welcome to the second lecture in this
year's ghulam lecture series many of you
will know that these lectures sponsored
by the Institute are dedicated to the
memory of stanislav ghulam he was one of
the truly gifted scientists in the
Manhattan Project over at Los Alamos
after the during and after the war but
also a friend to many of the founders of
the Santa Fe Institute I didn't know
Stan olam personally but by reputation
among his friends and colleagues he was
greatly admired as not only a tremendous
intellect in the areas of his own
specialization but somebody who was
broadly interested in science and
willing to pursue seriously the entire
range of his interests so was felt that
he personally represented the spirit of
scientific inquiry that was the purpose
for founding the Santa Fe Institute and
so it's a special privilege that we get
to give you this extended lecture series
each year I want to thank again Penelope
Penland for supporting underwriting this
year's lecture series Penelope
has been a long-standing friend to the
Institute and too many of us there
before introducing tonight's speaker i
wanted to mention that the next Santa Fe
public lecture is the first time we
break from our usual Wednesday night
schedule so that will be here but it
will be Tuesday October 7th a speaker
will be France Duvall talking about our
inner ape and it should be fun so I'm
grateful that I had the opportunity to
introduce Sam bowls as our speaker to
you tonight I met Sam about five years
ago at the kickoff meeting of the
behavioral sciences program at the Santa
Fe Institute and I was struck
immediately by two things I had come
from a somewhat narrow background in
physics where we didn't ask most
interesting questions and I was amazed
that you could try scientifically to ask
questions at this interface of economy
and society behavior cognition and I was
equally impressed with a clarity and
lucidity of the guy in the center who
seemed to be holding it all together but
the other thing that struck me was the
way Sam and his colleagues actively
worked to include me in the group
meetings the workshops for years and I
have no doubt this was a great cost to
them in time and patience but it was a
great benefit to me so it seems fitting
somehow the same talks to us about
altruism at the series of lectures
Jeffrey gave Sam a good introduction
last night and kind of emphasized the
person of enormous energy and sort of
boundless optimism that we all have
experienced so I'll only highlight a
couple of things for those of you who
may be coming for the first time tonight
Sam is of course a professor at the
Santa Fe Institute and the director of
the behavioral sciences program also a
professor at the University of Siena his
education was first at Yale and then at
Harvard and his PhD was in economics and
then he taught at Harvard for I guess
eight years and then about three decades
at the UMass Amherst sort of a group of
renegade professors who were out to
reform economics and the social sciences
with the results much of what you will
see tonight in addition to his academic
credentials he spent a lot of time in
serious policy advice Jeffrey mentioned
the Robert
candidacy but Sam also advised the Jesse
Jackson candidacy in addition to
providing advice to the Mandela
government in South Africa he's advised
the governments of Greece and Cuba which
is a remarkable story by any account
from which there's still lots to be
learned the World Bank and a variety of
international labor organizations Sam
has been either author or editor of
eight books one of which recently is a
big introductory textbook and economics
some of them are about properties of
individuals things like moral
sensibilities or altruistic behavior
others have to do a system effects so
persistent inequality poverty traps the
effects of globalization or the problems
of environmental student sustainability
and it's this broad range of topics all
sort of informing each other that Sam
and his colleagues bring to the Santa Fe
Institute through the behavioral
sciences program and there's another
book due out with group herb dentists I
think to be finished this year which
will be drawing together a lot of these
ideas that have been built piecemeal
over the years so we when we look at the
lectures it's striking the magnitude of
what Sam and colleagues are trying to do
they're trying to reform economics and
put it on to a solid foundation with the
rest of the behavioral sciences I
remember either at a meeting or informal
talks some years ago you were telling us
about going to Nigeria to teach school
thinking that when there's something
missing an opportunity what you do is go
fill the opportunity and then finding
these attempts at local solutions forted
so problems of ethnic and language
boundaries that get made even more
fractious by religious divisions and
thinking okay the ability to see the big
picture of these systems is what
economics should be giving us but it
doesn't because it has such an unreal
and unnatural picture of humans and
human behavior so we saw in last night's
lecture some of the problems with that
picture the sort of ruthless analyzer
and player of games who has only a very
narrow notion of self-interest Sam was
able to show the ways in which if you
try to understand the cooperative
behavior that are part of all of our
lives this paradigm falls flat now there
were important ideas for how to try to
make
Bert of behavior understandable without
giving up the paradigm but the real
jewel of last night was that there's
such overwhelming behavioral evidence
that it's just the wrong way to ask
these questions so what Sam and
colleagues are doing as the sort of
Sistine Chapel picture is to try to
embed human choices in human motivations
in brains and bodies that live in the
society and that live in history which
is tremendously ambitious and very
difficult now a lot of the things that
have been learned in the choice
framework are still going to be useful
and a lot of the problems that were
there are not going to go away because
choices still had to be made maybe they
were made by social selection or by
biological selection maybe they're
recorded in jeans or in culture but
those lessons still have to be learned
and they the solutions still have to be
understood the thing that's impressive
though is that if we can get the
richness of these many layers of
description together maybe there's a
chance we can do it right this time that
we can ask the questions in the right
way and get answers to them that have
something of the confidence that we
expect from a scientific discipline so
super hard very interesting questions of
course vitally important never more than
now and I'm very eager to hear part two
Sam thank you all for coming thank you
for your interest in these important
topics I look forward to your comments
and your questions you see on the screen
before you a rock painting in the
drakensberg mountains in kwazulu-natal
South Africa a place where I spent a lot
of time camping and hiking this is a
picture of what some part of the economy
of our ancestors may have looked like
and I will be going back at least that
far to try to understand how we became
the cooperative species that we are but
I want to review a little bit yesterday
I made the point that we are uniquely
cooperative species in the ways that we
cooperate other species cooperate but we
cooperate in distinct ways I also
advanced the idea
that important aspects of cooperation
can't be explained by self-interest with
a long time horizon or any of the other
variants of the somebody may be looking
paradigm I further said that there's a
sufficient evidence to think that part
of the explanation for this is that many
of us much of the time are altruistic in
a way which I defined and today the much
harder task is to try to figure out how
did we get to have brains and bodies
that act this way given all of the way
that the deck is stacked against an
altruistic gene or an altruistic person
surviving and prospering this is based
on a bunch of papers some of which by
the way are outside oh and this reminds
me I will provide tomorrow evening
copies of the slides of the letters of
the first and second and third lectures
some of you who have asked for that and
we were unable to get them copied at the
last minute today but you can certainly
get copies I do not post these on my
webpage because essentially my lectures
change all the time and so I I don't
encourage the circulating them widely
simply because they're always in motion
but I'm very happy if you want to have
them it may help you connect what I said
in the previous lectures much of this
work is ongoing Eric's very nice
introduction did stress and colleagues
at the end I'll come back to the very
large number of people who are
responsible for this work it being
interdisciplinary and touching on the
topics you see before you in the screen
including this very nice new term paleo
economics I suppose that's what you're
going to get in the I will try to
connect these things but the idea that i
have is really a simple one these are
young in botswana and that rather large
former ungulate will be shared with a
very large number of people far greater
than this group here I want to argue
however that this kind of sharing on a
large scale which character
is all human societies including our own
is connected to this this is warfare in
Irian Jaya in and it's the connection
between these two things that I think is
really crucial to understanding how we
came to be the cooperative species that
we are and the kind of cooperative
species that we are now this guy here
see that those guys are fighting these
guys and this guy here is way ahead of
his group now you wouldn't really say
that that guy was maximizing his fitness
and indeed he wasn't maximizing his
fitness so this is about fighting and
food and fitness don't continue that
there are many jokes in biology about
what it's all about the I want to start
with an old debate which will be
familiar to all of you if you don't know
the names you probably do you know the
names everyone has had this debate
usually late at night during your
freshman or sophomore year peter
kropotkin russian proposed the idea in a
book by that name that mutual aid was an
intrinsic characteristic not only of
humans would have many animals as well
Thomas Huxley an opponent of Kropotkin
in many debates actually stressed that
evolution in nature was red in tooth and
claw these two apparently emphasizing
contrasting and conflicting and
inconsistent viewpoints about the nature
of human nature I but I'd like to begin
with a view which you will see
immediately perhaps combines the two
Darwin in the descent of man wrote
selfish and contentious people will not
cohere and without coherence nothing can
be affected a tribe possessing a greater
number of courageous and pathetic and
faithful members who are always ready to
warn each other of danger to aid and
defend each other would spread and be
victorious over other tribes thus the
social and moral qualities would 10
slowly to advance and be diffused
throughout the world now
so the idea here I guess is that we
engage in mutual aid because evolution
is red in tooth and claw it's basically
a conflictual theory of the evolution of
these things which we find so admirable
when we treat members of our group with
respect and generosity so this is the
theme which I'd like to place before you
did we come to have things like the icon
of cooperation barn-raising because we
also did this now I want to explain to
you in the way we now do computer
simulations Darwin's idea so let's start
we have two types of individuals we have
al tourists who are called A's and we
have those are not altruists they're
defectors they're called bees here but
they're called ends there sorry about
that and we start off with the group
here composed of some individuals and
you see there's some pairings the we
have some some defectors paired with
defectors some altruist compared with
altruists and some mixed they're paired
to do some activity are they we may say
they're randomly paired and then they
get some payoffs out of that interaction
that is they benefit or lose in some way
and there that's in the second thing
here they have certain amounts of payoff
depending on who they got paired with
and what their activities were when I
say all tourists and defector you can
think of the prisoner's dilemma if you
want but it's much more generic than
that and they then reproduce and so we
have here a new society and the
important thing to notice is there used
to be four altruist and now they're
three well that's obvious because the
defectors are clearly going to do better
than the altruist by the definition of
altruism which is paying a cost to help
someone else now then some of the read
then it in this reproduction process
some actually mutate a very small number
obviously and then some migrate to other
groups
so here we have some emigrating here we
have some coming in and the crucial
thing the red in tooth and claw part is
that they run into this group here prax
competing for some physical or
reproductive resources and the winning
group is the group that has more
altruists because they'll cooperate in
the defense of the group as Darwin said
warming warning of danger and so on so
this group is eliminated perhaps it's
site is taken and the winning group
repopulate sit this group now too large
to be governed by the kind of forager
government which is by consensus in
small groups it then divides randomly
and then you have two other groups and
then these two groups start at the top
this is actually a description of a
computer program that we used I'll show
you the result much later on the now if
you haven't studied biology it sounds
like a good idea sounds like it might
work right now I had the great advantage
that when I started working on group
selection problems about 20 years ago I
hadn't studied biology so I didn't know
that it was a dumb idea the this whole
framework is called group selection now
I studied economics and I know that if
somebody says that free trade is a bad
idea then you know they haven't studied
economics all right that's sure test
they just don't understand the first
thing in biology it works the same way
if you think group selection works well
it just means you've never been in a
biology course because obviously it
can't work so somehow this idea which
sounded sort of reasonable with Darwin
and it looks reasonable here God sent to
the doghouse it's called group selection
usually with a sneer and about 40 years
ago it was set to rest in a very
influential book it was thought to be
unworkable because for genetically
transmitted traits
it requires the two things these
victorious tribes would have to be very
different genetically from the losers to
make this a powerful force and these
encounters between the tribes would have
to be frequent enough so that the
encounters in which the Alturas can
actually increase their numbers in the
population would happen frequently
enough to offset the fact that they're
losing all the time in the reproduction
process within the group's now the first
was thought to be this point here the
differences among groups are thought to
be small because there's a lot of
migration most animals move from group
to group and humans are no no different
and the second encountered some
resistance that is the idea that these
counties tribal warfare was frequent
encountered resistance from people who
had the idea that our ancestors actually
were rather peaceful people now it
should be said that the criticism of
group selection was not aimed primarily
at humans and many great biologists like
Haldane for example speculated that it
could very well work for humans and
Hamilton as well the argument was that
for most animals it doesn't work because
the group's won't be different enough
because there's too much migration
so-called gene flow between groups now
today those of you who weren't here
yesterday means that this is a hot topic
and I it's it's the doghouse by the way
the doghouse is a hot topic whether or
not group selection should be in the
doghouse a number of very influential
biologists have always thought that the
argument was actually quite a plausible
one number of people associated with the
Santa Fe Institute like mark feldman and
others and Robert Boyd and others have
proposed that it actually could work for
for humans and in recent years EO wilson
one of the course most prominent
biologists in the united states has
taken up the argument that well yes it
really might work now but i want to
explain why it is thought not to work
first we're going to start with the
prisoner's dilemma which
we introduced lat yesterday I think it's
probably familiar to most of you but
just to review there's an altruistic
behavior the individual can engage in it
costs si si is denominated either in
material goods or in in fitness units
depends on what kind of a model you're
doing this action which cost C confers a
benefit be on a randomly paired single
member of the group and so we conclude
from that that a group which is composed
entirely of altruists would get B minus
C that is in every case there'd be an a
match with an A and this is the payoff
to the rogue I that's the payoff if
you're a non altre stand you get matched
with an a guy you get B but you don't
pay the cost now it's with the crucial
thing about this is that the individual
the N who defects gets a higher payoff
no matter what the other guy does and
that's what I called last night a
dominant strategy it's independent of
what the other guy does now so this is
basically the game which has provided
its kind of the workhorse of this of
this literature either well there are
other work horses too but this is one of
the ones now a little warning here is
going to be a little heavy lifting for
the next couple of slides because i want
to know to show why this dooms altruism
because we have to understand that
clearly in order to understand why it
might not be doomed so we now turn to
the evolutionary fate namely doom of an
altruistic trait now I define this term
here this means the probability of being
paired with an altruist conditional on
your being an altruist and that's the
probability being paired with an
altruist conditional on you being a not
altruist now obviously if you have a
large population and you just randomly
pair people those two numbers are going
to be the same everybody's going to have
the same probability now so if you have
random pairing then it turns out that
the the payoff to the Alturas will be
less than the payoff to the non altruist
and it
doesn't matter how many altruists there
are in the group this line here is the
payoff to the non altruist this here is
the payoff to the altruist now so for
example here there are no altruists in
the group and so the defector gets zero
but over here the group is entirely
altruistic cept him and he gets be
obviously but the crucial point is these
two lines this line is always above that
line so it doesn't matter where you are
along here you can be zero altruists or
you can be all out tourists and the
altruists will be suffering the
disadvantage which is the vertical
distance between these two lines so if I
gosh I should have done this suppose I
wanted to give you the idea this is a
dynamical system I just would have put
arrows along here going in that
direction so wherever you are if
evolutionary pressures are pushing you
over to the left towards zero altruism
and that is the fate now suppose you
don't have this large population
scenario suppose you have a population
in little groups like our ancestors
groups of maybe 10 or 15 adults in a
group then you have another possibility
because the if you have a lot of groups
just statistically by chance some groups
will have a lot of a's and some groups
will have a lot of ends and if you take
it the next step most of the A's will be
in groups which have a majority of a's
and most of the ends will be in a group
of the majority of ends and you can see
immediately where this is going then it
will turn out that the probability of
being matched with an a given that urine
a will be greater than the average in
the whole population and greater than
the probability of getting to match with
an A and exploit the a if you're an M so
the doom scenario can break down if the
groups are different enough now this
number here the difference between these
two conditional probabilities that's
that minus that in this graph here that
tells you how different the groups would
have to be in order for them to make the
same payoffs notice the A's in this in
this population the A's are likely to
meet another a with this probability
they get that payoff
ere the ends are likely to meet an a
with a probability and they get that
payoff there now i just drew it so they
happen to have equal payoffs obviously
if the groups are even more different
than that then the aids would have
higher payoffs and if they're less
different then the A's would have lower
payoffs so you see where this is going
the more different the groups are with
respect to the fraction of altruists in
them the better it's going to be for the
altruists so out of the doghouse I think
so at least for humans there is a lot of
recent evidence much of it collected by
people working at the Santa Fe Institute
and others who are my collaborators in
outside and the rest of the world a lot
of recent evidence suggests two things
that our foraging ancestors lived in
genetically differentiated groups which
were also warlike so there was a lot of
conflicts and they were really different
and moreover they adopted practices
which were likely to make Darwin's
account work slowing down the process of
selection against the altruist within
their groups I'll explain what those are
now I can't survey all the evidence I'll
give you some pictures of what what we
now have but just to give you a taste
this involved start with obviously
population genetics we had to get
genetic material from a large number of
populations and study that and figure
out how different groups were we had to
obviously look at a lot of
anthropological accounts of how people
interacted in foraging societies
contemporary ones are those in the
historical record the archeology came in
and figuring out how common world wars
were looking at smashed skulls and
broken allness and trying to figure out
how many people died as a result of
clashes climate ology came in as you'll
see and in looking at these we had to do
things like looking at skeletal remains
looking at Jenna genetic markers we use
extensively computer simulations
ethnography and so on so this is a
massive project involving a very large
number of people with obviously a very
diverse set of skills and you'll see how
we tried to pull it together I'll begin
with the evolutionary modeling because I
want to say a bit more about
how the doom scenario maybe isn't
inevitable now this new evidence here is
as I say it's mostly published in top
journals so that's good but that doesn't
mean it's not controversial it just
means that some referees have said it's
worth thinking about and I expect a lot
of new data and critical analysis of the
work that our group is done and perhaps
this will turn out to be not as we now
think it it is now how humans may have
escaped the evolutionary fate of an
altruistic trait is that our groups may
have been very different one from
another that is this distance between
the groups but between the conditional
probabilities may have been a lot that's
called in biology positive assortment
that is you're more likely to meet
someone like yourself we usually talk
about positive assortment in mating but
obviously any group differences can be
described that way positive assortment
is just measured by the difference in
the conditional probability of meeting a
type to the extent that it depends on
your own type as opposed to being
independent of that now this is not
rocket science but if you look at this
graph here how far apart do those two
things have to be in order for the
Alturas to do as well as the non
altruist well it turns out that this
distance from here to here is equal to
the ratio of the cost to the benefits of
the altruistic trait now we're getting
somewhere because now we know how
different they have to be if they're
very different then the the evolutionary
process will support a very costly form
of altruism if they're not very
different than the amount of the
costliness of the altruistic trait which
will be supported by natural selection
will be very limited now those who put
that group selection in the doghouse for
animals in general but it was applied to
humans they believed that the group
genetic difference is this thing here
that different the difference between
these two conditional probabilities was
much too small possibly on the order of
point 02 that's a teeny teeny difference
in groups uh and that's what's all right
that's what he speculated human groups
might be that different now you don't
have to think too hard to realize that
if the differences are just point out
too then the benefits would have to be
50 times the cost in other words C over
B would have to be 0 point 0 2 in order
for the for altruism to be able to
survive now others thought that B over C
it would also be quite small that is it
might be the benefits to revise twice
the cost or four times the cost but
nothing like 50 I mean it so that seemed
to basically spell the Fate the doom
fate now what we know is that group
selection or sometimes multi-level
selection is it's obviously a horse race
it's a race between what goes on within
the group which is the altruists are
always losing in every single group
there fraction is declining that's one
horse the other horse is occasionally
the group's meet and the groups with
more altruists win and that way all
tourism can spread which one is the more
powerful which one is working more
quickly is going to determine which
horse wins obviously most biologists
thought that the wizard group horse
would win and I think that maybe for
humans that was that answer was wrong
now among us perhaps uniquely we proved
to be extremely good at both raising the
group benefits of altruism that is
getting a high B and we also proved very
good at having our groups be quite
different one from another by various
kinds of boundary maintenance which will
become an important part of the later
part of this lecture and we also did
things that lowered see all of which
I'll describe to you in just a minute so
this kind of gave Darwin's idea a chance
okay the good news is how do we lower
see well we lower see by adopting
practices like monogamy and sharing food
so that the people who are doing
relatively well in the group that is the
ones who are not the altruist they can't
get too much for example suppose that
it's a hunting society and some hunters
help other hunters and other people just
get as much as they can now if they take
it home and the selfish ones eat what
they got and the ultra see what they got
you'll have a reproductive difference or
at least a material difference between
those but suppose as in many foraging
societies something else happens some
fraction of the food is put into a
common pot and shared equally and the
rest of it is taken home well that's
like the welfare state just like a tax
write some part is being shared
generally and that reduces the
difference in the payoff between the non
altruists and the altruists thereby
lowering the cost of being an altruist
monogamy likewise makes it more
difficult for dominant males to
monopolize reproduction thereby
essentially just reducing the stakes of
the game within the group and slowing
down the process whereby altruists will
be selected against now I suppose this
is bad news the thing that really raises
be and the thing that really raises this
difference in group composition is that
we have characteristics of human
societies not all of them but many of
them is hostility towards outsiders and
frequent warfare frequent warfare made
the benefits of having altruist in your
group gigantic because if you didn't
survive one of those conflicts you're
all likely to die that is a very very
big Fitness consequence and the
sometimes hostility or what we now call
xenophobia would make this difference in
these groups rather substantial now I
think and I think I've shown in the
papers that I mentioned that the
combination of these two things
operating at levels which we can
estimate probably occurred during the
last hundred thousand years prior to the
development of Agriculture ten thousand
eight thousand years ago those things
could have conveyed could have been a
force large enough to make altruism
successful
the examples that I gave our
reproductive and material levelling that
reduces payoffs within groups and that
obviously means that if you have a bunch
of alturas in the group they will still
be in the process of being eliminated
but it'll be much slower so you'll
retain your alturas longer therefore you
might actually win one of those battles
now we know that these levelling
practices are common among ethnographic
foragers and we think it's quite likely
they were common among our ancestors now
the interesting point here is that
suppose you have some groups adopting
levelling practices slowing down the
selection against the altruists and you
have some other groups who don't well
the groups with the leveling practices
will end up at any given time with more
altruists in them and so those groups
the levellers are more likely to win the
contest your first thought is oh that's
going to allow the altruist to
proliferate that's true and what else
that makes leveling proliferate because
the new societies which they form on the
sites of the eliminated individuals will
of course with high likelihood adopt the
same culture and institutions that they
have so now now we're talking about a
dual evolutionary process in which as
Eric said in this introduction we have
selection going on about the individuals
which type of individual is going to
survive but we're also selecting groups
for the kinds of institutions that they
have and the process by which altruism
may have succeeded is also a process
which would have promoted the spread of
leveling as a characteristic of forager
society perhaps accounting for the very
quite striking degree of egalitarianism
among our ancestors another way of
looking at this is these leveling
institutions might be called a nish nish
construction is a very interesting topic
now in biology many animals create
environments which affect the evolution
of their gene distribution of genes and
it's something like leveling mating
practices sharing food is just another
example of a kind of a niche
now here's the same figure as before
remember I said that sharing the meat in
the common pot was like the welfare
state okay well here's the tax rate here
that's the fraction that goes into the
common pot all right what I've done here
is I've taken exactly the same graph
with exactly the same payoffs and I've
modified them now the selfish guy in the
population of all el triste he doesn't
get B he gets B minus C times T that's
he pays those taxes and so the blue
lines now represent the expected payoff
to these individuals well you still have
the same problem the altruists are still
losing but notice the groups don't have
to be as different as they were before
they have to be only this different as
opposed to that different in other words
what leveling does is it gives group
selection a helping hand by slowing down
the selection within each group these
ideas have been common in biology for a
long time they were applied in for human
societies initially by Chris Bowen where
you Chris where's Chris bum Chris bond
was hiding up in the back he's a
brilliant anthropologist he really began
a lot of these ideas and he's a resident
of Santa Fe and a professor at USC so
let me give this this to you in the
words of Steve Frank also a faculty
member at the Santa Fe Steve are you
here steve was here last night here's
what Steve wrote he was this is a paper
about slime mold but it might have been
it's kind of a preface to what I'm
saying evolutionary theory has not
explained how competition among lower
level units is suppressed in the
formation of higher level evolutionary
units mutual policing and enforcement of
reproductive fairness are also required
for the evolution of increasing social
complexity so this is far from a new
idea it's just applying those ideas of
what's called variance reduction
technically to the human species there
are some economists here and I'm sure
you're noticing what I've just said the
suppression of competition not
competition itself is the key to the
evolutionary success of a group in this
case now the story I've told you is
called coevolution the coevolution of
individual behavior and group level
institutions the synergy which I said
operates between reducing the costs of
altruism and leveling is I think a part
of the story but of course it there has
to be more than more than the story
there's more than that to the story
frequent warfare increasing the benefits
of having altruism in your group or
rather increasing the cost of not having
them and hostility towards outsiders
spreading out the differences among
groups now we have a problem doing paleo
anything is really fun it's like reading
great literature because sometimes you
can't really figure out what's happening
and so you can kind of interpret now as
a scientist of course I find this deeply
frustrating between because we're asking
really hard questions we're asking a
causal question about why something
happened we know what happened but we're
asking why it happened that's hard the
process we're investigating is far too
complex for mathematical modeling alone
to be illuminating that is it can be
modeled but it's very difficult to
extract sufficient answers from those
models but we use agent and of course by
the way what's obvious is we have a you
see how limited the information is the
kind of inferences we can make about
what was happening 50,000 years ago
among people who left very few traces
right these are not builders of
monuments and so on these are hunters
and gatherers now like the experiments
that I discussed yesterday agent-based
modeling allows us independently to vary
influences on behavior while holding
constant other things it allows us to do
hypothetical thinking what would have
happened if the groups had been a little
smaller a little larger what would have
happened if migratory patterns had been
different so this allow it's almost like
hypothetical history is what I call it
but we're allowed to do experiments with
a historical process once we're
reasonably convinced that we have a
model which is replicating the things
that we do know about the historical
process now you could start for example
by saying well okay suppose I proposed
this idea that warfare is crucial so
let's make a model of early human
society but what I mean is from say a
hundred thousand years ago to maybe
10,000 years ago and then see if you
just arbitrarily vary the frequency of
war what kind of difference does it make
well here's here's a result of some
simulations very large number of them
each point here that's 10 runs of fifty
thousand generations and we here we have
the probability that a conflict happens
between groups so in every period groups
with some probability are identified
you're going to have a war and then
they're paired randomly and here we have
the fraction of alturas that results in
the long in the very long run of that
society and the blue line is when we
don't allow them to share resources we
just turn that off this is what it's
great isn't meeting play God with
history just say suppose they couldn't
do food sharing then so T is arbitrarily
set to 0 and then what you can interpret
this in the following way suppose that
with twenty-five percent probability
this is the percent you're going to have
a war so one more every four generations
roughly in that situation you'll get
roughly seven seventy percent altruists
in the population in the long run once
you allow food sharing take place I set
aside monogamy you get a very different
picture it takes much less war to
generate a lot of altruism to generate a
lot of ultras and that's because you've
turned down the dial on the within-group
selection how do I model that sharing
thing okay well I say I first randomly
give every group a practice they can
they can share one percent they can
share ninety percent whatever however if
they meet a group and lose a war
the site on which the losing group used
to be takes over the sharing practices
of the winning group so it's kind of
cultural imperialism if you want and in
every period group kind of experiment or
they may experiment with some
probability moving they're sharing a
little bit in one direction or the other
so that's how I model done and the basic
idea is that if you allow sharing you
can see you get a lot more altruism for
every frequency of war or another way of
putting it is suppose you're interested
in having a population of half altruists
well that takes here you know a thirteen
percent probability of having war if you
allow food sharing to evolve and it
takes a lot more war otherwise so this
this convinced my co-authors in me that
we were onto something that basically
warfare was having a really powerful
effect but but it was cheating right
because and we can't just assume that
war happens war is one of the things
we'd like to explain after all I mean
many animals have what we might call
wars there are boundary skirmishes among
chimps meerkats have wars in which
substantial number of the animals die
fire ants do the same thing by the way
with in some cases with mortality not
terribly different from humans but there
are so there are other species that do
have warfare and we'd like to explain
why it is that we're so particularly
adept at it so we need to expand on
Darwin's idea and I amended here well do
we engage in mutual aid because
evolution is red in tooth and claw the
simulations I just showed you I think
perhaps will convince you that yes that
is true but the second thing is also
possible is our evolution red in tooth
and claw because we engage in mutual aid
that is is war a frequent matter in
human society in part because we are
altruistic okay I did I lose you on that
I know it's very a very unsettling
thought okay here's the idea you can
have a decent war without altruists
right because nobody will fight there is
it after you right uh so I saw that the
fact that we have extraordinary lethal
wars probably has something to do the
fact that we're altruistic animals now
that's hard however because how could we
become this hostile or what I call
parochial just because I think it's kind
of fancy we became alturas with a
parochial bend how could that be
parochialism by which i mean favoring
ethnic racial or other insiders over
outsiders and altruism they're very
commonly observed sometimes in
experiments in natural settings it's far
from universal I'll come back to that at
the end the parochial bear costs they
forego beneficial interactions with
outsiders then I'll like them I don't
like to deal with them they don't want
to exchange with them they don't want to
share food with them they don't want to
Co ensure they have a limited scope
because of their narrow minds so
parochial altruism is puzzling because
both parochialism and altruism reduce
the actors payoffs by comparison to
somebody who was tolerant and non
parochial the idea that my group wanted
to explore is this we wondered if maybe
parochialism and altruism alone couldn't
make it they would indeed be doomed but
they could evolve together each
providing the conditions for the other
to survive that's a co-evolutionary
process now not between institutions and
individual traits but this is a
co-evolutionary process between two
types of human behavior or as I'll model
it between genes at two different low
sigh so we're going to we're going to
try to model this population we have a
population in which individuals may it
be either altruistic or not that's that
dimension and they can be either
parochial or tolerant that's not a
payoff matrix it's just
characterization of the types in the
population there are four types
parochial altruist tolerant etc now
these are behaviors they're not the
Preferences that motivate them the I'm
here looking at behaviors which would
succeed without asking what did it
what's the psychological underpinning
which would get people to act that way
okay the a is contribute to the fitness
of other group members but only the pas
the / Oracle alturas will fight wars you
have to be both an altruist and hostile
towards outsiders to be willing to kill
them the parochial induce hostilities
and they also forego the benefits of
feasel interactions with other groups
which are enjoyed by the t's and so you
can see that in every group the tolerant
ones beat the parochial because the
tolerant ones can access all these other
people in the surrounding groups and the
and the parochial can't but the knots
are going to beat the altruists for the
familiar reason that we explored
yesterday name is by the definition of
altruism the altruists are giving away
fitness to the knots now the key point
here is that to be a not altruistic
tolerant is the dominant strategy
remember what that means that's the
highest payoff thing to do independently
what other people are doing that's the
highest payoff thing to do in the group
so if that's all that was happening if
we didn't have anything else going on
just a single group constructive this
way the group would be composed entirely
of tolerant uh and non altruistic people
and we'll see there's a lot of
evolutionary forces which will create
that however war to the rescue I didn't
mention that if the group's get into war
then having some parochial el triste in
your group can save your life so so we
have these two processes within the
group we have what's called a public
goods game with benefits be and the cost
see the same thing yet before this is
some other group over here same thing
going on inside it but between the
groups they may either have a hostile
conflict or they may have trade
insurance and they may be able to
exploit the benefits of peaceful
coexistence
and we want to then model how this thing
adds up in terms of evolutionary
processes we know what's going on here
the altruists are going to be eliminated
and the parochial are going to be
eliminated but when the war has happened
between the groups the groups a lot of
parochial altruists will have an
advantage I assume that the behaviors
are transmitted vertically that is from
parents to offspring it could be
cultural it could be genetic I use a
genetic metaphor here talking about
different alleles at tu lo sai but it
doesn't matter it could be good things
that you get from your parents as
opposed to from anybody else now this is
a story about what might have happened
and I'll turn to our trying our attempts
to simulate this but what I always do
before I simulate anything before I
write down any game theoretic equations
or dynamical systems I try to ask well
what is the thing in the world that I'm
trying to understand what do we know
about that does the model described our
ancestral pass I'm going to embarrass
Chris poem by quoting him again towards
the end of the pleistocene as
anatomically modern humans began to
emerge group extinction rates could have
risen dramatically as needy bands of
well-armed hunters strangers lacking
established patterns of political
interaction frequently collided either
locally or in the course of
long-distance migration that's the older
that I mentioned that's the outside bone
in your arm a fracture in the left ulna
is often interpreted as a defense
against a right-handed attacker if you
see the outside being broken a lot in
burials that's indicate this likely
indication that you've had some conflict
if you see the radius broken that's
probably you fell off a tree or
something now the strength of Chris
bones assessment of that is greatly
enhanced by recent data about climate
this is ninety thousand years ago this
is the what's called the Holocene this
is when agriculture starts I'm
interested in this period here
geologists are very perverse they like
to put things
in the you know distant pass over here
and the present over here that's just
because that's one of the tribal things
that they do the this this oxygen
isotope signature scales with a surface
with a surface centigrade temperatures
we have recent data we can compare them
so these differences here are a
difference of about 10 degrees
centigrade okay please look at that
carefully 10 degrees centigrade over
what period of time maybe 100 years or
200 years do you know what we're
freaking out about right now what is it
one and a half something like that you
know what the little ice age was the
devastated Europe that was a fall and
temperature of two degrees centigrade or
put it this way suppose you're an animal
that lives in a certain kind of
environment and you hunt certain kinds
of animals and so on and suppose the
temperature is going to change by 10
degrees centigrade in the course of say
two or three generations how far would
you have to walk to get to the
temperature which you're used to well if
you're in Africa which probably we all
were at that time and you lived in Cape
Town how far would you have to go
Mombasa you all know where my boss is
right it's a long way that I mean
literally that's how far you have to go
that's why what Chris bomb said it's
probably right a lot of groups we're
moving up and down finding places to
live and undoubtedly finding each other
in the way this beautiful map for which
I thank the fantastic staff of the SFI
for putting together this tells you
something about the evidence that will
now put before you I wanted to figure
out where the group genetically
different enough and was warfare common
enough these square things here are
archaeological sites these two here and
that one there being extremely
interesting this one here by the way you
just read about this is a goober oh it
was in the New York Times about two
weeks ago so I mean the things are
everything is changing
it's a fantastic site so far 35 remains
have been studied so these are
archaeological sites where we study
things like the ulna and and stone
points in bones these are ethnographic
studies of the ah Cheh before contact
the arrow and so on he we so those are
all based on essentially recent accounts
these lines without any dots are where I
got the genetic data from for example
from the Kung from a lot of groups in
southern Africa from 14 groups of
original Australians these are two other
groups and so on these are some these
are from some fantastic studies done by
geneticists in the ex-soviet Union and
and more recently done by us teams also
now if you if you look at the
ethnographic evidence these are ones
which are not so relevant to us because
of some problems with the data there's
always a problem if you find somebody
studying how many people died in a war
it quite it may be that the people were
interested in that society because
they're interested in war so there is a
selection problem in these data and but
these are these are this says that among
the arch a in the pre contact period
thirty-seven percent of all deaths were
because of conflicts that's an
extraordinary fraction if I had to
choose which of these were kind of my
best estimates having very carefully
read all the dissertations and so on
that these are based on I think maybe
the he we the Murnaghan and the oblivion
paraguay in groups are kind of in the
ballpark but let's see what we have here
okay maybe it's you know something like
eighteen percent does anybody know what
fraction of europeans died during the
previous century the century of total
war probably one-fourth of that I
or a little less actually surprisingly
i'm including civilians of course and a
lot a lot of these don't include
civilians although the kinds of warfare
that are going on a lot of this doesn't
include the deaths from displacement and
those are included in the first and
second world war deaths so our ancestors
were a lot a lot more bellicose in terms
of the mortality consequences now the
archaeological evidence is interesting
it's basically it's based on points
stone or other kinds of points of
weapons the those two little dots in the
Sudan the there were 58 skeletons day
these were dating from the
pre-agricultural period quite a bit
before it they were probably mammal
hunters and fishers and it looks like
what happens whether than it was with
the deterioration in the weather a group
which had been somewhere else encroached
on their very nice fishing site on the
Nile and eliminated them you know that
because of well here's what the
archaeologist said violence must have
been very common event in Nubia at this
time if we consider this graveyard is
typical there appears to be no
significant distinction between males
females and children in their exposure
to violent death evidently all members
of the group were involved in conflict
not just the adult males and the
individual on the Left had 19 stone
points embedded or associated with it
with his skeleton now here again there's
some biases a lot of the studies counted
as death because of an arrow or spear if
there's a point in the bone now a lot of
ways to dive without getting an arrow
point in your bone in fact us us our
army surgeon studying the wounds of US
soldiers in the Indian Wars found that
most of the arrow wounds and most of
them are fatal by the way most of the
arrow wounds did not make any marks on
the bones so we would have lost I mean
so these estimates could be way off they
could be way low because of all the
wounds to the throat and the stomach for
example
now not to mention all the wounds to the
head impact wounds there's a lot of
evidence in these I'm really going on a
lot about this you can come yeah I got
really fascinated at this losing out
what you can tell about these burials
but let's go on the oh there's another
one that whole that whole shouldn't be
there I mean it if you have a hole like
that and you know you should go get a
new one it's easy to get a new one now
the gum so these are the evidence of the
archaeological data and you'll see that
there it's I mean I was very surprised
there's no particular reason why the
archaeological data with its biases
should be similar to the ethnographic
data and its biases but they're they're
really quite similar by the way this
last one here go Barrow that's the most
recent one it's a very good study 000
that is there 35 individuals there
there's not a sign of violence at all
I'm of course in correspondence with
there are a total of two hun more than
200 and I'm just dying for them to do
the other rest of the analysis on the
others because it really is quite
unusual in these studies to find no
deaths by violence at all now oh by the
way you can ask well what about murders
you know well we we try to get evidence
of things which have to do with these
skirmishes so when you find two or three
people being buried at the same time as
they were in that Nubian site that's a
pretty good piece of evidence
particularly if they also have points
embedded in them and so on but you
really can't tell now how different were
these groups one from another we can't
tell obviously but what we can do is we
can look at groups which are probably
demographically sociologically and
economically similar that is foragers at
the middle of the last century some of
them contacted some of them from whom
blood was taken almost at contact as for
example in this group here in Australia
I mean the content the contact was with
some people said oh by the way how about
some blood you know they must've thought
these white people are really odd but
now this is interesting though look at
this is a disaster Australian group
that has a this is how different they
are that this is the conditional
probability of differences between the
group these these apps are that and this
is a point 0 8 1 well notice first
that's four times what sewell right
thought it was and that's about the
average of this but what's remarkable
about this is these two islands on which
these people live are inside of each
other they had some exchange amongst
them and they both visited the mainland
they they had ways of getting back and
forth and yet they're genetically as
different these two islands are as the
major so-called races or what should be
called ancestral groups of the world and
you see the same thing in the Siberian
groups adjacent groups are as different
as Siberian people's are from say North
American so called native Native
American people's so there are some
processes which we don't fully
understand which are making groups very
different now i can tell you what I
think they are I mean the migration
among groups is non-random there's a
very boom and crash dynamic in the
population which creates the same the
effect of a very small group and so on
and that tends to make them more
different but so far what we I think the
facts of the matter are that the groups
are genetically a lot more different
than those who put group selection in
the doghouse thought what I gather from
this is if you just take the central
tendencies of the genetic data and of
the warfare data and you put it together
with the assumption that if group of
more ultrastar proportionately more
likely to survive then you find that a
very costly kind of altruism could could
be proliferated by this process in other
words group selection would be a
powerful force among these people but I
keep putting off the big question why is
warfare so common to do this we have to
play artificial history these are
Aboriginal Australians I love this
picture because notice as they are
decorated they're not likely to be
mistaken by the guys on the other hill
over there as people who are like them
and it's humans at an early stage began
to decorate them ourselves and also our
to make certain kinds of tools and
artifacts which were distinct now this
is a this is basically how the model
works and I don't expect you I'm not
going to work go through the whole thing
but it'll it'll help to see what's
really going on two groups meet I
randomly paired they meet well the
interaction can be hostile it can be
hostile or non-hostile if it's if it's
hot if there are a lot of parochial in
one group it's going to be hostile
doesn't have to be both does even want
to do it so if it's non-hostile then
they don't have a war they don't do
anything they just get the payoffs that
I described before in which NT not
altruistic tolerant is the dominant
strategy now they can have a hostile
interaction but like many animals humans
when they're evenly matched have a
tendency to back off so they may not
have a war but if there is a big
difference between how many fighters
that's parochial alturas there are in
the two groups they have a war then the
stronger one what one is stronger and
one its weaker and the probability of
the stronger one wins depends on how
many fighters they have now this guy who
wins he loses some fighters but he takes
over the a part of the site of the
losers the losers meanwhile they lose
some fighters and they lose a bunch of
civilians and these civilians over here
all of these guys who are dead over here
are then replaced by this group here so
the the groups that lose a large number
that is the losers in these war they re
populated by couples randomly selected
from the dominant group to go and and
it's so they have extra reproductive
possibilities of course you immediately
thought well what about if the fighters
from the winning group raped the
surviving women of the losing group
that's another scenario we've also
simulated that I'd be very happy to talk
about that is the results are remarkably
similar actually and here's what you get
when you have this clove illusionary
process this is a picture of some runs
we're looking here at the outbreak of
war here we have
the fraction of parochial and here's the
fraction of alturas this dark line is
the parochial altruist and you're going
along here and there's very few protocol
el triste you can match this vertically
this is the same run that is notice that
these are the same years here so this is
a fraction this is the frequency of wars
well wars aren't happening because
they're very few parochial zin the
population and so and because they're
very few war is happening obviously the
altruist aren't doing very well either
because the only way they can win is by
winning a war so you're bumping along
here not having many wars and then by
chance you get this uptick in the number
of protocol alturas and that gives you
an uptick in the number of wars and you
go on for a long period of time here
with a lot of wars and then you go along
here you have a lot of parochial alturas
notice here it almost crashed and that
could have crashed the wars and you
could have gone back down or it could
have gone for however long and here you
have the outbreak of peace Wars here
very frequent it's sustaining this world
in which the parochial altruists are
doing well because there are a lot of
parochial altruists you have a lot of
wars and then there is a crash here I
don't think we should call it a crash
though right we should call it a
wonderful piece broke out and and then
you then you get down here and you have
basically very few Wars so that's you
see these transitions that take place
now it's an interesting question am i
imagining that you have societies moving
back and forth between parochialism
altruism and you know selfish tolerance
or am i talking about a transition from
a kind of an animal or a kind of early
human who was tolerant and a non
altruistic and then the whole that or a
very large group came and we became and
and remained so that's an interesting
question but I want to first show you
what we can do here as you probably
figured out from looking at those lines
you're very likely to have say that this
is what's called the state space this is
all the combinations of 40 heels and
alturas that you can have in the
population so here you have 0 altruists
and you also have 0 / oculus so we
ilysm in this dimension altruism here so
these this skyscrapers here says the
height of the skyscraper is the fraction
of a very long period in which the
population spends at that pair so for
example this would be ten ten percent
altruists and no parochial and that's
some percent of the time and so
basically there are two ways to be in
this world you can be a society of
parochial altruist and you can be a
society sorry society here of parochial
alturas with very frequent Wars or
tolerant non altruists and those of you
who like to think about these things can
see that they're right around here is
something called a saddle point it
slopes down in this direction and up in
that direction and so what's interesting
is well can we actually observe these
transitions let me see if I can show my
mouse doesn't seem to be working but
fortunately I'd never go anywhere
without many mice okay try me now by the
way this is the thing I said you can do
but don't worry about the the addiction
problem over here that you're going to
see this is the state space that's the
fraction of alturas that's that
dimension that's the fraction of
parochial that's that dimension and what
you're going to see here is a history
you're going to see the fractions in the
population just like the lines that I
showed you as they move along so here's
how and just for fun i'm going to start
it off down here somewhere and then each
dot is one period in which the
population has that particular
distribution and what you should be
looking for it well one thing it's going
to be ill astound you this thing moves
around a lot what we in the business
what we say is the surface is pretty
flat so whatever selection is doing its
not riveting you on one spot
there's a lot of motion but at a certain
point you'll find an excursion and it'll
end up up there to keep you have to
watch it because it you know compared to
how much time it spends where the
skyscrapers are it it passes over the
saddle really really quickly so you got
to pay attention ok wait how about slow
well ok here's here's what's going on so
far it's moving around this territory
here which is the non altruistic
intolerant part and here we have very
few parochial altruists obviously you
cannot infer how many parochial else was
there are from knowing how many how many
alturas and how many parochial there are
because they could be disjoint or as it
could be altogether but unless of course
there's a hundred percent of each but
let me continue this I'll do it slower
and there's a lot of action there but
whoa you're probably going to get a
movement up to the upper corner now so
that will stay up there for so basically
we've made a transition from this
tolerant altruistic to this parochial
altruistic and now you see that the gray
line is the parochial el triste almost
crashed here could have come back down
there and it just moves back and forth
now when I said that I've run 55 million
of these that's a fact uh well five
million in one eye but I'm not recording
this one after a while you can't really
see what's going on because the dots are
on top of each other one thing I want to
say about this method is that what you
saw no one has ever seen before I'm not
giving you something was canned there I
ran something that will never be seen
again everything had been seen before
why because there's so many stochastic
processes going on the mutation process
who meets whom and so on so what you do
is you run this thing over and over
again it's a lot of discussion in our
our trade about well how many times have
to run it before you think you
understand it okay you remember that I
introduced my friends at the end of the
last meeting I think that um here's what
I think is true on the basis of what I
found out so far under conditions
approximating those experienced by our
late pleistocene ancestors groups of
four Oracle alturas could have emerged
and such groups would have provoked
engaged in and won Wars with other
groups and independent of any initial
conditions what would have occurred is
that altruism and parochialism would be
a non-viable separately but they could
have evolved co-evolved jointly with
warfare now oh I should have put the
restore here this is a really
speculative point one of the most
wonderful puzzles is this what is the
most likely scenario that explains why
we're all here tonight is that a small
group perhaps numbering a few hundred
probably in the northern Rift Valley
north of Nairobi they expanded out of
that territory and then they spread
around the shores of the Indian Ocean
starting at about sixty thousand years
ago they reached Australia probably in
fifteen thousand years which is
unbelievably fast uh having of course
remained in Africa for a long period of
time probably having remained in Africa
with a lot of modern attributes and
eventually of course also moving into
Europe and out competing the
Neanderthals now isn't it remarkable
that this small group could be the
ancestors of all of us and don't you
wonder well what did they have or what
has they become or what could they do
that the other groups that they were
competing with couldn't do or didn't do
or hadn't yet learned how to do I'm not
just talking about the Neanderthals I'm
talking about all of the other hominids
who they encountered including other
humans well a possibility which i think
is
there's no evidence against it and it's
a very plausible story and there are
some other alternative explanations that
also are plausible this is what I'd like
us to think about cooperation
cooperation against others may be the
distinctive capacity of our ancestors
that explains their success our success
in the great exodus from Africa 60,000
years ago now there is no evidence that
there's any genetic basis for war or for
altruism or for racism or anything of
the kind we may get that evidence I hope
we are able to explore the evidence for
whether there is any kind of genetic
foundations or of these behaviors we
don't know that now all that this shows
is that if alleles plural almost
certainly supporting these act these
behaviors were to exist they might have
evolved in the way that I said the
important point is that if a parochial
form of altruism is our legacy genetic
or cultural if I'm right in that it need
not be our fate that is up to us we are
uniquely a cultural species in the sense
of our cultural capacities surpass all
others and we're able to invent to
redirect to overcome outside or
hostility through socialization and
exposure I am encouraged by what we're
finding out in experiments I mentioned
last night some experiments in which
people favored insiders over outsiders
and there's a big literature it's called
the minimal group experiment literature
in which they ask people do you like
this painting or that painting it's
usually clay in Kandinsky and then they
put them into the clay group in the
Kandinsky group and sure enough they get
to hate each other and the Kandinsky
people will give more money to their
group and so on well some years back a
frequent visitor to the Santa Fe
Institute toshio yamagishi who's deeply
suspicious of this he designed an
experiment to get it his
and his hunch was that the clay people
thought that by giving more to the clay
group they would get more back from the
clay group that is they had sort of
thought that this would be reciprocated
so he designed an experiment in which
everybody got paid before they made
their decision about which group they
would give to they already got their
little envelope with their but i would
have whatever they're going to get they
said oh one last thing could you make
this allocation and this has been
reproduced a number of times they
allocated absolutely equally absolutely
equally this is true among Japanese
people Australian people now what's
really interesting about this is that
when when you got rid of the idea that
your group is going to treat you better
if you treat them better by separating
that out people had no particular reason
to give to the kandinsky people less
than to their own clay people but it's
better than that the people who were the
clay people they asked them they
debriefed uma what do you think about
the clinic can it kandinsky people they
had bad attitudes about the kandinsky
people just the way they always do in
all these experiments they asked would
you rate how good their good looks would
you rate how you think they are as
people and so on and the group business
worked they really came to not like the
other people but they didn't see any
reason to give them less money it's that
inspiring I mean I mean that you know I
mean it does me you know you can have
bad attitudes and still be a just person
I find that really remarkable now a a
student and co-author of mine also did a
remarkable experiment with real money
real big-time money in which she showed
people pictures of the victims of
katrina and the the manipulations were
very clever in some cases you saw people
a very sort of shock like house which
was tree falling on it in some cases you
saw a rather nice house you know in a
treed fallen in the swimming pool or
something and in some cases it was odd
because the people who are in the
picture there were African American
people and in some case there were white
people and so then
given these various treatments about who
they're giving to they then had to give
real money actually they're giving a lot
of money that is the experimenter gave
them a hundred dollars and said which
communities would you like to give to I
didn't guess the answer they were
extremely sensitive to whether it was a
shock or a swimming pool they gave to
the poor people and there was no race
effect at all these are all white
experimental subjects they didn't pay
attention to race now if you look
carefully there were some people who
paid a lot of attention to race some
positively some negatively but the
average was not at all but so I'm not
pessimistic that we can overcome the
parochial aspects of our heritage and I
want to close with a following to me
inspiring story of a retired tamil
schoolmaster boarding a train in candy
in Sri Lanka during the nineteen
seventy-seven aunty tamil riots where
the Sinhalese people were murdering
systematically Tamil people in their
presence he was unlikely to be mistaken
for a Sinhala as he was dark in
complexion as he boarded the 315
upcountry bound train from candy I don't
know candies in the center of Sri Lanka
he chose one of those old red train cars
with two long wooden benches one with
its back against the window and the
other across from that facing the
outside the only other passenger in his
compartment was a candy and sinhala
woman she was a typical and now that's a
description by the person now he's
quoting himself the mr. Emanuel she was
a typical Candian Sinhalese with a sorry
Warren in the Kandyan way he goes on and
describes her jewelry she was obviously
cinelli's she was seated on the window
seat i sat on the bench against the wall
away from the door she could have been
the mother of any of those many sinhala
boys and girls I had taught for 50 years
I knew the riots had started in candy
town I was hearing the thugs shout in
sinhala get the Tamil kill them I didn't
look I could hear the passengers being
pulled out of the train and beaten there
was lots of screaming rioting cheering
then I heard screaming in the very
compartment behind ours and then the
door opened and the thugs were climbing
the steps into our compartment and this
woman suddenly gets up and she comes and
sits next to me I have my hands on my
legs to stop them from shaking she puts
her hand on my left hand she doesn't say
a word I don't say a word the mob comes
in and they stick their heads in the
window there are three guys in front of
us and they look at us and they turn and
say there are no tamil here and they go
on to the next car from which there are
more screams a few minutes later the
train pulled out of the station tamil
passengers from the train were still
being chased and beaten and stabbed this
woman did not let my hand go until we
reached Kampala 35 minutes later she
didn't say a word not a single word I
didn't say anything I couldn't life
passed through my head like a real all
the schoolchildren the teachers all of
this in halle parents and their kids the
sports meets all the cricket games and
the prize-giving like a real at gun
paula she got off the train she didn't
even look at me I don't even know her
name so there's hope thank you very much
I did want to say something about what
we're doing tomorrow so I was so moved
by that story that i forgot what I'd
like to say is this I think so far to my
satisfaction I've established that we
are uniquely cooperative in ways we
cooperate our cooperative nature can't
be explained by self-interest part of
the explanation is that we are
altruistic some of the time and today I
think I've established that we could
have evolved by a coevolution of as I
say warfare parochialism and altruism
tomorrow we have a much harder job
tomorrow I want to ask you to think
about this how can this knowledge
improve the way we govern our local
national and global interactions to
provide a flourishing and sustainable
life for all humans i will use
experiments i'll use some economic
theory and i will try to think what we
could do to make this world better for
every human being on the basis of what
we have learned there are no easy
answers and I want you to go home
thinking about the following I'll begin
tomorrow with the following experiment
it's actually real life it was an
experiment in Haifa in Israel parents as
around the world came late to pick up
their kids at a daycare center it was
actually a string of daycare centers
there were 16 of them and the teachers
of course being somewhat inconvenience
by this decided that they would post a
fine for people coming late but they
cleverly did this in some of the schools
but not others they wanted to see what
the effect was and so on Thursday and
Friday there was a sign on the door it
didn't say any reasons because by this
time an experimental economists have got
involved probably he was a parent of one
of the kids he said listen let's not say
why let's just say there's going to be a
fine we don't want to buy us this
experiment so it just said from Monday
if you pick up your kids late you'll pay
the following fine and they did this in
10 of the schools and they didn't do it
in six of the schools okay and then they
had recorded how many people were coming
late the previous five weeks and then
they recorded how many people we're
going to come late we're going to come
late in the next throughout the whole
experiment it went on for 17 weeks
I'm not going to tell you what happened
but what happened will educate us a lot
about how there are no easy answers in
making this world a better place to live
in that I think we can do it thank you
very much
I noticed I've gone on for a long time I
think I got too involved in that story
about the Tamil man but I'm happy to
take comments and suggestions come yes
why don't you stand up and turn around
because it first I think the first thing
you said is absolutely right notice I I
was what was happening is you're going
from the the tolerant non altruistic
part of the state space to the
altruistic and parochial part well why
not the tolerant and altruistic part is
there a scenario by which humans could
have become that way or maybe we are
more that way than I have stressed and
I'm just being pessimistic yes there is
a way here's how it could have happened
remember the weather data tremendous
environmental crises well now suppose
that you there's an environmental crisis
in the group with more altruist survive
the crisis and some other groups go
extinct not because of warfare but just
they couldn't cooperate when the when
they had to relocate that would have
vacated a site so this whole process
could work without the actual conflict
between groups rather it could be the
interactions of groups with this
extremely volatile natural environment
in which the cooperative groups would
win and they wouldn't have to be
parochial in order to win now so why
didn't I tell you that story I didn't
tell you that story because I think the
evidence is overwhelming that our
ancestors were warlike but it doesn't
mean that the warlike aspect explains
the whole thing it just means that's
what we have evidence for I don't know
how to test the more hopeful hypothesis
that it could have been really more
of a combination of these things leading
us in some ways to the other corner of
the state space in which we are
altruistic intolerant I think it's a
fantastic idea now about gender I gender
is important both in how you actually
construct these models but do the sexes
come out differently in terms of their
behavior I haven't modeled that in this
in any of these works except as I say I
did model the the rape scenario in the
conflict between groups the one thing I
think is quite remarkable and very
surprising is that in the experiments of
which there are a lot of different kinds
of experiments there baby maybe five or
six that are the you know that are done
everywhere and hundreds have been done
what I find remarkable is how similar
men and women are in these experiments
there are some systematic differences
about risk-taking for example but in
terms of things like how much you give
in the ultimatum game and cooperation
and so on the the differences are there
really are not systematic differences I
find that surprising because I was asked
last night do I think that people's
values and preferences are shaped by
their experiences and I said absolutely
and I claimed that that's something I
work on and believe in well what could
be a bigger difference than being a man
and a woman in the world in terms of the
likely kinds of experiences that you
have today of course but also in the
past so this is a big puzzle now maybe
we haven't studied enough what the
differences are maybe we haven't devised
experiments which would bring out the
differences though I suspect that the
hypothesis behind your question is right
and we haven't designed experiments to
particularly study that because the
experimenters so far have not been very
interested in it but there are that now
there's some very good experiment is
working on that will know more five
years from now yes
well I think the big lesson about ethnic
hostility is that hostilities which are
said to date from primordial times we're
often invented a decade ago and I mean
I'm not I'm not just talking i mean i
can tell you examples of this in which
you have societies members of people
living together intermarrying doing
common activities and then everything
blows up and every he said oh yeah but
it blows up but it was like simmering
below the surface beforehand well I mean
that we're not behavioral aspects of
that and the simmering below the surface
is what people who don't believe that
ethnic hostility and also ethnic
solidarity can be created in short
periods of time now I am extremely
optimistic in that respect because in
the short space of half a century racial
attitudes in America have radically
changed I put a picture of my hero Rosa
Parks on the screen but there are plenty
of other examples too prominent to name
tonight and so I there are lots of
examples of overcoming these things and
creating them and it's something on
which I'm you know we know a lot about
that people are extremely susceptible to
example in overcoming racial prejudices
and I mean even we even have sort of
neuro scientific evidence about fear of
different people p fear of other races
white people's fear of african-americans
for example but not Denzel Washington
right honestly that all you have to show
is a familiar face and then there's a
very very different reaction so I think
we're talking about something that can I
say it is skin deep
it's very powerful but it also is very
vulnerable to a systematic and dedicated
attempt to eradicate it and I think we
can do that yeah altruism came first the
I mean I it's unimaginable that when
humans began to target large game they
that they hadn't already begun some kind
of altruistic sentiments because it's
not that you can't catch a large game
without cooperating it's it it's not
there's no point in it unless you're a
large group that's figured out some way
to share so I suspected the rudiments of
cooperative activity among humans some
of which was caught was altruistic some
of which was self-interested I think
that's a probably a fairly old thing in
in humans now but if by religion you
mean beliefs about the supernatural and
the afterlife's and things like that of
course we don't know in the distant past
but we do know a fair amount about the
religious attitudes and things like
burial practices associated with belief
in the afterlife and so on among
foraging groups that are called
immediate return groups immediate return
foraging groups they don't save and they
don't they think very little about the
relationship between the present and the
future because they don't save they
typically dispose of the dead simply as
they would dispose of any carcass of any
other animal and they typically don't
have views about the afterlife now when
I say typically i mean the studies are
limited in a sense that there aren't
that many that have been studied but if
the immediate return type of foraging
group where our distant ancestors i
think it's quite unlikely that we had
anything we would call religion amongst
them but quite likely that there was
some kind of altruistic conscience among
these these people say Chris what do you
think about that
you
Thanks Yeah right there yeah there's
nothing in this story that has to be
genetic the reason why I did it as a
genetic story is because I think people
rightly say that the culturally it's
pretty easy to see how this could happen
culturally it's much harder to see how
it could happen genetically I i did a
genetic model it's actually quite a
rudimentary genetic model but there is
vertical transmission and there's
recombination and all the sort of
standard stuff I did that because it was
harder because I thought a fortiori I
could probably do the cultural now that
may be mistaken didn't think that I
think these things are all genetic which
I don't and that's why I emphasize so
strongly we really don't know about the
genetics of the behaviors I'm talking
about yes sir well that I don't know but
I can tell you this that if you make
your living as a hunter-gatherer you're
probably a very cognitively advanced and
creative person a lot more probably than
the typical individual citizen of a
modern economy the intellectual demands
of knowing a hundred or more animals and
100 or more plants and where to find
them when and that way of making your
living is cognitively extraordinarily
demanding those people must have been
curious about finding that information
and transmitting it so I would expect
that curiosity may have been around for
a long time because our foraging
ancestors really had a lot harder time
cognitively making a living than most
people do in America today yeah
that's a great question and I know it
comes from a profound knowledge of this
stuff because that's what you do I'm
studying a period during which we didn't
have governments it doesn't mean that we
didn't have hierarchy but we didn't have
governments meaning a specialized group
of people with coercive powers that's
almost all of human history and that's
the part that I'm studying now it's it's
it's very important that sometime
towards the end of my period maybe
10,000 years ago to 5,000 years ago you
begin to get societies that have varied
pronounced leadership centrality of
networks and so on often with political
influence and sometimes with or without
economic advantages that's really an
interesting thing sometimes you get
political power without the economic
privileges that would make a difference
here now I mean still in most of the
societies pre-state societies you do not
have the ability to coerce people to
fight a war in fact being able to coerce
people to fight a war is almost never
been the case you have to do sigh mean
is it warrior groups that are coerced or
obviously not very effective it's a
classic case of because then the field
you have a hard time disciplining people
so most of it most of warfare must have
been to some extent voluntarily engaged
in or otherwise the fighting force
wouldn't have worked now that doesn't
all of it I mean obviously there's a lot
of coercion within military
organizations right at the back
yeah they are and that's I mean I've at
the Institute for the past eight years
I've run a workshop called the
coevolution of individual behaviors and
institutions because I want to see how
these two different dynamic processes
work a lot of people are studying that
now it's true that in some fields people
study only the institutions and treat
them as if they were people in other
fields economics of being one you tend
to study individuals and you ignore the
institutions but clearly the way you ask
the question I mean that's the right
track and everyone is trying to figure
out what is a good way of combining an
individual dynamic with a group level
dynamic the group selection models that
I've put forward are one example but
there by four there's many many others
and obviously this raises huge questions
of scientific method should you start
with individuals and see if you can
create the institution's out of them or
should you start with the institutions
and see what kinds of people would
result if they were living under those
institutions and I answer you should do
both obviously and that's that's why we
have this rather demanding process of
trying to look at the way that the
aggregates and the individuals interact
but not in any simple way of moving by
addition from one to the other and and
that's why as I say theorem based
mathematical reasoning is very limited
in its capacity to do this what we
really lacked by the way is historical
sociological psychological insight the
problem is not really modeling it the
problem is getting good ideas last
question I'm very sorry I appreciate
very much these questions yeah well its
heart unit ah it's obviously hard to say
what what are causing these things
obviously religions have these various
aspects I mean there is an Old Testament
and a new testament aspect of all of
this there's the eye for the eye
and there's also turning the other cheek
now what's interesting is that contrary
to my model and contrary to my
simulations turning the other cheek has
actually gotten a pretty big success in
the world as an ideology as a as a
morality that people have followed and I
mean that's I mean we're really looking
at this contrast old and new Testament
kind of reasoning and I find it to tell
you the truth in the models that I do
turning the other cheek is often not a
good strategy and said I can explain why
reciprocity would become a very very
prominent trade among humans I can
understand that I can also but the
simply unconditional help everybody no
matter what they do to you strikes me is
something which really would have a
limited capacity to evolve however I
find it very inspiring and the people
that I see it like Mother Teresa thank
you very much for your comment I'll see
you tomorrow
you
