#786 - Steve Stewart-Williams - Why Are Differences Between Men & Women Being Denied?

27:38You find them a lot of them appear quite early in development before it's sort of plausible that socialization could be involved. The sex difference in aggression, for instance, appears rarely, rarely early. As soon as kids can basically move around and be capable of aggression, you see sex differences there. And also, like a lot of sex differences either appear in the wake of puberty or they get bigger in the wake of puberty. So the developmental timing there is, you know, it's not 100 % proof, but that sort of suggests as well that it might be, having evolutionary basis. The third one is that often it resists, often sex differences persist in the face of culture.

28:26So I think the usual story is, okay, so you have these differences and they're created by culture But often they persist even when the culture is pushing in the opposite direction So so aggression is a good example of that actually there's a sex difference and aggression males on average I don't need to say the The difference the direction of the difference but males are more aggressive and People might say well, that's because we encourage males to be more aggressive But actually if you tabulate how often people are saying don't be aggressive to boys and don't be aggressive to girls because they're saying a lot more to boys.

28:57They're discouraging boys from being aggressive, a lot more from their discouraging girls. Not because they want girls to be more aggressive, but just because boys are more aggressive. Integration is a problem and they try to clamp down on it. And they clamp down on it in most cultures. They're a sum where they actively encourage it, but in most cultures they do clamp down on it. But despite that, you still have that same sex difference persisting anyway. So that was three, right? for is hormonal, especially prenatal hormonal associations that you have between levels of testosterone in the womb in particular and then the emergence of traits, male typical and female traits, female typical traits later on.

29:41So there's a condition called congenital adrenal hyperplasia where you're exposed to very very high levels of testosterone, other androgens in the wound. For guys that makes no difference because they already have very very high levels. But for women who, for girls who are exposed to them, the higher levels, it does have a big effect on them and it sort of masculinizes their behavior in a lot of ways there. More prone to aggression maybe they have more male typical preferences. They sort of shifted in the male direction. They're somewhere in between the female and the male norm as result of testosterone.

30:21Number five is cross -cultural universality. So if these things, if the kind of sex differences we're talking about, we're just due to culture and culture alone, we'd expect them to vary quite a bit across cultures. And some cultures you might have, men being more interested in porn, for instance, women being more interested in romance novels and other cultures, no sex differences, in either direction, they both like or dislike them just as much as each other, and others you'd find it reversed. So some cultures wear. Women are more into porn and women hire prostitutes and men are the majority of the prostitutes and men are reading the romance novels.

31:04And of course, you don't find that. You find that these differences are very consistent across all, depending on the trade, every single culture that we've looked or the vast majority. and it's a lot easier when you find that to explain it on evolutionary terms that are in terms of purely socio -cultural ones. And then the last one, maybe the most persuasive one is that you find the same kinds of sex differences in other species as well. And you don't find them in all other species, but importantly you find them in other species that are subject to the same selection pressures as our species is.

31:42What do you mean when you say that? Well, the main selection pressure that creates most of these sex differences is the sex difference in reproductive variability, or in other words, the sex difference in the maximum offspring number. So basically, men and a lot of male animals potentially can have many, many more offspring than any female. Even the most successful female can have. The average has to be about the same. It has to be almost exactly the same as long as you have an equal sex ratio. The average for both sex is supposed to be the same, but the variance can be greater for males and females.

32:18And often is. And when you have that, when you have greater variance in males, that means that there are more males than females having no offspring at one end. But then the important thing is that you have more males than females having tons of offspring. And with that's the case, you have stronger selection on males for traits that are going and drag you up toward that end of having more offspring rather than fewer. So different selection pressure from what you have in females. So it selects for things like aggressive status seeking, stronger desire for status, a stronger desire for multiple sexual partners so you can end up with multiple offspring or would do an ancestral past when we didn't have birth control and the like.

33:01All this kind of traits, lower level of parental investment so you can spend more time seeking mates, all those kind of traits are selected and not just announce species, but just any species. We had great of reproductive variants among the males and the females. And that's the key thing. That's the key line of evidence is that we had that greater reproductive variants. That's where you'd expect these six differences, that the theory is correct, and that's where you do find six differences. Yeah, so you've had your hypothesis proven by the world around you. Exactly, yeah, but by many different species, and it's very cool, right?

33:37Because there were some species where you don't find the sex difference and repute the variance, and those species, you don't really find much in the way of sex differences. So you find, you have what, you have what, a monomorphic species, and in a few that's actually flipped into reverse, and females are greater variants, and then all the usual sex differences are turned on their head, and that the females are more aggressively seeking mates and beating each other up to try to get mates and jacannas, that's a North American shorebird for instance, that jacannas basically, jacannas females try to put together a little haram of males and they have a bunch of different nests and they try to get these little males, these choosy little nonaggressive little males are trying to get them.

34:21Chos are on the other foot now, women, how do you like that? My students do actually love this when I talk about the jacannas And I think it's for exactly that reason that it feels like the shoes on the other foot. Yeah, eat some of your own medicine for a while. My favorite one, I think I think I learned this from David Geary and he was talking about the preference that males have, even male chimpanzees, other sort of primates for reciprocal motion, reciprocating motion in toys. So, you know, you would think the reason that young boys like trucks and young girls like dolls and fluffy things is that some socialization need thing.

35:02And he's like, you can give this to close sort of species relatives and the boys will pick that. There's something about the male brain, which loves that, I'm gonna guess that you've looked at this as well. Yeah, I have an, it's fascinating, right? You find that in the way that monkeys and Yeah, the cacks maybe, I think they both are, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's incredible, right? Because I have to say, like, there's toy preferences. Before seeing evidence like that, it does seem pretty plausible. What could that have to do with evolution? It's much more remote than things like aggression and sex drive and interesting casual sex.

35:40All that stuff is much more plausible, I think, basically. Well, what would be the adaptive reason for you wanting to have a toy that goes back back and forth, or you wanting to hold something that's soft and fluffy. But then you actually need to think sort of five steps down the line. Well this reciprocal motion is your spatial orientation starting to lock in a little bit more because at some point in the future you might need to throw a stone and hit a snake or throw a spear. And this, what are you doing? Well, you're kind of learning to keep something alive as a young girl. You're learning to be able to care and nurture to look something in the eyes and to be able to work out whether it's still alive or dead And then you know you roll the clock forward and you look at like Joyce Benenson's work What is it that children in primary schools are doing children in primary schools if you're a young set of boys You're doing warfare you're fighting Indians or aliens or or whatever it might be and if your girls You're playing that or nurse or doctor.

36:40You're keeping something alive. It's all interpersonal and And yeah, whether it's macaques or vervet monkeys or toddlers, the sort of rules seem to be very similar. Yeah, yeah, it's amazing, right? And like with the munky research, the macaques and the like, the bit of that that I find most plausible is the caring for. The caring for dolls, caring for little things like that, I think it's pretty clearly an offshoot of a greater parental inclination and the females and the males. Yeah, but it is really interesting. And you know, the toy differences, it's like, I was saying it's hard to think of evolutionary rationale, but despite that, it's among the largest sex differences, other than sexual orientation, that there is.

37:23It's a really big sex difference. Yeah, strange. Well, I saw David taught me about that study where you can raise, you can, you work out whether or not a child has been raised in a gender conforming or a gender non -conforming household, then you bring the children into the lab and you let them play with any toy that they want. You can play with trucks as a girl, you can play with dolls as a boy, and whether you've come from gender conforming or gender non -conforming households, you still see the same thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's great. And I think the big difference there is that the ones in the gender non -conforming household are just more tolerant of kids who want to be gender non -conforming.

38:04Yeah, yeah, that's nice. That's a nice effect. All right, you're sub -stay apart from, like I'm just blowing you the entire episode. Your sub -stack is also fantastic and everybody should go and check that out. But what happened with the attempted debunking of the man, the hunter theory, please tell everyone the gossip? Yeah, yeah, so that's one of my sub -stay posts, right? It was a paper last year by Abigail Anderson and colleagues where they basically tried to debunk the idea, they called the man the hunter idea by which they meant the idea that and hunter -gatherer conditions men did most of the hunting and women did most of the gathering and it was a pretty clear division of labor.

38:52And I remember when I read that I thought I think that's quite unlikely just on the face of it, it's quite unlikely that anthropologists studying this issue for more than a century, and not just male anthropologists have looked at this issue, is it really plausible that they have just kind of hallucinated this massive sex difference? And are they just muddled about this conclusion that men do most of the hunting, especially most of the big game hunting, and that women either do basically none, or they just do little bit and more often small game hunting rather than big game. So my thoughts doesn't seem very likely and then this pre -print has come out in the last couple of months, which has more systematically gone with that intuition and made it, well I think it's a very strong case that they weren't right about that.

39:44They were wrong about this idea that hunting is a lot more even than we had thought. And what they seem to, they seem to have made a number of a mistake that there are coding errors in there where they were coding societies that didn't have female hunting as ones that did. That was one area, one area rather. Another one was that they only included a relatively small subset of the available societies for which we had data. and plenty of others that they could have included, that would have met their criteria, but which they didn't include, and when you include those as well, they tend to show the traditional view that meant mostly the hunting, and when just a bit of a - They didn't show frequency or like density of hunting as well, right?

40:31It was like a single instance of female big game hunting. You take your wife to work with you one day, and that kind of counts as her being there for a 50 -year career. Yeah, and that's a way that you can make sex differences seem really, really small, is if you just have a yes -no format, like I've seen studies where they say, for instance, that interest in pornography is pretty even between the sexes, because if you ask people, have you ever watched it? How's the any difference? But if you look at frequency, the difference becomes huge, and it's exactly the same for hunting. Fuckery, fuckery everywhere, Steve.

41:02So I wrote a little theory off the back of this. you have this really sort of lovely breakdown, which is the male default, right? There's this assumption that male behavior is desirable in some way, and I call this the soft bigotry of male expectations. Nice. Which I think, which I think fits of male expectations. Yeah, so for instance, you make this really great point, which is no one is asking, everybody was asking why are women not doing so much big game hunting? No one was asking why aren't men doing more berry collection. And there is implicit in, you know, what is I think supposed to be a not even thinly veiled, completely transparent sort of pro feminist, boss pitchy moving forward kind of text.

41:51Well, are you not implicitly derogating the role that women mostly took, which is that of being the carer, that of being the berry collector and the note collector and the tuba connector and all of that. Exactly. It does crucial tasks and equally difficult tasks in their own kind of way. And they're just considered to be not as valuable implicitly. Lesser. And yeah, exactly. They are implicitly seen as lesser even though, yeah, even though it's supposedly a profaneless thing. You can read, you can see, and it does have a sort of negative judgment about the things that are more common among females.

42:33I mean, there's something so satisfying about people that are self -righteous and self -aggrandizing, sort of falling on their own sword. And you know, reading that, I'd be lying if I said it didn't give me a big sort of kick of satisfaction when I read your take down of it. Nice. I'm just going to write down, writing down soft, bigotry of male expectations, I like that. Oh yeah, okay. So what are your best explanations for the gender equality paradox that we're seeing? So the gender equality paradox is the quite surprising counterintuitive finding that for a lot of traits, sex differences seem to be smaller, rather larger and less gender equal nations.

43:21So basically as nations become more gender equal in terms of who's involved in politics and I call it the under the law and equality of access to education etc. as they become more gender equal in those kind of ways. Traditional sociocultural theories and like social role theory would predict that the sex differences would get progressively smaller as gender equality increases and for a few traits they do but for a lot of traits, strangely enough, it's the other way around. So gender equality increases and associated with that are larger sex differences rather than smaller ones. And I find it just because of very surprising finding, I would have even accepting that there was an innate contribution to a lot of sex differences, I still would have thought that more patriarchal societies where men and women are treated very, very differently and they're expected to do different stuff, I would have expected that.

44:18they would amplify this x differences and make them even bigger than the a nate push. But often it's the opposite and they actually get smaller. And then the question is why on earth is that the case? And I guess the first thing I want to say about that is that I don't think it's fully known. But my best guess is that what's happening is societies that are more gender equal, it becomes with a cluster of different cultural level variables. So they're more gender equal. They also tend to be more individualistic on average. It also tends to be correlated with wealth, greater human development of the societies, that kind of thing.

45:03And where that's the case, people have more freedom to pursue what they'd most wanna do, pursue the things that interest them most, and nurture their own individuality. And the more people can do that, the larger that individual differences get, but also the larger the average sex differences get as well. Yeah, I mean, it's so odd, like from first principles to think that that would be the outcome that people are going to get. It is so strange. Have you got any idea what actually happening with men and women in STEM at the moment? Yeah, we've got a few ideas about that. The first thing is, so we often hear that there are more men than women in STEM, and depending on how you define STEM, there's not actually necessarily the case.

45:57So if you include the health sciences, it's actually pretty even at least among younger generations, it's pretty even how many men, how many women go into STEM. Overall, really, really close, but the difference that everybody notices and worries about is the fact that more men than women go to certain fields. Fields like physics, man -engineering, and mathematics, they go more going to philosophy as well, let's not stand but these are the ones that people worry about. Not so worried about the flip side of this, not so worried about the fact that more women the men go to the health sciences and that kind of thing.

46:38And I do wonder if there's another example of the soft bigotry of male expectations. Is that people? Is that people kind of assume that anything that tilts male is superior and therefore that we need to get women into that and kind of implicitly downgrade the importance of the kind of areas in which more women than men go into. Either way though, there's an interesting question about why those differences are there. An interesting question, and also it's quite a controversial question, or at any rate they're a controversial answer to that question. So I should probably, that first thing I should say is that, so the main explanation that people like to give is that it's largely a product of discrimination and sexist socialization.

47:26and so I just want to point out that I agree that that's part of it. That's part of the story. I would just say I just don't think it's the whole story though. I think that some of the differences that we talked about already, actually the difference in interest in people versus interest in an object, plays into it as well. And then those differences, they appear very, very early on, they're found across cultures. In fact, it's a massively consistent and sex difference actually. There's one study I saw which I think had about 200 ,000 people in it, 53 nations and every single one of those 53 nations they found that sex difference.

48:06And another study which David Gary actually was involved in, they had half a million participants in the study, 80 nations and 80 out of the 80 nations you found that sex difference. So it is a huge difference. difference. That's patriarchy going global. That's the patriarchy everywhere, exactly. Except that in less patriarchal nations, some of those differences are larger rather than smaller. You do get a gender equality paradox for the sex difference and objects versus interesting people, which is fascinating. And it's just perfectly plausible to me that those sex differences and interests are part of what's shaping this ex -difference in which areas people go into, which occupations.

48:52And actually, I want to put that more strongly. I think that it would be implausible to think that those interests are not part of the story. Like, how could they not be? That people are freely choosing what they want to do. They have these interests. Even if we just ignore the question of where those interests come from, they do have those interests. It must be part of the story feeding into the difference in what's called occupational segregation. That's putting it too strongly, I think that phrase, because it's not segregation or what a great occupation apartheid. Except that, you know, it's the difference is a much more modest than that.

49:28And there's no field where one sex is present and one sex is absent. There's just, you know, going away from a 50 -56 ratio. So there's even where women are at least represented. there's a significant minority of individuals in those fields of women. But it's vice versa for men. What do you think was our typical ancestral setup for mating when it comes to the way that we got together, stayed together? I think that, let's come back to the alien, right? So the alien's the size to look at our sexual behavior. I think one thing I would notice immediately is that we're pretty varied in what we do. As long as they're not really with a strict norm, so you absolutely can't do x, y, z.

50:18We do a fair amount of x, y, and z. I think that the most common, we've got the pattern though that we engage in is pair bonding. That's the most common. So we do some pair bonding that we have polygyny as well. It's not too uncommon across the cultures of the world that some guys will have more than one wife. And there's some casual sex as well, and every culture on record, there's some casual sex as well. Pay bonding though does seem to be the most common setting for sex and reproduction. Even in societies that anthropologists classify as being polygenous, to say that a society as polygenous basically just means that But, um, um, polygene is acceptable.

51:04You're allowed to do it. Um, if you can, if you, you know, if everyone evolves to him. Um, actually that's maybe it's not necessary for everyone wants to do it necessarily. Sometimes there's coercion. So I'll take that back, but you are allowed to do it. Um, but even in those societies, the majority of actual relationships are pair bonds. So that's a most common one. Yeah. How do we get to a situation where people assume that are just free wheeling, sleeping around, you don't have sexual jealousy that is an actual innate problem. This is just your resistance that needs to be overcome through some combination of psychedelics and meditation.

51:53Like, how do we share from what seems to me to be quite an obvious setup of it takes like between 10 and 15 years to get an infant to maturity so that it can stand on its own two feet and look after itself. therefore you probably need people that stay together for at least a good portion of that. What's being missed? What's modern dating sort of, a modern mating done to that, like innate understanding? Yeah, that is a good question. Yeah. I don't know. So I think so, so people have argued for quite a long time that things like jealousy are just social inventions. and I think it was very good evidence that they're not.

52:40I do think that people differ. I was thinking about this a while ago and I do wonder if there are maybe three kinds of people. There are some people who get jealous and just could, you know, appear on suits and really well and they couldn't possibly contemplate or enjoy an open relationship or polyamorous relationship. And I think there are some people who are kind of the reverse of that small number of people who just naturally Polyamorous and they don't particularly get jealous And I think there may be some people in between who do get jealous and who do naturally feel that way But who can if they decide to they can kind of hack their brains or Perhaps just insanely high socio -sexuality to the point where it kind of outweighs The potential sexual jealousy not that they don't feel it true that there's overclocked on their desire for sexual variety Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think that's likely.

53:39Yeah, so I think that, so some people can hack it, hack the system, so to speak. I think, I think if they think that jealousy was just implanted by culture and culture alone, they're mistaken about that. But that doesn't mean that some of those tricks to get rid of it might, they might work for something. It's like a belief in determinism, not believing in it means that you don't need to believe in it. Okay, so how likely do you think it was that humans would have stayed together for life? and how likely do you think that we're monogamy sure, serial monogamists? I think that both happened, but serial monogamy was more common.

54:14So I've seen data for instance in hand -to -gatherer societies that most first marriages don't last for life. So most people will have subsequent, they will split up and have subsequent marriages as well, but that a small number do. So I think maybe among I think it was the... I think it was the Kung San. Maybe I shouldn't say actually because I'm not... it was the Kung San or the Hudson or something like that, I saw a data on it. And I think around 5 % of marriages just lasted for life. But so the majority don't. And I think in our own culture we see this, right? Is that most people fall in love more than once in the course of their lifetimes.

54:58You do get both, but just serial monogamy is more common. I suppose the rarity, ancestral, would have been a viable fertile couple staying together for a little while and not having children, though. You know, we've decoupled having sex from producing babies now. Yep. Yep, and sometimes to the detriment of, there's a theory you probably heard of that there's a sort of built tendency that you partner up with somebody and if there are no kids come along, that you just de -partner, that there's a built -in tendency to sleep. I got absolutely annihilated for dropping this theory about two years ago and we repurposed it into it.

55:43I mean, it's just, it's very difficult, like it's uncomfortable for people to hear. Hey, if you and your partner have been in a relationship, you get together at 21, you're like, when we get to 30, we're going to start having our family, but we're going to enjoy our 20s first. And over a time due to neither of you are too false, maybe you're on birth control, maybe you're just timing it right, I don't know, maybe you're, you know, cycle tracking, whatever. But, and, cessually, the only reason that you and another partner would have been together for a long amount of time and not had children would have been that there was a problem with someone, is it you, is it them?

56:14You don't know. But what you certainly know is there is a 50 % chance that if you stop being in love with them and go off with somebody else that maybe you're going to be sweet and I said that and it got reclaimed. And it's an uncomfortable thesis for people to hear, especially people who are maybe in relationships that are eight years long and have been intending on holding off having children for a little while. So yeah, but I love it. I love it in theory. Yeah, it works. And one of the reasons I take it seriously is that there is pretty good evidence, I think, that you find the same thing in pair bonding birds.

56:45That if birds pair up and if they one or other is infertile and actually does a third option, which is that the couple together can be it. They just, yeah, exactly. And they could both have kids with somebody else, but for some reason it's just not the right match. But in birds' year, the same thing, if there's no offspring, little chicks coming along, in the breeding season, they will split and try again. What do you make of the fact that if what you've said is correct, maybe 95 % of unions, ancestrally, would have not lasted for life. What should we make of the fact that we have a culture and a relationship setup system ingrained that looks down on and disparages, unions that do end up in a way that may be more sort of uncessfully aligned.

57:45In the sense of not lasting for the life right, yeah. That is an example where culture is kind of pushing against our nature to some degree. And I think that I don't know, like, especially in the past, right, there was massive stigmatisation of divorce, couples who divorced, that was just a really, really big deal. And I remember it would have made it a lot harder for them. And I think it probably made it a lot harder for the kids as well. It's hard enough for kids when the parents split in general. But if your culture is strong, we're stigmatizing it and therefore it's very, very rare. Then that's just going to make it twice as hard for the kids.

58:24And I think it was probably the cause of quite a lot of needless misery where people who were miserable couldn't split up if they were forced, especially in the past, forced to stay together. I think it caused a lot of needless misery and, you know, splitting up too easily, especially if you have kids, that's a, that can be a problem as well. But I think it's got to be a, it's got to be a balance somewhere, a middle ground somewhere in between those extremes. You know how many divorces were registered in the year that Charles Darwin was born? How many divorces did, no, I'm not sure. Four. Four, is that right?

59:02Four. That's fascinating. Nationally. Yeah, well. That's how many that's not four per thousand that's not four per county for four into the UK for yes, four in total. Yeah, so funny. It's just that's another Robert Wright ism from oh interesting. Yeah, this one's from the moral animal. Yeah, moral animal. Sorry. Oh, yeah. Yeah. What can we what can we tell about our mating preferences from our testicle body size comparison? Can you imagine how surprising that question would sound?

59:40Why is it going so much ahead? Exactly. It's a bizarre fact, but the relative size of males' testicles is related to the mating system of other species. And so in our friends, the binobos, who we discussed earlier and chimpanzees as well, basically everybody mates with everybody. And in that context the best way that males can boost the number of offspring that they're going to have is to produce moss berm. So on exactly the same principle that the best way to win the lottery is to buy more lottery tickets. Lots and lots of people are mating, lots of chimps rather are mating with the same female, produce moss berm, you boost your chances of being the one that actually fertilizes the egg and size the offspring.

1:00:32So yeah, so they've evolved huge testes, relative to their body size. And in fact, their testes are almost as big as their brains. I've seen a photo of a chimp brain and chimp testes and the chimp testes are only a little When you say that you're being led around by your genitals, not by your brain, it actually goes through. Totally. And that's, and chimps are quite smart too, so they're pretty big brains.

1:00:58So... At the other end of the spectrum among the primates we have gorillas, for instance. So gorillas, the massive creatures, the massive males, they have a haram of females. And although the males mate with all the females, each of the females, well, well they're in that particular haram, each of the females only mates with one male, which is the haram master, the big guy. And therefore you don't have sperm competition when you have lots, when you have sperm from multiple males and the females reproductive tract at the same time. But you don't have them in gorillas because the males are the only ones that mate with the females.

1:01:37And so they have very, very small testes. So they're the massive muscular, huge, scary creatures with tiny, only tiny testicles. Don't tell him. He's like, he'll come and get you. He's staying up for him. He'll come and get you.

1:01:58And then the question that everyone wants to, and I'm sure everyone's thought of as already, okay, so we're the humans fit within the scale from, but I wasn't chimps at one end to gorillas at the other. And the answer is that we're somewhere in between, so we're close to the gorillas, but we are, we're somewhere in between. And a lot of people haven't interpreted that to mean that we have walked somewhere down the path, toward chimpanzee level, promiscuity, we haven't anywhere near as far as them, but we have walked somewhere down the path to that. And it's necessarily wrong, but there's an added bit of information that you need.

1:02:34I think to properly interpret that, which is to look at Gibbons. So Gibbons are another primate. They're a pair bonding primate. And actually, their relative test size is very, very close to ours. So we're closer to the pair bonding Gibbons than we are to the promiscuous chimps and binobos. And so the moral of that story, I think, combined with what we know about human behavior, is that there's possibly been some degree of sperm competition in our ancestral past, but not a huge amount. So some degree of promiscuous mating, in other words, but not a huge amount. And again, I think that pair bonding is our most common format.

1:03:15What do you think about the mutual mate choice model? Are you familiar with this? I named it. No way. Yeah, yeah. So, me and Andrew Thomas did actually. So we worked on a paper call. Oh, Andrew, for the people who don't know, Andrew is a horrible, horrible Welshman that I love daily. He's a great guy and is a great researcher. I'm just produced. He's a great work. He was my PhD student and while he was my PhD student, we did this. Oh, sorry, I see that for you.

1:03:48We did this paper called the ape that thought it was a peacock, in which we argue for this idea that humans are sexually dimorphic, but that it's easy to exaggerate the extent to which we are dimorphic. And in that we coined the term mutual matrix model, MMC model, we called it and MCFC models. So, males choose females compete. Other way around. Males compete females choose. And the idea is these are two different ways that you can construe human sexual behavior. One way is the MCFC model. So, males compete with each other for access to females and females choose from among the competing males.

1:04:30And males do all the competing, females do all the choosing. The mutual matrix model, on the other hand, the MMC model, that's the idea that both sexes compete for desirable mates and that both sexes are choosy to some degree about their mates. And we argue that we fit more with the MMC than the MCFC model. You do still have the same sex differences but they're in a muted form. So although both sexes are choosy in our species rather than only the females being choosy, at least both sexes are choosy, at least about long term mates. But females are choosy, so you do have the same sex difference, but it's muted.

1:05:16And likewise with competitiveness for mates, an intersectional competition, intersectional competition in both sexes, but it's ramped up in males compared to females, especially the first minute comes a risky and a risky competitive tactics and aggression and the like. That's much stronger males than females, but both sexes do it rather than just males competing and females just not competing at all. Why? Why is this the setup that you think that humans have? Because of our big brains is the short answer. So basically as we evolved our big brains and our high intelligence and our cultural capacity.

1:05:57All the culture that we had, that was so confused the alien. As that happened, it became more and more intensive to look after kids. So for most apes, the females can do it alone. The females can look after the kids all by themselves and they don't need help from anybody else. And that's not the case with our species. For a number of reasons. So one of them is that when babies are born, they're completely dependent. They can't even grip on to anything like the young of most primate species. And that's because we're in effect born prematurely because it's the only way to get a big brainer baby out of the reproductive tract is to be born in effect prematurely.

1:06:40And basically, if we appeared on the scene, if babies appeared on the scene in the same developmental stage, As most primates, pregnancy would last about, I think it's close to two years maybe, a horrifying prospect. Yeah, and then, and then rip a person in half when it's exactly, exactly. And as, as I mean, presumably that happened in the process of selecting. Oh, wow, of course. Yeah. Which is a really horrible thought. Yeah, just how many proto -human females died during childbirth because their genetic mutation was like, ah, we'll test it, 12 months, who cares? Yeah, or for the sake of our intelligence and cultural capacity.

1:07:27So that's the first thing, so they're completely dependent at birth, and then just takes a lot longer to get a human being to be nutritionally independent. Is that the barometer nutritionally independent? Yeah, so not being in the red in terms of nutrition, not being, you know, making at least as much as you're receiving. And that can take up to 18 to 20 years, even in a traditional non -state society. So for both of those reasons, women can't do it alone. So I think as our big brains were evolving, they must have co -evolved with various forms of what's called allowing maternal care. So in other words care from individuals other than the mother.

1:08:14And that can come from different sources. It often comes from the woman's mother, so maternal grandmother of the kid, siblings, especially sisters of the mother, various other sources, maternal and the one cause, et cetera. Very often though, it comes from the father. So often, fathers are the key investors, which makes a lot of sense, right? Because the father's the only other adult in the world who's as closely related to that kid as the mother is. So it makes sense that in many cultures, and we do find that in most cultures, maybe all cultures that men invest a lot more than most male mammals.

1:08:51So evolution of male parental care. And then the key thing is that as we started forming these pair bonds, as we started having male investment, as well as female investment, that reduced the sex difference and reproductive variants that we were talking about earlier. So the maximum offspring number for humans other than a few exceptions who would have had heaves, but in general it would have come down quite a bit. And as it came down, that would select for a lower level of dimorphism in our species then as typical of mammals. One other paper, I didn't realize because I went on your Google scholar and had a big deep dark rummage around.

1:09:31You've done a good bit of stuff about men insulting intimate partners. Why or when do men do that with the significant other? That is going way back into the past. That's not research that I led. So I shouldn't say too much about that other than the gist. But the gist of the idea was that men sometimes use derogation of their partner basically as a tool for, believe it or not, for keeping their partner. So David Bus talks about this quite a bit, right? He talks about the ways in which men keep a partner. And they fall to two main categories, the carrot and the stick. So the carrot is the nice stuff so people are more attentive, they give gifts, they kind, all the good stuff.

1:10:20Sometimes though, men will forget about the carrot and go with the stick instead and use various ways, unpleasant ways to try to keep a partner under their thumb. And the rationale for all that research was that one of those ways is kind of insulting them. So if you could persuade somebody that, you know, they're not so great, then they're less likely to think, well, maybe I could do better than this guy. That's the main rationale. And it's not a recommendation, by the way, I was nervous talking about this stuff. It's not a question. No, we have an unreasonably reasonable audience. So, and, you know, moving from a benefit of forwarding to cost -inflicting mating strategies, everyone's seen that.

1:11:05And everyone's seen it on the reverse side as well. You know, they've seen it with women too. This fear that maybe your partner is slipping away from you. So when he says that he wants to go and hang out with the boys, it triggers a little bit of jealousy or uncertainty. Is he actually spending time with the boys? So then you make him feel guilty for spending time with the boys, which means that if he doesn't spend time with the boys. I mean, one of the worst ones that Bus talks about is that, like, I can't remember the term for it, the isolation from male kin and support. I can't remember the name, but I know what you mean.

1:11:37Yeah, well, basically, if a woman has fewer males that are not, brothers, uncles, father, etc. around, then it's going to be harder for her to leave. You know, like, resource independence is basically going to be tougher for her to get to. So, yeah, it's wild, man. I mean, when I think about just how many of the impotences and impulses we have as humans that we assume are either of our own making or the very least under our control, I'm a huge fan of agency. I love the idea of being the author of my own desires and direction in this world. And, you know, it's the Jonathan Height thing of the rider atop an elephant, but it's not the elephant that's got the blinkers on, it's the rider.

1:12:27And how have you learned or how would you describe or advise the audience of how to fold evolutionary psychology thinking into the view of what it means to live a good life, of how to feel like the architect of what they're doing. So I think people can learn about how their desires and defaults are highly preset and highly disposed in a variety of directions. And it can feel disempowering. It can, I once tweeted Jeffrey Miller asking how to deal with the discomfort of learning stuff from evolutionary psychology. So have you got any advice of how you've done that? Yep, well, I do agree that it can feel disempowering, I agree.

1:13:19But I think actually that longer term that it can be empowering for a few reasons. So one is if you have a good understanding of where these impulses come from, they can stop seeing, they can stop seeming like, your emotional reactions and your desires and that kind of thing can stop seeing like direct perceptions of the nature of things. It's really, really, really, really just objectively is very, very important for me to do this. And this is really good, and this is really bad. It can allow us to take a step back from that and potentially deflate those feelings to know where they come from and to know that a lot of the feelings that we have, we have in our minds because they, on average, let us ancestors to pass on their genes in ancestral environments.

1:14:09And so we can think, well, my goal isn't to pass on my genes. I've got these other things that I think are more important And therefore, I'm not going to take these emotional reactions as seriously as I would otherwise. And I do think it works. I do think it can deflate our feelings. One example that I think it was one of Stephen Pinkers' books. He was talking about how, you know, when people are seeing the high status kind of people who strut around and that kind of thing. When you see that chickens do the same thing and the males puff up, it doesn't make you think, oh cool, well, this is even more important than I thought.

1:14:46It deflates it. It makes you think, oh, this is just a silly animalistic tendency. So I think that's one way I think that it can help. It can deflate things so you can more easily choose what or I really want to do. Rather than just going with your gut instincts. And the second thing I think relates to what we're talking earlier about jealousy and whether people on hack their brains to get rid of their jealousy. And I do think a lot of people can't do that. But I think that people think that they can. They might think, okay, just this jealousy. I do feel this jealousy. You know, I've got this partner who wants to have a polyamorous relationship.

1:15:24I don't know what the idea, but that's just because of society. It's I can cast it off just as easily as it was taught to me. And if they know that quite possibly that's not the case, that there is an evolutionary origin to that emotion and that therefore quite positive isn't, they're not going to be able to cast it off. They can make a more informed decision. I think they can think, well, I'll probably not be in a cast it off. There's probably is going to be unpleasant for me, whether I want it to be or not. So I just think that this is perhaps not the relationship for me. And they can stay clear of it because they might realize that it's unrealistic, that they can just reprogram themselves so easily.

1:15:59Not to say there's anything wrong, like a polyamory or it does work for some people.

1:16:05But having those kind of thinking tools can help you think through whether it's going to actually work for you or not. Certainly for me, letting go of castigating myself for thinking a thing or feeling a thing, very difficult, right? Because we want to hold two competing thoughts in our mind at the same time. One, being, I am in control of my outcomes. The other, being, I did not get to design my source code. And like these two things are just going to continue to clash up against each other. And David Hawkins wrote a great book, Letting Go. And that happens to be the thing that you try to do with emotions when they're rising meditation.

1:16:44It's the thing that you are trying to do with this also. Look, I can try and leave it all on the field of play and control my destiny. And at the same time, know that I don't have full control. I don't really even have partial control. Yeah. Yeah, and that kind of thing, let it go and meditation. That's those are the ways that we can hack our brains. There are ways, but there's definitely evolutionary push in certain directions from our genes, but our genes aren't the only things that are shaping us. And therefore, we can sometimes push back at least to some degree, which is nice. And I know one reason that people resist evolutionary psychology is that they dislike that.

1:17:25They dislike the idea that they're just puppets of their genes. And I do think that, well, first of all, an evolutionary perspective doesn't say it's just genes, right? So it would say that your puppets are the genes and the environment, really. But that would be my other thought is that if being a puppet is the problem, rejecting an evolutionary perspective isn't a solution, right? It's just choosing an alternative puppet here because the environment. If it's just the environment, well, then it's just the environment that's shaping our, shaping our source code instead. Which is even more ruthless.

1:18:03I mean, you recently did a great post about behavioral genetics, plurment being on the show. And, you know, if you were to get to a world where all genetic differences between people had been flattened out or gotten rid of or accounted for, the entirety of the difference in your outcomes in life would be laid at the feet of your environment. And that seems like even more fucking brutal. Exactly. Pick what it is that you want. I keep poison right. Yeah, exactly. And so, and, yeah, sorry, go ahead. Just, I'm kind of thinking about whether or not we are fated to fail at discovering a greater reason for our existence, if all that we are are just propagators for our genes.

1:18:46Like, is it all just futile this trying to try to get something more out or is there a realistic path to enlightenment here? Not a nice easy question.

1:19:06I mean, what sort of higher things are you thinking of? Meaning beyond the immediate, like trying to find a way to contribute to things. It seems especially upon your book and most evolutionary psychology, I think speaks to you in the mood or the vibe that you're in at the time. Like if you read something about reciprocal altruism, when you're feeling full of serotonin and everything's going well, you think, God, how great that I love my mom. I have fantastic that I rang her last week, but if you read it when you're feeling a little bit more zero sum and like the world's up to get you, you just see it as a thinly veiled mask for selfishness, masquerading as selflessness.

1:19:50And I'm trying to work out whether or not how we can take more pleasure in the things that we want to take pleasure in beyond this is just a transaction for my genes to get themselves toward the next generation. Interesting. So I wrote a bit about this in my first book, which was called Down and God and the Meaning of Life. And in the Meaning of Life section of that book, I looked at the question of, is there any ultimate meaning to life? Is there any meaning to life in any sense? And I concluded that, I concluded with a message that initially might seem a bit of a downer, which is that there's no ultimate meaning to life.

1:20:29So no meaning to life imposed on us from outside of ourselves from from from a God or from a fraud or any kind of meaning imprinted into the basic nature of existence. But I don't think that is necessarily terminally a downer. I think that once you get used to that idea, it in a way it gives us a kind of freedom. And the freedom is that we can choose our own meanings in life rather than having a meaning imposed on us from outside of ourselves. So we can choose a meeting and our genes may be to push us into the into a direction that we can quite easily feel cynical about. It's just just an interest to the genes and yet some of the stuff is kind of nice but ultimately it's just about gene propagation and but having turned us into a cultural animal and an intelligent animal made us an open system I think we can think beyond that and that's what we're doing when we learn about evolution psychology and step back from looking at our evolved nature and thinking, okay, well what I actually want my life to be about.

1:21:30What do I think is more valuable? If I don't think transactional, this is the other thing, what are bigger goals that I do think are important that I can choose for myself? And for some people that might be like a fact of altruism and dealing with existential risks and for other people it might be something more modest, But I do think that the fact that we are evolved creatures doesn't preclude, doesn't preclude being able to go beyond our evolved nature, via culture and to do other things that choose other values beyond what's been bequeathed to us by natural selection. Yeah, you do get to be the architect in that way.

1:22:12I think, again, as it comes down to with many things, it's holding conflicting ideas or at least slightly sort of tensionary ideas in your mind at the same time. Before we finish up, I learned something. John Toobie passed away last year. I was very fortunate that I got to meet him. Yeah, great, great guy, right? Phenomenal. I think David Busse is one of only two people he's ever met in his entire life who justifies the title of genius. Hi, great. And also a really nice guy. Phenomenal dude. Also, also, most importantly, subscriber of Modern Wisdom. That was the best thing. Someone sent me an article looking at a quote of his and deconstructing it and were an hour and 20 minutes into the episode.

1:22:58So anyone that's not reasonable is already left. So I wanted to have a quick chat with you about it. It's the crumbling genome theory of population dysgenics. Probably genome theory of population dysgenics, right? So basically, two B's argument is that each time that a new generation comes along, there's some genetic mutations that get fiddled with. Every time that that happens, some of them are better and some of them are worse. Some of them are more optimal and some of them are more sub -optimal. When selection pressures in an environment get released through things like health care and the ability to improve medicine and a germ theory of disease and so on and so forth, you relieve some of the selection pressure.

1:23:43You know, somebody that was blind in both eyes probably didn't last very long, ancestrally. Somebody who was born without legs probably didn't last very long, ancestrally. In the modern world, we have technology that can thankfully keep those people alive. The problem being that you are accumulating mutational load that that, and Cessera would have been suboptimal, making no judgements about the people that are alive today. But that his, the balance, the genome balance needs to be you discarding suboptimal mutations at the same rate as you acquire optimal mutations. And if you roll this forward over a long enough time that basically a reduction in selection pressure results in an increase accumulation of all of this stuff.

1:24:29Now, here was the really spicy bit that someone put, if that wasn't spicy enough, right, the really, really spicy bit that someone put toward the end of this article was perhaps this explains birth, death, which is if you as a human who has a genetic mutation, even it like just normal person's walking around all over the place, if you make it to reproductive of age. And for some reason there's just something about you that shouldn't go on to the next generation, who's to say that your desire for children wouldn't just be nerfed a little bit, or maybe your desire for sex wouldn't just be tuned down a little bit, perhaps enough so that you don't end up making children and taking them forward.

1:25:17So when you think about the ever -increasing rates of depression, anxiety, anti -social behavior, all of that, the maladies that people are dealing with mentally at the moment and the ones that people are dealing with physically like obesity, etc. How many of those would have been selected out, ancestrally, and how much is the decline in desire for children and subsequent birth rate collapse, a population -wide prophylactic or a filtration net stopping those particular individuals from going to the next generation. Interesting. So a lot there, spicy, like you say. So I guess the first thing is that that's all perfectly possible right.

1:26:08So I do think that so one example right is that in ancestral times, myopia was probably a much bigger problem for survival than it is today. And people who had genes that predisposed into my OPM and couldn't really see so well, probably well less likely to put forward their genes. That's been released for quite a long time. We have glasses and things now we have cultural ways of meaning that there's just no longer a problem. And I think it's quite plausible that the average genetic quality of eyesight could have deteriorated to some degree for that reason. And that would just be one example, there could be others along those lines.

1:26:52And then it's tricky to know how to deal with that right. So you couldn't say, okay, well, we're just going to ban glasses so that this doesn't happen. And for people that have got myopia diet a higher rate. Exactly. So that is wandering randomly at the traffic and take them myopic genes out of the gene pool. So we couldn't do that. I think what could happen is that the more that these kind of technologies evolve culturally, the more dependable will become on them, not just habitually but also biologically as well. I think it's possible, you know, people are looking at ways of, so to speak, mending the genomes for like major health.

1:27:33So genes that contribute to major health problems, it's not implausible that the time will when it's possible to filter those out or to, if you have our spring, you can choose to go with, I don't know, like, by fertilize the eggs and choose the ones that throw out the eggs. Embrose elections for both. Yeah, that's the phrase. Yep, exactly. Yeah, I think that, well, actually, I think it's embryo selection against negative traits, I think, because the main one that people are. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the prophylactic idea I'm not so sure about, because that sort of seems like a good of the group explanation.

1:28:08So it would be good for the species as a whole if we were to have that kind of doled down sexual desire or desire for kids. But what would that be? What would be in it for the individuals with those designs? Yeah, why not just roll, why not just roll the dice anyway? What do you care about resource depletion? Like there's no tragedy of the commons baked into our genes? Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. I do know though that with things like the, well we're actually most mental illnesses, so depression, schizophrenia, the vast majority of mental illnesses are actually associated with lower number of offspring.

1:28:47So there certainly, I think there is some filtration in some areas. That's a really good point. The fact that you don't have this God's eye view, the population wide coordination thing, what like give me the mechanism through which your genes would just be like just have a crack. Like see what we don't know what's going to happen. Maybe maybe you were a blip and they're going to be they can fly. Like the new kids can fly like who knows. Yeah. That's really, really interesting. Steve, I'm a huge fan of your work. I'm a huge fan of your sub stack, your books fantastic. I'm excited for whatever the next thing is.

1:29:27Why should people go? They want to keep up to date with everything that you do. Well, my subsdac is my favorite thing at the moment. I really love subsdac. It's taken over from Twitter in terms of my favorite social media outlet. So that's called the Nature, Nurture, Nietzsche newsletter. And it's stevesjure .wagims .com. I am still on Twitter as, sorry, go ahead. Nothing, just I wanted to know where Nietzsche came in. I haven't seen you right about nature yet? Yeah, I'm not sure it was the greatest name for us to the sub -sac because I love the clever play on words and I love philosophy. And that's what it is.

1:30:05I love nature, nurture issues and I love philosophy and it's kind of a nature stands in for philosophy as a whole. I do quite like nature's writing style. I'm not a huge, I'm not actually a huge fan of nature. Maybe it's not the perfect title. People probably think I'm a nature nut, but I'm a philosophy, not instead. And I'm on Twitter as well. It's at Steve's Jewel, so, S -T -E -V -E. S -T -U -W -I -D -L. Alia, Steve, I mean, you're fantastic. I can't wait to see what you do next. Awesome, thank you very much, man. It's been a lot of fun. I've really enjoyed this conversation. We've been dug.

1:30:47Here we have the Lemo Emo in its natural habitat, that helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally Doug. Uh, Lemoo, is that guy with the binoculars watching us? Cut the camera, they see us. Only pay for what you need at LibertyMutual .com. Liberty Liberty Liberty Liberty Liberty Liberty. Savings very underwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliate exclusive Massachusetts.