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Episode 38: More listener questions and comments
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all right good evening dr. Lyle how you doing today good good to hear your voice again how likewise I guess you're the only one so yeah haha that's all right thank you very much forever oh go ahead I said thanks very much last week for taking care of the the technical difficulties I'm sure there are a lot much much funner time listening to your introduction than my voice oh sure that's what I think now just getting look let's roll what do we got on for what do we got on deck all right so this week and actually last week we had an episode about the psychology of the elections and politics and a little bit about Trump and Ellington and I got a number of emails from a lot of different listeners from a lot of different subjects so what we did for this show today is to go over some listener questions and comments now we're live shows you can call in and callers will take priority but in the meantime what we're going to do is ask you some questions that people emailed me and we're going to get to as many as we possibly can granted there's a lot of you that emailed me Anna so I really want to thank you guys and so whatever questions that I don't get to this time we're going to save for another show that's dedicated to more listener questions and comments so let's get started all right all right dr. Lyle so this use this listener wants to understand what does dr. Lyles take on both of the candidates Trump and Clinton and why they appeal or repulse certain segments I'd also like him to speak on how political correctness can be so diametrically opposed to our genes and what the impact of political correctness is upon our instincts well you know these are interesting questions that's a very interesting bunch of speculation whirling around in the in that listeners head politics is going to be a person's political preferences individually we talked about last week let me let me sort of separate out psychology into two very different second the first segment is going to be what we're going to call general psychology so these are going to be the the general principles of how psychology works in all humans this would be the equivalent of Grey's Anatomy so the Grey's Anatomy is going to work everywhere in the world everywhere in the world the kidney and the liver and everything is going to be in the same place the then there's going to be the second half of psychology is going to be what we're going to call personality and personality is going to be the study of individual differences between people so how everybody's kidney is different so under general psychology we would probably reasonably steady sex differences in other words in some ways all females are the same and in some ways all males are the same and in some ways males and females are reliably different and so in those that that would go under general psychology although it starts to essentially leak its way into the concept of personality in the sense that a person is not a person as a person a person is either a man or a woman and that has profound consequences for a lot of their characteristics now so so last week we talked about politics and we talked about how essentially politics derives from the Stone Age Village problem of share not share and so we talked about that essentially the political to polls that you see that that emerge in human nature in human politics are going to be sharing and not sharing which is the equivalent of the left and right wing or liberal and conservative is what we call them the United States the with liberal being the share dimension and conservative being the not share dimension and we talk about where an individual is on the dimension of how they perceive the the resource stability of the adaptive landscape and so therefore those who see the adaptive landscape as more variable and capricious and therefore more essentially intimidating are going to tend to be liberal all things being equal and people that tend to the adaptive landscape as more stable etc are going to be more conservative so these are these are reasonable inferences and decisions that all human brains would make given the given set of circumstances now the so but now what we're going to do is we're going to move inside the problem as to the question that the listener asks is why I guess some candidates are you know repulsive or attractive to do different people and so some of that is going to come because if you happen to be for example a person who is is in circumstances or you've made the inferences that that the world is economically capricious then you are more likely to be thinking that we should be sharing more and therefore you're likely to be liberal so that's going to be one reason why certain candidates are going to appeal or repulsed certain segments but it goes beyond this so even once we take this out of it like where you happen to be on that dimension there's other aspects to whether or not someone is more conservative or liberal that have to do with the individual differences in the person's genes so if we start to think through a template of what liberal or conservative would look like we would go through what we're going to call the big five and we could also actually also look at IQ and we would find in really IQ is not particularly related to liberal or conservative which of course it everybody on either side is going to be upset say that it is but it isn't the so what we're really going to look at is we're going to look at the big five not not and we're not going to add like you to this so once we once we pull IQ out of personality we're going to now look at openness to experience conscientiousness introversion extraversion agreeableness disagreeableness and emotional stability and what we're going to find is that we're going to find that liberals are more open to experience and conservatives are less open to experience so this is going to this is going to be like an easily demonstratable and on of individual differences in political preference so what we're now going to see is something useful maybe for our listeners to understand and that is that your your political preferences are not inferences based on superior logic to the other guy they have to do with number one your circumstances with respect to share not share in terms of what seems to be your interests or the group's best interest on that dimension and all alternatively and in additionally your personal individual personality genetics so if you are more open to experience it is very likely that you are liberal and if you are very conventional and not so so wild you are much more likely to be inherently conservative and of course as we see that the genes have built this thing in a bell curve so nobody is right and we are going to see that the optimal personality for the average member of the species under average circumstances is going to be right down the middle and so there there you go on that dimension now the next one would be conscientiousness and now everybody would want to say that they are more conscientious but as we measure conscientiousness interestingly enough we're going to find the Conservatives are more conscientious than liberals and this means they've got more anxiety about getting things done properly and right and so on and so forth and now for on a sort of moral dimension the Liberals would be upset at this sort of this sort of inference because they're of course much more concerned about the environment and the fish and this or than that so isn't that conscientiousness no that's just one component of conscientiousness and the fact that that liberals would be much more conscientious on those dimensions is not in fact going to change the score keeping so the Liberals are going to be more open to experience and they're going to be less conscientious the the if if anybody wants to test this they can just look at credit scores for example and we're going to find we're going to find that this is going to come out of the data now the next thing that we would look for is introversion extroversion and I don't know there is a strong difference here so I have a feeling that that this individual difference variable may be unrelated to politics I have a feeling that it is the the next dimension of agreeable disagreeable is related to politics and the I believe that conservatives are more disagreeable and so this is I think this is you know these things are probably they're probably relatively small effect sizes so on each of these things we might find that for example on opus openness to experience we might find the the average Democrat to be at the 57th percentile of that dimension and the average conservative to be at the 43 percentile in other words I'm not sure how big those effect sizes are they're not likely to be huge but they're likely to be measurable the same with the conscientiousness and the same with the agreeable disagreeable dimension emotionally stable I'm again I'm not sure and again I couldn't tell you but the three that I believe that there are correlation coefficients established for our openness conscientiousness and agreeable disagreeable and so we are going to see that that those that the big five are going to be pulling correlations which essentially are going to tell us something that was that of first was indicated in the monozygotic twin studies out of Minnesota which is that your political beliefs are amazingly genetic and so there's no way that you could get correlations out of two people that grew up in you know entirely different households a whole set of them that were separated at birth and raised by different people under entirely different circumstances and that they wind up being remarkably concordant with their politics that could have only happened if politics was associated with the genetic variation the in personality characteristics and it turns out that it is so that say that will tell you why some candidates appeal to you and some candidates repulse you because if you are if you are conservative then typically candidates who have a more liberal bent will be signaling their affinity for openness to experience agreeableness and less conscientiousness and and the the opposite will be on the mirror image will be on the other side and so you're going to be typically uncomfortable with people that are that are on the other side of the fence you know I remember you explained this one time in a live lecture and you explained it so well that and I had been very involved just interest in politics for the reason of trying to convince a lot of people to my position and yeah an hour after you explained it I realized I was suddenly completely uninterested in politics after that yeah the start to realizes it's all the waste of time that you're not going to be convincing anybody on the other side but they lack clarity or intelligence and that's you know that that's why they've arrived at the positions they've arrived at you're no more going to do that then change their eye color and right this is a people will say oh well that's not true when I was 16 I was a conservative and then by 19 I was liberal yeah well that's because you were under your parents thumb and didn't know anything for a while but as soon as you happen to your little genes found their way to their right place in the world there you are and there you stay so this is innocent to say that people cannot be sometimes have their mind changed by rational argument on on lots of things that that is possible it's just not very likely and so yes the I agree I mean politics is in in it inherently intriguing because we feel like these this is important now the truth of the matter is this is an illusion that all politics used to be important it was important fifteen thousand years ago I was important that the leadership of the village that you participated in the process of trying to make sure leadership was assigned to the right person because the wrong person could could mess up negotiations with the people on the other side of the river they could take us into a bad direction or dangerous direction just because they had too big of an ego in other words there was actually some pretty serious consequences and therefore constant vetting of the the sort of political power structure and whether it was serving the interests of the village today the the essentially your your life and it's what's going to happen with your life and your family's life how it's essentially nothing to do with Washington and so therefore all that's happening is this is a this is tickling an ancient instinct as if it's important and yet in the final analysis it's utterly unimportant that's uh yeah that's my value and actually all the scientific evidence would support this yeah I've often wondered if we could sit down some of these big-name politicians like some guys on the left and some guys on the right and kind of explain this at them would they just suddenly become uninterested with us so like the guys who are honestly arguing hoping to change people's minds like that they strongly believe that they're they're changing minds not but not the you know the the liars yeah we're just doing it for carrot yeah yeah there's people that actually believe in their position they believe in the rightness of it and it's extraordinary the and it is what it is and so we're not going to worry about it all right you fellows fill our next question heart okay so next question on a previous show dr. Lyle Aquila made a brief comment in the early days of the show he alluded to the fact that meat can possibly can definitely be included in a very healthy diet and how it would not be that detrimental what's your take dr. Weil please explain oh yes uh yeah those in the in the vegan world which some of the listeners will know me from that world the the vegan world in the scientists involved have been able to show some really remarkable health improvements from people going from a conventional diet to a whole natural foods diet nobody else has been able to demonstrate some of the things we've been able to demonstrate like will sustain at the Cleveland Clinic Dean Ornish at University of California the reversal of a thorough Genesis and so on and so forth so that those aren't that that isn't in dispute but the what what cannot logically be derived from that is the notion that a vegan diet is necessarily the healthiest diet the and it certainly cannot be derived from that that including animal food in the diet is detrimental in any significant way so I actually believe that first of all there's all kinds of interesting reasons and an arguable reasons for excluding animal food from from the human diet and it is certainly not necessary and anybody that thinks it's necessary in any way just doesn't doesn't have any clue the facts the so there's no question that a vegan diet can achieve optimum help for people but that's that's not in any kind of scientific dispute the the issue is whether or not if we include animal food in the diet whether or not it is necessarily detrimental I do not think so and I certainly don't think that it was true in our natural history now the animal food that anybody would eat today is not the same as the animal food that we ate in our natural history the animal food international history would have been healthier considerably so if people today actually saw the health of the animals and how they were treated the animals that they were eating they would be pretty freaked out actually over that it's sort of remarkable that were not worse off off reading animal food than we are given the health of the animals that people are eating the however the reason why I'm confident about this is that the first of all it's clear that this creature is an omnivore and it's also clear that in in biology there's a concept that we're going to call thresholds so there are thresholds at which the differences from within the threshold doesn't mean anything so for example you might say well it'd be good to get sunlight every day well really how much okay well how about you know 20 min gives me my vitamin D okay well would it do us any good to get 26 minutes is there any difference between 26 minutes and 26 minutes and 2 seconds this has changed what what about the arc relative do you know where we are relative to the equator you know what time of day is that 26 minutes ie how many watts of sunlight should I be getting if I were to count them what would be optimal and the answer is like well don't be absurd there's going to be a range that if you don't get enough you're going to wind up with a vitamin D deficiency that you're going to have to correct somehow or you can have health consequences and if you get too much you're going to get sunburned you're going to increase your likelihood of skin cancer and all kinds of other things so the bottom line is is of course there's a range of which the system is well able to tolerate that and nobody would actually know even within that range exactly what amount would be the Lately stress on the organism so there's going to be essentially functionally equivalent amounts of sunshine that are going to do the job that people need to have it done and essentially there's no possible way for us to figure out whether a little more a little less is better and the same thing is going to be true with animal food at this point there is no compelling evidence to suggest that if you were to include let's suppose that we were talked about 10% of your calories or even 20% of your calories from animal food there's no compelling evidence to suggest that that wouldn't inherently be negative for humans now the however it is interesting however that if you have a person that already has very serious coronary artery disease as a result of far too much rich food including animal food oil etc in the diet too much unnatural food and too much animal food if you if you already have coronary artery disease it is truth that you are not going to reverse that kortnee artery disease probably with a diet with 20% animal food in it but you will reverse it if we have a non-oil diet with 0% animal food in it so it is interesting that we can demonstrate superiority and carrying a pathology but that's not the same question as whether or not this is actually costly to the organism as long as we are below the critical thresholds for generating the pathology so this is why it is that I will say that I'm of course certain that it let's suppose let's take this to the extreme just for the principle to be demonstrated one more time let's suppose for example we say well how about if I have one bite of tuna fish a year is that going to make any difference well use any reasonable person would say well of course not there's just it's inconceivable that could make a difference well how about one bite a week well you know I can't I can't possibly see any evidence that would suggest that well then how about one a day so where where do we draw the line and when we look at the correlation coefficients worldwide and we look at epidemiological evidence as you include more animal food in the diet and what happens pathologically what I see is that when people start eating large amounts of animal food and other food that is this process particularly oils refined carbohydrates etc when you start having a diet that is full of those foods we start to see very significant rises in pathology but we do not have evidence of the battles taking place at small percentages so I believe that the human organism was robbed certainly robust to a diet of whole natural foods in its natural history that included animal food in the diet and I don't I don't think that I would expect any pathology to have resulted from that mmhmm yeah and in my practice I tell my patients that there's a big difference between maintaining health and then reversing disease and if there's a stage where they have to reverse disease they're going to have to behave a lot more than if they're just kind of maintaining what they're currently at absolutely you know so it's a good a good example would be if you have a sunburn when you go out in the Sun it hurts it's like that's that's trouble you're in trouble but that same amount of Sun is fine when you don't have a sunburn and so that's how I would look at that's how I would look at just a really great account that yeah that's a great example because I got a sunburn you know a couple months ago and I remember exactly yeah I felt like going into the Sun right you got alright alright no lunch mmm ok so this next listener send me an email and she is Arius about a book that they're reading so dr. Lyle I'm currently enjoying the novel Walden 2 by BF Skinner where Skinner is showcasing his theories of behaviorism in the design of a potentially utopian human community I'm loving the positive story as opposition to some darker dystopian preferences like brave new world or Animal Farm so the question is are all communal or intentional living societies doomed to failure she's got a couple questions in here are any of Skinner's ideas on operant conditioning and cultural engineering valid and what is it about human nature that has us preferring to guide rather than being guided which I understand is a big reason for the failure of many of the communities inspired by this novel let's see a lot of questions there so I'm not sure I'm getting answer them directly but let me just sort of free free forum on BF Skinner so just to give the listener say a little backdrop so you know who this is because the people may think they know or they know a little bit about BF Skinner and what he did or what he thought but they in my knowledge of Skinner is isn't extensive but the BF Skinner was a early actually early in mid 20th century psychologist is one of the most influential psychologists in the 20th century and he was at Harvard University that's where he spent his career and he is famous for writing about and discovering principles of what we call operant conditioning so this is going to be very different than what we're going to call Pavlovian conditioning that was discovered in the very early 1900s by even Ian Pavlov who is a physiologist in Russia so Pavlovian conditioning is the notion of what we're going to call pairing so pairing a bell and with the prostitution of food to a dog if we do that the presentation of food will automatically cause the dog to salivate but if we also hit the bell at the same time we're presenting the food pretty soon the dog if we keep doing this over and over the dog will start salivating just to the Bell so that's called Pavlovian conditioning and that was that the discovery of that was was hailed as a major advance in human thinking about you know psychology in general and became the the back the bedrock of early American behaviorism for and this was happening well before BF Skinner so however Skinner then goat comes along and discovers and discusses at length something else and that something is going to be what we're going to call operant conditioning and what this means is this is what you would not be called reinforcement or punishment so let's suppose we have a rat and we are trying to get that rat to turn in a circle so when that rat turns a little bit we light up a key that it knows that it can go over and hit that key and get food ok so yet this is not we didn't care anything with anything this little guy did a little behavior and we reinforced it immediately and so as a result the next time he's in that cage she's going to go back and he's going to start turning that little circle again and what Skinner would do is he would he would then reinforce that for a while maybe the little rat turns a quarter of a turn to the left and then after he reinforces that ten times and the rats consistently doing that to men going and getting its food then he waits until it turns a little further than a quarter until it turns maybe to you know one third of the way and he doesn't reinforce it till then and so in this way by by this is what we call shaping that he he shapes the behavior of the organism in order to get reinforcements so this is this is different this is called like I said operant conditioning and this is the this wins at having enormous impact on American education systems as if you'll remember the SRA reading stuff as kids those of you that are older knate knate won't remember those she's too young but we they all taught us how to read by using essentially little reinforcement systems and these were all being derived out of skinny Aryan conditioning thinking now I can barely read a hot yeah so in any rate so skinner looks at this and he he examines the concepts of classical conditioning i you have a loving condition and operant conditioning and he says look this is nature this is animal behavior i can get an animal to do anything i want so if i put a rat in a cage and and i want him to play ping pong on you know on a little screen i can get him to do it and so effectively he's saying since i can do that how do you know that that's not what human behavior is it looks really complicated but how do you know it's not just a reinforcement history that somehow it's it's been essentially stroked in a given pattern and that is what you're observing and in fact he goes further and he says that's exactly what i think has happened and this becomes this becomes the the conventional view of psychology in in the 20th century by academic psychology in general this is going to be what we're going to call the standard social science model that the reason why a human does what it does is that it is being reinforced for doing this previously okay this gets a little tweak from Albert bandura where we find out that if you observe somebody else getting reinforced that's almost like getting reinforced yourself so this is going to be observational learning but it's going to in principle follow the same concepts as Canarian conditioning now this all sounds fascinating it in some ways it seems positive because if there's some kind of a problem that somebody's having let's suppose they're angry or belligerent or they're abusive or they're they're biting their sister or something like this then we would say well they've just been reinforced for this somehow and what we need to do is to stop the reinforcement and then we will improve the behavior and we can we can reinforce some other behavior that's what we called pro-social behavior well it turns out that so the meta theory that I've explained here which is the the meta theory of American behaviorism or standard social science model the it also as a general underlying concept and that is that the the behavior of animals is actually fundamentally quite simple the reinforcement history may be very very complicated because you don't know exactly what happened to it in its past and so if you've got some angry looking teenager must have been that they were abused or some such thing so you don't know when and their mom seems like they're nice the mom shrugging their shoulders like hey I adopted this kid I've been sweet to him for sixteen years I don't know what the problem is and you're thinking oh well you must have done something bad were you know when did you adopt them Oh at age five I wonder what happened between you know day one and day five the if if you'd op them at day five so everybody has always been looking back at the reinforcement history and this this dominates clinical psychology to this day so somebody that is having trouble at 38 years old having orgasms well we got to go back in their history and find out you know what's holding them back and so on and so forth so everybody's examining this through the lens of BF Skinner and they don't really know it they don't understand that that's who you know trust this concept on the world but he did now it turns out this is the drum roll that he is totally wrong but it's a it's a complete misunderstanding of human nature it's not just missing by a little bit it's missing by a country mile the the concept that organisms have very simple learning mechanisms like reinforcement they're essentially like a recording device like well if I do that and I get reinforced that I'm going to do it again there is a there is some truth in this but the truth is is it's not even close to understanding how organisms are actually wired up so BF Skinner then goes on to write something like Walden 2 which has a few little principles of reinforcement and they're not really much it's not it's just kind of his general idea of saying you know what we can turn humans we can make them kind of any way we want so if we want to make them really nice and cooperative all we have to do is reward nice and cooperative behavior and they'll be nice and cooperative okay well it ain't so okay human beings will be nice and cooperative when it's in their personal best interests to be nice cooperative and they will be honoree and nasty when it's in their personal interest to be an honoree and nasty and a great example of how BF Skinner couldn't possibly figure out a square one of a clinical problem would be man-woman dynamics because Skinner wouldn't understand that the purpose of the organism is to reproduce genes into act in ways that are advantageous for gene survival that means trying to figure out how to negotiate the other team and out negotiate them at times in order to get the better end of a genetic deal this now explains why it is that you got 90 million people on match.com everybody's struggling to try to get a 10 percent better deal than the one that they've got in front of them this is why relationships break up this is why they're conflicted etc so we can understand the problems of human nature when we start to see more deeply into the way motivation is constructed BF Skinner would simply say well that shouldn't happen to have to happen that way we would just reinforce people be in love with each other and that would be that you know I'm saying and in fact that is kind of what he says enrolled to do so Walden 2 is a is a very sort of sweet naive view of the leading American behaviorist on how pliable human nature would be if you had somebody smart enough to kind of set up the reinforcement contingencies in such a way but it turns out to be an utterly false view of how human nature is constructed and just to give you a whole series of examples at Walden 2 and BF Skinner would essentially believe that the reason why your child is homosexual is because something half and some some male for example must've rubbed his penis but rubbed the kids penis when he was three and therefore he got reinforced and it felt good while he's looking at Uncle Louie and so therefore that's what caused him to be homosexual and therefore in principle we should be able to rub his penis while he's looking at a female and we should be able to change it back shouldn't be any reason why this shouldn't be completely pliable well I think everyone listening is sophisticated enough to know that they may not know that that it is not caused early there's people that think that that's true and it is not true the truth is is that mating search images and our attraction to characteristics in mates is part of mating search images that are embedded in in utero it's before you're ever born so the so this is you know a complete and lack naivet nettie that runs through behaviorism but hey you know what it was an inevitable set of inferences that a man that was spent his life with pigeons and rats and shaping their behavior and trying to learn about how they learn things it would be reasonable that he would would extrapolate those simple lessons to human nature and that he would think that he had solved the puzzle of human beings he had not and that solution wouldn't come until evolutionary psychology was born in the early 90s wonderful I'm always reminded of the time Pavlov was sitting in a bar and the phone rings and goes oh shit I forgot to feed the dog is that very good we got to write that one down that's a winner all right where do we go next all right and so so with this with this listeners question hmm yeah the she was wondering also is do you think that communal or intentional living societies are doomed to failure doesn't have to do with human nature preferring to guide rather than being guided oh I think that I'm not even sure we'd have to start defining intentional living communities I mean people people could like-minded people might put together some conservative sort of group situation where they've got their own rules as to how they're going to do things and it can work out pretty well it's not it's not going to tend to work out very well because of the notion that the people are very keen on on watching the cost-benefit of their own behaviors and trade and so the the communal type living tends to essentially try to take people back to a to a to a communistic primitive sort of environment where we're all sharing and we all pitch in and then divide and it's what it's attempting to do there's allure to this for some people because essentially they don't want they want to take material competition out of the equation and they want to just set everybody equal and so then we can all just sort of quote be ourselves and we can let our own sexiness be the competitive process by which sexual dynamics are resolved the truth of the matter is is that individual differences in the ability to acquire and and protect resources winds up being a critical variable inside the female brain for deciding mates and so in there's going to be struggles in any sort of communal situation where everybody's economic situations are going to be a little bit different and if they're not then the people who are contributing more to the situation are going to be annoyed so we're going to be right back to the Stone Age political situation of share not share so the more confident people are quickly going to be frustrated that they're greater contributions are not being rewarded and they're going to want more because they as they observe the cost/benefit processes it's it's essentially undermining their incentive so the it is obvious when we look at the the total failure of any communist society in so far to make any headway at all that we see that when you essentially realize that your efforts are being divided by two or three hundred million people and that we're all in this together and we divide equally then nobody's interested in being productive and you can see the tremendous difference in productivity in a capitalistic society where if you make a hundred million dollars you get to keep most of it and so that there's tremendous incentive in capitalistic societies to be productive you when you when you make systems more communistic you generally you're Yordy incentivizing people and you are it is not working very well so pretty quickly people are natural capitalists they are naturally trying to figure out how to be more successful materially that's that's part of animal nature animals are literally trying to scheme to try to figure out how they can get more material resources for less effort they're they're under a selection pressure by evolution to be as efficient as effective as they can human beings are the same and so the fact that we can be friendly with other humans doesn't cause us to suddenly say well let's all just pitch in and divide equally and so this is why some of these some of the kinds of things like this like Walden two are always going to fail because you're more competent people are going to sniff out pretty quickly that they're getting sandbagged by the by the least the less industrious mmm-hmm yeah all right all right next question is we're changing topics a little bit to relationships and mating strategies okay any questions for dr. Lyle you mentioned that the legitimacy of casual mating as a strategy for this species can be demonstrated by the fact that both men and women are willing to engage in it under certain conditions however you also mentioned that the ideal arrangement for a pair bond relationship from the male's point of view is to be in a committed relationship with as life to engage in sexual relations with her frequently but also to have sex on the side with a chippy from time to time ha but what I'm gonna get big trouble someday for that go ahead well it's in his words I guess but yes and perhaps there's some fantasy attached to it which write what you didn't really discuss in depth is the fact that as far as I know this ideal is almost never realized in modern-day relationships my question is yeah I think it is be honest but it's just not out there so my question is if this pair-bond relationship ideal has existed in psychological hardwiring of males over time why isn't their willingness of female females to be accepting of it as opposed to casual mating strategy where both sides are willing to play why would this ideal persist in men but be almost universally rejected by women are there certain conditions or personality characteristics that determine whether females are willing to go along with their pair bond partners while they're parable partners pursue the chippy strategy a priceless question okay all right we're going to start out right away that that you know how in the hot hot crazy matrix that that guy so brilliantly did if people haven't seen it it's a lot of fun the hot crazy matrix where they say that the really hot female who is emotionally stable and all cool that's what they call a unicorn there there exists in theory but nobody's ever seen one okay that's really very well if you want a real the true unicorn that is a situation where where everything everybody's happy in the relationship including the fact the woman is fine with the guys screwing around on the side that is truly there is no personality characteristic to find in a female like that that that is a frickin nature now the let's talk about why and let's talk about why this is a male dream scenario no that is not going to come about without without walking through a minefield the reason is is that in in for example in the casual mating situation the reason why we have both the reason why you have a cow so many situations at all the reason why the male's would want to play this is obvious they would want to essentially spill their seed and then walk over the hill and dump the cost of child-raising on the female that they inseminated that this would be males would be highly motivated to do this essentially just this is just sheer math of gene reproduction so it's no surprise that this is a very very exciting possibility and exceptionally highly motivated behavior in males now we would it wouldn't persist to exist in males unless the females were willing to play that isn't quite accurate it could exist if females were not willing to play but they could get tricked into playing so there's actually two methods by which this could persist in evolution number one would be if the females were willing to play the game and the other one would be the females are not willing to play the game but the males are sufficiently deceptive that they trick them into it anyway now the truth is is that both of those things are happening and have been omnipresent forces and evolution females have been willing to play casual mending strategy under the conditions particularly when they are genetically inferior to the males and so they are a female six willing to tumble with a nine male who has who's showing her no evidence at all that he's going to stick around after next week he's just going to attempt to fill her uterus with his seed for the next week and he's got he's got a pretty good shot probably a 25 or 30% shot but he will impregnate her in the next week and then he's going to take that you know just going to take off over the hill and leave okay that bad has happened obviously hundreds of millions of times in the history of this species why the female would put up with that behavior is because he is he's got fancier DNA than she is and her offspring from him will be some more sexually attractive than she is herself so this is why that strategy under certain conditions will be genetically profitable and therefore executed by the female now the other conditions where that's going to happen is going to be where the female is going to be tricked by the male into the male exercising short-term mating strategy on the female who had no intention that that's where it was going to go so males are obviously have been selectively bred by evolution to to get very good at lying even to the point of being self deceptive so that their lives are exceptionally good in this regard and females have been selectively selected by evolution to try to detect the line and there's been an evolutionary arms race between lying and lying detection that that comes to the extraordinary subtlety that we have today and man women communication over these issues as people are getting to know each other and thinking about sleeping with each other the I II Carole King song you know we used to love me tomorrow tonight with words unspoken you say I'm the only one like how beautiful is that like the females looking at this guy saying boy everything about you is saying that I'm it and that you're going to be with me forever but you're not actually saying it okay so this is all this this very extraordinary game that's being played now the question is so so we see that that it has been in females advantage to at times play casual mating and also it has been at times when she has been tricked into it thinking that she wasn't playing it that is why it still exists now pair bonding is another strategy that is played by both members of the species where the male is actually honestly signalling and follows through on the concept that he's going to invest heavily in this female and that what the female would like in principle we be all of his resources directed towards her and her offspring all all residual resources above his survival should be directed there that's what she wants and in fact that is what a parent situation that's what the female is trading for the female is basically saying you know I'm going to give you my sexuality I'm going to give all you my time and energy to raising your children I'm all in on this and I want you to all be in on this now this is why the from the standpoint of the male this is not ideal we could improve the situation here if he gets to do casual mating on the side while he makes his primary investment in the para bond ie this is what I call wife wife wife chippy in other words this is exactly what's going on in a typical male's brain and this is exactly how we'd like to play the question on the table is gee why don't you find this anywhere well you sort of do whenever males can get away with it so just look at the muslim world where we have a whole bunch of men that can't mate with anybody because some men have four wives this is effectively exactly what's happening is that one male is is getting access to more than one female at a time and so this is is so it's quite possible if people get in get themselves in sufficient positions of power that males will try to pull this off so this is a attractive wealthy male that not only is sleeping with wipe it is also managing to sleep with somebody else on the side often the reason why it would require wealth for example is because they may be needing to do some provisioning for the chippy because the chippy is not wanting to just trade for his genes she's actually also wanting some resources so this is like the mistress okay now the question is gee why haven't wives been adapted to being fine with this the answer is they're not at all fine with it they want all of the resources that's what they want so they don't want any resources being directed towards any other woman and any other children because the only purpose of in principle of the woman is to bear children God knows what's what the feminists here that quote out of me this is we're talking like a biologist that's the whole purpose of the females bear children the purpose of a male is to you know inseminate females and get resources to talk females into inseminating them I mean this is in principle what's happening so of course the female by Nature is going to be very much on guard and upset and it's a total direct conflict between her and her paraben husband about any chippy on the side so no there would be no reason for a female to ever be okay with this and happy with it and if they are okay and happy with it they're probably not interested in their husband okay what they probably out is a marriage of convenience and nobody's screwing anybody except the husband screwing the chippy on the side so that's how that works which reminds me I got a question for you what is uh what is Bill Clinton say to Hillary after sex I don't know what I'll be home in 20 minutes oh man roll of your bullets and strike bad cheese well Doug all right very good go ahead all right and so the motion um next one more okay last one here it's there's a couple of questions here some you just pick the one that you you know the the one that makes the most sense here yeah okay so dr. Lyle what's your opinion about the relationship concept that some people refer to as the beta zation beta ization process a simple explanation that it's the process that occurs between a pair bonded male and female by which the female engages in certain manipulative behaviors to cause the male to behave in a way that is best for her and her offspring survival to tie this question to the purpose of your show beating your genes do you have any advice for men on how to maximize their happiness and relationships in light of in light of this theory advice that he seen include the following either avoid the situation altogether by never agreeing to be exclusive or pair-bonded or to have a serial pair-bond relationship but do not let them last much longer than the honey mousse honeymoon phase ie end the relationship the first sign of a significant complaint or argument or nagging or requests for compromised and then don't spend time trying to work things out and trying to get things back to where they were instead just look to move on to a new partner and begin the new honeymoon phase okay now let's let's talk about this because we're I'm not sure what all this guy is referring to but we're going to talk to the heart of I think the concept that that's uh that's perplexing and disturbing for people and that is what what is the what is the enjoyment you know payoff long-term for what we're going to call romantic love relationship and you know what does this really look like so in theory is it the case the human beings were built in such a way that they're going to be inevitably disappointed in their relationship and that they that the only reasonable way to behave is to try to ascent essentially jump from high to high like Elizabeth Taylor you know getting married eight or nine times or whatever the heck she did now the I would say that that human beings are built with a with this euphoric process of falling in love that is is going to be a major signal that tells you that from the best you can tell you are being over rewarded which is what that's what falling in love is is a feeling that I'm getting a hell of a deal here and so it's the same feeling that you're going to get for the same reasons that if you get get a a great sale on it on an outfit at Macy's it's like oh my god I can't believe this is only 120 dollars worth 350 all day long that same feeling of excitement like yes I want to make this transaction this is a very good deal that's exactly what's happening in the nervous system except it the most profound level because the chips are so high because you're all about gene reproduction so if you if it appears to you that you are getting one hell of a deal in a potential pair bond that's what we call falling in love okay and there is nothing like it in the human nervous system there is nothing that will hit as many circuits as hard as that now just as once you buy that outfit at Macy's when you bring it home the there may be reasons why it was honored so therefore we will find that a lot of these relationships will crash and burn in three months or six months okay because we found out the reason it was on sale so that is precisely what happens all right now that is not anything inherently frustrating and miserable and and depressing about human nature that's just that's just part of the the inherent risks of the game and people will be fooled again and again by this because the the nature of the neuro chemical shift that takes place when your quote falling in love will look right past some red flags that are there may be obvious to a third party that are basically saying look I see some characterological problems here or I see some personality problems here with your potential mate but doesn't matter if you feel like you're getting a screaming deal then it's going to turn out that very often those will blow right past any sort of warning signs so that's why very often things will will blow up in a few months and I call it the law of ninety days like very often something that looks really good after two weeks doesn't look anything like you thought it was going to look after 90 days the now but now the question is where are we after two years the you know is it possible for human beings to be happy and how happy and for how long well you cannot be euphoric indefinitely that is impossible because part of the euphoria is this major signal that is actually trying to get you to repetitively engage and dominate that person's attention because you're trying to get rid of all competition and you're trying to essentially secure a trade okay so the euphoria that's involved in early romance cannot be had indefinitely that's not a possibility it's no more possibility than your first bite of a really good chocolate bar I'm saying it that that the the let's put three of those bars in front of you that the last bite of the third bar is not going to be like the first bite of the first bar there's no way that's going to happen you know your eighth pcc's candy just is not having the same impact as the first piece the that is because the Delta or the change of this of the systems so circumstances from one moment to the next is not as great so when we go from no relationship to quote fallen in love we have now massively improved your genetic circumstances according to all estimates and so all systems are firing saying dominate you let this dominate your existence make sure you figure out where that person is try to figure out what it is that they like about you try to enhance that try to show that you're a great deal you will do this you'll do that for them etc etc etc so this is all trying to essentially do as much as you can to make the other person an offer they cannot refuse this is very much like lost leaders in any kind of sale discounts etc etc you're essentially trying to say you know look at what a great deal I am and very often people are over selling it in fact of course they are they have to because their competition will be over selling it to get those same secure those same people so as a result as people actually start to make the deal they start to renegotiate it ok and so as a result it's going to turn out very often but it's not quite as good a deal as we thought things sort of cooled down but it still may be well worth having this is after we find out that actually it wasn't actually a Saks Fifth Avenue suit it was Saks Fifth Avenue knockoff but it's still a pretty nice suit so it's still a pretty good deal for $120 ok so this is sort of what happens now the is the will this fade off into a grumbling you know brother-sister like not very interesting relationship as we start to look out two three four five years and the answer is not necessarily at all okay now it might and in fact it very likely will but it isn't inherently necessary that that takes place via if it turns out that that those two people actually continue to discover in each other character logical strengths that are impressive and if the people do not dramatically change in their mate value in other words nobody gains forty pounds nobody you know winds up with some illness that winds up being devastating and expensive and problematic etc etc da you might say well gee that's not fair what happens if I get breast cancer and they have to remove a breast or something well it really isn't up to it isn't a question of whether or not people stick together and do the highly conscientious thing the question is how much do they want to be there that's really what love is and love is the the the inference that we have a very good deal okay and can we maintain a feeling that we have a very good deal yes you can but not usually okay but you can and so there's people you've had this happen in many things of your life so you may have had a home that you bought and you really really liked it and you you may have considered moving at times but you may be very happy there and it's not the fanciest thing and you could even afford fancier or better potentially but you really like it that's what it mate can be like okay and so this is uh so it is it is quite possible for people to be long-term happy sexually interested in each other it's not typical of the species but it is possible of the species and I think the concept that we should say oh we'll forget it we're not going to even commit to a pair of on forget about that because that isn't really what we would want because I'd really like to have a chippy on the side know you giving up a chippy the side in protection of a para bond that's really worthwhile is a very reasonable cost benefit analysis of understanding that life is it has compromises in it that are inherent in human relations you and your partner are not the same person you are different people the question is can you have an intersection in a relationship which causes a great deal of moods of happiness in both people the answer is yes it's possible not typical and the answer the answer for for many of us is to to leave relationships when they are clearly signalling to our nervous system that they are not a good deal but search for and hope to secure something that can last a long time and maybe you like them fantastic yeah this user it sounds like they're from one of the forums on reddit that I've read through that has to do with evolutionary psychology and some of the information there is valid and it's actually much of what you talk about here on the podcast and some of the information actually they're a little bit off in that they blame females for what they say in essence taking an alpha female alpha male and turning him to a beta beta male and from what you're saying from what we've kind of learned on the podcast what's actually happening is the male is most likely been blessing that he's fancier than he is and as time goes on he just goes back into who he actually was I wish to point the female loses attraction or they both just kind of drift away there's all all kinds of things can go south and the truth of the matter is is that it typically sort of the average person and when I say average I mean average the average person is not typically going to have the characterological strengths and emotional stability to to make a really excellent choice and then feel like that's a really good choice forever because they're probably the choices are making the person on the other side is really not that impressive and won't continue to win points over competition behind character strengths that are being demonstrated in behavior but that is not true for all people so the character logical strengths can continually over time add to people's attractiveness and and that so that is a possibility in human nature and but it's not a typical possibility but it doesn't have to do with intelligence or fanciness it has to do with some some character traits that are that come in inherently natural to some people and so some relationships can actually get get better over time they may not be as wild or sexual but they can actually be better in terms of feeling how valuable the mate is and how lucky you are to be with them that is an absolute possibility of human nature wonderful I guess we have something to look forward to as we journey on through this life yeah we hope so
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