CASBS faculty fellow James Holland Jones interviews former CASBS fellow Richard Wrangham, professor of biological anthropology at Harvard University. They discuss the early development of their discipline, primate and human violence, and the value of evolutionary frameworks and interdisciplinary approaches to understanding human behavior.
Narrator: From the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, this is Human Centered. Today on Human Centered. CASBS Faculty Fellow James Holland Jones, Associate Professor of Earth Systems Science at the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford, interviews the legendary Richard Wrangham, the Ruth B. Moore Professor of Biological Anthropology at Harvard University and founder of the Kibale Chimpanzee Project. The two discuss the early days and development of the study of human evolutionary ecology, primate and human violence, how cooking made us human, and the value of evolutionary frameworks and interdisciplinary approaches to understanding human behavior.
James Holland Jones: So, you know, this is for the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and I figured I'd ask a few questions about the role of CASBS and the characters associated with it in shaping research in biological anthropology, primatology, And by my reckoning, CASBS is actually a pretty important place for primatology, sort of surprisingly, given that there haven't really been a lot of biological scientists, evolutionary anthropologists at CASBS for, you know, quite a long time now. But, you know, in 1962, 1963, right, there was a group that Sherwood Washburn and and David Hamburg organized, right? And of course, our old friend and mentor, Irv DeVore, was sort of central to that. And they published that super influential volume, Primate Behavior, in 1965 that really sort of introduced the world to primatology as a thing to study and as an important plank, right, in biological and evolutionary anthropology. Man the Hunter, that sort of thing. Primatology was really central to that. And—
JRichard Wrangham: That book, I think, really represented primatology to that generation for the next probably 20 years.
James Holland Jones: Yeah, yeah. Well, and what is it, 21 years later, you reconvene there with your group. And out of that comes again, the super influential volume, Primate Societies, which, you know, it's what got me hooked. Excellent. I in fact have my copy from 1987 here. Yes. And, you know, it— that volume clearly influenced at least two generations of primatologists. And I guess to start with some actual questions, there are two key figures in this whole conversation that I'd like to talk about. Robert Hind and David Hamburg. Hind was your PhD supervisor at Cambridge, and while he wasn't involved in any of the CASBS primate years, I don't think, he had just a dizzying number of advisees and just this incredible sphere of influence on your whole generation and generations to follow. And I've always imagined what it was like for you and all this, you know, this incredibly accomplished and important group of ethologists and primatologists and, you know, whatever, developmental psychologists sitting around a seminar table, kind of like the old Bone Room in the Peabody Museum where we had our seminars, right? What was that like? What was Hind like? And what was the intellectual environment of Cambridge and Mattingly you know, in the late '70s, early '80s.
JRichard Wrangham: Early '70s in my case.
James Holland Jones: Early '70s, yeah.
JRichard Wrangham: Early to mid, yeah. So I was there from '74 to '75. And what we're talking about is the sub-department of animal behavior in the village of Madingley, about 3 miles outside the University of Cambridge. I think the fact that it was a little sub-department in a village which was isolated from the rest of the university, was quite important because it meant that this was rather like a field camp. You know, the people who were there saw each other every day and didn't see anybody else. And it was a group that was utterly dominated by Roward in the sense that he was an extremely demanding advisor who held everybody to very high standards. You know, so there was this classic story about him that all the graduate students who were there, or many of them, were so alarmed by the kinds of critical comments that he would make in seminars that they felt that they would really feel do sort of better have more interchange among each other if they can meet without him. Pat McGinnis, who was a researcher on sexual behavior of chimpanzees, was elected to go and say this to Robert. And so he went sort of slightly nervously to say, "You know what, we'd like to have our own seminar. Is that okay?" And Robert listened and said, "Well, let's have a meeting and talk about that." And so a few days later, there was a meeting, and Robert said, I understand that some of you feel so intimidated by me that you don't want to meet in my presence. Now tell me, who wants to talk about that? So naturally everybody was so intimidated that they didn't say anything and everything went on as before. Now, you know, that was kind of a— it was a fun story about him because it was said with great affection. And the affection came from the fact that everybody knew that he was a very fair judge. And a very thoughtful commentator. And the reason he was, was that he was utterly on top of the field because in the late '60s, he had written a book called Animal Behavior, which integrated ethology in the tradition of Niko Tinbergen and Konrad Lorenz with psychology in the tradition of people working with rats mostly. So, he was the arbiter dicendi. He was the person who really was in control of how to do really first-class animal behavior work. So he was, of course, a fantastic person to have as an advisor, and he attracted really interesting people. Among them, of course, famously, Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey. And since they were doing the two introductory studies to long-term research on respectively chimpanzees and gorillas, they themselves became attractants for other people. The seminars were exciting because there was a lot of just new information coming in from the field about what animals did in the wild, and that basic information was grist to everybody's mill for thinking about why did they behave in this way, what was responsible for these species differences, and so on. And the intrusion in the early '70s of the ideas about evolutionary theory and its application to behavioral biology that came from William Hamilton, Bill Hamilton, John Maynard Smith, Robert Trivers, and Dick Alexander. You know, those four were really representing this new wave. And Robert Hinde was to some extent resisting that intrusion. And so for students like me, it was a fascinating opportunity to integrate two kinds of theoretical perspective. And in the end, you know, Robert Hinde never really became comfortable with what at that time was called sociobiology, but more generally is evolutionary behavioral biology. But he remained on very comfortable terms talking about it with people like me to the end of his life, 3 or 4 years ago.
James Holland Jones: And so in addition to Hind, I mean, obviously David Hamburg was pretty instrumental in a lot of this and in particular getting these groups together at CASBS. How did Hamburg— and, you know, so much of Hamburg's later career was dedicated to thinking about violence and conflict. And how did he influence you or you influence him? Like, what was the dynamic there?
JRichard Wrangham: Well, I mean, you know, I'm delighted in the sense that you pick up on Hamburg because these are the two greatest influences on me. And Hamburg was much less concerned with core theory and the details of animal behavior, much more concerned with big issues about integrating an understanding of, well, ultimately psychiatry, you know, because he was a psychiatrist, but leading to, through from that, to stress physiology and clinical psychology, integrating all those human aspects with the question of where characteristics that were particularly important for humans came from in an evolutionary basis. So he was a big picture thinker, and he was indeed very concerned with violence and aggression in later years. But the time when Hamburg became really concerned about violence and aggression was following May 19th, 1975, which was the day when 4 students were kidnapped from Gombe National Park in western Tanzania and taken overnight in a boat to the Congo across 20 miles of Lake Tanganyika and disappeared to the world. And 3 of those who were taken were students in an undergraduate program from the Department of Human Biology, the program in human biology at Stanford that Hamburg had launched. And, you know, so this represented, of course, exactly what Hamburg wanted to do. He wanted to do human biology, integrating it with evolution, and to have students go and work with Jane Goodall studying chimpanzees was exactly the way that he thought people would get a fantastic education. And the kidnapping of these students brought home to him him the reality of the threat of violence in a very, very personal way. And it came within a year or within literally 15 months of the discovery in chimpanzees of lethal raiding by chimpanzees on their own species, which was itself a fantastic shock. It was a huge shock because most of the way that people thought about the evolution of aggression at that time was that limited aggression was favored in the form of competing against members of your own species. But Konrad Lorenz, the great authority, had written a book in which he said natural selection will not favor killing of your own species. Then chimpanzees, we see them killing first infants and then adults of their own species. And of course, since then, you know, since 1974, when the first kill was documented, we now have dozens of such kills. And we have, you know, we understand the pattern. But this came as a huge shock. And I just want to point out that the way in which the Center for Advanced Study was founded, I believe, did have in its mission the aim particularly of understanding the kind of appalling upheaval that occurred during the Second World War. You know, this was, as I understand it, a response to that and saying, you know, how is it that human behavior could include these appalling aberrations? So that when Hamburg, as a— fascinated by the center as an opportunity to integrate human and non-human behavioral biology, is then exposed to this kind of aggression first in animals and then in humans, well, you can see why he was thrilled to become president of the Carnegie Corporation and use his influence to really seriously advance the study of violence and aggression, as well as, by the way, get very seriously involved in developing and modifying the kinds of political institutions that are designed to suppress aggression, to suppress war. So he was an exciting person to be with. I mean, I could go on for hours about him. And what I liked about him was the big picture. But Robert Hein, let me just add, he had some big pictures there again. He was involved as co-president, I think, of the Pugwash group, which was aimed at suppressing or controlling the spread of nuclear weapons. And 4 or 5 of the books he wrote were about trying to control war.
James Holland Jones: Looking back on your first trade book that I was around when it came out as a grad student, Demonic Males, would you characterize Demonic Males as a feminist work? I know that you were disappointed by some of the criticisms of it as naturalizing violence or, you know, sort of engaging in some sort of biological determinism. But I know that you, and for what it's worth, I think very differently about this. And, you know, I, yeah, so I guess that's the question.
JRichard Wrangham: Yeah. And the answer is yes. I do think of it as a feminist book because, because it draws attention to the ways in which females of various species are They, they have their interests in conflict with males, and in humans this leads to all sorts of things that are, from a social and political perspective nowadays, rightly considered to be ethically wrong. And the, the evidence that I take for it being feminist is partly because of people who have read it who are, you know, just very patent feminists who love it. And, you know, I've got a friend who helped implement the Violence Against Women Act under the Clinton administration and continues to be enormously involved in very practical aspects of feminism. She's a lawyer, Diane Rosenfeld. And and we met and bonded over Demonic Males. And that really gives me cheer. You know, I think the people who have criticized it are people who are reacting not really having read the book, but more to the notion that any book that is going to talk about the evolutionary biology of male violence is likely to be a bad book.
James Holland Jones: Yeah. Well, that leads very nicely into this next question, which is another thing that really concerns me, right? And evolutionary approaches to human behavior often get what I see as extremely unsympathetic reads. And, you know, that was the case with Demonic Males. It's the case with, you know, any sort of work that makes it into the broader you know, ecosystem of ideas. And I think a big part of this is certainly internal academic politics within anthropology departments, within the academy in general. But I think there's more to it than that. And this makes me think about my continuing bewilderment and perplexity of the way that biological and evolutionary approaches to human behavior are interpreted by the broader public. I feel like there's this persistent idea that evolutionary reasoning about human behavior is somehow politically reactionary. And I find this so bizarre, in no small measure because evolution is literally progressive. I mean, obviously I don't mean in the sense that it's teleological, but in that the main outcome of natural selection is adaptation, and adaptations are dynamic since environments are dynamic. The selective landscape is always changing and all that. Yet it seems really hard to shake this perception of evolution being reactionary. What is that about? What do you think is going on there? And is it a function of who ends up being the public face of evolution and human behavior? Is it a function of— is it actually just base politics? What's going on there?
JRichard Wrangham: Yeah, I agree. It's fascinating. And it's a terrific issue to raise because it would be a wonderful problem to be able to solve better than, than we do. And of course, the Center for Advanced Studies is the kind of place where you might hope that progress will be made. To me, the, the big thing is these two strange words that people don't have a good concept of what they mean, and that is biological determinism. But, you know, for most people, as soon as you hear the words evolution evolutionary theory, human evolution, they tend to think that an argument is being made that whatever you're talking about as having evolved, but particularly if it's behaviors that tend towards violence or nastiness of some kind, the accusation is, oh, this is biologically determinist. You're saying that these are behaviors that can never change. And there are so many ways in which one can challenge that sort of argument. Um, you know, I came across a— well, there are all sorts of examples. I mean, the, the basic point, of course, is that everyone doing evolutionary theory recognizes that what you're talking about is a biological framework on which there is a superimposition of all sorts of cultural variation. And that doesn't mind— it could be whether you're talking about eating, you know, where humans need a certain type of diet. But guess what? In different places and among different individuals, we all eat different things, we have different tastes, and so on. There is whatever area of behavior you take, there is no such thing as biological determinism as it exists in the minds of these critics. So why do intelligent people make the accusations of biological determinism? I think it's a fraudulent accusation. I mean, certainly in the minds of very smart people like Stephen Jay Gould, who knew that it wasn't true, really. But it's an accusation that is a piece of demagoguery. But it works.
James Holland Jones: Yeah, I sometimes feel like the criticisms are a bit of a Rorschach test. I'm like, You know, they produce these sort of lurid fantasies of like what the implications of what someone who's saying very reasonable things, you know, actually means. I was like, huh, I never would have imagined that in 1,000 years.
JRichard Wrangham: Yeah, we're accused of imagining that humans are robots. Just, you know, working out some very simple program. And obviously that's not the way humans behave, but it's a— it's just a frustrating accusation.
James Holland Jones: Self-domestication is a central theme that's run through your work, you know, starting with the, you know, the work in the '90s and Demonic Males. And then you're— in your latest book, you note that humans display remarkably low levels of, of what you call reactive aggression and high levels of coactive aggression, and that this is really the nature of the goodness paradox. And you've gone in pretty hard with Chris Boehm's execution hypothesis, and, you know, namely that predominantly men who exhibited antisocial levels of reactive within-group violence were effectively systematically culled from their social groups, right? And we're certainly experiencing a moment politically and socially here in the US and really throughout the world right now rise of authoritarianism and enormous amounts of social dissension. Many authors, myself included, have noted the broad breakdown of what we might call social capital or trust in societies. And we have an increasingly aggressive political and social culture that seems to be dividing us further every day. What do these ideas you've championed of self-domestication tell us about getting ourselves out of this mess? Uh, do we— are there, are there practical ways to get us, to get us forward into a more, uh, pro-social future?
JRichard Wrangham: Well, I mean, that, that's, uh, that's not a great question, you know, because it's obviously completely impossible to answer. Um, you know, it's, it's a lovely question from the point of view of, um, I think, drawing attention to an area of investigation that has been, to my mind, astonishingly underserved. And that is that if we try and think about the problems of human conflict versus cooperation, When people have thought about the evolution of, of cooperation, the great effort has been to simply understanding how people basically solve the prisoner's dilemma. How is it that you can get people to cooperate without their cooperation being undermined by freeloaders? And that is fine, and it's an important question. But what it does not do is take advantage of a huge and very obvious difference between humans and other species of ape, which is that in those other species you have bully males, alpha males, who impose their, their physical force on others to get what they want. That doesn't happen in humans. And somehow in humans, our cooperative ability goes to not just figuring out how to solve the prisoner's dilemma, but also, uh, it involves the evolution of an astonishingly repressed, inhibited, uh, unreactive, uh, tolerant psychology. You know, so I think you have to study chimpanzees or gorillas or baboons to see just how appallingly males behave in species other than ours. You know, we are demonic in the sense that once we get coalitions together and have the opportunity to kill members of neighboring groups at very low cost to ourselves, we'll do it. That's demonic. But there is also this sense in which we're thoroughly undemonic, which is that We can be walking about the streets and greeting people and saying hello with very, very low risk that anyone's going to lose their temper. So this is a long way of saying that I do think that this has been a problem that people just have not recognized as a problem from an evolutionary perspective. Now, you know, you might say, well, it's kind of a boring problem. Because the fact that we are actually rather tolerant and nice means that we don't have a practical issue in dealing with that. It doesn't raise conflict. But on the other hand, it kind of underlies the, the power of the tribalistic dynamic, because the fact that we can get together in these big groups and trust each other once we have the appropriate signals of you're in my group, they are in their group. It means that you get these huge assemblages of power through just large numbers of individuals. So none of this answers your very, very difficult question of how do we use these advances in understanding to solve the political problems. But You know, I would say that, that there seems to be opportunities here. And what I'm thinking about is that in 2019, the Leakey Foundation, which I think has always had some sort of connection to the Center for Advanced Study, at least it did through David Hamburg, they organized a symposium on tribalism. Taking multiple perspectives from archaeological, paleoanthropological, evolutionary theory through to contemporary political science as represented by Frank Fukuyama. And I, you know, I think that everybody there felt that there was an opportunity to, to bring together these multiple perspectives on, you know, what some people might say is as important a problem as any. I mean, you know, climate change is important, but one of the reasons climate change is just desperate is because it's going to promote the potential for war. So I don't know, you know, I'll carry on thinking that it's worthwhile to understand human social tendencies for violence and cooperation in the desperate hope that, that, uh, one day some leaders will be able to take advantage of, uh, of those breakthroughs in a positive way.
James Holland Jones: Yeah, no, that's fair. I, I do think it's really interesting, like, people don't understand how weird humans are. Because they've never thought, you know, all they know are humans, right? And, you know, I talk to students about this sometimes. I'm like, so you think that your dog has unconditional love for you. Really? Here's a little thought experiment. Get down when it's feeding time and eat out of your dog's bowl. Let's see how unconditional that love is. You know, the fact that, you know, groups of unrelated males sit down together every day and in the dining halls of Stanford or Harvard or Oxford or Cambridge, right? And don't want to kill each other is kind of crazy when you think about it.
JRichard Wrangham: Yeah. Or don't just lose their tempers easily.
James Holland Jones: Yeah, right? At least it is for me. Every once in a while I have one of these little flights of fancy thinking about that. We're getting on towards the end here, but maybe as we've said, as I've said, we certainly seem to be having a moment. And as you know, I'm quite concerned right now about the future of humanity as a function of the way we're changing the planet. But, you know, looking back on the many lessons you've learned over the course of your illustrious career, thinking about the future, are you optimistic about the future of humanity? And if so, you know, what gives you hope for the future?
JRichard Wrangham: Well, There's a Beatles song, isn't there? You know, one day the world will be as one. And it seems to me pretty clear that if you take a big picture about international relationships, the system that we have of a whole series of nations in conflict with each other is too unstable to have a long-term future. So, you know, it's no good imagining a sort of George Orwell 1984 vision in which you have three major powers, no two of which are sufficiently powerful together to defeat the other one. There is no evolutionary stability to international conflict. So you— the future would depend on some alternative to that. And the obvious alternative is what many people thought about, a single world government. And so I mentioned the Beatles, you know, one day the world will be as one, because to some extent that's already happening. And, you know, the fantasy that we are going to unite in the face of some visitors from outer space is being made real in the sense of a fight against climate change, which affects everybody. But there are just huge problems on the way to achieving any kind of world government. And then once you get it, there are huge problems towards making sure that the— those in authority do not abuse their power. Because, you know, if there's one message that just haunts me about humans, it is just like every other animal that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. The, you know, people often talk about climate change as if the real technical, the real challenge is the technical challenge of, you know, finding a way to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide and so on. And I've— my constant refrain is that's not a big challenge compared to the social challenge, sociopolitical challenges of integrating conflict and cooperation in this context. So, you know, am I an optimist? I'm quite sure that there's going to be some very nasty ups and downs before any kind of evolutionary stability is reached. And the trouble is that we don't have any models of evolutionary stability. So, you know, uh, it's exciting that we are learning so much about what drives us as a species or as a series of populations, um, but it is still unclear as to whether or not we will fumble our way towards evolutionary stability.
James Holland Jones: I, I can't let our conversation go without bringing up the topic of cooking. Um, but you know, I don't have any specific questions about cooking. Can you tell us something cool about cooking?
JRichard Wrangham: Well, what you're referring to is the fact that I have argued that one cannot understand the evolution of the genus Homo from an Australopithecine ancestor without crediting the Homo with the ability to use fire, including cooking food. And I published that idea robustly in— starting in 1999 with you as a co-author, and in 2009, a book that took it to the wider world. And since then, as we both know, the age at which fire was supposedly found in the archaeological record has gone down, has gone older, but it has not yet reached the time when you and I, I think, would like it to be, which is 1.9 million years ago. And I think it's on its way there. The— it doesn't really matter. Exactly when it happened, although, you know, I do have a very— I would be very puzzled if it ever can be proven that it was not 1.9 million years ago. But another angle on the use of fire is the fact that this was the time when humans entered a different relationship to the world from every other species because they were exploiting fuel And that exploitation of fuel accelerated and continues to accelerate with its immense impact on the world in the form nowadays of climate change. In other words, the thing that might destroy us as a species is the thing that gave rise to us as a genus.
James Holland Jones: Yeah, funny how it works that way, isn't it?
JRichard Wrangham: Yeah. It's a Greek tragedy.
James Holland Jones: It is. Let's hope we can turn it into a comedy. I'll have a good laugh when we look back on how close we were.
JRichard Wrangham: Well, you know, I just hope that the center continues its mission and maybe even develops its mission of bringing people together across the different subfields. You know, it's all too easy for everybody to resort to their specialization rather than get into the hard work of integrating fields. And, you know, evolutionary theory, I mean, it's got its sort of slightly crude aspects in the way that it was first presented in terms of what it meant for the evolution of human behavior. But I think that in the last 40 years. It's become much more sophisticated than it was in the 1970s. And it really earns its, you know, it's earned itself a very strong seat at the table of social science. In fact, you know, really, I think that social science should not be taught in any university without giving a basic understanding of evolutionary theory. Because this is, you know, the strong evolution, the strong, uh, theory that we have for human behavior. Without it, any theory will always be weaker.
James Holland Jones: Thank you for this.
JRichard Wrangham: You prepared so well, do all these wonderful questions.
Narrator: That was James Holland Jones in conversation with Richard Wrangham. You can learn more about this and other CASBS events by visiting our website at casbs.org. Casbus.stanford.edu, or you can find us on Twitter. We're @casbusstanford. The CASBS live event series is still on a summer break, but we've got some great, terrific original interviews coming up with renowned fellows from CASBS history. So be sure to follow us in your podcast app of choice. You won't want to miss those. Until next time, from everyone at CASBS and the Human Centered team, thanks for listening.