YouSaid · the spoken record

Richard Wrangham

lines on the record: 156
first: 2021-10-10
most recent: 2021-10-10
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“So there are two major clues to why it was with Homo rectus that our ancestors first acquired the control of fire. One is the fact that they were clearly not sleeping in trees in the way that chimpanzees and gorillas and bonobos and all the other primates do. And the other is that there was this striking reduction throughout the gut, a reduction in size of the mouth and the chewing apparatus and in the gut itself. And that conforms to what we see nowadays about humans, which is that our guts are about two thirds of the size of what they would be if we ate raw food. Judge by the great apes So at some point in our evolution, We acquired the skill of cooking and skill of controlling fire.”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That gave rise to homoctus and homorectus here how different it was. It had a smaller mouth, a smaller jaw, smaller teeth, and to judge from its ribs and pelvis smaller gut. In addition, it had lost what astrolopithecines all had, which was adaptations for climbing in the trees. And that meant that Homo erectus must have slept on the ground. Since it slept on the ground, it should have been able to defend itself somehow. And I can't think of any way they could have done that unless they had fire.”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the way to think of astrolopithecines is that they were like chimpanzees standing upright. So they were erect by pedalwalkers. They were like chimpanzees in the sense that they had brains about the size of a chimpanzee. They were literally about the body size of a chimpanzee, a little bit smaller, actually. And they had big jaws because they were still eating raw food. They had big teeth and big jaws. And then around two million years ago, Line of astrolopithecines, which ended with an intermediate species, a kind of missing link area, because it is not missing, called Habilis, sometimes called Homohabalus, but more properly, in my view, called Australopithecus Habalus.”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Subtitle, How Cooking Made Us Human refers not to Homo sapiens but to Homo erectus. So, human there means the genus Homo. And Homo erectus is the first full member of the genus Homo in the sense that it looked like us, just with a sort of slightly robust, more robust build and a smaller brain. And the central idea of catching fire is that it was the control of fire that was responsible for the emergence of homo erectus and therefore the genus Homo, which happened two million years ago, and it was an evolution from a line of astrolopithecines. And Australopithecines are the creatures from whom we evolved. They were present in Africa from something like six Seven million years ago up to actually up to one million years ago, and then a branch led off to Homo around two million years ago.”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I don't know about whole alphabet, but I think the big layers are the married men. And the unmarried men. Because the married men had a problem with the unmarried men. I mean, you see it in ethnographies of hunters and gatherers recently. Where the unmarried men would be given rules, such as, I mean, a very extreme rule in Northern Australia was you cannot come to the camp for months. You have to go away and live somewhere out in the bush. Because we don't want you anywhere near our wives. And then another kind of rule is if you are in camp, you must be in the firelight all the time. Otherwise, we don't know what you're doing out in the dark. You're real efforts to control them because. The men who had lots of wives did not want those horrid bachelors sneaking around the picture.”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, sapiens then had groups of, you know, who knows exactly how big they were, but scores of people, to judge from their remains, whereas Neanderthals were living in widely separated small groups of maybe as many as 15 or 20 people sometimes, where they saw others so rarely that they were in breeding at high levels, fathers having babies with their daughters. Very different world”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Share their food together or pass ideas from one to the other, or support each other when they're ill or whatever the issue is, cooperate in ways that make the group far more effective. So you asked earlier, you know, what did I think about why Sapienz was able to expand at the expense of Neanderthals so dramatically around 40,000 years ago? And the answer is that whatever it was, it had something to do with the Sapien's ability to cooperate. That was what gave them bigger groups. That's what enabled them to have a far more effective way of living. And I suspect it was to do with weapons and military aspects. But even if it wasn't that, the greater cooperation that sapiens were showing would have been hugely important.”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You've got to include that as almost certain from the past. And then now we've taken our reactive aggression and we've down regulated it and that's given us power. It's given us power because once you get rid of the alpha male, once the beta males take over and force selection in favor of a more tolerant, less reactively aggressive individual, the effect is that our cultures suddenly become capable of focusing on things other than conflict. And so we have social groups in which individuals instead of constantly being on edge in the way that chimpanzees are with each other are able to interact in ways that enable them to share looking out a tool together.”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And what is so exciting now is I think we can understand why we are both. And the answer is we come from ancestors that were elevated on proactive aggression, that were hunters and killers, both of animals and of each other.”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You've got this fight famously between Thomas Hobbes and Jean Jacques Rousseau, or literally you got the fight between their followers. So the followers of Hobbes say, well, Hobbes was right because he says that we are naturally violent and you need a Leviathan, a central government or a king to be able to suppress the violence. So we're naturally horrid and we can learn to be good. Whereas Jean-Jacques Rousseau is interpreted as saying the opposite, that we are naturally good and it's only when culture intervenes and horrid ideologies come in that Corrupt, or are we naturally kind? And that has gone on for years. And it's only in the last two or three decades that anthropologists like Christopher Bohm and Bruce Nauft have said, look, it's obvious what the answer is. We are both of these things.”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What we've done is retain proactive violence being high and got reactive violence really being low. And so we have these wonderful societies in which we're all so incredibly nice to each other and tolerant and calm and can meet strangers and have no problem about leading to any kind of conflict. At the same time as we are one of the worst killing machine species that's ever existed. So what's so extraordinary about this is that if you look at the political philosophers of the last few hundred years.”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the paradox is the fact that humans show extremes in relationship to both violence and non-violence. And the violence is that we are one of these few animals in which we use coalitionary proactive violence to kill members of our own species. And we do it in large numbers, just like a few other species. non-violence is we're particularly extreme in how repressed we are in terms of reactive violence. And I told you the story of how we get there. So what's so extraordinary about us is that most animals are either high on both or relatively low on both. So chimpanzees are high on proactive violence and reactive violence. Bonobos are less than chimpanzees on both of those, but still hundreds of Times more reactively aggressive than humans are.”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The point is that you do not find societies in which people are spontaneously showing the kinds of behaviours that we would all love them to show.”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, lots and lots of training, you know, lots and lots of education can do it. The famously most peaceful society that anthropologists have recorded involves tremendous amount of teaching, including some punishment. It's a society in Thailand. You have to beat it out of children to make them nice”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, but, you know, I mean, you can't just teach that because our evolutionary psychology puts us in particular directions.”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it is only a thought experiment. I mean, it's got no practical meaning right now. And I take your point that males get a hard rap nowadays in some ways because the balance of social power is moving. Against I mean, quite rightly, in a strong sense, of course, against all the nasty things that males do. What people sometimes fail to remember is that life is very hard for males who don't have the power, who don't have money, who don't have access to women. You know, I'm sympathetic to insults. I'm not sympathetic to them using violence to solve their problems. But I am very sympathetic to the fact that Not easy simply to be told by Well, off Feminist middle class people that you shouldn't behave like this or you shouldn't feel like this because you do.”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Course, the difficulty is that because we're tribal, some country somewhere would say, well, we're not going to do that. And then, guess what? They'd take over, you know, because of their mail. So that's why it's impossible to imagine it actually happening.”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But this is not suggesting that males have to die in order to make room for females, it's just all you have to do is just say, don't let's have any more males born.”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I don't see why being a man should make you any more interested in having a male future for the world than a female future. You know, you've got just as many ancestors who were male as were female.”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And certainly females are capable of conflict. I just think it's a gamble worth taking if you could actually do it. You can certainly find females in history who've done unpleasant things But nevertheless, we have a very strong evolutionary theory which explains why males benefit more by having conflict and winning conflicts than females do. And so, if we want to talk about reducing conflict, Then it would reduce it to get rid of males. Now, I understand this is a fantasy. And I think it's a fantasy that people would be able to talk about fairly soon because reproductive technology is getting to the point where it's quite likely that human females could breed without the use of males. And so there would be a sort of a potential dynamic if everybody just agreed not to have any male babies.”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, no, no. I mean, I don't have anything against males as individuals and that sort of thing. And males have clearly done a lot. I mean, they've been incredibly exploratory and creative and what they've done in art and music has been wonderful and that sort of thing. On the other hand. Sure, there's anything particularly special, and I think there are probably females could do the same thing just as well when given the chance.”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's yes, I mean, it's all science fiction stuff. And so how it's going to work out, totally unclear I don't see any worry about the magic of life disappearing. I mean, first of all, you somehow get rid of males. I think you really need to get rid of males because males are the source of a major problem, which is... The lust for power and the resulting conflict.”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I can't really exactly make one. I would just say that. We're talking about the dangers. Obviously, the dangers are there. But what I would sort of think about is the notion that That surprises come from all sorts of different directions. You work in robotics. And I can well imagine that there will be advances in robotics that in some way I can't even conceive will somehow undermine the motivation for conflict. Something about by the time chips have been planted in human brains and we're all instantly sharing information in a way that we never did before, will this change the nature of human existence in such a way that these conflicts get resolved?”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We haven't yet really faced that challenge. The Soviet Union collapsed because of the poor economy, but with China desperate to take back Taiwan and America shifting its focus on the Pacific, the potential for something going wrong.”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's a scary view, but on the other hand, things have changed hugely with the advent of nuclear weapons, because at least that conforms to this psychology that is very clear in other animals, which is you don't want to get into a fight if you are going to get hurt. So that's the whole principle of mad, mutual assured destruction, and it's doubtless been why powerful nations like America and Russia have not used their nuclear weapons since nineteen forty five. So if we can overcome the problem of accidental launches, then maybe the fact of MAD does fit into human psychology in a way that means that we really will resolve our tensions without using them.”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the longer that you have of a period of peace following a war, then the more these tensions of unresolved changed dominance relationships build up, and the longer they take to occur, then the more challenging are going to be the conflicts.”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is that after a big war like the Second World War, they established new kinds of dominance relationships and then during the periods of peace what happens is that the de facto dominance relationships change because some nations become poorer, some become richer, some become more militarily powerful and so on, generally economy and military go hand in hand. So right now China emerged from the war as a relatively low status state and is now high status. So if these were chimpanzees, what would happen is that you would predict a conflict because you need to have a readjustment of the formal dominance relationships to recognize the new in practice dominance relationships recognized by the economy and the military.”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, I'm surprised only in the sense that accidental, the fact that we have not had an accident yet has been quite remarkable because all the accounts are that we've come very close to having very serious accidents where people on either side have misread intentions or apparent launches and so on. So, yes, I think it is remarkable. There is a nasty generalization that can be made that the longer that powerful states go without having wars, then the worse the war is afterwards. And you can sort of see that that kind of makes sense because basically what's happening with these tribal groups that the nations are at the moment.”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, right. Absolutely. And it may well be that the future will emerge out of some sort of quite surprising. Direction like that”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That itself is a terrifying vision because the capacity for abuse by a single world power would be so problematic. And in addition, how do you get there without a war in the first place? You know, at the moment, we have no reasonable kind of future in mind. But I'm sure it's there somewhere. It's just that we haven't yet to find it.”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's reasonable at all. That is to say, we've now got 170 or 190 nations in the world dominated by a few big ones, all with arms pointing at each other. And the notion that we could just carry on having peace talks and making sure that these arms don't get involved in some kind of massive conflagration seems incredibly optimistic. Some kind of major change has to happen whereby some people would like to see all the weapons go. That would be great. I'm a member of that sort of group that tries to see that happen. It's going to be very difficult to see it happen. Another kind of concept is the nations themselves will dissolve and will become one One government”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, George Orwell's vision in 1984 was of two or three world powers, each so powerful that nobody could diminish, could destroy the other. But the notion of an evolutionarily stable relationship among heavily armed world powers just does not seem”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's got to be very, very different from what we're doing nowadays. And it's unimaginably different if we could imagine it, then maybe we could work towards it. At the moment, nobody knows how to work towards it.”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we haven't got very far down the course to nonviolence, but I don't see why we shouldn't just carry on doing it. I think it's ridiculous, frankly, excuse my frankness, to say that violence is a good thing. I think that it would be a wonderful concept if we could evolve somehow to a world three thousand years from now where violence is really regarded as simply appalling and that they look back on our time and can't believe what we were doing”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm sure you're right. Probably humans would not have evolved in the sense that we have. But I would hope that the course of violence in evolution will continue in the way it has. So there's all sorts of indications that the importance of violence has been reduced over time And this is made famous when Stephen Pinker's book, but others have written about it too, that the frequency of death from violence in every country you look at has been declining. That's just great. And so, you know, the amazing thing about this is that even when you take the death due to the First World War and the Second World War, the 20th century appears to have been statistically meaning rates of death per individual, the least violent in history.”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What do you mean by conflict? I mean, you can have conflict in the sense of people have different ideas about the solution to a problem. And so their ideas are in conflict. They can sit down at it on a log and chat about it and then decide, okay, you're right or I'm wrong or whatever. But if by conflict you mean a great idea to build a nuclear bomb and set that off, then no, I don't see why it's a good idea to have all this violence.”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The fact that there are some nice things to males doesn't mean that they're not bugs. Maybe they're quite nice bugs, but it would be much better for the species as a whole not to have to have males who impose this violence on the species as a whole.”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's beneficial from, you know, it's beneficial in the sense that it evolved by natural selection to benefit the individuals who did it. But if by bug you mean something that from the point of view of the species, it would be great if you could just wipe this out Because the species would somehow do better.”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But nevertheless, they are tribal, so they will have fairly intense intergroup interactions in which everybody knows whose side is on whose side. And the long-term consequences of winning those battles, non-lethal battles. Is that the dominance I get access to larger areas of land, more safety and so on with chances are better record of reproductive success subsequently?”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What we're talking about is tribal power, power on behalf of a group. And yeah, that seems to me to go right back to a deep evolutionary origin because you see essentially the same thing in a whole bunch of animals that most of the sort of cognitively complex animals live in social groups in which they have tribal boundaries And so, what you see in chimpanzees is echoed in almost all of the primates. The difference between us and chimpanzees and humans on the one hand and other primates on the other. That we kill and they don't, and the reason they don't is because they never meet in the context where there are massive imbalances of power. So, two groups of baboons, you know, the study on this side and 50 on this side, fine. Nobody's going to try and kill anybody else because the serious risks involved.”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, no, absolutely. Yes. And so just like chimpanzees, we are fiercely tribal and the tribalism resides particularly in male psychology. And it's very scary because once you assemble a set of males who share a tribal identity, then they have power that they can exert with very little concern about what they're doing to damage other people.”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it was more than that again because he really wanted power for the Soviet Union. And so surely the reason that he He orchestrated the export of wheat from Ukraine and in so doing was willing to lead to mass starvation was because he wanted to sell it on the market in order to be able to build up the power of the Soviet Union. You know, alternative view of communism might have been, well, let's just make sure everybody survives and make sure everybody has enough to eat and we'll all be mutually supportive in a communal network. But no, but he wanted the power for the country.”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of them were coming, explicit communists, that's right, but what he was worried about was that they were rivals to him.”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Suppose so. But it seems to me what really motivated Stalin was not so much a communism as the retention of power So once he became leader and in the process of becoming leader, he was absolutely desperate to get rid of anybody who was a challenger. He was deeply suspicious, suspicious of anybody even on his side who might possibly be showing a glimmerings of willingness to challenge him. So, you know, when he apparently had Kirov murdered, Kirov was a great communist. Trotsky was a great communist. All his rivals, and I mean, when he went into the towns and murdered people by the tens of thousands.”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lord Acton's famous dictum was power corrupt, an absolute power corrupts absolutely. And then the point that people often forget is the next sentence that he said, which is great men are almost always bad men. And that is right. It is very difficult to find a great man in history who was not responsible for terrible things.”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think that It's easy to imagine that most men could have become Denghis Khan. It's possible that he had a particular streak of psychopathy. It's striking that by the time you become Immensely powerful Then your willingness to do terrible things for the interest of yourself and your group. Becomes very high. Stalin, Mao Zedong. These sorts of people have histories in which they do not show obvious psychopathy. But by the time they are big leaders, they are really psychopathic in the sense that they do not follow the ordinary morality of considering the harm that they are doing to their victims. What kind of experiment would we need to discover whether or not anybody could fall into this position? I don't know.”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, which is, you know, human nature is awkward because it includes some unpleasant features that when we sit back and reflect about them, we would like to them to go away. But it remains the fact that men are Hugely concerned to try and have sex with Least one woman, and you know, often lots of women, yeah, and so women are constantly putting pressure on women in ways that women find unpleasant. And if men sit back and reflect about it, they think, you know, we shouldn't do this. But actually, it just goes on because of human nature.”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't want to go deep into his missing perspectives, but I just think that what he's doing in that particular example is focusing on the legalistic position. And that's great that you do not find formal patriarchy in the law anything like to the extent that you could find it a hundred years ago and so on. Women have got the vote now. Hooray. But it took a long time for women to get the vote. And it remains the case that women suffer in various kinds of ways. A woman who is... Has lots of sexual partners is treated much more rudely than a male who has lots of sexual partners. There are all sorts of informal ways in which it's rougher being a woman than it is a man.”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Basically, a patriarchal world that we have come from, a patriarchal world in which male alliances tend to support males and take advantage of the fact that they have political power at the expense of females. And I would say that that all goes back to what happened 3,000 to 400,000 years ago when the beta males took charge and they started imposing their own norms on society as a whole and they've continued to do so. And we now look at ourselves and Jordan Peterson says we are not a patriarchal society Well, you know, it's true that the laws try and make it even handed nowadays between males and females. But obviously we are patriarchal de facto because society is still in many ways supports men better than it supports women in these sorts of conflicts.”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, so the punishment, here's one example of this, the punishment for a husband killing a wife has always been much less than the punishment for a wife killing a husband. And you see similar sorts of things in terms of the punishments for adultery and so on. I bring this up in the context of males sexually intimidating their partners, be it wives or whoever, because it's a reminder that”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source