#143 William von Hippel: The Social Leap, Human Sociality, Mating, Agriculture, and Happiness

Feb 25, 2019

01:04:57

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Dr. William von Hippel is Professor of Psychology at the University of Queensland, Australia. He has published more than a hundred articles, chapters, and edited books in social psychology, and his research has been featured in The New York Times, USA Today, The Economist, the BBC, Le Monde, El Mundo, Der Spiegel, and The Australian. He also recently published a book, “The Social Leap: The New Evolutionary Science of Who We Are, Where We Come From, and What Makes Us Happy” (2018).

In this episode, we go through the main topics of Dr. von Hippel’s book, The Social Leap. We compare humans with other animals. We talk about the movement from the rainforest to the savannah; the evolution of bipedality and our hands; meat, cooking, and diet; hunting, cooperative breeding, and the social brain hypothesis; alloparenting, pair-bonding and monogamy. We also refer to Christopher Ryan’s book, Sex at Dawn, and the points where his thesis fails. We then go through the importance of language and culture, and gene-culture coevolution. We also talk about tribalism, the advent of agriculture, and hierarchy and economic, social and sexual inequality, and the problem with polygamic societies. Also, the mismatch between the ancestral environments we adapted to and the modern ones, and what our innate psychology tells us about what makes us happy, even in modern industrialized societies. We finish off by talking about a recently paper authored by Dr. von Hippel and Dr. David Buss, “Psychological barriers to evolutionary psychology: Ideological bias and coalitional adaptations”.

Time Links:

00:56 Humans and the Great Apes

03:44 From the rainforest to the savannah

04:50 The evolution of our bipedality, and the stone-throwing hypothesis

09:51 The importance of our hands

12:35 Meat and diet

16:28 Fire and cooking

17:47 The social brain hypothesis

20:32 Large brains, prolonged development, and cooperative breeding

22:53 Alloparenting and monogamy

28:08 Christopher Ryan, Sex at Dawn, jealousy, polygamy and monogamy

32:40 Language and learning