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

“Indeed, they do. So this was discovered first in 1974. It was observed first in 1974, which was about the time that the first major study of chimpanzees in the wild by Jane Goodall had been going for something like five years of the chimpanzees being observed wherever they went. Until then, they'd been observed at a feeding station where Jane was luring them into being observed by seeing bananas, which is great. She had learned a lot. But she didn't learn what was happening at the edges of their ranges. So five years later, it became very obvious that there was hostile relationships between groups. And those hostile relationships sometimes take the form of the kind of hostile relationships that you see in many animals, which is a bunch of chimps in this case shouting at a bunch of other chimps on their borders.”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In other words, not face confrontation. That's the ordinary way that ARM is trying to work. And there, it turns out that humans and chimpanzees are under very similar kind of state. That is to say, if you look at the rate of death from chimpanzees conducting proactive coalitionary violence, it's very similar in many ways to what you see in humans. we're not down regulated with proactive violence it's just this reactive violence that is strikingly reduced 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
“because we're so unviolent. But people say, well, what about the hideous engagements of this twentieth century, the First and Second World War and much else besides? And that is all proactive violence. All of that is gangs of people. Making deliberate decisions to go off and attack in circumstances which ideally the attackers are going to be able to make their kills and then get out of there.”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A society that is as bad from the point of view of violence as an ordinary society can get. There's excellent data on the frequency with which people actually have physical violence and hit each other. And we can compare that to data from several different sites comparing. We're looking at chimpanzee and bonobo violence. The difference is between two and three orders of magnitude, the frequency with which chimps and bonobos hit each other, chased each other, charge each other, physically engage is something between 500 and a thousand times higher than in humans. There's something just amazing about us. And this has been recognized for centuries. Aristotle drew attention to the fact that we behave in many ways like to”
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 thing that is really striking about humans compared to our close relatives is the great reduction in the degree of reactive aggression. So we are far less violent than Chemps when prompted by some relatively minor threat within our own society. And the way I judge that is with not super satisfactory data, but the study which is particularly striking is one of people living as hunter gatherers in a really upsetting kind of environment, namely people in Australia living in a place where they got a lot of alcohol abuse. There's a lot of domestic violence.”
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 haven't said exactly that were less violent than chimps. What I've said is that there are two kinds of violence one stems from proactive aggression and the other stems from reactive aggression. Proactive aggression is planned aggression. Reactive aggression is impulsive, defensive. It's reactive because it takes place in seconds after the threat.”
2021-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source