Home 🏠 🔎 Search


Bad Transcripts
for the
Beat Your Genes Podcast & More

Episode 17: Caller asks Dr Lisle about polyamory
an auto-generated transcript


To get a shareable link to a certain place in the audio,
hover your mouse over the relevent text,
right click, and "copy link address"
(mobile: long press & copy link address)
 


today we have a very very interesting episode we have a caller by the name Nigel and he's going to be he has some questions and he wants to talk to dr. Lyle on air and we're thinking it might be the benefit to the benefit of the listeners using this type of the theories that we've been talking about the last few months and see if it has any practical applications and what's what's that's all about so we want to welcome Nigel on the radio Nigel how you doing today doing well thank you it's a beautiful day here in Los Angeles just been down to the Santa Monica Pier so here's what thanks one who's go and dr. dr. Lyle how you doing today great great glad to be excellence good so I'm just going to let you guys take it away and and we'll listen it okay very good hey Nigel how you doing doing well thanks dr. Louis another says a lovely Sunday even how about yourself terrific terrific yeah I'm not down there by the beach so I'm in the San Francisco Bay Area so you got us you got a little better situation there I guess so yes all right well so you I guess you've listened to the show a little bit and have some interest in US and yeah I guess yeah I just guess I'd begin by just asking you sort of you know what some some questions you have are or what any any challenges that you're dealing with that you'd be just sort of interested in talking about or maybe trying to get a little bit of assistance with yeah I and I have discussed various things in terms of dating in terms of an understand you're an evolutionary psychologist is that a correct term yes yeah and really hmm I've been sort of for most of my life I was sort of a serial monogamist I always thought there were two options open up to it you either had deep meaningful monogamous sex or you had casual meaningless sex and then they really appeal to this always used to say oh I must be a monogamous sort of guy I realized there were any other rock now from the menial position do you feel like there is a spectrum would you think that the Germany speak in human beings in one way or the other oh actually human beings aren't one way or the other relationships are sort of one or the other so the any normal human being has within them the the ability to to be shifting their mating strategy so a male that may be and yet even even within that context a given a given man maybe more actually most men are actually like you so most men are would prefer to have a monogamous relationship where it felt very deep and meaningful where the person really cared about you and you care about them so they that that is actually the the worldwide preference inside of our species however kinetically hide it yes absolutely so it's going to turn out though that there's a that there sits in inside it's kind of like let's suppose you have a a couple of different CD players in your car CD player so you have one of them that is your favorite but you have another one that you also like okay good so so it's going to turn out that I actually have a name for this and I call it wife wife wife chippy okay so that the typical male would if he's really into his wife we just didn't have sex with his wife three times and then had sex with somebody chippy a little hot little should be on the side once so he could you know so that's sort of what's sitting inside the average males psychology typically and so both strategies reside inside of essentially all males now some males are going to be more what we're going to call para bond dominant in other words they're just they're just more into pair bonding than they are into couch and this would be all things being equal you wouldn't depend upon their personal life circumstances so you will find I don't know the facts but for example you could have a guy like Sean Connery who could immediately play played the field with three different females a day but it really wasn't in it okay in other words a parent apparently this was not Sean Connery sexual psychology he was para bond dominant the on the other hand you you might have a aa Magic Johnson you know that theoretically was slept with six thousand women over ten years that's and one who is casual mating strategy dominant but Magic Johnson also was very attached of a woman he eventually married and cookie and so in other words they'd cat the the the monogamous pole still in even a casual meeting heavy mail but so each of us has within us those two two strategies and they tend to get played out depending upon circumstances so yeah you don't see where the middle ground because I'm of the belief that you should be able to have eat meaningful sexual connections with more than one person at the same time so that amazing strategy or not yeah I don't think that's a strategy that flies and let me tell you what I mean the yeah yeah I don't think so I mean I there may be a few rare individuals out there that they could sort of pull that strategy off but let me tell you what you mean when you say deep meaningful connection deep meaningful connection to the female brain means that you are going to go all-in with your resources directing them at me and my offspring okay that's what that means to the female so therefore by definition males cannot be having deep meaningful relationships with multiple females not if they're telling the truth well I mean this counts the whole notion of polygamy when it comes to I mean another while we see having an alpha male and many females is because we like to see we've evolved from chimps or somewhat gorillas as well that have those sort of structures in place do you think we're close at the gym or do you think we're closer to bonobos we're actually eons away from both of them you're right we're nowhere and we're nowhere near either one of those species so we are we are millions of years away from them so we're we're more alike the difference between dogs and cats okay so you can't you can't be thinking you know this is sort of physical anthropology 101 is that we we've learned that there's that this species is you you know the species species is out incredibly unique and so if you want to try to understand the sexual psychology of our species you have to examine a lot of different factors okay and so we are clearly a species where we're male provisioning of females and their offspring is a very very big deal okay and so you cannot a male cannot even in stone age environments it is exceedingly difficult for males to be holding down to relationships at the same time and so the they can and an alpha male with with a lot of with a lot of push you know can sort of pull that sort of thing off and usually does for periods of time but a typical male in other words out of 20 males very few of them will ever pull off such a thing well I mean let me ask you this could you know envision an environment where there were a number of males and a number of females and all the resources that you're talking about was shared equally among the females and all the sex was also shared equally among all the females so an egalitarian tribe so to speak which I think maybe they might have mentioned sexist Orrantia before which is a book I've read and and could we not have evolved from that do we have to evolve from these pair-bonded units no let me confuse in here okay so the the answer to your question about whether or not you could have this sort of egalitarian system the answer is now so there never was any sort of you Gallacher caring system and there is not an egalitarian system and even in other animals so what's going to happen is that through different mechanisms animals exercise mating choice and so it's going to turn out that in humans the the females and actually in all in all species the females are generally extremely discriminating about which mates which males they mate well they're they're designed by nature to be this way because they they hold very valuable reproductive resources particularly eggs in a womb and the machinery to actually reproduce another entity and so a female is the female eggs are very valuable and as a result it would it would be anti evolutionarily advantageous to squander those valuable resources indiscriminately so females do not do that so females actually are exquisitely discerning and discriminating about which males they mate with so the the so right away we got a problem because if there's ten females around in as little Eagle eteri in society where supposedly all the resources are being shared and there's trails trust trust me the female without very strong preferences about which males they want to screw and which ones they don't want to score how would they decide that if all if all the resources were Stanley how would they decide which male to sleep they would decide on physical characteristics and mental characteristics that were associated with low mutation loads so the the females are designed by nature to try to pick out differences in males and gene quality so for example it turns out that if you look at males at different deciles of physical attractiveness just by photography so you have failed it is true truly a one and then another one that's a two and another one that's a 5 etc if you actually if you actually then have those guys ejaculated to a jar and then you observed their sperm motility you will find that the handsomest men have the best sperm motility and the least calves and then have the worst sponsor motility so you know what I am your sperm motility changes as you grow older yeah I know and so that one case does that mean so you know sorry yeah you're uglier the older you get Doug Leier you get and the females are picking that up so the females yeah and it's actually designed by nature to actually calibrate your gene quality by looking at your appearance okay and that's how that's how we calibrate their gene quality by looking at their occurrence so we are we're looking at all of their physical characteristics and that's just getting started because in in our species not only do we look at physical characteristics which is typical in the animal kingdom of animals being unbelievably discriminating about the other animals looks okay so human beings share that characteristic with animals that we are very very discriminating about the looks of our potential mates the eyes but not only not only that the there is no egalitarian communist Wonderland anywhere in human nature then turns out that what's that one about anything no no this is your you know the the bonobos live in an interesting little mating situation that they particularly have but remember they have nothing to do with humans they're not wait a second oh but you have drawn parallels between humans and animals enduring characteristics but you know in other one artistics right right right because we're just I'm just trying to explain to you that that in in our species males provision females this is and this is actually a very typical process that you will see in any speed he's whether it's going to be what we call pair-bonding so it's going to turn out that in in 97% million species including bonobos there's no pair-bond so they don't they don't have that character essentially thanks Mei monogamy no no they don't so they don't have a mere bonding system in that species okay so in humans and humans and there are about 100 million species that have a that have a psychological characteristic that we're going to call care bond ok this is where this is where males basically get themselves locked in on female and extremely interested in her and then when she gets pregnant they stick around in provision offspring ok that doesn't happen in the bonobos and it doesn't happen in the channels so this is not characteristic of these relatively close relatives of humans so the that sort of mating strategy is is known even in fairly close species to literally a few genes can trip the difference between how species winds up going about its business so for example in one kind of a prairie Bowl they are very promiscuous but that's a promiscuous mating strategy like the bonobo but then a very very close closely related species that you might have difficulty telling the difference between the two species they behave completely differently and and the there the whole species is organized around an urban planning strategy so humans are are heavily Terrebonne strategy strategic and so therefore the females are not not just discriminating about the male's about their looks but they are also very discriminating and towards the male is about their ability to protect and provide resources and so that's why there's there's never been some egalitarian system where the chicks didn't care about how well the boys could hunt okay you know in humans in humans the women are looking at the men they're looking at the physical characteristics trying to determine how many essentially how mistakes there are how many mistakes there are in their genetic code and the least mistakes they have in the code the handsomer the women find them and that's why yeah that's why the women have high agreement as who's attractive that's why we're never going to have our little mating system where we've got 10 men and 10 women and everybody shares equally never going to happen all the women are going to want to be mating with the guys that are the most attractive and all of the guys are going to be wanting to make with the women that is most attractive and so there's going to be tremendous conflict of interest in those individuals and that's why that's why humans don't do that well anything else then um yeah there are so another thing is the human beings don't naturally do for example I don't think we're naturally philanthropic we're naturally you know we just we are usually yes we are yes we aren't actually you're mr. P yes yes we are so if we are if we are naturally philanthropic why don't get we want to share sex in the same way that we would share resources because the the reasons for that well you could in principle but it wouldn't be it would be being it would be the same process as when people share other resources so when we when you share resources the reason there are reasons why people share resources and one of the main reasons they share resources is to demonstrate their ability to waste the resources and the reason why they are are motivated to waste resources is to demonstrate that their gene quality is so much better than their competitors that they have plenty of other resources for them their own consumption and that they literally are so outstanding and getting them sources that they can afford to waste them okay so this is this is actually a sexual advertisement strategy in humans and so the said that you wouldn't be sharing sexual resources that isn't what you would be doing and so that's that's not something that people do alright I suppose the other way looking at looking it this way it kind of makes sexing no rather unromantic and and rather we're sort of a slave to the way that we're hardwired genetically which I don't know what maybe them various away whether we are but homosexuality is has been prevalent throughout all of humankind essentially what in fine how much sexuality homosexuality yes has been right present within humans other since written times right that doesn't seem to fit with in any kind of traditional mating strategy right what do you think from evolutionary psychologists standpoint well we've done with people at home essential right actually let me explain what happened the homosexuality appears to be an anomaly with respect to understanding that the entire purpose of life is to reproduce genes so ok essentially there was two possibilities in in staring down this anomaly of homosexuality there was essentially two possible roads that one could take to try to figure out why it exists the first road the the first road would be that this is simply some kind of a mistake okay so in essence to try if you think about when animals mate it's it's extremely sophisticated how they have to have the ability to recognize their own species and then they have to recognize the opposite sex of the species and they have to have a bunch of feelings and behaviors associated with trying to procure a mate and so they have what we're going to call mating search images and those images are largely visual but they could also be olfactory they can also be tactile in other words there's it can also be auditory whether words animals make certain sounds that are very sexually attractive and that lines up being how it is that mating is decided that's going to be true in whales and certain frogs and birds and so on so in but the question is how how would it be possible to to have a homosexual animal be born and the gantt one answer would be it's a mistake there's a loose wire in a very complicated system and once in a while a wire gets loose and that's just how it happens now that happens all the time by the way there's all kinds of little mistakes all over the genetic code so you know somebody somebody's has some little part parcel of their body or mind it doesn't work very well like for example as burgers okay so you have all kinds of little circuits that could go haywire and possibly homosexuality was a little haywire circuit now of course that doesn't that doesn't fly very well with homosexual community but science doesn't really care about anybody's feelings they care about the truth so that was one possibility the other possibility was that homosexuality was actually some kind of adaptive mechanism and so for example maybe it was true that for example men that were homosexual would be particularly helpful to their nieces and nephews and maybe if they were so helpful to their nieces and nephews that maybe they essentially sacrifice their own mating life and then provisioned you know their sisters and brothers offspring and maybe that gave a statistical advantage so maybe there was some essentially advantage biological to this characteristic now it turns out that the answer is sort of both so we've now figured out the reason for homosexuality and I'll explain it to you so that the Enigma of homosexuality is that that it could actually that it reduces the genetic success of the individual that happens to be homosexual so the question is is that of course one up one eye a third possibility that existed that we have dismissed was the idea that homosexuality could be the result of some bizarre developmental assault maybe you got you got felt up my Uncle Louie and you liked it so much that you came gay as a result of this okay now that turns out to be utterly and completely untrue so you cannot change people's sexuality by virtue of their experiences so these are mating search images that are embedded into their nervous system at birth actually in utero now yes so here's the deal so it turns out that that one day an evolutionary psychologist stared at this problem and came up with a solution and the solution is that if homosexuality is being caused by a genetic genetic mutation that results in reduced genes success for the individual that is holding that gene then to somewhere else in the gene pool where he's related it may be causing a increase in genetic success so it turns out that the most likely way to increase reproductive success to increase sexual attractiveness so it turns out that that following this logic the very same kinds of genes that cause people to be homosexual are the same kind of genes to cause women to be effeminate so homosexuality is the is the estrogen izing of the brain and if the brain of a male becomes is sufficiently estrogens in utero then the mating search image will tip over and they will wind up with effectively the females mating search image which is a male so that male will wind up being attracted to males instead of attracted to females and so it turns out that a gene that would cause a hyper loading of estrogen is a gene that would very every once in a while tip avoid a male child into being a homosexual now it turns out that if we then look in that gene pool and we find his sisters and we look at his sisters we should see that his sisters are hyper estrogen eyes because they're carrying the same gene and so we know that hyper estrogen eyes females are more sexually attractive than average females so it should be the case and if you're more sexually attractive than you make more advantageous Lee with fancier mates and your children have better opportunities so it's going to turn out that more attractive women and wind up with more successful children they wind up with more branch children on average so the question was then scientifically if you were to look at a hundred sisters of gay males they shouldn't actually more sexually attractive than 100 sisters of straight males and that turns out to be scientifically verifiable okay now so that that's how that works well fascinating yes so there you go so I'm trying to think I was thinking about circling back around you had some other question it was still a little bit open oh I think the question was are we sort of slaves to the the genetic code or can we sort of break out of these things and the answer is that we we are we are slaves to the genetic code so the you're designed by nature to to actually like whether or not you want to have children or not you you are designed with hardwired systems to for example if you're a male and you're heterosexual you're designed by nature to be able to analyze the individual differences in females for their sexual attractiveness so you cannot like hypnotize yourself out of that so today it would be a great benefit to human happiness if the males in the world could not care about the fact that women are fat okay it would be tremendously valuable and the reason is is that people are reading such such amount of rich food and with such sedentary lifestyles that the average female is gains 40 pounds in fat between her sixteenth birthday and her 36th birthday so the average 36 year old female in the United States is 40 pounds overweight now the problem with this is that the male is designed by nature to look at an expanded waistline and and infer that the woman is pregnant and if a woman is pregnant it's not worth seeking her out as a sexual partner so when when and are designed by nature to find overly heavy women sexually uninteresting we cannot hypnotize men out of this they are hardwired by nature and they will continue to wind up pursuing women who have a shape that indicates that the Fertile so the same is true with female psychology looking at males the female is going to look at males not only for the physical characteristics but their psychological characteristics and their in their willingness and toughness and aggressiveness and intelligence with respect to getting resources and then they're also going to be wanting those males to signal to them that they are the particular special female for whom the male wants to signal and give all of his resources to so the female seeks what we're going to call love from the male because she's designed by nature to to be trying to reproduce her DNA in an environment of where she needs her sources and therefore she needs protection and provision and she was designed by nature to seek that out of a highly interested mate so we cannot escape these these strategies were stuck in these timeless timeless card games is what's going on measured so when a lot of people who you know a guy who is not necessarily considered attractive he's going to be still be attracted to the most attractive girls right yes correct but then when he realizes oh I can't get one of those because I'm not sure enough I mean you know he gets to somebody there is of his attractiveness level then right it is there some kind of psychology going on where he has to convince himself that he's happy and he's content and he's settling or could clearly truly feel that this this woman is the most beautiful than in the world well he wouldn't feel this most beautiful woman in the world but he could be what goes on here is the following the this is going to be what we're going to call calibration so mercifully our psychology is designed by nature to to go through a process that we're going to call calibration and it's critical for the organism to calibrate its relative competitive strengths and weaknesses so that it does not waste its life trying to search for something that it can't attain so let me give you an example so the average eighth-grade boy in the United States 85% of eighth-grade boys believe that they're going to be professional athletes it turns out that that one in 10,000 will become a professional athlete now as they go through high school a bunch of them are going to start to see the light and so they will go through a process where they'll have some disappointing instances where they find out that there's no way this is going to happen and this is going to get more and more brutal as you get all the way to number 9,998 who he is almost good enough to be a professional athlete he's one little lucky breakaway but he's not quite good enough okay so he's a he's a one in five thousand athlete he's not a one in 10,000 athlete and though the so there's going to be increasing sort of little heartbreaks along the way the but then what happens is so the individual who is is almost good enough to be a professional athlete we can see that since he doesn't know that he's not quite good enough for a long time he will continue to pursue and invest this in this process for many many years because he believes that he's likely to get there and in fact he's so close that he can't tell okay and so but one day he will finally buy his 26th birthday he'll give up and he'll realize it looks like I'm just not going to make it okay and now he'll start to figure out how to pursue his life's goals and dreams through some other mechanism so you're this is exactly what happens in the midden game for humans now none of these like I I believed that I was going to be a professional athlete when I was in the eighth grade and yet it became increasingly obvious by the time I was a senior in high school that that wasn't going to happen and therefore I didn't even really think about it very much okay so the so what happens is that the mind is designed by nature to try to utilize your time and energy which is the two constraining resources that you have and as a left form that you're the mind is designed by nature to try to assist you in figuring out where you should be placing your resources and so by 12th grade I realized that my relative strengths was my intelligence not my athleticism okay and so as a result and it also wasn't some stellar Hollywood looks so I realized that my best move to distinguish myself from Sexual competitors was going to be with the mind not with the looks and not with the athleticism and so as a result also what's going to happen so in that same way people are constantly calibrating where they are and so a guy who's a five of course he would love to be mated with and have a ten that's in love with them okay but the problem is is that that is not a possibility and so as a result it's not even possible that he's going to get a nudge okay now the the band width of acceptance possibility is pretty wide in other words if he's japaese Phil Collins you know I'm saying he may wind up with a ten but that's because he is a one-in-a-million artist and so some 10 somewhere may actually be able to choke down his books and be very attracted him but most of the time we're gonna wind up with people within 20 percentile of our attractiveness and so the male it was a five is very likely they're going to wind up with a six now he's designed by nature to be to be to be willingly sexually attractive to a six if that's the best he can get okay and so the nature doesn't say well he'll there's tens out there that are far more reproductively available you would have much fancier grandchildren who would be much more sexually successful than the children that you're going to have if you mate with this girl okay but the problem is there ain't any tens that are willing to mate with them so as a result nature again like there's no professional athlete jobs for me graduating from high school you you take the avenues that you have available to you and you do the best you can for hmm and that's how that's how it works interesting let me ask you this um yeah I did biology when I was at university and one of the things I was studying was a hybrid vigor which is where if you cross like a white rose with a red rose the pink rose yes stronger than either of the oranges now there's the same thing work with humans so if someone of one race has a child with another race is there kid generally speaking automatically going to be a better genetic code no this is uh it's a misunderstanding right yeah this is a misunderstanding that the genetic differences in races are a big deal and they're not it's going to turn out that there's there's more far more genetic diversity in a small little you know in a little town in in Ireland than there is in the genetic diversity between races so it's going to turn out that the problem of of optimizing sexual recombination to try to get good offspring is going to take place not between races but it's going to take place by sniffing people's smell and it's going to be also observing little funny little characteristics about them and trying to put together an optimum blend so for example females olfactory system is very very sensitive to male scent and the reason that's true is that we give off evidence chemical evidence of our the nature of our immune system in its natural chemistry and so you're actually designed by nature to seek out people whose immune chemistry is very very different from your own and and the reason for that is that you actually want your children to have a lot of different tools than you had because you you want them to be this along biological story why this is true I'm not going to like explain it in detail for you but there's a it can be explained in in a book called the Red Queen by Matt Ridley okay there's a there's a way there's a there's a deep important biological reason immunologically why you want to be doing exactly what you just talked about with crossing of the roses so you want to actually cross you have to understand that people in the natural history had no access to people of different races that was important okay so the so it's going to turn out that we're designed by nature to be attracted to people who have these subtle differences that were designed by nature to pick up that would make very very good combinations this is why people are generally varied I mean this is a reason why you're very not attracted to your brothers and sisters is because their smell actually indicates that they have very similar genes with respect to your immune complexes and from the female standpoint particularly females netizens are actually twice as acute as males they are much much more sensitive to smell than males are and the reason for this is because they need to make sure that they're not impregnated by somebody as a historian complex that is not a good match for their own okay a male at the impregnates of female and it turns out that the kids are dead oh well okay it's not nearly the investment for them so males don't have that kind of sense acuity towards the females smell the females are very picky about the smell of their mates and and so and it's because literally it's a driving force of what we're going to call chemistry because they're actually trying to take a good immune combination so is there any variation in terms of people being attracted to people of their own race versus somebody else's race that it's going to tend to be the case that people are going to be generally most attracted to their own race but there are a tremendous amount of individual exceptions there and we're not we're not sure what drives that but probably something that drives that is a personality characteristic that we're going to call openness to experience so people have six major dimensions on which they are very very where human personality varies dramatically and and one of them is openness to experience so the you can imagine that the evolutionary reasons for this are are likely to be as follows so suppose that you are a rabbit that lives in an area where the optimum distance that you should ever go from the rabbit hole would be a hundred feet okay and but suppose that your your as a rabbit you're alone you have a little less anxiety than the average rabbit so you go 110 feet okay well if you do that all other things being equal athleticism and luck you're a little more likely to get eaten by predators than the guy that only goes 100 feet so that the gene that would cause you to be a little more adventurous would be a little less likely to be in the gene pool and then you think about a rabbit that would go out 150 P he'd be less likely and then a guy that would go 200 feet he would be less likely meanwhile the optimal distance to go for the food and and mating search is 100 feet so then think of a rabbit who's so anxious that he only goes 100 feet so he doesn't find optimal mates and food so he's not taking enough risk okay so if you could imagine that this these individual differences would fall in a beautiful bell curve so if you looked at a thousand rabbits and how far that they would go from from the the hole you would find the mean would be a hundred feet and then there would be a bell curve based on that so this is God I forget we're quite oh this is personality so openness to experience is going to be this this characteristic and in humans that characteristic beautifully falls on a bell curve just as we would expect and it's going to have to do with how adventurous people are and therefore you know if you're adventurous you sometimes are able to grab a hold of the spectacular resources that you're more careful comrades aren't going to get so that gene will survive that it will survive in lower probabilities and so therefore it's going to have less than the bell curve so we're going to find I believe I would be very surprised if we didn't that people that are attracted to mates a very different-looking races are likely to be people that are more open to experience that that's probably what's driving that all right yeah that's connecting fascinating yes so there are yeah yes there's uh there's there's a great deal more to learn you know the main about how all this all this works but thousand thousands of little pieces of the puzzle have actually been put together already right all right yeah um-hmm do you think that like I need to find a life mate to be happy or not do you think that that the ultimate goal for us as human beings now that we've obviously left evolution behind and that number of thousands however many tens of thousands of years ago right what do you think we get a different way well we're not suppose that I'm torn by our genetic hardwiring yeah you you're you're going to be you're gonna seek all the values that are designed inside your genetic hardwiring so and you're you you you're not going to stop that the I can't remember oh yeah you talked about the ultimate goal for people the oh yeah there is no effectively ultimate goal for people terms of their life satisfaction they were simply designed by nature to do a whole bunch of different things that lead to genetic success and those things tend to be very pleasant so your your happiness is going to be at any given moment it's going to be dictated by what the the evidence from your environment is telling you about how well you're doing at these very basic you know fundamental biologically driven goals of life so are you valued by the tribe or you found sexually attracted by people that you find sexually attractive you know these these are are you healthy and fit is there plenty of food is you feel safe from predators these are the things that cause humans to be happy and so the so there's you could build a chart what I call a taxonomy of happiness and it's going to turn out that it's fairly finite that there's going to be certain kinds of environmental cues and interchanges that are going to cause human happiness now one of those mechanisms is going to be to be found sexually attractive and interpersonally totally attractive and extremely valuable by somebody that you find the sample so there's going to be a signaling of the scheme between two people where they basically say I've looked at a lot of other options I have I have looked at you know I've looked over the world pretty carefully you are I believe an outstanding trade for me okay and this is what love is it's this feeling of this is an outstanding trade this person is super valuable these the resources that they they carry within them mental and physical are are not going to be easy for me to replace and may not be replaceable so then you have a response to this that we're going to call love and this is a this is uh probably the most exquisite feeling you know that a person can have as you would make sense in other words it's basically saying you just got a screaming genetic deal and we are going to reproduce the DNA your DNA you get to mold your DNA with that outstanding specimen forever okay and that any offspring that comes in other words you guys are making a timeless deal that is meant to go across biological time together it's it's the most flattering possible interchange that a human being can ever have okay now so you would say can you be happy without it of course you can because the moods of happiness are this is like saying you know root beer floats or my favorite food can I ever enjoy a meal if I don't have a root beer float the answer is absolutely could I enjoy my gustatory life if I never had a loot bag full of course I could I get a great great enjoyment could I enjoy it to the maximum that it is possible to enjoy it no I cannot okay you cannot because you have within you the capacity to have the greatest possible enjoyment from a root beer float so therefore if the root beer FLOTUS off the table you are missing the experience that is possible to you so the same way that people can be very happy alone but they are not as happy as they had the potential to be so this is this is the the it seems like the holy grail of human life is to find the the outstanding partner that you want to go through this life with and it's pretty damn close to the holy grail okay it's going to turn out that the scientific evidence tells us that the that that is the single most important factor in predicting somebody's happiness you know this is no shock okay hmm actually it turns out that if you if you do a split half on peoples age you will find that people up to middle age the most important thing that predicts their happiness is whether or not they're happy in a romantic relationship in the end the end of their life it turns out that the most important thing that predicts their happiness is their health okay so this makes sense because as you age health starts to become very painful okay because people start to fall apart and so they literally feel really bad physically very often and so that winds up statistically since so many people in the data pool are doing so much suffering behind their physical health the people that are not suffering or substantially happier than the people that are not that are that are suffering and so it lives that correlation coefficient okay but but as because but that's sort of an anomaly that doesn't have anything to do with human evolution the we see the most important value in human evolution we could see it right in the data and the data is have you found an outstanding partner that you feel like it's a screaming deal flu to you that you're really happy about the people that have are are on average and happiest people in the world and that's why that's why all the music and all the stories are all directed towards that problem all right he's not problematic within society that that's only nowadays tough to maintain that sort of a relation shit well here's the problem there's there's many problems with this Nigel but one of them is the following problem that the sort of the human being was by no means designed to have these relationships go on for 10 years they yes so the the chip we are using a chip inside the mechanism is probably built for more like five years so it's so it's essentially that's not saying that if you have a less chip that's been going on for 15 years that you're lying to yourself that's not true but what I'm saying is is that the the mechanisms the way they were built the discriminating mechanisms that cause you to have the excitement and and profound happiness that you found someone outstanding that only results from a process of the finest discrimination it's like this is the really outstanding one that I got and I'm really flattered and I'm really happy now mmm-hmm you're not designed really search your whole life and never find that and not never have that experience you're actually design with an excitement chip the in order to essentially what it does is the following what you do is you look over your shoulder at your last couple three or four years and you you you essentially sift through the options the mating options that you had and if you sit through those mating options and you can think you think essentially about what kind of trades were available for you and then you come upon someone who is significantly better than any of those trades it's very like that what you will now find is you'll have love circuits firing up goals okay so the love love mechanism is a mechanism of comparative this with respect to quality exactly why someone takes a spoonful of one dessert and a spoonful of the other dessert and the other one they say oh my god I love this now the first one is okay but I love this you actually use the same word okay so the word love is the word we used signal to each other that we value something very very highly you know I mean I love this music I love this I love my dog okay the works unless okay what does that mean that means that this mate is particularly outstanding okay now you're designed by nature to get those feelings fired up when it looks like this is the best deal you've seen in a few years okay that's not only going to work now the problem is is that so it's not designed to be able to plot all the facilities of human life over the next 40 years it's just no way that's not how the mechanism was built the mechanism was built to say you should mate with this one this is a hell of a good deal ticket okay and that could easily not be your best deal five years from now and for various and sundry reasons it's probably going to be your best deal a year from now because your circumstances will not have changed and their circumstances will not have changed it will probably be the best deal two or three years from now but six or seven years from now very good chance circumstances have changed substantially and it turns out that somewhere out there there's a better deal and you found it we've got evidence that you can get a better deal so the that's why you know you're going to find that this species does not typically pair-bond happily for 40 or 50 years they just don't do it it's not careful right not characteristic of our species yeah and so if you were going to design some kind of sexual society the serial monogamists a short period of time yes you'd have renewable contracts the you you'd find you'd find you'd almost have people have to go in front of a panel every five years and venison would have to tell the panel privately that yes I really do want to continue I'm saying right the panel could say well you know even if both of you say that you want to continue you know we could cover everybody's ass somehow yeah I try to think think through how I would do this now you would how you'd manage to you know pull this off but the truth is is if if they systemic breakups we're actually more common and when you call it not not socially unacceptable then we'd actually have a happier human race because people that are that effectively get locked in by this this modern bizarre phenomenon called marriage you know very often just can't get out I guess that's just too many little social strings keeping them there right yeah Wow fascinating like this is very very eye-opening experience to me thank you really fair my my pleasure yeah have like any any and books or any literature that I can read something that sort of sums up a lot of this stuff yeah I one of the great books in this field is called the evolution of desire and it was written by social psychologist David buss and the USS and David buses the world probably the world's leading authority on human mating behavior and so when you read this when you read this book you will you will see the detail and the sophistication in human mating systems and human strategic you know decision-making and you'll you'll you'll see really why it is that you're not gonna walk away from these instincts just because we all would think it would be cool okay it's like no no this is uh you're gonna try to turn a watch into a TV set and you're gonna try to do that and this is this is not how it's going to work so right there could easily be ways to recognize the mess that we have and to potentially socially engineer our way out of it in ways that I was just talking about like in rinsable you could do that but you will never wind up with anything that's going to that system that I'm talking about it's actually much consistent with the natural history of the species no in principle we could wind up with some social engineering that could get around that mess we actually have it was the divorce now is much less problematic than it was 50 years ago so so but but you still see the basics the basic outlines of the game remain the same Wow okay all right wonderful I think we're getting up close in an hour now so um I appreciate the time dr. Lowe thank you very much absolutely thanks for calling Nigel great talking to you
Back to the top
🏃     👖




Artist