools. So, yeah, you always have to test animals and that becomes ever more complex. For example, the elephant has a hundred times better smell olfaction than the dog. The dog and the dog probably a hundred times better than us. So you can imagine the elephant. You need to test them probably on olfaction. So recently, recently, Josh Plotnik, a former student of mine, he did an experiment with elephants in Thailand where he would give them two buckets. In one bucket, he would beat sunflower seeds and the other one was empty. And then the elephant, of course, with his trunk, could not look into it, but the trunk would smell and would pick the bucket with the sunflower seeds. Then he started to vary the quantities and he found that elephants can distinguish a bucket with 120 seeds from a bucket with 100 seeds. So they can count with their nose, so to speak. They’re so sensitive, no animal can do that, I think. But the elephant can do that. So they can estimate quantity olfactorily. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Wow. And has it has the limits of that discrimination been tested? Yeah, well, I think if you look at that paper, he has been testing by making the differences smaller and smaller. Yeah. Hmm. Oh, that’s really something. Well, yeah, we have no idea how an animal, most animals brains are arranged around olfaction, not vision. We’re really weird in that regard. It’s like us and birds of prey, you know, and maybe some close primate relatives. That’s it. The rest of the animal kingdom, it’s almost all smell. And we can hardly even imagine what a world like that is like. So the brain business is interesting because at some point, five years, six years ago, people said we should not look at brain size, not even a brain size relative to the body. We should just count the number of neurons. And that will give us an index of the intelligence of an animal. And of course, everyone must convince that at that time that humans have the most neurons. We have 85 billion neurons or something like that. Until a couple of years later, it was found that the elephant has three times more neurons than the human. And then that theory was abandoned because humans need to stay on top. Yeah. Well, you know, we radically underestimate the relationship between intelligence and morphology. You know, I thought about this in particular with regards to dolphins who have quite a remarkably large brain and a large brain in relation to their body size. And they well, dolphins are intelligent. It’s like, well, it’s possible that they’re intelligent in some way we don’t really understand, but they don’t have hands. And so they can’t build anything. And I would our prefrontal cortex emerged in large part out of the motor cortex across the course of evolution. And it looks like what we do with our prefrontal cortex is primarily map out action and manipulation before implementing it. And so, again, we think of the world as a place we can grip and move. And when we think about problem solving cognitively, we’re really looking at at elaborations of what we do with our hands. So it’s not obvious at all what dolphins do if they think because what can they do with it? That’s even reflected in our language. Can you grasp the problem? Exactly. Exactly that. Can you get a grip on it? You know, can you get a handle on it? Absolutely. Can you handle that? That’s all that’s all questions about competence. And so, yeah, well, so so if you if you look at the animal kingdom, we judge animals by our standards. We are good at language and we’re good at tool use. And that’s our standards. But if you look at, for example, echo location by bats, it’s a very complex cognitive skill. Ask any engineer who who designs radar system for for airplanes, how complex that is. You’re a moving object and you need to calculate and recalculate and so on. And so echo location is a very complex skill. And you can dark this room, make it completely dark and release an insect and the bat can catch the insect. It’s just incredible that they can do that. But we’re not impressed by it. We’re not impressed by the bat because we don’t do these things. We’re not echo locators. And so bat intelligence is not on our radar, so to speak. We always go for language and tool use. Well, dolphins echo locate too. So that could be a huge part of what their cognitive processes is devoted towards. And you don’t only know what they’re doing linguistically. So let’s look. Let’s talk about. One of the things I liked about the your book on animal cognition was because I’ve thought this for a long time, especially in relationship to rat studies. So there’s this idea that was drummed into my head as an undergraduate is that you shouldn’t answer primorifies animals. And then as I got to be a more sophisticated viewer of the animal literature, I thought, no, no, no, that’s exactly backwards. What you should do is presume continuity of all function unless there’s compelling reason to not. And so that made me interested in the issue of animal consciousness because conscious. And so you touch on consciousness in that book. And so when first. So I’d like to ask you, what do you make of consciousness? Like, how would you define it? And how far down the animal chain? I’ll tell you a story about a wasp because I’ve watched wasps and those bloody things, man. Those things are sophisticated. Let me say one thing about anthropomorphism. OK, OK. We need to respect homologies. Homologies are similarities between species that come from a common ancestor. So my hand is homologous with the hand of a chimpanzee. And so what the chimpanzee has, we don’t call a paw or a claw. And then we call it a hand because we use the same terminology for homologous traits. The same is true for behavior. If I laugh, my laughing expression is very similar to that of a chimpanzee who is being tickled. We need to both call it laugh. When I was younger, people would say, why don’t you call it vocalized panting? They wanted us to get away from them. Anthropomorphism, but I think anthropomorphism is useful, especially for species that have homologous traits. Yeah, yeah. Well, that’s where it should be the assumption rather than the exception. Yeah. So and Panksepp showed that rats laugh too when you tickle them. They just do it ultrasonically. So that homology is extremely deep. OK, so this wasp, it was buzzing around my head. And I nailed it with my hand and hard, you know, I kind of snapped at it. And so that’s a hell of a fast gesture, that forward movement back. And so I nailed the wasp with my finger and I knocked it probably 15 feet, which is a hell of a G force blow for an insect. And that bloody thing righted itself an inch from the ground and dove directly at my face. And I thought, oh, my God, like I don’t. And then so I watched that and I thought, wow, that’s something, man. To do that is something. Then I read also about these wolf spiders who are predatory. And if they if they’re on a plant here and they see a prey animal or insect over here, they will walk down the plant across the ground and jump on it from behind. It’s like, OK, OK, that’s a spider and it has like no brain. And yet that is so unbelievably complicated. Navigation of unfamiliar territory. It has a brain. Yes, it certainly does. But I mean, neuronal neuronal numbers very low. But I think are they are wasps conscious, are spiders conscious? It’s like and you can take, you know, if you take the whole cortex and the cortex and the limbic system off a cat and you leave it with nothing but its hypothalamus and its spinal cord, that cat is hyper exploratory. And that’s bloody weird, right? You take the whole brain off a cat, except for like 2 percent, and it doesn’t just lay there and do nothing. What it does instead is engage in almost all its normal activities, but it can’t remember anything. So it’s hyper curious. And so let me let me give you my take on consciousness because no one has a good definition of it, so and if we have no definition, how am I going to measure it? But there are certain things that we humans cannot do without being conscious. So for example, you cannot plan a party for tomorrow without thinking about what you should buy, what kind of music you’re going to have, which friends you’re going to invite, what time it’s going to start. You have to be conscious of the process before you organize your party. Now, we have evidence, we have very good evidence nowadays of planning in animals. So, for example, chimpanzees in the wild, they will pick up tools and they’re going to walk two miles with these tools and then they’re going to use them on a termite hill or whatever, which means that 20 minutes before they started the activity, they were already planning the activity. And so we also have experiments now. They have all sorts of experiments where you can give tools to animals that they can use only the next day, so to speak. So we have good evidence for planning now in animals. Now, if we cannot plan, if we cannot plan without being conscious, it would be unlikely that these animals can plan without being conscious, because, of course, the process is going to be very similar to what we do. OK, so I talked to Dr. Roger Penrose about consciousness, and he believes it’s non-computational and non-algorithmic, and the reason he believes that in part is because the horizon of the future differs unpredictably from the past. That’s the problem of induction. And so he thinks that consciousness is a tool that we use to solve the problem of true unpredictability. And so your association of consciousness with future planning seems to me both dead on and in keeping with that idea. And so, so, so then. OK, how far down the chain of animal existence do you think that consciousness extends? So consciousness is, I think, a subcategory. The bigger category that we use usually is sentience. You must have heard about sentience is the ability to experience positive, positive or negative experiences. And sentience probably goes back all the way to insects. And we do that emotional sentience as well, because it’s associated with approach and avoidance, right? So it’s really old. Yeah. So maybe you get as soon as you get a nervous system that can represent embodied movement, you get something akin to the emotions of approach and avoidance and then maybe something akin to sentience at that point. Yeah, sentience for the longest time people debated do fish feel pain, which was a sentience question to fish feel pain. And then experimentals, they found that if you shock fish or crabs, you know, in a laboratory, you bring them in a situation where they can hide themselves in crevices and you shock them in these places. They’re going to avoid the places where they were shocked. Right. So they have anxiety too, then, because that avoidance is anxiety. So they have pain and they can abstract from that. So they have pain and they remember the pain and they change their behavior as a result of that. And so that was used as a conclusion to conclude that these animals have sentience because they have experiences. So sentience is the bigger issue. Also, morally a very important issue, of course, do animals have sentience? And consciousness, I never know exactly what it is because philosophers talk a lot about consciousness, but they never tell me how to measure it. Well, you said that you associated sentience with the capacity to experience. And then I think, well, there’s no difference between the capacity to experience and experience, and there’s actually no difference between experience and being because it’s very, very difficult to understand being itself in the absence of any experience of being. I mean, what is it that there’s not even nothing right? Because nothing is only a concept that’s something that’s capable of apprehending something could ever come up with. So I don’t see consciousness and being as being separable concepts in some sense. And OK, OK, so you chase that all the way down to two insects. So sentience now is recognized also in invertebrates. And there used to be a debate about fish, but I think that debate has been settled. Well, it certainly seems to be the case for octopi. Those things are so smart and so flexible in their behavior that it’s just it’s beyond did you see my octopus teacher? Yeah. Their capacity to mimic and camouflage is just to see that octopus aggregate all those shells and turn itself into a rock, I mean, especially given they have, what, about a three year lifespan. So the octopus is interesting that that movie, the octopus teacher, many people were very moved by the octopus embracing the person who approached. Octopi are not particularly social, as you say, they live maybe one year, maybe two years. They’re very solitary creatures. I don’t think they have love for each other or the capacity to love a human. But maybe that octopus was very curious and maybe maybe the octopus also felt safe in the presence of a human because this human kept predators away, I’m sure. So it was maybe a good situation for the octopus to be in. Yeah. And curiosity could easily be the reason because the octopus is so damn smart. It probably has some excess cognitive capacity like a. But the people that often projects, they would feel they think the octopus is loving the human. I’m not sure about the loving. I think I think anything that isn’t cuddly is probably a little low on the love end of things. You know, so so. OK, so so let’s talk about self-consciousness then, because that’s that’s the consciousness, that’s a sentience that involves at least a reflexive distinction between self and and other, broadly speaking. And I’ve been interested in, but also skeptical of the animal self-conscious experiments because mirror recognition isn’t nothing, but humans have an unbelievably elaborated self-consciousness. I mean, we’re fully aware of our span of life. We know we’re going to die. We can really distinctly apprehend the future. And we have a really complex, explicit model of ourselves. And animals, well, many animals can recognize themselves in the mirror. And that’s not nothing, but it’s certainly not. There’s not many animals. There’s a few. There’s only a few who do that. But we do have evidence in chimpanzees and in orangutans that they embellish themselves in front of the mirror. So the observations, they’re mostly anecdotal of apes in captivity who put something on their head and then look in the mirror or in human context, they may put lipstick and look themselves in the mirror. So if you embellish yourself and then look in the mirror, it’s sort of interesting addition to the test. Definitely. Because, yeah, well, it also sees that you view yourself as a modifiable entity in the eyes of others in all likelihood. Yeah. So we also have evidence from behavior that female apes, female chimpanzees and female bonobos, they do more self adornment and self embellishment than the males. So the females, they will hang things around themselves, put things on their head, walk around with them, much more so than the males. The males also use tools to enhance themselves, but that’s more to be more intimidating. Like beating on a garbage bin or something. Yeah, banging things or whatever. When my daughter was young, I watched my kids quite closely when they were little. And there was a variety of differences in them on the sex difference front. My son was much more disagreeable and tough minded than my daughter, for example. And but I also saw remarkably early in my daughter this instinct for self adornment. Now, my wife doesn’t wear much jewelry or much makeup. She’s kind of a minimalist in both regards. And so she didn’t even have much of a jewelry collection. But my daughter was really entranced by jewelry and makeup from as long, far back as I can remember. And I thought, well, maybe that’s a socialized difference. But I can’t see how, because she didn’t have makeup dolls. It wasn’t part of what she was being fed. She didn’t watch TV. And so but she was she was really, really interested in jewelry and endowment. And I think that’s that’s actually been a stable part of her character, because as an adult, she’s been much more interested in self adornment than my wife was. And it wasn’t obvious to me at all that she learned that. And I thought, well, that that so. So in the in the apes, that’s a super stimulus thing like the stick, sticklebacks that it’s more a female thing. And I think in the apes, of course, the females have a genital swelling, which fortunately, I think humans should be happy that we don’t have that. But they have this when they’re fertile, their genitals swell up. And I think the female apes, that’s an adornment for sure. And they add to it. They may add to it. Now, we know from human women that in the time of ovulation, they adorn themselves more. So there are studies on that is that women dress differently at the time of ovulation, and they expose more skin and they fancy clothes on usually at that time. That’s also when they prefer the same photos of men with a square jaw than a narrower jaw at the peak of ovulation. All of this is unconsciously, because in that study, they what they did is they photographed women in the regular clothes, and then they asked them about their menstrual cycle. And that’s how they figured out how they were dressed relative to their size. Right. And that would manifest itself in that umbell, which would be something like I really feel like dressing up today. And that’s a spontaneous motivation that’s drifting up from hormonal influence and unconscious in that sense, and tuning by hormones, tuning of perception and emotion by hormonal influence. For me, it’s always very interesting, the things that we do unconsciously and that we’re not really aware of. So there was a study, for example, looking at handshakes. And I think it was an Israeli study. Man shaking hands of men, men shaking hands of women and the other way around. And what they found is that people bring their hand to their nose to close. So they touch their face, they bring their hand close to their nose when they have shaken hands with same sex partners. Not with the opposite sex. And they think it has to do with testing anxiety or testing dominance or testing rivalry. Well, God only knows what sort of information we’re picking up on the olfactory front. Like a lot of that could be unconscious. I mean, I know, for example, that if you give women t-shirts, laundered t-shirts have been worn one day by men, and you ask them to rate the odor preference, the women prefer symmetrical t-shirts that symmetrical men wore. And so that’s obviously not in any sense a conscious olfactory preference for like the concept of symmetry. It’s just built right into the olfaction. So we have seen now during the COVID crisis that now that we’re coming out of the crisis, everyone is very happy that we have physical interaction with others. And I think one of the things we have missed is probably smell. So you can talk with your grandparents over Zoom, but that’s not the same as visiting them and seeing them and smelling them. I once… Yeah, there’s a deep sense of familiarity and memory that’s associated with that. You know, my wife, when my wife’s mother died, my wife took one of her scarves and she kept it in a little jar. And she now and then she’d take it out and she could detect the smell of her mother on that. And then about five years later, she said, I can’t smell my mother on this anymore. And she just got rid of it. But that was a, you know, that smell is so evocative, right? And it can produce a kind of a longing and also a sense of deep comfort. Yeah. Yeah. But it is also, you know, I was once on a flight before COVID on a flight to Tokyo. I was sitting next to a businessman and he was going to Tokyo for a meeting of a couple of hours. And then he would fly back. And I said, you really feel that you need to fly to Tokyo for that? You could do this virtually. He said, no, no, it’s a multimillion dollar deal. And I want to see these people. I want to smell these people. I want to see them up close. He felt that this all this bodily interaction was awfully important to him. And that is how we are. We have remained primates in that regard. And all faction is largely unconscious. We don’t even have words for it. We cannot even express what’s happening. But it’s largely unconscious, but it’s extremely important to us. Yeah, well, we have. That’s the problem with virtualizing the world to some degree is we don’t know. Well, like we talked about earlier, does me does female pattern, antisocial behavior scale on social media? And if the answer to that is yes, it’s like, well, that’s revolutionary because it’s never scaled before. And so we have no idea what these virtual virtual environments are doing to us by interfering in unexpected ways with our embodiment. Yeah, but you know, I just recently saw that on Twitter, there’s far fewer women than men, it’s mostly men who do this Twittering and Facebook and so on. Yeah, well, I think I think that what’s happened on Twitter, you know, this might I might be accused of tormenting my theory past its justification. I think that the fact that there is no direct to face to face confrontation between men on social media platforms facilitates a female style of antisocial behavior between men on social media platforms. Yeah, yeah, because you see this reputation savaging and it’s like, well, you don’t do that in face to face contact with a man, because if I’ve seen people repeatedly hundreds of times, not the same person, but say something on Twitter. That no one would ever say face to face to another adult male even once in their life, because it would immediately cause well, a movement towards physical aggression, if not an immediate punch. But that’s not there. And so then you think, well, the fact that that’s not there. What does that do to the communication pattern? And the answer is we have no idea. God only knows what it does. So maybe I could close with a couple of general questions, unless there’s something else that you would like to OK, OK, so. I’m always curious about people’s intellectual heroes. Like I mentioned, some of the people who’ve been really influential to me, my viewers know Freud, Jung, Piaget, Panksepp, Jeffrey Gray, like a handful of, well, you, a handful of animal experimentalists, some philosophers like Nietzsche, Solzhenitsyn. For you, like who’s been signal in your intellectual development and really shaped your thinking? Well, the founders of etiology, which were Nico Tinbergen and Conrad Lawrence, they were very important. I think they’re very different characters, but they were very important for my intellectual development. Ed Wilson, I think, was very important. Yeah, I think Wilson and, you know, I was also influenced in the beginning by Desmond Morris’s book, The Naked Ape. Yeah, yeah, even though now if I can easily mention quite a few things that are not correct in that book in terms of theories, but the way he wrote it and sort of irreverent way of writing about the human species and sort of also making fun. Just the idea that this comparison between species was interesting ethically and morally and emotionally, that was kind of revolutionary. He didn’t do a good job of that. Yeah, his book was extremely successful and partly because he had this tone of mocking humans a little bit, you know, and I think he did a real good job of that. So, yeah, those were my early influences, I think, you know. Yeah, one of the things that’s so interesting about your writing, I think, is, apart from its remarkable approachability, which I really think is a gift, is that it’s also non-naively positive and optimistic, which is so cool to see because that combination doesn’t occur that often. Often people who are optimistic are kind of naive, but you’re a hardcore biologist sort of in the scientific trenches in a real sense. And yet I always come away from your books with a positive, with a fundamentally positive, they have positive consequences on me. And, you know, the fact that you, I think your work on the biological basis of moral development is, I think it’s an, of what would you say, it’s kind of epoch level philosophical significance. You have such a… Yeah, well, I’m an optimist by nature. And even though I started studying violence and aggression, because that was the topic at the time everyone was studying aggressive behavior, I very soon switched to conflict resolution because I found it actually more interesting than the aggression itself. Well, that’s extremely cool, you know, that you got in through the darkness, so to speak. But the consequence of that was that you actually learned that aggression and violence weren’t the fundamental basis of social interaction and that reconciliation and competence and empathy and long-term planning, all of that actually turns out to be more fundamental and important. Yeah, that’s so optimistic that that could possibly be true. And I must say, I don’t enjoy violence. So I have colleagues who will tell you a horrible story about two chimps killing each other or people who watch sports games where there’s a lot of violence. And I, you know, I’ve seen a lot of violence among the primates, I can tell you. I know, I’ve read about it. But I don’t enjoy it. I prefer when they get together afterwards and groom each other. Right, right. Well, that’s interesting, too, because that actually made you capable of seeing that when you did see it. You know, and that’s really something. Yeah, well, your work and your work has really been a cardinal influence on me. And I’ve been able to talk about it with all these people. I talked to, you know, 150,000 people publicly in the last three or four months and making this case that the fundamental basis of human social organization is much better construed as reciprocity and the spirit of play and the ability to reconcile. And that’s such a… People just don’t hear that. And to know that that’s grounded in a solid scientific literature, as well as, you know, being the target of ethical conceptualization, it’s so helpful to put that other foundation underneath the claims that, you know, there’s real reasons to be optimistic about the nature of social organization and individual motivation. And your work on gender differences and your support, in some sense, for male ambition in that regard, it’s also, I think, unbelievably important. So I really appreciated you talking to me today. Pleasure to meet you. Yeah, it was nice talking to you.