#1959 - David Buss

Joe Rogan (0:04)

The Joe Rogan Experience.

All right, David. Well, thank you very much for being here, man. Appreciate it.

David Buss (0:15)

Thank you. I'm delighted to be here, and it's a great honor to be here talking to you, man.

Joe Rogan (0:19)

Well, it's very nice to meet you with Jordan. He speaks so highly of you, and we had such a fun conversation at dinner that I said, well, we definitely should do this publicly.

David Buss (0:28)

Yeah, yeah, it's terrific. And I've been catching up on your podcast.

You have so many that it's nearly impossible, but I watched the recent one you did with Jordan when he was here in Austin, and also the one that you did with Russell Brand. And I was on his podcast, and I was just saying, man, he talks so fast.

Joe Rogan (0:50)

I know.

David Buss (0:51)

That it's like, glad you were kind of a calming influence, just slowed him down a little bit.

Joe Rogan (0:56)

And he's sober.

The guy's completely clean and sober. You would imagine that he was definitely on Adderall or something.

David Buss (1:02)

Yeah. That's what I was thinking. Maybe when he was on Heroine, maybe it's calmed him down a little bit or slowed him down.

Joe Rogan (1:09)

Maybe. Yeah, maybe that's why he was interested in that stuff.

So what we started talking about was your life's work, which was your life's work is human mating strategies.

David Buss (1:21)

Yes.

Joe Rogan (1:22)

As a psychologist, like why, first of all, why was that so appealing to you? Why did you choose that as a field of study?

David Buss (1:28)

Yeah, well, it wasn't a field of study when I did choose it, and it wasn't like I had a plan going in, but a little bit of backstory on this is, I'm a psychologist by training, so trained at UC Berkeley, PhD, and there was nothing of this sort going on there or no research, but I started reading because I have fairly broad interests. I started reading in different areas, like evolutionary biology, and I was reading in evolutionary biology. I came across these amazing theories of evolution, like Hamilton's theory of inclusive fitness, Triever's theory of parental investment, of course, Darwin's theory of sexual selection. That's really the one that blew me away, Darwin's theory of sexual selection.

And then I realized, man, these theories have so much applicability to humans, but nobody is studying them.

And they lead to, at least the then theories, lead to some pretty clear predictions that could be tested. And so I was trained as an empirical scientist where, you know, you take the hypotheses, generate predictions, do the studies, and if the studies, if the empirical findings support the predictions, then you say, okay, this looks promising, you know, we'll go further.

And so I did some initial studies of human mate preferences. So one of the core things, maybe to back up just a second, if I could, Darwin's Theory of Sexual Selection. So this is Darwin, 1871

And it's one of the most brilliant and then unrecognized evolutionary theories in existence. So most people, when they think about evolution, they think about survival of the fittest, you know, nature, red in tooth and claw, you know. And of course, that's really what Darwin's first book on the origin of species was all about, survival, adaptations to survival. And he came up with this brilliant phrase called the hostile forces of nature and that organisms have these adaptations to deal with these hostile forces of nature in order to survive. So there were basically threats from the environment, things like you fall off a cliff, you drown in the ocean, food shortages, threats from predators, you know, the lions and tigers and bears, threats from parasites that can eat you from within. And so that's really what his first book was all about. And so people equated natural selection with survival selection, but there were in fact phenomena that Darwin could not explain on this theory. And he was very troubled by him. He noticed that something that all scientists do, scientists develop funds for their pet hypotheses, right? Their pet theories. And so, but he noticed that he had a tendency to forget facts that were inconsistent with his theory of natural selection.

And so he forced himself to write them down in a separate notebook because he didn't want to forget them. He was, you know, so one was like the brilliant plumage of peacocks. And he asked, how could this weird structure possibly lead to a survival advantage? It's like, first of all, metabolically expensive, and it's like a neon sign to predators advertising fast food. How could this weird structure possibly have evolved? He even said in his notebook that the sight of a peacock gives me nightmares. He couldn't explain it on his theory of natural selection. And he also noticed other phenomena, sexual dimorphism, differences in the size, shape, morphology of males and females of the same species. And the reason this troubled him was because he thought, well, both sexes face the same survival problems, right? Both sexes have to eat. Both sexes have to fend off predators. Both sexes have to fend off parasites. So why would they differ in morphology, size, strength, et cetera? And moreover, why would different species vary so dramatically? So you have like elephant seals, for example. Males are four times the size of females. Chimpanzees, less so, twice the size of females. Humans, it's complicated because it depends on which aspect of morphology you're talking about. So men are only, say, 10%, 11% taller than women. But things like upper body strength, it's like monumentally powerful sex differences. And so all this is a long-winded way of saying that in response to these anomalies, things like the brilliant plumage of peacocks, the elaborate bird song, and so forth, and the sex differences, he came up with the theory of sexual selection. And sexual selection deals not with the evolution of characteristics that lead to survival advantage, but rather those characteristics that lead to a mating advantage. And he identified two causal pathways.