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

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“Yeah, exactly. And in that respect, it's worth noting that although this wasn't appreciated for some time, it's emerging that in a bunch of primates you have somewhat similar, somewhat parallel kinds of sexual intimidation, where males will target particular females, even in a group in which the norm is for females to mate with multiple males, but each male will target a particular female and the more he is aggressive towards her, then the more she conforms to his wishes when he wants to mate. So a long-term pattern of sexual intimidation. There's that aspect. The other aspect I would just note is that Get away with a lot compared to females in any kind of intersexual conflict.”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then there's sexual coercion within groups, and so that takes various kinds of forms. But nowadays, of course, I think people recognize increasingly that the principal form of sexual intimidation and rape occurs within relationships. It's not stranger rape that is really statistically important. There's much more what happens behind the walls of a bedroom where people have been living for some time. And just two sort of thoughts and observations about this. One is that It may seem odd that males should be Think it a good idea, as it were, to impose themselves sexually on someone with whom they have a relationship. But what they're doing is intimidating someone in a relationship in which the relative power in the relationship has continuing significance for a long time. And that power probably goes well beyond just the sexual.”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But you can see that that could build on a pattern that would have been adaptive if happening under much less extreme circumstances. The war is very extreme nowadays in the sense that you get battles in which people are sent by a military hierarchy into a war situation in which they do not feel what hunters and gatherers would typically have felt, which would have been that if we attack, we have an excellent chance of getting away with it. Nowadays, you know, you're sent in across the Somme or whatever it is, and there's a very high chance you will be killed. And that's totally unnatural and a novel evolutionary experience, I think.”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think you've got to distinguish between groups and within groups? And I think the world has been slowly waking up over the last several decades to the fact that sexual violence is routine in war And that to me says that. It's just another example of power corrupts because when Frustrated, scared, elated soldiers come upon females in a group that has been essential dehumanization of, then they get carried away by opportunity. It is not always possible to argue that this is adaptive nowadays because you get lots and lots of stories of women being abused to the point of being killed. She'll be gang-raped and then killed. There's lots of terrible cases of that reported from all sorts of different wars.”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“or powerful they had everyone agrees they had larger groups they had better weapons they they had projectile weapons bows and arrows to judge from the little microlith bits of flake Which the understanding didn't. Know nowadays there's evidence of interbreeding, quite extensive interbreeding between sapiens and Neanderthals, as well as with some other groups, and sometimes people say, well, you know, so they loved each other. They made love not war. I think they made love and war. You know, it wouldn't necessarily have been too loving. I mean, If you just follow through from typical ethnographies nowadays of when dominant groups meet subordinate groups, they didn't know each other, then you can imagine that Neanderthal females would essentially be captured. Taken into Zapians groups”
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, nowadays, when Homo sapiens meets Homo sapiens, And we don't know each other initially, then conflict breaks out and the more militarily able group wins. You know, we've seen that everywhere throughout the age of exploration and throughout history. So I'm rather surprised the conventional wisdom that you see nowadays in contemporary anthropology is very reluctant to point to success in warfare as the reason why Sapiens wiped out Neanderthals within about 3,000 years of the Sapiens coming into Europe, 43,000 years ago. And people are much more inclined to say, well, the Neanderthals are at low population density. So they just couldn't survive the demographic sort of sweep or that disease came in. And maybe those things might have been important. But far and away, the most obvious possibility is that sapiens were just”
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 other kind of value is things that are good for the males. Such as, hey, guess what? When good food comes in, males get it first”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Generation of a new kind of human And incidentally, For imposing on the society a new set of values because when those beautiful males discovered that they could take out the previous alpha male and continue to do so because in every generation there'll always be some male who says maybe I'll become the alpha male and they you know so they just keep chopping them down Discovering that, they also obviously discovered that they could kill anybody in the group. Females, young males. Anybody who didn't follow their values? And so this story is one of which the males of our species, and these would be the breeding males. Been able to impose their values on everybody else. There is two kind of values. There's one kind of value is things that are good for the group, like thou shalt not murder.”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The changes that are characteristic of domesticated animals in general compared to wild animals are all found in Homo sapiens compared to our early ancestors. So it's a very strong signal that when we first see Homo sapiens, what we're seeing is evidence of a reduction in reactive aggression. And that suggests that what's happening with Homo sapiens is that that is the point at which there is selection against the alpha males. And therefore, The way in which the selection happened would have been the way it happens today. The beta males take him out. So I think that homo sapiens is a species characterized by the suppression of reactive aggression. A kind of incidental consequence of the suppression of the alpha male. And the story of our species is the story of how the beta males took charge. and have been responsible for”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When you domesticate wild animals, what you're doing is reducing reactive aggression. You are selecting those individuals to breed who are most willing to be approached by a human or by another member of their own species and are least likely to irrigate. Aggression. And you only have to do that for a few generations to discover that there are changes in the skull. And those changes consist of. smaller teeth I reduced maleness the males become increasingly female like and reduced brain size”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly Exactly. Okay, so at some point alpha males get taken out. Well, what alpha males are are males who respond with high reactive violence to any challenge to their status. You see it all the time in primates. Some beta male thinks he's getting strong and maturing in wisdom and so on and he refuses to kowtow to the alpha male. And the alpha male comes straight in and charges at him or maybe he'll just wait for a few minutes and then take an opportunity to attack him. All of these primates have got a high tendency for reactive aggression and that enables the possibility of alpha males. We don't. We have this great reduction, as I talked about earlier. And the question is, when did that reduction happen? Cut to the famous experiments by the Russian biologist Dmitry Bellev, who tried domesticating wild animals.”
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 answer that has been portrayed most richly by Christopher Bohem and whose work I've elaborated on is that only in humans do you have a system by which any male who tries to bully others Become the alpha equivalent to an alpha gorilla or an alpha chimpanzee or an alpha bonobo or an alpha baboon or anything like that. Any male who tries to do that in humans Gets taken down by a coalition of beta males. That coalition.”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Started three to four hundred thousand years ago, and if you look 170, it's got even more like us. And if you look at 100, it's got more like us again. And if you look at 50, it's more like us again. It's all the way. It's just getting more and more like the moderns. So the question is, what happened between 300 and 400,000 years ago to produce Homo sapiens? And I think we have a pretty good answer now. And the answer comes from violence. And the story begins by focusing on this question. Why is it that in the human species we are unique among all primates in not having an alpha male in any group in the sense that what we don't have is an alpha male who personally beats up every other male.”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have been dated three or four years ago at that time and have been characterized as earliest Homo sapiens. Now at that point they are only beginning the trend of sapianization and that trend consists basically of grassinization, of making our ancestors less robust, shorter faces, smaller teeth, smaller brow ridge, narrower face, thinner cranium, all these things that are associated with reduced violence. Okay, so that's saying that's Homo sapiens beginning. So it began sometime 300,000 to 400,000 years ago because by 315,000 years ago you've already got something recognizable.”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So Nowadays, people Begin the concept of what Homo sapiens is by thinking about features that are very obviously different from all of the other species of Homer. And our large brain, our very rounded cranium, our relatively small face, these are characteristics which are developed in a relatively modern way by about 170,000 years ago. That's one of the earliest skulls in Africa that really captures that. But it has been argued that that is an episode in a process that has been started substantially earlier. And there's no doubt that that's true. Homo sapiens is a species that has been changing pretty continuously throughout the length of time it's there. And it goes back to 300,000 years ago, 315 literally is the time, the best estimate of a date for a series of bones from Morocco.”
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 violence was responsible for creating your Homo sapiens. That raises the question of what Homo sapiens is.”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, that's the optimistic perspective and the great sort of concern, of course, is that small conflicts can build up into bigger conflicts, and then dehumanization happens, and then violence is released. As Hannah Ahren says, there currently is no known alternative to war as a means of settling really important conflicts.”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because what was human was the people that were in your society. And the other things that actually looked like us. We're not regarded as human So there wasn't a kind of automatic dehumanization of everybody that didn't speak our language or hadn't already somehow become recognized as sufficiently like us to escape the dehumanization con”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I mean, and that word you produced at the end is critical, I think, you know, because it would be a little bit weird, I think, to imagine a lot of enjoyment about people in your own tribe being killed. I don't think we're interested in violence's sake that much. It's when you get these social boundaries, said Up, and in today's world, happily we kind of are already one world. You have to dehumanize someone to get to the point where they are really outside our recognition of a tribe at some level, which is the whole human species. ancient times that would not have been true because in ancient times Are lots of accounts of hunters and gatherers in which the appearance of a stranger Would lead to an immediate response of shooting on site”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Relatively gentle and deliberately moral society that we have today, it's very difficult for us to face the thought that in all of us there might have been a residue and more than that sort of actively potential for that thought of really enjoying killing someone else. But I think one can sustain that thought fairly obviously by thinking of circumstances in which it would be true. That the ordinary, Human male would be delighted to be part of a group that was killing someone. What you've got to do is to In a position where you're regarding the victim as dangerous and thoroughly hostile.”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mostly what they're thinking about is I want to get my end away. And I think that it's a similar kind of process with the gems. What they are thinking about is I want to kill this. Individuals, and it's hard to imagine that Taking the other individual's perspective and thinking about what it means for them to die is going to be an important part of that. In fact, there's reasons to think it should not be an important part of it because it might inhibit them. They don't want to be inhibited. The more efficient they are in doing this, the better. But I think it's interesting to think about this whole motivational question because it does produce the sort of rather haunting thought that there has been selection in favor of enthusiasm about killing And in our”
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 think it's. I can't think of any way to get an answer to the question of what they know about that. I think that the way to think about the motivation is rather like the motivation in sex. So when males are interested in having sex with a female, whether it's in chimpanzees or in humans, They don't think about the fact that what this is going to do is to lead to a baby.”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The damage to the point of expecting a death in one place and they just finish it off in the other, but most likely that sort of difference will be due to differences in the numbers of attackers.”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, you have to understand that these things are happening at high speed in thick vegetation Mostly, so that they have not been filmed carefully. We have a few little glimpses of them from one or two people like David Watts who's got some great video, but we don't know enough to be able to say that. It's hard for me to imagine that there are styles that vary between communities, cultural styles, but it is possible. And one thing that is striking is that the number of times that an individual victim has been killed immediately has been higher in Kibali Forest in Uganda than in Gombi National Park in Tanzania. It's conceivable that's just chance. We don't have a real numbers now, but what is this? I can't remember the exact numbers, but 10 versus 15 or something. So maybe”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sometimes it can go as low as three to one. But that's getting risky. But if you have eight, you can see what can happen. I mean, basically you have one male on one foot, another male on another foot, another male on an arm, another male on another arm. Now you have an immobilized victim with four individuals capable of just doing the damage. So they can then move in and tear out his thorax and tear off his testicles and twist an arm until it breaks and do this appalling damage with no weapons.”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're talking about killing. Then violence in the sense of killing is very much associated with a group. And the reason is that individuals don't benefit by getting into a fight in which they risk being hurt themselves. So it's only when you have overwhelming power that the temptation to try and kill another victim rises sufficiently for them to be motivated to do it. The average number of chimpanzee males that attack a single male in something like 50 observations that have accumulated in the last 50 years from various different study sites is”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The tendency to make war is a consequence of a long term evolutionary adaptation and not just a military ideology or some sort of local patriarchal phenomenon. And of course a reading of history, a judicious reading of history. Fits that very easily because war is so commonplace.”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Chimpanzees and humans fit into a larger pattern of understanding animals in which You don't have an instinct for violence. What you have is an instinct, if you like, to use violence adaptively. And if the right circumstances come up, it'll be adaptive. If the right circumstances don't come up, it won't be. So some chimpanzee communities are much more violent than others because of things like the frequency with which a large party of males is likely to meet a lone victim That's going to depend on the local ecology So the overall answer to the question of what do chimps teach us is that we have to take very seriously the notion that in humans,”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which is a really kind of ironical observation. Conrad Lorentz, who I mentioned, had been the person who thought that human aggression in the form of killing members of her own species was unique to our species. He was a great fan of wolves. He studied wolves. And in captivity, he noted that wolves are very unlikely to harm each other in spats among members of the same group. What happens is that one of them will roll over and present their neck much as you see in a dog park nowadays, and the other might put their jaws on the neck but will not bite. So now it turns out that if you study wolves in the wild, then neighboring packs often go hunting for each other, they are in fierce competition, and as much as fifty percent of the mortality of wolves is due to being killed by other wolves Adult mortality So it's a really serious business.”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Until we had this information about chimpanzees, it was possible to believe that the Psychology behind warfare. Was totally the result of some kind of cultural recent cultural innovation? Had nothing to do with our biology. If you like that it's got something to do with sin and God and the devil and that sort of thing. But what the chimps tell us After we think carefully about it is that it seems undoubtedly the case that our evolutionary psychology Given us the same kind of attitude towards violence as occurred in chimpanzees. And in both species, it has evolved because of its evolutionary significance. In other words, because it's been helpful to the individuals who have practiced it. And now we know that, as I mentioned, other species do this as well. In fact, you know, wolves.”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Has got these features that we share, and that one of the features is something that is the most horrendous in the As well as fascinating aspect of human behavior, then how can you resist just trying to find out what's going on?”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Making tools. She had seen that they were hunting meat. She had seen that they were sharing the meat among each other. She had seen that the societies were dominated politically by males, coalitions of males. All of these things, of course, resonate so closely with humans. And then it turns out that in contrast to conventional wisdom at the time, the chimpanzees were capable of hunting and killing members of neighboring groups. At that point, the similarities between Chimpson and humans become less a matter of sort of sheer intellectual fascination than something that has a really deep meaning about our understanding of ourselves. Until then, you can cheerfully think of humans as a species apart from the rest of nature, because we are so peculiar. But when it turns out that As it turns out, one of our two closest relatives,”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now at that time we didn't know very much about how chimpanzees and humans were related chimps, gorillas, bonobos are all three big black hairy things that live in the African forests and eat fruits and leaves when they can't find fruits and walk on their knuckles and they all look rather similar to each other. So they seem as though those three species, gypsum, gorillas and bonobos, should all be each other's closest relatives and humans are something rather separate and so any of them would be of interest to us. Subsequently we learn that actually that's not true and that there's a special relationship between humans and chimpanzees. But at the time, even without knowing that, it was obvious that there was something very odd about chimpanzees because Jane had discovered they were”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, for my PhD in the early 1970s, I was in Gombe with Jengal and was studying feeding behavior. But during that time we were seeing, and I say we because there were half a dozen research students all in her camp. We were discovering that Chimps had this capacity for violence. The first kill happened during that time, which was of an infant in a neighboring group And we were starting to see these hunting expeditions. This was the start of my interest because it was such chilling evidence of an extraordinary similarity between chimps and humans”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Particularly through grooming. So grooming occurs when one individual approaches another. I might present for grooming a very common way of starting, turning their back or presenting an arm or something like that, and the other just riffles their fingers through the hair. And that's partly just soothing, and it's partly looking for parasites, but mostly it's just soothing. And the point about this is it can go on for half an hour. It can go on for sometimes even an hour. So, this is a A major expression of interest in somebody else.”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. I mean, it's very obvious with violence, as we talked about, that they will kill not just strangers. They can kill other adults within their own group. They can kill babies that are strangers. They can kill babies in their own group. So, you know, this is a long-lived individual. Obviously, these killings can't have very often because otherwise they'd all be dead. We're now finding that they can live to 50 or 60 years in the wild at relatively low population density because they're big animals eating a rather specialized kind of food, the ripe fruits. So it doesn't happen all the time. With friendliness, they are very strong to support each other. They very much depend on their close friendships, which they express through physical contact.”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some of those infants had the personality of wanting to take advantage of that knowledge later. And so, you know, you had an individual, Frodo, who was violent on a regular basis towards humans when he was an adult, and he was quite dangerous. I mean, he could easily have killed someone. In fact, he did kill one person. He killed a baby that he took from a mother, a human baby that he took off her hip when he met her on the path. So it's a reminder that we're dealing with a species that are rather human-like in the range of emotions they have, in the capacities they have, and even in the strength they have, they are in many ways stronger than humans. You've got to be careful”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“who come with us that it is absolutely vital that you do not fall into that temptation. Now, you know, we heard a story of one person who did reach out and touch one of our chimps. It's a very, very bad idea. Not because the chimp is going to Do anything violent at the time? Because if they learn that humans are as weak physically as we are compared to them, then they can take advantage of it. And that's what happened in Gombi. So after Jane had done the very obvious thing when you're first engaged in this game of allowing the infants to approach her and then tickling them and playing with them.”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If they did something, you know, it was a gentle squeeze. I mean, chimpanzees could squeeze you very hard as that occasionally has happened. Some chimps are aggressive to people and others are friendly. And the ones that are friendly tend to be rather sympathetic characters because they might be ones who are having problems in their own society. So Jomeyo in Gombi used to come and sit next to me quite often and he was having a hard time making it in that society, you know, which I can describe to you in terms of the number of aggressive interactions if you want, you know, but just to be informed about it. So all of this is a temptation to be very firmly resisted. And in the community that I've been working with in Uganda for the last 30 years, we try extremely hard to impress on all of the research students.”
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 a very reasonable question, and of course, Jane in those early years, I think she's willing now to talk about the fact that she regrets to some extent how close she became. And the problem is not just from the humans, the problem is from the chimpanzees as well, because they do things that are extremely affectionate, if you like. You know, at one point Jane offered a ripe fruit. A chimpanzee called David Greybeard. David Greybeard took it and squeezed her hand. As if to say thank you. And then I think he gave it back, if I remember rightly. Yeah.”
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, obviously, the friendly ones would be the ones who have exceptionally high rates of spending time close to each other, of touching each other in a gentle way, of grooming each other, and by the way finding that those things are correlated with each other. So it's possible to define a friendship with a capital F in a very systematic way. And to compare that between individuals, but also between communities of chimpanzees and between different species. So that, you know, we can say that in some species, individuals have friends, and others they don't at all.”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so that from that you extract a pattern of relationships and the relationships can be defined as relatively friendly, relatively aggressive, competitive, based on the frequency of these types of interactions. And so one can talk in terms of individuals having a relationship which on the scores of friendliness is two standard deviations outside the mean. Mean.”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I mean, it's particularly difficult with chimps because chimps are so similar to humans in their behavior that it's very easy to make those projections, as you say. Process involves making very clear definitions of what a behavior is aggression can be defined in terms of a forceful hit, a bite, and so on, and writing down every time these things happen and then slowly totting up the numbers of times that they happen from individual A towards individuals B, C, D and E so that you build up a very concrete picture rather than interpreting at any point and stopping and saying, well, you know, they seem to be rather aggressive. The sort of formal system is that you build up a pattern of the relationships based on a description of their different types of interactions, the aggressive and their friendly interactions. And all of these are defined in concrete.”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There is no research tradition of thinking about personalities. Well, now, whatever it is, 60 years later, the study of personalities is a very rich part of the study of animal behavior. At any rate, the important point in terms of what was she like is that she stuck to her guns and she absolutely insisted that we have to show, describe in great detail the differences in personality among these individuals and then you can leave it to the evolutionary biologist to think about what it means.”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So Gombe was in Tanzania on Lake Tanganika. She was there initially with her mother and then alone for two or three years of really intense observation and then slowly joined by other people. What she discovered was that there were obvious differences in individual personality, and the difficulty about that was that When she reported this to the larger scientific world, initially her advisors at Cambridge, they said, well, you know, we don't know how to handle that because you've got to treat all these animals as the same, basically, because”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, she's wonderfully independent, courageous person, she famously began her studies not as a qualified person in terms of education, but qualified only by enthusiasm and considerable experience even in her early 20s with nature. I so she's courageous in the sense of being able to take on challenges. The thing that is very impressive about her is her total fidelity to the observations, very unwilling to extend beyond the observations, waiting until they mount up and you've really got a confident picture. And tremendous attention to individuals. So that was an interesting problem from her point of view because when she got to know the chimpanzees of Gombi, this particular community of Kazakhla, about 60 individuals.”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, they're very, very keen to avoid those kinds of battles, but occasionally they can make a mistake. But so far there have been no observations of anything like a battle in which both sides maintain themselves. And I think you can very confidently say that overwhelmingly what happens is that if they discover that there's several individuals on the other side, then both sides retreat. Nobody wants to get hurt. What they want to do is to hurt others.”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Warfare is restricted to humans, animals do not deliberately kill each other. Well, now we know that actually there's a bunch of animals that deliberately kill each other, and they always do so under essentially the same circumstances, which is when they feel safe doing it. So humans feel safe doing it when they've got a weapon Animals feel safe when they have a coalition, a coalition that has overwhelming power compared to the victim. And so wolves will do that and lions will do that and hyenas will do that and chimpanzees will do it and humans do it too.”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The place where they heard a lone call erupts with a volley of calls. It was just one calling out of a larger party. And our chimps put on the brakes and scoot back for safety into their own territory. But if in fact they do find a lone individual and they can sneak up to them, then they make a deliberate attack. They hunting, they're stalking and hunting, and then they impose terrible damage, which typically ends in a kill straight away, but it might end up with the victim so damaged that they'll crawl away and die a few days or hours later. So that was a very dramatic discovery because it really made people realize for the first time that Conrad Lorentz had been wrong when in the 1960s in his famous book on aggression he said”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But dramatically, in addition to that, there is a second kind of interaction, and that is when a party of chimpanzees Makes a deliberate venture to the edge of their territory silently. And then search for members of neighboring groups. And what they're searching for is a lone individual. So I've been with chimps when they've heard a lone individual under these circumstances or what they think is a lone one. And they touch each other and look at each other and then charge forward, very excited. And then while they're charging, all of a sudden”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source