Home 🏠 🔎 Search


Bad Transcripts
for the
Beat Your Genes Podcast & More

Episode 57: Listener emails, questions
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)
 


hey dr. Lyle how's the audio on my end good so far so good we'll see how it goes all right well if I start chopping up just take it from there you'll probably have something more intelligent than to say that me anyway so well we'll just wing it see how it goes oh wait what I go you are a dear eight acting so these we actually have some interesting news from the evolutionary psychology [Music] like up hypothesis that a bacteria found in cats in subjects actually makes people more sexually aroused with BDSM stimulus of bondage dominatrix you know submissive nice things like that so this journal suggests that toxoplasmosis can make people more pointed in not mental sexual practices so they found that people infected with this express higher attraction to non-conventional sexual practices but toxoplasmosis infection visuals also reported performing this activities less often than Toxoplasma free individuals so the the difference was not that big either Yaroslav Slager he's from the university of charles charles university and czech republic what he says was that it this Toxoplasma probably changes sexual behavior of its human host some changes such as increased affinity to BDSM as observed in infected men are related to the manipulative activity of the parasite that needs to get from its intermediate host to the stomach of a definitive host and most of these observed behavioural changes are rather side effects of an impaired health status of the infected subjects so there we dr. Loe there you go the very interesting it's probably my guess is that it's as bad as they're saying it's a small effect size and it's probably it's probably simply a sort of tickling a little circuit that's already potentially there so the it's not like it's inventing a new perspective in human sexual behavior I think it's those are latent circuits and because of the infection it's it's probably tickling or facilitating something in a little bit of an odd fashion mm-hmm interesting oh yeah very good yeah it seems to explain some of the the crazy cat ladies that I've come across there you go else and alcohol consumption as a short-term mating strategy so this was actually done in Belgium University and they were trying to figure out men's perception of female smoking and drinking and they showed that young men who perceive women who used cigarettes and alcohol as being more sexually unrestricted so tobacco and alcohol use brought some short-term attractiveness benefits to women and in short-term mating context drinking enhanced women's attractiveness whereas occasional smoking was found equal but in long term mating context frickin drinking and all smoking behavior was actually harming women's desirability then they did another study that confirmed perceptions they showed that female users of tobacco to alcohol are indeed more short-term oriented in their sexuality so overall these results they show that female smoking and drinking can operate as a bit of a short-term mating strategy yeah it's just straight indicating sort of a dopamine reactivity just sort of sort of looking at more impulsive people and so of course men have picked up that correlation the correlation is probably fairly high in other words if we were to look at women who are smoking and drinking at the same time particularly in public and plainview the correlation coefficient between the the likelihood of being able to engage in casual mating with that female versus one that is not doing those things is probably a very high correlation when I say very high I don't mean it's super high I just mean that it's it's a lot better than chance and so yeah so it acts it's it's a it's an advertisement for for both personality and probably the person's situation as well so we know for example that women show more square inches of skin when they are fertile when they go out to bars and restaurants and so forth so so when you add that all together you have females that are definitely advertising in particular ways for particular meeting outcomes good very cool huh and I stay on a cat then we all know what to expect about that short-term mating strategy go ahead what else yeah we've got an interesting group turns out so there was a snooze new study out of University of Nevada in Las Vegas and they were trying to figure out whether or not step grandparents would provide less care and be less emotionally close to grandchildren than would be biological grandparents it turns out they actually do so biological grandmothers provided more direct care financial investment and more emotionally close to the grandchild then we're biological grandfathers but Depp grandfathers were more emotionally close and more often played with grandchildren than step grandmothers so they were trying to figure out why well for the the step grandparents they were less close in general but the step grandfathers were closer they figured because this was a main strategy for the grandfather to be close to the to the kids so they were advertising advertising yes yes that's exactly what that is makes perfect sense so they they have definitely found that stepfathers are advertising to the mates that they're that they're trying to get by being what do you call it provisioning for offspring but that is clearly their motivation and I think that they are I think they see that I can't remember how does it they they were able to determine that but I think in one in one way if there's if there's a termination of the primary relationship then the stepfathers miraculously cut off all you know provisioning to two-step offspring so this is clearly we see this as a you know an advertisement strategy of their their benefit to the relationship so obviously it's no surprise that males bring financial assets to relationships in other words of what they bring to the relationship in that regard is very important and it adds to their total cachet and so so therefore the quote relationship they have they may have with stepchildren may be very much determined by that by the what's going on between them and the partner obviously now of course there's going to be many exceptions to that but but statistically we're going to see that that's going to be how that's going to work and that makes perfect sense mmm-hmm and this is this seems like to be it's in accordance to Hamilton's law so yeah yeah absolutely yeah so you we would expect if you think about all life on earth is simply trying to trying to use energy in order to reproduce DNA within time constraints of like you know of their of their survival time on earth then that that's essentially that is the biological problem and and of course then the brains would be shaped in ways to try to optimize those decisions and so we would expect there to be some some quite ruthless calculus that's taking place not just inside of animals but certainly insides of humans too to make those decisions as optimally as possible and that's exactly what it is that we do show so we're going to be we're going to be seeing that for the next hundred years in evolutionary psychology in in fifty thousand different ways investigators will always find the same answer that there is clever mechanisms by which to to optimize the fat transformation of your energy into jeans survival and and when it doesn't look like it makes sense it always does so the The Stepfather investigation is a very good one because on the face of it it's puzzling to us why why that would be happening and now of course all we have to do is see that he's grandstanding for probably his stepdaughter for god sakes so uh for his stepsons wife you doubt of Zang there's a there's a there's a motivation in that pile somewhere we just have to look a little bit for it okay well and then here's the last one my favorite one other than the Spanish government just appointed a sex Bazar and the reason they did this was to reverse their country's declining population so they created this new post in attempt to boost pregnancy rates and halt the country's declining population and so this is role of this is taken up by a Miss Adele mira bari arid is a Democrat demographics expert and Senator in the Galician Parliament so the court I get this year's the first time that they've had the open reversed then deaths so of course I miss Eric who's been appointed to head this up and try to reverse this trend now I mean I don't know seems like a good time to go to Spain to come visit but rather than then you know lack of sex here oh my goodness that's hilarious alright well one of it oh so you know you're breaking at Nate okay yeah well am I am I breaking up too you know okay okay so we will all keep an eye on this and so whatever we do if it turns out that we can't track you because you're breaking up then I will I'll just take over we'll see how it goes go ahead oops okay you're breaking up so I'm going to go down through Nate emailed me a list and so we're going to go down through some questions tonight and we're going to answer some of these and and we will and make it just shut up yeah all right you've been chime in if we can hear you are you still there yeah I can't hear a male okay all right so let's see now we we got some questions let me just go down through them here's the question from let's see we have a lady here that says the i/o doctor a while I agree the overall purpose of any organism is to thrive and replicate his program by our genes and driven by the instincts derived from our genetic code so that just sounds like music to my ears alright however what about humans okay this is me who have no desire to breed so ever or in fact or totally abhorrent to the whole idea process and outcome don't get me wrong I'm not prudish strange repressed or with any violent abusive history in this area and I could easily afford to have many offspring I've loved practicing to procreate but Conant cannot and never have understood why women quote want to have children nor had the urge to get within a thousand miles of pregnancy so the question is in my total weirdo or is this in my genes somehow what do you think the deal is is that no animal on earth other than humans and only recently figured out that sex causes children so our Dell here actually is perfectly interested in sex but not interested in children and that of course the the attraction to to children and the processes of child raising per se are actually going to be highly subject individual differences and so she is genetically what we call not a breeder other women are unbelievably interested in that process so I have known of young teenage women that will walk around with a volleyball under their shirt because they love the idea of that process so this is clearly an individual difference and I have I have little doubt that it is generally a genetic one and so that is the answer to that you are in a stone age my dear you would have had no choice nature nature leaves you know no option as far as that goes okay let's see sir didn't it didn't it's not a harm doctor well yes there you are oh okay okay I'm back hopefully this is better now good okay good we'll try again I just answered one of the first question the first one yeah I was curious because I wonder how much how much do you think the desire to become pregnant has to do with the great amount of reverence that pregnant women get treated nowadays and the desire to kind of be have that much attention hmm I don't know maybe maybe it's a very good question I I really couldn't say I think that I mean all this all the issues about the psychology around pregnancy are a little bit moot from the evolutionary perspective because pregnancy was never any kind of choice it was just simply a automatic byproduct of sex obviously so the whatever happens today our our interesting little cultural perturbations of what might be going on but the truth of the matter is is that you you were simply locked into this naturally and that's that it also turns out that a lot of times of people who have no interest in children per se are unbelievably interested in their own children and so they they can't anticipate this they don't they're simply not there's a lot of people that are just really not into kids particularly at all but when their own child is born they become unbelievably interested in their children just like any animal on earth that is what we're going to call it a low reproduction species so low reproducing species species that produce small numbers of offspring are very attached to those offspring and that includes that basically all humans all humans are all normal humans are extremely interested in the welfare of the offspring and I have no doubt that includes the person that wrote this question but she's not going to find out ok ah go ahead let's go on go on to the next one all right next question I'd like to submit a question regarding suicide my boyfriend's 33 year old daughter has been experiencing suicidal ideation and anxiety attacks apart from getting into the specifics of her particular situation what are your general thoughts on how to support someone in this situation and what kind of medical care if any is helpful and also what is the evolutionary psychology thinking why a person would take their own life yes okay first of all let's let's back the for just a second and get a little perspective over suicidal ideation behavior the suicidal ideation is is going to be the first step before we wind up with suicidal behavior and then suicidal behavior is going to be run a gamut of low risk to high risk for whether or not the person actually actually pulls this thing off so let's try to figure out why this would be an adaptive mechanism inside the genetic code so it's it must be true that if a person if this is a genetic is if it is an adaptive mechanism which I believe that it is the reason why you would expect something would be an adaptive mechanism if it's something that you see species wide and so there isn't some little island in Borneo somewhere where they've never heard of suicide that's never happened you know wherever human beings have walked the earth there have been suicides and so the suicides have a pattern and so they have a most of us have considered suicide at one point or another and so as a result of that it indicates that there's circuits in the brain that are that are essentially suicide circuits and so those circuits are going to be activated under certain conditions in the same way that you've got sense of humor circuits that are activated under certain conditions and you've got thirst mechanisms that are activated under certain conditions then suicide circuits will also be activated under certain conditions and those certain conditions are going to be where there is a cost-benefit analysis where the the individuals brain is figuring out that the genes that reside inside that individual may be better served by it being dead been alive and the question of why how that would be possible would be that you're not actually interested in your genes themselves you're interested in these of your jeans so the jeans are quote clever enough to understand that there are copies of them of themselves located in other bodies and so specifically they're located in the bodies of your kin so that's why animals throughout the world are extremely interested in their kin and they're not very interested when kinship then when the genetics kinships start to drift out to 2nd and 3rd and then finally 4th degree relatives from the standpoint of violet so first degree relative you share half of your unique genes for a second degree relative that would be grandparent grandchild or niece nephew that's going to be 1/4 of your genes and then you're going to go out to a cousin that's going to be 1/8 of your genes and so as you sow from a cousin the second cousin is going to be 1/16 I believe from the standpoint of what they can tell through most breeding populations that this when you get out to the level of second cousin you might as well not be related in other words the degree of overlap in the genes is is small enough that that would have been not a typical in a lot of breeding pools you wouldn't want to rule out a specimen who what you thought was particularly good just because they were a second cousin so so at any rate the bottom line is this so the genes are cleverly analyzing or obviously I use that as a metaphor the genes aren't doing any thinking there are neural circuits built by the genes that are designed by nature to solve this problem and so the problem that they're solving is would we be better off killing the host whether we're sitting in in orders for that other copies of us to thrive better and the answer on that would be well if the obviously this host is itself a generating system for genes but there's other local generating systems that you first-degree relatives and second-degree relatives that are important and it's going to turn out that if we are hurting the prospects of enough of all first agreed second-degree relatives by our by our existence then it we may be then the gene may be better off with gone and us here so this is a person for example like Bertie main offs kid so Bernie Madoff skid you know I think it was Bernie min up junior I don't know if he was a junior or not but the bottom line it probably was I don't know but the bottom line are you seeing guys right yes right so Bernie Madoff skid who is some 50 year old man and and I don't know if he was in jail ever or anything else but bottom line is he killed himself so this is a this is an example of a nervous system that says well now wait a second you know I've got kids kids so what's in the best interest of my kids maybe not for me to be around and a constant reminder to everybody that we ever run into better to maybe just bury this this horrendous event that my father did and just sort of cut the chain between us and you know and the social humiliation and my children and so that that is I have no doubt like he's not thinking that consciously his stone-age brain is running an algorithm and try to come up with the right answer that statistically maximizes the possibility of genes survival so the reason why we know that this is what's going on is you will find telltale tracks in the snow that will show you that this is exactly the kind of process that's happening so when people are humiliated they're much more likely to commit suicide they're also much more likely to commit suicide when they have have lost a big shot at romance and they're devastated and potentially really embarrassed about it the or they have had something happen which indicates that their odds of ever being able to reproduce ie to be sexually interesting anybody are dramatically reduced or they've had a major sort of setback in their career as or as far as that goes interesting leaning up if they're in chronic pain that's another example of a system that is basically saying we were getting evidence that you know you can't get well your your we might not want to get that fancy about that one it can be a much more conscious cost-benefit about whether it's even worth it to survive we don't have to ask evolution for for the answer to that question that's that's a little more straightforward the ones that are trickier are like this one this is a 33 year old woman probably not in any chronic pain but she's experienced suicidal ideation and anxiety attacks so I don't know what those anxiety attacks look like I'm sure they're quite you know probably quite unpleasant but there's probably a lot of things about her existence that is puzzling and upsetting and she's having a hard time competing in some important domains of life and she can feel that because she's emotionally unstable that she's she sent out a lot of signals to her social environment to get help and so she has probably cost people in her social environment a lot of time and money to essentially assist her and those those resources are those are supposed to be a cauldron of reciprocal resources where when you're in trouble and you draw on the villages insurance you're supposed to be able to heal up and then be a producing member of the village and probably that for whatever reasons her her deficits have continued indefinitely for for a long period of time so it looks to her like she's nothing other than essentially a drain and so what will happen then is that suicide circuits start to go off and then because the system is considering the possibility that it may be in the best interest of the genes to to take yourself out to to essentially stop the the cash negative cash flow essentially out of the energy of the coalition and so then what people will typically do is that they will then do gestures so they'll they'll cut open an artery sideways they'll they'll do something that looks scary and dangerous etc that's to signal to the village that hey I'm really I'm really considering this and and people say it's a cry for help but that's a typical shrink talk because they don't know what they're looking at it isn't a cry for help per se it's an assessment it's actually a brain checking mechanism the computer inside the one brain that is holding the suicidal individual is checking the computers of the coalition it's essentially a like their networking in with the other computers so let's suppose there's half a dozen computers that are first-degree relatives got a couple of siblings got a couple of parents etc so it's like okay I'm thinking about killing myself and you saw that I made an attempt here that was relatively serious and I didn't I didn't kill myself I didn't happen to kill myself but I could have enough so that you now can really picture that I wasn't just bluffing before when I was when I was bitching and moaning about how miserable I am so now you really know okay so now everybody can do one of the following two things they can say oh my god don't you understand how valuable you are you're the apple of our eye we know you've got problems but we can get through this don't even think that you're being a resource train we would just be devastated without you oh I'm glad to hear it okay no I don't think I'll be thinking about suicide anytime in the near future if that's what the reaction is from the coalition then this is extremely important for that individual you can imagine a situation where the Coalition says oh gee that's kind of you know did sorry to how here you're having a bad time oh well you know you did get some help from the doctor ie I'm not so wild about trying to save you okay so at this point the the individual now is getting feedback from its first-degree relatives to figure out you know essentially how big of drain am i how how you know does the system to see that it is that in fact better off without me so this is these are very reasonable algorithms to be inside the system and that's that's what it looks like so anyway that's the story on suicide so now the question would be what would you do about this well obviously so this is this is clearly in a scheme crisis it might be a crisis obviously a physical pain that's a little different issue person could have psychiatric disorders where they're in a great deal of mental distress independent of the suicidal ideation that's quite possible the end this person looks like they have they have panic attacks which may or may not be that substantial and that important but what's what's important here is that it's very likely that the person feels like they are their feedback from the world in the three major domains which we must compete in a by nature which is mating friendship and trade those three arenas if her competitive feedback is substantially below her expectations then we would expect her to be puzzled and confused and depressed and so the the best solution when they say what kind of medical care would we give them well I'm not sure what medical care we would give them because we're going to want to keep that person away from antidepressant medications and psychiatrists biological interventions I believe because I don't think there's any evidence to support them and I think those things are problematic so what would we want we would want supportive sensible therapy which is probably the most supportive sensible therapy I would see today would be you know an empathic patient good personality cognitive behavioral therapists that's who I would send her to and if they can't get rapport with an individual for some reason get a different one and so you you're looking for sometimes animalistic connections between patient and therapist and you can't necessarily predict how that's going to happen but you can look for people who are or at least have a generally decent logic to how it is that they think about such things and that's where I would send that person for her care and and that we should be the odds are overwhelming that this person isn't going to commit suicide unless unless we have a person that has you know various very unusual characteristics that that could happen it always can but it usually won't and it sounds like this is probably an esteem crisis where this person needs some support and coaching and to have how to become more effective in this life and miraculously when people start to become a little bit more effective the suicidal ideation will disappear all right good enough whatever go to the next one great we had a listener that was on hold in the middle of this hang up so hopefully you answered their question but if she didn't feel free to call back Chanda and we'll take the call okay next question okay dear dr. Lyle I've been married to my wife for two years and ever since we started dating I've been jealous here and there in small amounts but I don't drink nor have I ever and every time she goes to drink with her friends my jealousy gets escalated and I don't trust the situations the question I send out she picks up on and she doesn't go out which makes her depressed I've tried to make myself fine with it but I can't she's very social and flirty when she drinks it makes me very uncomfortable I'm not wanting to control her or the relationship but I feel that the relationship is at risk if she goes and then does what she wants I want us to be on the same page of what's okay and what's not okay is there a right or wrong or are we just wanting different things that will never change I feel like I put limits on what I think is acceptable for her to do and she says I can she said I can do whatever I want that she puts no obstacles in front of me but I can't help that things don't bother her what steps can I take so that we can reach a middle ground where both of us feels good about the others decisions Wow really tough situation here and so let me walk through some of this and obviously there's going to be nuances to this individual situation that that I'm going to miss in other words I'm not going to get it quite right so all I can do is I can sort of talk generically about a situation that would look like this one and I would tell you about what I would be thinking and how it is that I would try to manage this situation and see sort of you know where this would go now first of all the first thing we're going to talk about is jealousy in general so jealousy is the is a natural reaction that that tells the person that their pair-bond situation is under threat so it's going to turn out that in the best relationships we generally have little smatterings of jealousy will be going on so and that's because the the person in the relationship on either side of this thing feels very well rewarded and therefore they feel somewhat vulnerable because they feel like they are sort of at the upper reaches of their competitive reach for the mate value that they have that they've they've got that they're in a relationship with and so as a result it's essentially like being paranoid if you're in a job that you're being overpaid by 25% you're excited about it and you're sure as heck the fact that you go to bed at night kind of paranoid that you could lose the job doesn't mean that you don't want to have the job you still won't have the job but you're very nervous that you may lose the job okay so that's so jealousy is simply the the angry touchy reaction that feels like you have to you have to make guard and you've got to worry about it so a little bit of that is fine a little bit of that from time to time if that comes up is actually a signal of a very healthy relationship that is a signal of a healthier relationship than if that never comes up by the way now however this doesn't look like that this looks like the the the jealousy process is asymmetrical so it looked like it looks like our young man here feels gel but the female does not feel jealous and it's also what he's suggesting here about some things that she says are very disturbing so she says you can do whatever you want and I'm essentially I want to do whatever I want you do whatever you want well what exactly does that mean if we translate that into English does that mean that she wouldn't care if this guy went out to sleazy places and was hitting on on women and then and going home with them and then sleeping with them if he could etcetera etcetera it's not a problem if her reaction is well that's not a problem with me then then we know that we're in the wrong place okay that that's a very one of two things is happening that female is not that into this relationship or number two we've got a very strange email either way a romantic pair-bond psychological situation is in a lot of trouble so in going to be very unlikely to be very stable for very long so let's look at the possibility but that's not quite what she means we're going to say that maybe she's like a look you can go out and flirt with people too that won't bother me any and then I want to be able to flirt with people so however the let's so now we start looking into how motivated is she to do what and and what's it what is this about so a great many women in this life wouldn't necessarily want to sleep with attractive men that they bump into but they would love to have the positive feedback and so that feels very good to them and part of what's going on is an ongoing process that goes on your whole life which is to calibrate your mate value so you can't very well calibrate your mate value if your husband's right next to you guarding you so that that you can't sort of test the upper reaches of what it is that you might be able to pull down out of the world so you can see and particularly in in sort of drinking context where casual may be swirling around nightclubs this sort of thing it's going to turn out that this is to put women in a position where they're very likely to get fancier feedback on the on the basis of casual mating advertising than they could ever get in terms of anybody being serious about them being pair-bonded as we remember our thing from earlier today smoking and drinking is extremely attractive because it looks like the female can be had and therefore that makes them more attractive for casual mating but less attractive for a long-term pair bonding of course in the same way the males swimming through the the sea of opportunity at a singles bar are extra are willing to sleep down and so and so the female would suppose our girls a 7 or an 8 if she is then there might well be 9s or even tens that are willing to hit on her this can be giddy and exciting for her and therefore it's a little bit like a drug like reaction it's really fun ok really likes it now it's a little problem if she likes it a heck of a lot and kind of can't get enough of it then because this is suggesting any number of of problems percolating in the situation so one of the things that I would be interested in doing would be to essentially sit down in a fairly dispassionate fashion and do what I call crystal clear so crystal clear is when we say hey listen we're going to have a discussion and I want you to I want to just ask you some questions and I want you to feel free to say anything and you know I'm not going to fight or tell you to not think those things or not do those things or anything else I think we need to you know we're in some stress here and we need a going to open up the whole table and we have to understand that that you know you may have some feelings some ideas and some needs that are going to make me pretty uncomfortable and I'm going to have to live with that but I kind of want to understand them ok and I'll share with you kind of where it is that I seem to be at so with that kind of introduction we we say just tell me just describe for me what is it you think you know what what's fun about this what do you like about it because obviously you know it it scares me but just just talk to me tell me about this and then be willing to follow up with questions like you know have you you know in in this marriage you know this marriage is sort of a big deal these days and we has all these rules and regulations about it but how do you really feel about that I mean would you would you like this marriage to be an open marriage where it is that where you could pursue you know you know sexual relationships outside the marriage and and ask that question and you better be mentally prepared to ask it in a way that has a casual flavor to it so so that we just say we should kind of shrug our shoulders and and turn our hands from down on the table to up like you're doing it questioningly like you said like hey like ie if the answer is you'd like to do that I can handle it I'm not going to blow up and freak out okay so we ask the question because we want to be very very clear and you may find that she says no not at all I just really liked his feedback okay then that's going to be important for you to know that it's going to be important for you to hear that but you're only going to hear it aust if you if you ask the question in a way that appears very open to hearing whatever the answer is and even anticipating what the answer may be this is what I call you know feeding them the multiple choice so if you if you have something to ask somebody that is very difficult for them to tell you what it is then you can't ask them you cannot ask them an open-ended question to have them tell you you must tell them what it is and put the words out in the air so that they can see that you're not freaked by those words in that concept okay so that's why we say we begin open when why say what are you searching for what is it that you like how does that you feel about this how you know you know how do you see yourself doing this this is something that you feel like you want to do for you know the next few years or how do you know give me a little feel for that and then after we demonstrate that we are open to listening then we say you know I'm just trying to get a feel for really where you're at with this if you were flirting with some some handsome guy and and he he wanted to you know give you his phone number and maybe meet up with you a week later or a few days later and you felt like having a fling with them I mean is this is this kind of what it is that you're you know would you want to have this marriage be kind of open to that and when you ask that question once you ask it I'm going to give you a little bit of advice you shut up okay you shut up you ask the big question and then you shut up and you look calmly okay and you let them you watch for what's going on with them and you see and you try to communicate to them ie I can handle the truth and that that's a key question in this whole thing so we need to do crystal clear and we need to be very careful about how we ask those questions and and the reason for this is that then you know where you're at okay and so we're not in any big rush to make any decisions about this relationship and where we go because we don't know where it is right now it's all like unclear so there's a lack of clarity and ultimately where we would have to head with this is to be as to where I would what I call a position of power and a position of power that that the young man needs to arrive at is that once you understand the situation then you can then you have to decide that you're going to run an experiment experiment on how it is that you're going to let things go so are you going to say well I'll tell you what let's let this go for a year let's see what happens to this she just wants to go out and flirt etc and I'm going to look at this in a year and see if she gets out of her system and at the end of the year we'll see where we are see whether I can tolerate it okay so you put yourself in a position where where you give a timeline to the decision on this relationship and and you let the evidence come to you and after a year of this more you may decide you know what this is obviously the needs that she has cannot be cannot be had and the needs that I have cannot be had and we have ultimately too much conflict of interest and this relationship isn't going to fly no problem okay we're not there yet and one of the reasons we're not there yet is we don't actually know specifically what's in her head and one of the reasons we don't know specifically what's in her head is because we haven't asked in a way that we can get it okay so the most important thing we do is ask in a way that we can get to the information and we may have to take two or three passes at this so she may clam up and lie the first time around that's okay no problem we see how far we get we demonstrate to her that we're not freaked out whatever the answer is and then we come back and visit this thing a couple months later okay and we attack it from seven degrees different off center we ask the questions slightly differently we move the same direction we make same similar moves and now we ask a question again and now the second time two months from now she may cough it up that in fact should very much like to have the marriage open okay so if that's where we are then you don't make any decisions then you walk away and you think about it okay and and so this is how it is that we we attack a problem of this magnitude all right I think that's enough on that one we'll go on to something else okay next question what is the evolutionary purpose of female menopause does it decrease the probability of a long-term tear bond given that the female's hormone profile undergoes significant changes hmm the purpose of menopause is probably to divert female energies to a grandchildren so it's probably what it is the by the time a female goes into menopause is her her children her adult children would now be having children and so as a result of that it is a nature basically says you're in a lot of trouble for you our prot you probably don't have the chops to to survive all the way through and provision another new birth at age 48 so so as a result what we're going to do is instead of you having a very chancy kid with a lot of mutations because you the eggs are old and put a bunch of your life's energy into that the genes have figured out that we're better off of you putting your life's energy into grandchildren so I think it's obvious that this is a unique characteristic of humans one of the most striking unique characteristics is it's as unique as language I don't believe there's anywhere else in the animal kingdom where parents are are where grandparent hood use this and notice the fascination and attention that parents have for their children's mating choices it's unbelievable ok this is just this is just not like anything else you see in nature so this tells us something very interesting about the genes of the species and that is the brain is so big and so crafty it is actually thinking through the genetic interests of the organism trans generationally which is never going to take place in any other species so so it looks like it's a grandmother insisted and it basically says hey it's time to time to invest in grandkids and not so much yourself it's also very interesting that female sexuality interest in there particularly in as we survey it today females women in their 50s and 60s tend to be quite uninterested in sex far less interested in sex than their than their husbands so this this is again cannot possibly be an accident this is a this is a shifting of interest in behavior towards something else that is valuable for the genes which is grandmother hood clearly so this doesn't mean that that people you know women over fifty are never interested in sex that's not what it means it just means that there we see a we see a characteristic shift of interests that is quite remarkable so now the next part of question is does this does this reduce the probability of a long term para bond I'm not sure exactly what they're saying it's certainly going to possibly put pressure on a para bond because the male is going to still be interested in reproducing and so if the female is not very interested he you know it's certainly that conflict of interest should put pressure on a pair bond and that wouldn't surprise me any but that doesn't that doesn't mean that in principle I think that pressure essentially the fact that the female in general is going to be less interested in romance and sex and more interested in little tiny critters that Alber genes in them I think that that is a that is a conflict of interest that a postmenopausal female brings into mating relationships now probably what we're going to see is that these changes are my guess is is that you're going to see them more later in menopause than early because I believe that females early in menopause let's suppose you're 45 years old in the Stone Age and you just had your last so it should now you're you're heading in to pick menopause and let's say you're infertile by 48 I would expect that the system would still be interested in fooling the male who is the father of that child into thinking that further sexual activity would result in more children so I believe that females would still be motivated during menopause and in early years of menopause into essentially obviously completely unconscious not part of the conscious manipulative strategy of a female but the are we probably come from a long line of female ancestors who maintain sexual interest to some degree in the early years post menopause because they were still bluffing the males into thinking that there was still some eggs there and therefore that the sexual activity was a worthy harvest and therefore getting provisions for the existing offspring and so that I would expect after the normal level of provisioning that a male would probably stick around which might be 5 to 7 years that at that point it's time to give up the ghost and so that's probably how that goes that would be my guess okay any any amount of menopause isn't the you know it's Nature's Way of not competing with her daughters and granddaughters for sure all other men I don't think so I think that's a that would presuppose that there was that there would be I mean it's sort of an interesting idea I don't think so no I think it's I don't think that that's probably a factor in there I think that I think that's more what I'm talking about it's time to it's time to simply because you have such a such a long cycle to make a child a human child viable that literally nature just ran the remnant Alf matrix chimpanzees I believe I believe a female chimpanzee who maybe live 50 years is perfectly fertile all the way to the end that's probably because a a one or two year old chimpanzee could probably make it okay where is it a two year old kid doesn't two-year-old human has no chance and so the so the individual differences in in how fast development brings a viable organism would be the tell-tale sign of when it would pay to quit reproducing and and start essentially investing in ancillary offspring this is interest all right great questions for listeners we really appreciate it send in some more in a couple of shows we'll have some more listener emails and questions doctor well thanks again as always great we are a pleasure yes oh that's my cat I'm sorry [Applause] Holy Smoke we won't we won't ask anything about your sexual practices none look I'm not asking that question all right thank everybody miss Felicity what's our next one iceberg
Back to the top
🏃     👖




Artist