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The adapted mind

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Although researchers have long been aware that the species-typical architecture of the human mind is the product of our evolutionary history, it has only been in the last three decades that advances in such fields as evolutionary biology, cognitive psychology, and paleoanthropology have made the fact of our evolution illuminating. Jerome Barkow discusses.

Image courtesy of interviewee. March 12, 2024

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The speaker reflects on their experiences as a fieldwork anthropologist, noting a surprising amount of cross-cultural similarity among humans despite initial beliefs in extensive variability. They discuss the nature versus nurture debate, arguing that many human behaviors, such as sibling rivalry, aggression, and social hierarchies, recur across generations and cultures. The speaker emphasizes that human nature is complex and that evolution primarily addresses past challenges, leaving us ill-equipped for present-day issues.

The speaker critiques contemporary society's focus on high-status individuals (e.g., athletes, entertainers) as role models, which may lead children to prioritize superficial traits over substantive achievements. They explore the problem of sexual selection and how it influences mate choice, often favoring individuals with high status without consideration of their actual qualities.

Addressing the idea of humanity's future, particularly in the context of space exploration and potential generation ships, the speaker expresses skepticism about dealing with inherent social problems, such as competition and conflict, that may arise in isolated communities. They conclude that the tendencies rooted in our evolution pose challenges both on Earth and in potential future societies, and remark on the need for a deeper understanding of how our past influences human behavior and decision-making in modern contexts.

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If I hadn't spent most of my career

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as a fieldwork anthropologist,

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I would've assumed judging from the older, anthropological,

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ethnographic literature,

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that there was just about an infinite amount

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of cross-cultural variability in our species.

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We could be doing anything,

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but the more fieldwork I've done,

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the more people everywhere seemed to have lots in common,

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and it's what they have in common

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that's much more interesting nowadays.

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To me. For instance, at the conclusion of my career,

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which is about now, I was looking through some old photos

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that I had taken of, young people sort

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of camping out in, in the compound I'd built in a,

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a town in northern Nigeria.

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And I looked at the pictures

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and what I see are teenagers forcing around, playing around,

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having a good time,

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and they're just kids playing around.

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And aside from the way that they were dressed, if,

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I saw them in Halifax, Nova Scotia where I live,

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I'd have thought, yeah, kids having a good

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time, no big deal.

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There is a lot of variability,

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but there's also an enormous amount of similarity.

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I think part of the problem is that, well, my generation,

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which is the older generation were brought up with the idea

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that nature versus nurture was a dichotomy

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that meant something.

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And unfortunately, I still see that dichotomy.

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I still see people,

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particularly when they're not anthropologists, thinking

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that it means something to say nature versus nurture.

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Well, that's true. If you're talking about a sneeze,

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that's definitely nature.

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But if you're talking about something other than a basic

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reflex, that's a meaningless dichotomy.

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The example I always try to use in, in talking about this,

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the idea of, well, of a reflex,

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but in particular, the idea of sibling rivalry.

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And if you're a parent of more than one child,

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you probably know something about sibling rivalry.

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Now, cross culturally,

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some cultures actually emphasize it and think that it's good.

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Uh, and then there are cultures at the other extreme, which,

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I assume would be ours that try to minimize it.

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But the important thing to keep in mind is that

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you are never going to solve this problem

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for the human species.

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If you're good at it, you can solve this problem as a parent

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for your own children, maybe even

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help out with your grandchildren.

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But your next generation and the generations

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after that aren't going to have

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to solve this problem themselves.

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It's always going to recur.

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And that's

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what talking about human nature is more than

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nature versus nurture.

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Um, we can't solve the problem once and for all.

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It is part of our species, but we can certainly minimize it

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or if we want to maximize it.

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This is just one example.

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There are much more horrific examples,

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our tendency towards physical violence.

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Some societies actually emphasize it,

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and other societies, I hope, like our own, try

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to minimize it, but it's going to be a problem

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with every generation.

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How about sexual jealousy? Once again, you can minimize it.

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You can maximize it.

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You cannot say that, well, we have solved this problem.

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We never have to think about it again.

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No, the next generation will have to think about again,

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how about, to whom do we pay attention?

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Well, human beings, whatever our society is, we tend

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to pay attention to the people whom we perceive

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as high in social status.

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We also learn preferentially from them.

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And again, this is like sib sibling rivalry

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you don't like whom your children are paying attention

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to and learning from.

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Maybe you could do something about it,

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but even if you're very successful,

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the next generation is likely to have that same problem.

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The difficulty is that

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evolution is always the answer to the past.

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It solves the problems of the past.

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Uh, ask any zookeeper otherwise.

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It's so difficult to keep animals alive and breeding in zoos

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because it's a different environment

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and they're facing different problems,

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and they did not evolve to deal with those problems.

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Now we seem to have done a reasonably good job,

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because we're here in getting adapted

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through evolution to the problems that our ancestors faced

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maybe 140,000 years ago, maybe only 65,000 years ago.

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The trouble is that that's not our environment now.

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And judging from what we're doing to the planet,

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judging from our frequent wars

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and the risk that we're taking of even nuclear wars,

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we don't seem to be very well adapted at all

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to our current environments.

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Um, but we, it doesn't matter that we know that

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once again, our evolved behavioral tendencies

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are still there, and this is very worrying.

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And yet, do we still have a problem with sexual violence?

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Oh, yes. Do we have a problem with war?

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Yes, definitely. Do we have a problem with sibling rivalry?

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Yes, that's still there too.

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But we also have well, new problems.

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And to deal with the new problems,

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I should just put my notes away and talk about them.

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And the new problems really have to do with our adaptation

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to past environments.

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One of the things that we're adapted to we do automatically

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is we pay preferential attention to the high end status.

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And we learned preferentially

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from the people we perceive as the high end status.

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And up until really very recently that was quite adaptive.

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I remember once I was just beginning field work

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with the people in Nigeria's Middle Belt,

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called the McGill, and the young man who was my host,

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sort of taking me a tour through the town.

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And he stops and he points to

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actually another young man busy playing with his child.

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And he says rather proudly that this young man

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had made more mounds in which to plant yams, you know, you,

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you make a hill and that's what you put your yams into.

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Um, he made more hills for yams

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than anybody else in the village in the town had ever done.

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And this is pretty arduous work.

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And he was proud of this young man.

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And then we passed a woman

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and he said that woman had 18 children

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and most of them were still alive and healthy.

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And again, there was pride there

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and right, that's how the system worked up

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until very recently for our species.

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Your your culture can define what is success,

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but paying special attention to the successful,

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that's like sibling rivalry.

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That's part of what we do,

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and we learn preferentially from them.

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Um, well that's great if say you wanna learn how to farm,

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you wanna learn how to make tools.

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You wanna learn how to be a leader

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and perhaps keep people from fighting,

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looking at the people who are successful at this.

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That's great. And what do we do now?

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Well, if you're traveling somewhere

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and you start a con, you want to start a conversation

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with a perfect stranger, just begin by saying, kids

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nowadays and the other person will

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complete the sentence for you.

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Uh, what we're really complaining about is children

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do not perceive as high end status

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or often do not perceive as high end status.

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The people whom we see as high in status

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nowadays, what they perceive

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as really high in status are professional athletes,

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professional entertainers, politicians,

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people in the military, people who are simply very,

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very wealthy, and of course, more recently influencers.

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People who on the internet, seem to be everywhere

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and have perhaps millions of followers,

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and they're learning from these people.

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Um, the next door neighbor may be a wealthy accountant.

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That doesn't matter.

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What, what we have managed

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to do somehow is tap into whatever evolved mechanisms

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or, help us decide who is high in status

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and whom we're learning preferentially from.

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We're we tend to be ignoring the people whom our parents

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might think are high status, whom we ourselves

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in a few years may think of high status

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and instead, learn from strangers.

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Now, back when that meant learning from the best hunter,

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learning from the best, gatherer, the best,

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forger the best Mom, this was perfect.

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This was great. And now what does it mean?

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It means your kids may be insisting on learning

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drums in the middle of the night.

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That's one of the places we are,

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but there's another place we are that really seems

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to have worked well in the past,

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and that has to do with sexual selection.

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Uh, sexual selection simply means that,

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we prefer to have offspring

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with some people rather than others.

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We see some people as more sexually attractive,

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a better catch than others.

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And one of the things we really look hard in is, again,

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this idea of, we refer to mate with the higher status,

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with the people who are highest in status.

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And that's fine when it means you're finding sexy.

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You wanna have children with, people

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who are actually doing well in your society.

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But right now, we get right back into

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that same status problem.

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And so we want to,

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get involved with people who are professional entertainers,

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and that becomes the, the kind

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of people we think are important.

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We get attracted to the very wealthy, regardless of

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how they managed to get their wealth.

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So sexual selection today isn't necessarily,

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a particularly good choice.

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So that also creates problems for us,

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and it's one of the ways in which we're not very well

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adapted to our current society.

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I started off talking about what I used to do nowadays.

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I, I wish I could still do that kind of field work,

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but the problem is that we don't have

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interstellar spaceships generation ships yet.

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And if my early field work was just going to Africa,

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which is no big deal at all nowadays,

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to really continue that kind of field work now, I'd want

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to be, helping build

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a generation ship and then being a passenger on it.

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Now, for those who aren't into science fiction generation,

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ships are simply spaceships that can travel

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for a very long time

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and permit generations to follow one actor another.

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If you do read science fiction, then you'll notice

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that while there are many, many stories

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and novels about this topic, they usually assume that, hey,

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generation ships are no problem

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because we'll go into suspended animation

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or we'll become popsicles and you'll freeze ourselves

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and be thought out whenever we arrive.

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So we very few science, well, no,

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some science fiction stories also assume

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that you could go faster than light,

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but it doesn't look like we'll ever be able

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to go faster than light.

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And so far, there's no evidence that we'll ever be able

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to fall out a corps and have a living human being there.

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Uh, and while bears can sleep a fair length of time,

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there's no reason to believe

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that human beings will ever be able to sleep for centuries.

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If we're going to go light traveling, light years,

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we are talking about centuries and even longer.

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Now, in the science fiction stories, the technical problems

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of building a generation ship solved no problem at all here.

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I think the science section has it right.

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Uh, there are already companies investing large sums

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of money into mining and prospecting

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and asteroids, and it looks like it won't be very long

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before we are doing a lot

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of our mineral extraction from asteroids

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and eventually probably building, doing a lot

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of the messier construction,

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out in space asteroid.

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Uh, once we get that technology squared away,

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it'll be relatively simple to adapt it to a generation ship.

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For one thing, if you can hollow out an asteroid,

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you've already largely built your generation ship.

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Well, would anybody want to do this?

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Unfortunately, yes.

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All it would take is a billionaire

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or two to decide, well, Mars isn't good enough for me.

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I want to go off to one of the planets of Proximus and Torre

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and found the colony there.

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Or perhaps it'll be a military dictator with total control

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of the country that will spend its budget doing nothing

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but building generation ships, with the assumption that

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the, the dictators children

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or great-grandchildren will have their own planet too.

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Or maybe just there'll be a religious group splint,

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a religious group that wants

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to send the truth out to another planet.

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And that means building a generation shift.

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Now, I think perhaps, unfortunately, these things are going

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to be what we're gonna be seeing probably only maybe 10

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years or so, perhaps a little longer than that.

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And I don't think any of these attempts will ever succeed

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and they won't succeed because, well, yes.

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So we would've solved the problems of the technical problems

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of building this kind of spacecraft.

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We want to solve the social problems,

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the social problems being the products of

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what we were evolved to do.

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For instance, one of the things we were evolved to do is

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to want more for our children rather than

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for other people's children.

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And if you don't believe me,

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but you're also sending your children

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to a private university

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or a private school of any kind,

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why don't you believe me?

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But if we were to start a generation ship now,

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we'd probably be doing what we're already doing from

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in our reefer trips.

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We're using a military model. Well, that's fine.

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That's a good idea to have a captain in this

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kind of situation.

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And it works when you're doing a short trip.

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How would it work though if

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you're going to have generations?

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Well, the first generation is military is sort

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of a meritocracy.

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We're getting pretty well qualified people,

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and then they'll have children,

16:42.205 --> 16:44.865
and those children will have had educational

16:44.925 --> 16:46.345
advant advantages.

16:47.425 --> 16:51.445
Um, a little bit of influence from, well-placed parents.

16:52.775 --> 16:57.275
So the second generation will largely be the, the products,

16:57.275 --> 17:01.585
the children of the first generation only.

17:01.655 --> 17:03.545
They probably won't be as good,

17:04.825 --> 17:06.405
and they will be some people in

17:06.405 --> 17:10.285
that second generation whose parents were not officers,

17:11.915 --> 17:14.175
but who could have been as good.

17:15.605 --> 17:18.225
And there's gonna be some unhappiness,

17:19.995 --> 17:21.145
maybe some conflict,

17:22.845 --> 17:25.065
but the third generation there will be conflict.

17:26.125 --> 17:28.385
It won't necessarily be military at first,

17:29.125 --> 17:32.605
but within another generation it will be.

17:33.585 --> 17:36.525
And one of the problems with any kind of spaceship is

17:36.525 --> 17:38.125
that they're really vulnerable.

17:38.845 --> 17:41.685
Anything happens at the oxygen supply, food supply,

17:42.075 --> 17:45.565
anybody builds a weapon, just a little bit of conflict.

17:45.745 --> 17:48.245
And we have now lost our ability

17:48.305 --> 17:50.525
to have a generation ship going.

17:50.745 --> 17:53.005
And there'll be other problems too, of course,

17:53.105 --> 17:56.605
the usual ones, sexual selection that's right,

17:56.695 --> 18:00.645
until it becomes well filled with jealousies rivalries,

18:01.205 --> 18:02.325
conflicts, and

18:02.355 --> 18:06.165
what we have today is disagreements over whom we should be

18:06.165 --> 18:08.125
paying attention to, whom we should be learning

18:08.125 --> 18:09.325
preferentially from.

18:10.145 --> 18:13.765
I'm sorry, but we really seem

18:13.765 --> 18:15.245
to have chosen the wrong ancestors.

18:15.775 --> 18:17.725
We're a species that is well,

18:17.725 --> 18:20.685
obviously doing immense damage to our planet.

18:21.265 --> 18:24.765
The same kinds of call it selfish, if you like,

18:24.765 --> 18:27.165
selfish tendencies that are leading us

18:27.165 --> 18:30.285
to destroy our planet, much more rapid time period,

18:31.745 --> 18:34.965
be leading us to destroy any generation shifts.

18:35.895 --> 18:39.515
One of the things that evolutionists have noticed is that

18:40.125 --> 18:43.435
often species that are not at all related

18:43.455 --> 18:46.975
to one another may have been separated by tens

18:46.975 --> 18:48.575
and even hundreds of millions of years.

18:48.935 --> 18:52.895
Similarities. The most common example of this is the eye.

18:53.595 --> 18:58.565
The eye keeps on evolving, keeps on cropping up.

18:59.465 --> 19:04.395
Uh, for example, if you are into, an octopus,

19:06.145 --> 19:09.205
if you are looking at a live octopus, it's looking at you.

19:10.355 --> 19:13.535
Now, I don't know how long we've diverged from octopus,

19:13.595 --> 19:16.895
as must have been 140 million years or something like that,

19:17.035 --> 19:18.535
but don't, don't count me on that one.

19:19.125 --> 19:21.215
What you can count me on is

19:21.245 --> 19:24.055
that essentially it's the same mechanism.

19:25.005 --> 19:26.905
And that was convergent evolution.

19:27.655 --> 19:32.185
That is relatively unrelated species are exposed

19:32.245 --> 19:34.625
to the same kind of selection pressures,

19:36.125 --> 19:38.865
and they develop similar adaptation.

19:39.485 --> 19:42.225
And a selection pressure is anything

19:42.375 --> 19:45.225
that results in one organism,

19:45.225 --> 19:48.105
having more surviving offspring, a competitor,

19:48.205 --> 19:49.385
and a competing organism.

19:50.325 --> 19:53.305
And so we get selection sometimes for things like eyes.

19:54.755 --> 19:56.015
Uh, there are other examples.

19:56.035 --> 19:58.175
Flight would be another be an obvious one.

20:00.575 --> 20:03.965
Birds and bats are not related very closely at all,

20:04.105 --> 20:05.565
but they, they both eyes.

20:06.645 --> 20:08.465
So that that's convergent evolution.

20:09.255 --> 20:13.745
Some of it may well be convergent evolution again.

20:14.485 --> 20:17.985
Uh, one of the things we notice in many rather intelligent

20:18.055 --> 20:19.345
species, but not all.

20:19.865 --> 20:21.745
I mean, the octopus is the great exception.

20:22.325 --> 20:26.325
One of the things that we notice is,

20:26.535 --> 20:31.485
relatively intelligent species tend to have cooperation,

20:32.315 --> 20:36.155
tend to have, relatively small groups

20:36.865 --> 20:38.875
that have social hierarchies.

20:39.215 --> 20:41.675
So you know whom you can fight with

20:41.675 --> 20:45.275
and whom you can't fight with, who you lose with.

20:46.395 --> 20:49.415
And when we look at our relatives,

20:50.195 --> 20:53.135
we see rather similar structures.

20:53.635 --> 20:55.495
But then again, if we look at wolves,

20:55.645 --> 20:59.455
some people have argued, you see, again, very

21:00.295 --> 21:01.895
structures rather similar to human groups.

21:02.605 --> 21:03.615
It's a small group,

21:03.675 --> 21:06.255
but it's a cooperative, cooperative group.

21:07.245 --> 21:09.745
It hunts together, it shares food.

21:10.765 --> 21:12.315
Uh hmm.

21:14.085 --> 21:19.055
Now another process that sort of overlaps with it

21:20.025 --> 21:21.805
is good old sexual selection.

21:22.575 --> 21:26.355
And as I've mentioned previously, sexual selection means

21:26.545 --> 21:31.375
that, some individuals get chosen

21:31.445 --> 21:35.495
because if you choose them, you're likely

21:35.495 --> 21:37.935
to have more offspring than if you chose someone else would

21:38.965 --> 21:40.575
than, than than you would with someone else.

21:41.735 --> 21:45.145
And that sexual selection, the argument goes

21:45.175 --> 21:48.265
that are intelligent species, particularly our own

21:48.965 --> 21:50.305
sexual selection, was

21:50.845 --> 21:52.985
the most important factor that was there.

21:53.765 --> 21:58.465
You chose someone who learned preferentially from the high

21:58.465 --> 22:00.985
end status because high end status people were the ones

22:00.985 --> 22:03.345
who survived, the ones who had more children

22:03.645 --> 22:05.345
or grandchildren who survived.

22:06.205 --> 22:09.625
Uh, if you found these kinds of people sexy,

22:10.205 --> 22:12.675
and these are the people, who

22:12.675 --> 22:13.875
with whom you had children?

22:14.585 --> 22:16.795
Well, good old Darwin taught us

22:16.795 --> 22:18.515
that offspring resemble their parents.

22:19.575 --> 22:22.475
And it means that you're gonna have offspring who are likely

22:22.495 --> 22:25.115
to be successful or whether their parents are successful.

22:26.015 --> 22:28.355
Do you get sexual selection in other species?

22:28.535 --> 22:32.675
And does it lead to human type intelligence? Maybe?

22:33.095 --> 22:36.635
Um, we probably are getting it in, in,

22:36.895 --> 22:39.875
our closest relatives, relatives, chimpanzees,

22:40.775 --> 22:41.795
but we can't be sure

22:41.985 --> 22:45.175
that it takes just too long to study these.

22:45.255 --> 22:47.055
I mean, you need generations watching them,

22:47.235 --> 22:51.875
and it, it's hard to get a grant for, you know, I'd like,

22:51.895 --> 22:54.515
three generations worth of funding, please.

22:56.475 --> 23:00.215
But we suspect this is often true, but it's not always true.

23:00.355 --> 23:03.375
And, cephalopods like the,

23:04.725 --> 23:05.925
squid are like the octopus.

23:06.225 --> 23:09.365
Uh, the octopus is not a particularly social animal at all.

23:10.025 --> 23:14.315
And yet, for people who raise them, they get

23:14.315 --> 23:16.875
to know you, they get to follow that they're curious,

23:17.215 --> 23:21.375
and yet they don't have in any kind of, as far

23:21.375 --> 23:23.695
as we know anyway, a a any kind

23:23.715 --> 23:27.335
of social organization the way that wolves do, the way

23:27.335 --> 23:28.375
that human beings do,

23:28.395 --> 23:32.015
or the way that chimpanzees, bonobos gorillas do.

23:32.835 --> 23:37.125
So that that answer isn't there, even though

23:37.645 --> 23:38.965
I used to think it was there.

23:40.325 --> 23:43.585
Uh, we used to think that, well, we got to have sex,

23:43.685 --> 23:44.865
you know, sexual selections.

23:45.545 --> 23:47.405
One of the great factors that created us,

23:48.185 --> 23:50.205
and it may very well have been one of the factors

23:50.205 --> 23:54.405
that created us, but not necessarily leading

23:54.425 --> 23:56.605
to convergent evolution in all species.

23:57.545 --> 23:59.725
Uh, when we do get those spaceships out there

23:59.725 --> 24:02.925
to other planets, maybe what we'll find is

24:02.925 --> 24:04.805
that there are other ways of getting to be intelligent

24:05.075 --> 24:06.845
that aren't similar to our own

24:07.825 --> 24:09.925
and that do not involve sexual selection.

24:11.025 --> 24:13.205
Uh, I can't imagine how that would work,

24:13.745 --> 24:16.095
but that doesn't mean anything.

24:16.265 --> 24:18.375
We'll see, maybe in a few years somebody will be able

24:18.375 --> 24:19.295
to imagine how it works.

Exploring Commonalities in Human Behavior

00:00:00 - If I hadn't spent most of my career as a fieldwork anthropologist, I would've assumed judging from the older, anthropological, ethnographic literature, that there was just about an infinite amount of cross-cultural variability in our species. We could be doing anything, but the more fieldwork I've done, the more people everywhere seemed to have lots in common, and it's what they have in common that's much more interesting nowadays. To me. For instance, at the conclusion of my career, which is about now, I was looking through some old photos
00:00:34 - of camping out in, in the compound I'd built in a, a town in northern Nigeria. And I looked at the pictures and what I see are teenagers forcing around, playing around, having a good time, and they're just kids playing around. And aside from the way that they were dressed, if, I saw them in Halifax, Nova Scotia where I live,
00:01:04 - time, no big deal. There is a lot of variability, but there's also an enormous amount of similarity. I think part of the problem is that, well, my generation, which is the older generation were brought up with the idea that nature versus nurture was a dichotomy that meant something. And unfortunately, I still see that dichotomy. I still see people, particularly when they're not anthropologists, thinking
00:01:37 - Well, that's true. If you're talking about a sneeze, that's definitely nature. But if you're talking about something other than a basic reflex, that's a meaningless dichotomy. The example I always try to use in, in talking about this, the idea of, well, of a reflex, but in particular, the idea of sibling rivalry. And if you're a parent of more than one child,
00:02:08 - Now, cross culturally, some cultures actually emphasize it and think that it's good. and then there are cultures at the other extreme, which, I assume would be ours that try to minimize it. But the important thing to keep in mind is that you are never going to solve this problem for the human species. If you're good at it, you can solve this problem as a parent for your own children, maybe even
00:02:39 - But your next generation and the generations after that aren't going to have to solve this problem themselves. It's always going to recur. And that's what talking about human nature is more than nature versus nurture. we can't solve the problem once and for all. It is part of our species, but we can certainly minimize it or if we want to maximize it. This is just one example. There are much more horrific examples,

Generational Challenges: Status and Behavioral Patterns

00:03:11 - Some societies actually emphasize it, and other societies, I hope, like our own, try to minimize it, but it's going to be a problem with every generation. How about sexual jealousy? Once again, you can minimize it. You can maximize it. You cannot say that, well, we have solved this problem. We never have to think about it again. No, the next generation will have to think about again, how about, to whom do we pay attention?
00:03:46 - to pay attention to the people whom we perceive as high in social status. We also learn preferentially from them. And again, this is like sib sibling rivalry you don't like whom your children are paying attention to and learning from. Maybe you could do something about it, but even if you're very successful, the next generation is likely to have that same problem. The difficulty is that
00:04:20 - It solves the problems of the past. ask any zookeeper otherwise. It's so difficult to keep animals alive and breeding in zoos because it's a different environment and they're facing different problems, and they did not evolve to deal with those problems. Now we seem to have done a reasonably good job, because we're here in getting adapted through evolution to the problems that our ancestors faced
00:04:52 - The trouble is that that's not our environment now. And judging from what we're doing to the planet, judging from our frequent wars and the risk that we're taking of even nuclear wars, we don't seem to be very well adapted at all to our current environments. but we, it doesn't matter that we know that
00:05:24 - are still there, and this is very worrying. And yet, do we still have a problem with sexual violence? yes. Do we have a problem with war? Yes, definitely. Do we have a problem with sibling rivalry? Yes, that's still there too. But we also have well, new problems. And to deal with the new problems, I should just put my notes away and talk about them.
00:05:55 - to past environments. One of the things that we're adapted to we do automatically is we pay preferential attention to the high end status. And we learned preferentially from the people we perceive as the high end status. And up until really very recently that was quite adaptive. I remember once I was just beginning field work

Perceptions of Achievement and Status in Society

00:06:25 - called the McGill, and the young man who was my host, sort of taking me a tour through the town. And he stops and he points to actually another young man busy playing with his child. And he says rather proudly that this young man had made more mounds in which to plant yams, you know, you, you make a hill and that's what you put your yams into. he made more hills for yams
00:07:00 - And this is pretty arduous work. And he was proud of this young man. And then we passed a woman and he said that woman had 18 children and most of them were still alive and healthy. And again, there was pride there and right, that's how the system worked up until very recently for our species.
00:07:31 - but paying special attention to the successful, that's like sibling rivalry. That's part of what we do, and we learn preferentially from them. well that's great if say you wanna learn how to farm, you wanna learn how to make tools. You wanna learn how to be a leader and perhaps keep people from fighting, looking at the people who are successful at this.
00:08:05 - Well, if you're traveling somewhere and you start a con, you want to start a conversation with a perfect stranger, just begin by saying, kids nowadays and the other person will complete the sentence for you. what we're really complaining about is children do not perceive as high end status or often do not perceive as high end status.
00:08:36 - nowadays, what they perceive as really high in status are professional athletes, professional entertainers, politicians, people in the military, people who are simply very, very wealthy, and of course, more recently influencers. People who on the internet, seem to be everywhere and have perhaps millions of followers,
00:09:04 - the next door neighbor may be a wealthy accountant. That doesn't matter. What, what we have managed to do somehow is tap into whatever evolved mechanisms or, help us decide who is high in status and whom we're learning preferentially from. We're we tend to be ignoring the people whom our parents might think are high status, whom we ourselves

Modern Challenges of Learning and Selection

00:09:36 - and instead, learn from strangers. Now, back when that meant learning from the best hunter, learning from the best, gatherer, the best, forger the best Mom, this was perfect. This was great. And now what does it mean? It means your kids may be insisting on learning drums in the middle of the night. That's one of the places we are, but there's another place we are that really seems
00:10:07 - and that has to do with sexual selection. sexual selection simply means that, we prefer to have offspring with some people rather than others. We see some people as more sexually attractive, a better catch than others. And one of the things we really look hard in is, again, this idea of, we refer to mate with the higher status,
00:10:40 - And that's fine when it means you're finding sexy. You wanna have children with, people who are actually doing well in your society. But right now, we get right back into that same status problem. And so we want to, get involved with people who are professional entertainers, and that becomes the, the kind
00:11:10 - We get attracted to the very wealthy, regardless of how they managed to get their wealth. So sexual selection today isn't necessarily, a particularly good choice. So that also creates problems for us, and it's one of the ways in which we're not very well adapted to our current society. I started off talking about what I used to do nowadays. I, I wish I could still do that kind of field work,
00:11:42 - interstellar spaceships generation ships yet. And if my early field work was just going to Africa, which is no big deal at all nowadays, to really continue that kind of field work now, I'd want to be, helping build a generation ship and then being a passenger on it. Now, for those who aren't into science fiction generation,
00:12:16 - for a very long time and permit generations to follow one actor another. If you do read science fiction, then you'll notice that while there are many, many stories and novels about this topic, they usually assume that, hey, generation ships are no problem because we'll go into suspended animation or we'll become popsicles and you'll freeze ourselves

Challenges of Building Generation Ships

00:12:45 - So we very few science, well, no, some science fiction stories also assume that you could go faster than light, but it doesn't look like we'll ever be able to go faster than light. And so far, there's no evidence that we'll ever be able to fall out a corps and have a living human being there. and while bears can sleep a fair length of time, there's no reason to believe that human beings will ever be able to sleep for centuries.
00:13:19 - we are talking about centuries and even longer. Now, in the science fiction stories, the technical problems of building a generation ship solved no problem at all here. I think the science section has it right. there are already companies investing large sums of money into mining and prospecting and asteroids, and it looks like it won't be very long before we are doing a lot of our mineral extraction from asteroids
00:13:52 - of the messier construction, out in space asteroid. once we get that technology squared away, it'll be relatively simple to adapt it to a generation ship. For one thing, if you can hollow out an asteroid, you've already largely built your generation ship. Well, would anybody want to do this?
00:14:24 - All it would take is a billionaire or two to decide, well, Mars isn't good enough for me. I want to go off to one of the planets of Proximus and Torre and found the colony there. Or perhaps it'll be a military dictator with total control of the country that will spend its budget doing nothing but building generation ships, with the assumption that
00:14:54 - or great-grandchildren will have their own planet too. Or maybe just there'll be a religious group splint, a religious group that wants to send the truth out to another planet. And that means building a generation shift. Now, I think perhaps, unfortunately, these things are going to be what we're gonna be seeing probably only maybe 10 years or so, perhaps a little longer than that. And I don't think any of these attempts will ever succeed
00:15:27 - So we would've solved the problems of the technical problems of building this kind of spacecraft. We want to solve the social problems, the social problems being the products of what we were evolved to do. For instance, one of the things we were evolved to do is to want more for our children rather than for other people's children.

Generational Dynamics on a Spacecraft

00:15:57 - but you're also sending your children to a private university or a private school of any kind, why don't you believe me? But if we were to start a generation ship now, we'd probably be doing what we're already doing from in our reefer trips. We're using a military model. Well, that's fine. That's a good idea to have a captain in this kind of situation. And it works when you're doing a short trip.
00:16:28 - you're going to have generations? Well, the first generation is military is sort of a meritocracy. We're getting pretty well qualified people, and then they'll have children, and those children will have had educational advant advantages. a little bit of influence from, well-placed parents. So the second generation will largely be the, the products,
00:17:01 - They probably won't be as good, and they will be some people in that second generation whose parents were not officers, but who could have been as good. And there's gonna be some unhappiness, maybe some conflict, but the third generation there will be conflict. It won't necessarily be military at first,
00:17:33 - And one of the problems with any kind of spaceship is that they're really vulnerable. Anything happens at the oxygen supply, food supply, anybody builds a weapon, just a little bit of conflict. And we have now lost our ability to have a generation ship going. And there'll be other problems too, of course, the usual ones, sexual selection that's right, until it becomes well filled with jealousies rivalries,
00:18:02 - what we have today is disagreements over whom we should be paying attention to, whom we should be learning preferentially from. I'm sorry, but we really seem to have chosen the wrong ancestors. We're a species that is well, obviously doing immense damage to our planet. The same kinds of call it selfish, if you like, selfish tendencies that are leading us to destroy our planet, much more rapid time period,
00:18:35 - One of the things that evolutionists have noticed is that often species that are not at all related to one another may have been separated by tens and even hundreds of millions of years. Similarities. The most common example of this is the eye. The eye keeps on evolving, keeps on cropping up. for example, if you are into, an octopus,

Convergent Evolution and Species Adaptation

00:19:10 - Now, I don't know how long we've diverged from octopus, as must have been 140 million years or something like that, but don't, don't count me on that one. What you can count me on is that essentially it's the same mechanism. And that was convergent evolution. That is relatively unrelated species are exposed to the same kind of selection pressures, and they develop similar adaptation.
00:19:42 - that results in one organism, having more surviving offspring, a competitor, and a competing organism. And so we get selection sometimes for things like eyes. there are other examples. Flight would be another be an obvious one. Birds and bats are not related very closely at all, but they, they both eyes. So that that's convergent evolution. Some of it may well be convergent evolution again.
00:20:18 - species, but not all. I mean, the octopus is the great exception. One of the things that we notice is, relatively intelligent species tend to have cooperation, tend to have, relatively small groups that have social hierarchies. So you know whom you can fight with and whom you can't fight with, who you lose with.
00:20:50 - we see rather similar structures. But then again, if we look at wolves, some people have argued, you see, again, very structures rather similar to human groups. It's a small group, but it's a cooperative, cooperative group. It hunts together, it shares food. hmm. Now another process that sort of overlaps with it
00:21:22 - And as I've mentioned previously, sexual selection means that, some individuals get chosen because if you choose them, you're likely to have more offspring than if you chose someone else would than, than than you would with someone else. And that sexual selection, the argument goes that are intelligent species, particularly our own sexual selection, was
00:21:53 - You chose someone who learned preferentially from the high end status because high end status people were the ones who survived, the ones who had more children or grandchildren who survived. if you found these kinds of people sexy, and these are the people, who with whom you had children? Well, good old Darwin taught us that offspring resemble their parents. And it means that you're gonna have offspring who are likely

Sexual Selection and Intelligence in Different Species

00:22:26 - Do you get sexual selection in other species? And does it lead to human type intelligence? Maybe? we probably are getting it in, in, our closest relatives, relatives, chimpanzees, but we can't be sure that it takes just too long to study these. I mean, you need generations watching them, and it, it's hard to get a grant for, you know, I'd like, three generations worth of funding, please.
00:23:00 - And, cephalopods like the, squid are like the octopus. the octopus is not a particularly social animal at all. And yet, for people who raise them, they get to know you, they get to follow that they're curious, and yet they don't have in any kind of, as far as we know anyway, a a any kind of social organization the way that wolves do, the way
00:23:28 - or the way that chimpanzees, bonobos gorillas do. So that that answer isn't there, even though I used to think it was there. we used to think that, well, we got to have sex, you know, sexual selections. One of the great factors that created us, and it may very well have been one of the factors that created us, but not necessarily leading to convergent evolution in all species.
00:24:18 - to other planets, maybe what we'll find is that there are other ways of getting to be intelligent that aren't similar to our own and that do not involve sexual selection. I can't imagine how that would work, but that doesn't mean anything. We'll see, maybe in a few years somebody will be able to imagine how it works.

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