YouSaid · the spoken record

David Buss

lines on the record: 176
first: 2022-05-04
most recent: 2022-05-04
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Yeah. Well, I think that. There are some things that are biologically evolved, some standards, standards of attractiveness. And there are some of the things that I mentioned. So in male evaluation of females, let me back up and just say what is the underlying logic? Why would we have standards of attractiveness? So here's the interesting thing. And this gets back to your earlier question about what is unique to humans or what distinguishes us or what set us off on the path that we did is chimpanzee males do not have any difficulty figuring out when a female is fertile. She signals that like crazy with the bright red genital swallowing olfactory cues she goes into estrus.”
2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tip ratio that is circumference of the waist relative to the hips is acute to youth and fertility and acute to health. Symmetrical features. So we are bilaterally symmetrical species, but we all have deviations from perfect symmetry that are due to different things mutation load, environmental insults, diseases during development and so forth.”
2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Physical appearance provides a wealth of information about the health status of someone in the case of males, their physical formidability, and we have formidability assessment adaptations, and then fertility as well. So there are a very predictable set of cues to fertility that have evolved to be part of our standards of attractiveness, and they're not arbitrary. There are some culturally arbitrary ones. You go to the Maori in New Zealand, for example, and they find tattoos on their lips to be very attractive. So there are some culturally arbitrary things, but standards of beauty like cues to youth, cues to health in women, clear skin, full lips, clear eyes, lustrous hair, a small waist.”
2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Astonishing, and so he or her like a 50 contestants who were selected as the most attractive in their state, presumably, although they claim it's based on talent. But we noticed the differences. And this is why I would push back a little bit on the term socially constructed, because I think there are many different meanings of that phrase. And one meaning that some people have one connotation is that it's arbitrary. And I don't think it's arbitrary. So this is another shift in understanding standards of beauty where it used to be believed in the social sciences. You can't judge a book by its cover. Beauty is only skin deep. You know, don't judge people on the superficial characteristics. But in fact,”
2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would have a couple thoughts on that. It's an interesting set of issues you raised. One is that I think we have evolved adaptations part of our psychology is to detect differences. And so this is why like a, I don't know, a Martian or an alien coming down, they might look at humans and say, boy, they all look alike. Just like we look at, I don't know, zebras or whatever, and we think they all look. look alike What's important in decision making, especially in the mating domain or even friendship domain or coalitional selection domain is the differences. And so I noticed this is just a concrete example of this. I was sitting around, this is, again, ages ago watching something like a Miss America beauty contest. people with a bunch of other people and they were saying boy did you see Miss North Carolina what a dog and and so”
2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Part of it is, I think there are actually two quick answers to that one is the attentional one. So our attentional field. When they draw attention to it, those what could be very small deviations from perfect symmetry or whatever they are become magnified in our attentional field. But the other is that Who we have as a mate is also a reflection of our own status. And you saw this in a kind of overt and way in the earlier last presidential, not the last 2016 presidential election where Donald Trump was saying this was when he was in competition with Ted Cruz, I think, in the primary, said look at my wife. Look at Ted Cruz's life. And he really impugned the appearance of Ted Cruz's wife”
2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is a random example. I went to a party. This is back in my youth, but went to a party with my girlfriend at the time. And I got into this conversation with another woman who happened to be very attractive. But then we leave the party and she said something just casually offhanded. Like, she said, did you notice that her thighs were heavy? I hadn't. But next time I saw her, this other woman, I found my attention being drawn to check out her thigh. And originally it puzzles me why women would derogate other women on appearance. Well, they do it, of course, because men prioritize appearance. But I thought, well, the man can see the woman directly with his own eyes. Why would verbal input alter his perceptions of how attractive he was? And I think”
2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do that. And women and men both do that. So it's an interesting thing where male competitions, we were talking about the Yanamamo earlier and some of these overt physical or what animal biologists call contest competition, where there's a physical battle. Males do that. And so a lot of the early attention on make competition was focused on these sort of ostentatious overtles in contest competition. But we compete through language. And so there's this big overlooked domain of women, the ways in which women compete with each other using language. And one of the things that astonished me is how observant women are about the subtle imperfections in their rivals and take pains to point them out.”
2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of effort to maintaining the reputations, to building the reputations, to trying to recover reputations after a loss of reputation for various reasons. But we compete for mates using language, and that includes sending signals to the person that we're trying to attract using language, verbal fluency and obviously some more recent things like poetry. But also we use language to derogate our competitors. So one of the papers I published very early on was a research project on derogation of competitors, the ways in which people impugn the status, character, and reputations of their rivals with the goal of making them less desirable to other people.”
2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. And I mean, if you go to even things like how we compete for mates, and this is another kind of strange for some people angle on it, but mating is inherently a competitive process in that desirable mates are in scarce supply relative to the numbers of people who want them. And so even post-mating that is after mate selection mate attraction and mutual mate choice, desirable, that's why there's mate poaching. Mate poaching is one of the strategies that we in my lab with David Schmidt have studied. And so, okay, but one of the unique aspects of humans is that we compete using language. And that is, we have reputations and humans devote along.”
2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. I guess I would, I mean, that's an interesting thought. I hadn't thought about that. I guess I would use other terms to describe that. So like the term awe, for example, when you see a beautiful sunset, you know, that's why I kind of started out by saying I think there are different types of love and I'm focusing on the mating.”
2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that's a great question, but I mean, it's pretty well established that there are these different phases of love. So there's this infatuation phase where our psychology, we get obsessional thoughts. It's hard to focus on work when we're not with the person we're thinking about the other person constantly. So there's kind of like ideational intrusion into our psychology, but you can't sustain that. I mean, it'd be, and then, of course, Pardon the phrase, but what I describe is the fucking bunny's phase of. Of this intense sexuality, but people have other adaptive problems they have to solve. And so you can't stay in that state for too long. And so that subsides over time and develops into, at least in many cases, this warm attachment.”
2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I include that as well. So it's a broad. Definition and absolutely includes the emotion of love. And of course, there are many different types of love, brotherly love, love, parents for children. But love, I think, and this is one of the shifts in the social sciences. So when I was an undergraduate, for example, I was taught that love is this invention by some Caucasian European poets a couple hundred years ago. And it turns out that's not the case. So there's been extensive cross-cultural evidence now that people, not every person in all cultures, of course, but some people in all cultures experience this emotion that we call love.”
2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I first started studying it, yeah, I don't started studying it, I looked for the right term. And obviously it's much broader than sex. So by mating, I include things like mate selection, mate preferences, mate attraction, mate retention, mate poaching, mate expulsions.”
2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Again, you go back to chimps, and chimps with whom we share more than 98% of our DNA, males don't do anything. So they inseminate the females. But then when the kids are born, they basically don't do much of anything in terms of provisioning and so forth. But human males do. We invest in the modern environment could be decades, you know, especially with the boomerang kids and everything. Not all males do. compared to the vast majority of mammals, we are very heavy male parental investment species.”
2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've stayed in touch with him on and off. He's a brilliant, brilliant guy. And he thinks fire and cooking have been one of the key things. But I think it's hard to isolate. I would trace at least part of our uniqueness to the uniqueness of our mating system. So we have in mating, unlike chimpanzees who are our closest primate relative of which Richard Rangham is a world's expert, but they have basically no long-term pair bonded mating. Female comes into estrus, all the mating, all the sex happens, most of the sex happens during that window. But humans have evolved long-term pair bonded mating. And it's only one mating strategy, but it's a really important one. And then you have with that male parental care.”
2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, I think it's hard to isolate one factor. I know you've had Richard Rangham on this podcast. It was a wonderful, wonderful interview. And he used to be a colleague of mine when I was a professor at Michigan.”
2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think it's just one of these things. The words that are deemed appropriate to use to describe things change over time.”
2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yeah, it's important to establish status hierarchies, you know, but also, and here's just another one more concrete point on that. Yan Aman, we don't have this in our language. We just have one word for kill or murder, but Yan Mamo have you're either an if you're a mayo, you're an unokai or a non-unokai. The non-unokai are men who have not killed. If you're an Unokai, that means you have killed someone and the Unokai among the Anamamo historically had higher status and more wives. So they're a polygynous society, which has been true of something like 83 to 85% of traditional societies. He said, we no longer call them traditional societies. We call them small scale societies.”
2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh no, you're hitting each other. They get 20 paces away and they run up and you punch the other guy in the chest and he has to basically stand there.”
2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Violence, but not the only source. So there's also within group conflict. And so many ethnographies, many traditional societies have things, some of them are ritualized like wrestling matches or in the Anamamo. They have these, or used to, these chest-pounding duels. So if we're in this match, you challenge me and I have to, of course,”
2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Other than women. Of course, it's more complex than that because some go to war for reputational reasons. They say if we don't retaliate, because we've been attacked and they've stolen three of our women, if we don't retaliate, then we will get a reputation as exploitable and then other groups will start to attack us as well. And so they get into these cycles of, you know, like the Hatfields and McCoy's of attacks, counterattacks, retribution, and part of it is reputation management. So that's between groups, and I think that's been the primary source of.”
2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's part of our common thing. So just one concrete example unfortunately he's dead now. We passed away. Napoleon Chagnon, who studied the Anamamo for many, many years when he first started interviewing them, he asked them, why do you go to war? And they said, well, to capture women, of course, it's the only sensible reason. And they said, you know, why does your culture go to war, however they phrased it? And he said, well, we go to war to spread democracy and ideas and everything. They basically fell off their logs laughing at such a stupid reason because why risk your life for anything?”
2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Advantageous from a purely reproductive standpoint to conquer a neighboring group, kill the males, and get whatever resources they have, including females and sexual resources as well as tools, weapons, territory, and so forth. And so I think that we have, and of course, it's typically males. Who do that? I mean, yes, some females have participated in warfare, but as far as I know, there's never been a single case in all of human recorded history of women forming a war tribe with other women to attack another group of women and kill them and capture the men as husbands. But this phenomenon is common in the ethnographic record and small group studies.”
2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Stay together long enough, do all the sexual things you need to do to reproduce, have the kids survive, etc. So everything has to go through mating. And in that sense, I think it's, I mean, survival was really only a means to an end, if you will. So sex has got to be important, and humans have a very rich evolved sexual psychology and evolved mating psychology. I wouldn't minimize the importance of violence either. There's a ton of evidence that humans evolved in the context of small groups with a fair amount of small groups warfare. So inter-tribal warfare, and this is a harsh realization, but there historically, this is part of our bad evolutionary history.”
2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, both are important. I mean, first of all, humans are a sexually reproducing species. And so everything has to go through sex. So in our mating psychology has to be very rich and complex because to succeed, for us to be here now, all of our ancestors in an unbroken chain have had to succeed in selecting a fertile mate, attracting that mate, be mutually chosen by that mate.”
2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source