The Incredible Evolution Of Human Violence - Dr Richard Wrangham - #594

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hello everybody, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Dr. Richard Wrangham. He's an anthropologist and primatologist, a professor of biological anthropology at Harvard University and an author, whose research focuses on ape behavior, human evolution, violence and cooking. Humans have the capacity for incredible benevolence and kindness, but are also able to execute other members of our species with a uniquely effective ruthlessness. Why would evolution give us such differing capacities to chimps and apes? And what can this tell us about our nature? Expect to learn the fascinating evolutionary story of human aggression through the ages, how humans actually selectively bred ourselves to become less aggressive, how our capacity for violence informed the evolution of morality, the true reason for why humans might have a sense of right and wrong, what would have happened to a hyper-aggressive male ancestrally, and much more. This is a very, very cool conversation. Richard's work is phenomenal. He literally was one of the first assistants that went out to work with Jane Goodall, who was studying chimp behavior in the wild 40, 50 years ago, maybe even longer than that. He is super legit, really, really wonderful storyteller. And I mean, some of the insights from this are, they really upend a lot of what I assumed and thought that I knew about human nature. So yeah, get ready for this one. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Dr. Richard Wrangham.
Is it right to say that humans are an aggressive species, do you think?

**Richard Wrangham** (1:59)
Well, yes, in some ways, we are incredibly aggressive because we are responsible for more deaths of members of our own species than is typical of other animals. And yet at the same time, of course, the great paradox about us is that in some ways, we're just incredibly nice and tolerant and friendly and unaggressive. And for years, we grappled with how to resolve these two contrary sides of our personality. But we cannot deny that part of us is a really aggressive streak. And we're seeing it at the moment in wars that occur around the world. And those, of course, have gone on throughout history.

**Chris Williamson** (2:41)
What does it suggest about human nature or what our role is, or what would be adaptive for us, that we seem to be very effective at the barbell ends of aggression?

**Richard Wrangham** (2:56)
Well, you know, one of the great questions about human nature for two or three hundred years has been, are we biologically predisposed to be aggressive, or are we biologically predisposed to be tolerant? Are we an inherently aggressive species that is tamed by society? Or are we an inherently tolerant, unaggressive species that is made aggressive by society? And, you know, my view, and I think the increasing view, is that that question is misconceived, you know, because the answer is that we're both or neither, if you like. That whether or not you look at our tremendous capacity and even interest in committing aggression, or whether you look at our tolerant aversion to aggression, both of them are part of our biology. So I think that what we're learning about ourselves is that we have to recognize that we are a mixture. And society is not responsible either for taming us or for making us the sometimes horrible species that we sometimes are. You know, this is us. Take us all even.

**Chris Williamson** (4:20)
Who were the two philosophers that had this big push? Was one, it wasn't Foucault, who was the one, who was the French guy? Went and lived in the woods.

**Richard Wrangham** (4:28)
The French guy was Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

**Chris Williamson** (4:30)
That was it, sounds like Foucault, yeah.

**Richard Wrangham** (4:32)
Yeah, writing just before the French Revolution, at the end of the 18th century.
Very ironic really, because he has become associated with the notion that we are inherently non-violent. Of course, everyone had such high hopes for the French Revolution. Then this wonderful, charitable, exotic new dawn of humanity turns into the guillotine, and then Napoleon, and so on. The disaster that befell the growing sense of civilization in Europe at that time. Then the other great philosopher, Rousseau is associated with the notion that humans are inherently unaggressive, made aggressive by society. Then the opposite side was Thomas Hobbes, who was living in the time of the English Civil War in the second half of the 17th century. He was impressed by the fact that you really had to lock your door, and you had to worry about who your neighbors were, because they might come and kill you. And, you know, the Civil War was a terrible thing. And so he was associated with the notion that there is something just inherently competitive, cruel, violent about humans, and that what you need to be able to control them is a superior body, an ultimate authority. He called it a leviathan. We would now think about it as the state. You know, at that time, it might have been the monarch to keep everybody under control. And you can look at both of these great philosophers who have been representing these two opposing views, superficially opposing views, and think that in many ways, both of them were right. You know, they had a lot to them. And that's why people have sort of supported one or the other over these years.