For or is it actually true. Well it certainly is true looking at the number of species were driving into extinction though. The lesson of this season may be that unlike risk opic viruses can do at least as good of a job in the other direction when you look at humans the challenge is that theres this terribly confusing paradox which is we are indeed the most dangerous species on earth we are in news ripley violent species we have remarkable ray of ways of making their miserable damaging all of them. Yet at the same time were also the most cooperated species on earth where the most altruism where the most compassionate and for me this is science has what is the most challenging thing to make sense of is the biology of how we can be. All full when some settings and so wonderful in others and often its the same behaviors its very dependent on context so thats exactly what were going to talk about today to try to actually deconstruct what you just sat with your colleague from charges france and law has argued that there is no Supreme Force that makes it good or bad but there are her own rules that we by by fostered by the evolutionary need to survive ask if we follow the argument that being. Evolutionary beneficial arsal her to say that 2nd placed in why pop a branch in grapes so that they sound the territory. As we see from the war than any 15 years ago humans are just like humans in this regard so if evolution is responsible for this do all to others is it also responsible for our. The evil of islam. Easy yes although after a while when you study the. Words like good and evil begin to seem irrelevant and unscientific we we are we are nothing more or less than our biology and biology of behavior does not have a her lot of room for concepts like evil or soul or. Sanctity any any such thing. About us thats most striking is yes we can be exactly like chimps chimps have now been shown to have organized violence creme meditated violence something resembling warfare or territorial disputes something resembling genocide which is sort of the formal world court definition is being willing to kill somebody not for who they are but simply for what group they belong to and chimps do this and its enormously familiar and its just like us and they are physically violent they make weapons as do we but then we have something that no chimp could ever make sense of we can press a button and kill someone on the other side of the planet we kill so monk whose face we have never seen we can kill someone where we dont even know for certain if weve even had an interaction with them if we have had any effect on them and at the same time whats also clear is lots of other primates have altruism has most have moments of compassion have moments of self sacrificial compassion and then we do something utterly bizarre there in that we can press a different button on our computer. And send money to help a refugee on the other side of the planet we can feel pain and lose sleep over the misfortune of someone we have never met whose face we have never seen and in those regards were a very very strange primates so loudest slane that i mean youre saying were so much like charles and. Anything that is good or evil or soul doesnt make sense in a scientific way its irrelevant. What is it that makes us to france france as a lot of new your our scientists would argue that what makes us different from anyone else is the conscious the one thing that we cant see we cant pinpoint but its obviously there would you agree with that when you look at the human genome and compare it to say the chimpanzee or the bonneau poaching room theres more than 98 percent similar. So theyve been sequenced and you can then sit down and have this incredibly exciting thing of asking so one and a half percent differences in the d. N. A. Where are the differences what is it that makes us humans as opposed to the chimps and for the most part the list is really boring its not half of the genes have to do with olfaction others have to do with amused function oh theres have to do with reproductive isolation others have to do with how much hairier growing on your strollers these are not very exciting things and as a neurobiologist you sit there and say where are the genes that have something to do with granny who is going to be dramatically different were asked what makes this true we are. And when you look closely theres a very few genes related to neural function and the ones that are do something very simple they have to do with the rounds of Cell Division. Basically if you want to turn a chimpanzee brain and she was human brain just let it go through 34 more rounds of Cell Division so youve got 4 times as many neurons as you would have had as a chip and thats all youve got to do its the same dura transmitters its the same enzymes its the same Everything Else but if you put enough neurons together all sorts of stuff will serve emerging including consciousness and a wonderful way of describing it the people who doing merchants Complexity Science they say things like with enough quantity you invent quality just stick a nuff neurons in somebodies brain and consciousness is going to pop out the other side not because any given neuron is anything fancy or than it would be in a chimpanzee or a fruit fly but simply with enough of them Emergent Properties come out and so memory and there is consciousness and is static sense theology and all these other things that chimps could never make sense of well which they could if they really had 4 terms as many neurons its really all thats needed very well because youre asking just killer magic notion of consciousness that made a specialist human thesis but i think very flaming that to me so many of them back to what you were saying he said that he wants to have to draw a line between the socalled right kind of violence and the wrong kind of balance. How do you explain that and what he really does actually mean by that well thats that shoots puzzle of like every single culture on earth has prohibitions against killing. At the same time virtually every culture on earth will reward you enormously if youve killed the right person if youve killed in any of the states if you have you know do the exact same thing with your brain and the exact same thing with your muscles where you pull the trigger on a weapon and in one setting it is the most horrendous damaging thing imaginable and in another setting is it a wondrous thing that they will give you a medal for the people who vote for you because of the people who mate with you because youre good at doing that sort of say and its the exact same behavior its just in a different context and thats not just the case for damaging behaviors its the same for our affiliate of ones as well ok so a wonderful moment somebody is troubled theyre emotionally distressed and you put your hands on there and depending on the context thats a moment of deep compassion or wonderful moment or in another setting you were during the 1st step of betraying the loved one by straying into a direction you shouldnt be and his exact same muscles its the exact same behavior in other words understanding the biology of our behaviors the mechanical basic is not very interesting is not very challenging the challenge is understanding a context for it because they need to leave Different Things in different set of facts. Right now when were back well continue talking to a proper. Professor of neurology biology at stanford university. Capable of extreme statement s. Going in. Counting the cost and charting the future we demand any good theory to proceed it is time to assess the economic damage oh heres the crisis change the game look concrete and if theres going to be a recovery what kind to speed and are there lessons to be learned. Happened on the front of the. Way or both the food. Bank itself mukti about. Plus weve got to doubt its a hard luck the thing and the mother decided to see the work of a coward and i know from the start that if. This is the only thing that we do is music because everybody fights aimed his way. On the floor you can feel the 50 pound this will persuade you that you have all the ability to get the. Thank you but i think is this is the fans that is a constant. Thank. You. Oh im back to. Talking to the professor of neurology in biology and staff working for say a Professor Emeritus the biology of good any well as you refer to military psychologists and suggest that in the middle of combat soldiers should at each other and not our hate trait but fear of being killed because they were told to stand up and 5 by the command is path out of the feeling of kinship with that others so they should kill because others. And if you think about it we do a lot of stupid in appalling things because theres. Houses where i mean that things that we might be uncomfortable about several supine if others do that well what happens when we are a very conforming species classic studies in the 1950 s. You sit somebody down you show him a picture with 3 para loans were one of the lines is clearly longer than the other 2 and us the person which is the longest line and 99 percent of its when people say thats the longest rule then you do the study where the person is sitting there and theres 10 other people in the room and everyone looks at this picture and you get to ask everyone which is the longest and the other 10 people who are working for the experimenter go 1st and every single one of them says the line that shorter is a long one and you know what was seen classic psychology stuff 75 percent of people are willing to conform under those circumstances to be willing to say. Well i guess i was room yeah i guess that is the long the longest lie so those were studies in the fiftys but more modern versions of it now of involved doing neuroimaging on people when thats happened and what do you see as 2nd the 1st person says yeah thats the longest line wait thats not the longest line thats not what i thought was the longest line and what you see in a fraction of a 2nd is activation of this part of the brain called be an ig. Which has you with anxiety and with here and what you see at that point is being different from everybody else is a terribly enzyte he provoking thing 1st few days and you see at the point that subjects decide ok i dont know what theyre talking about but good im going to say that also the 2nd they do that the unit to work quiets down im safe im part of the crowd again im part of not standing up for himself where a terribly conforming species because. Least in the United States where there is such an emphasis on individual list cultures and all of that we are very into the individualistic in the ways that we go about conformity and everyone else. Being a nonconformist is very anxiety provoking for any primate out there but in particular seem so we can bring out the best of our behaviors but far more often it brings out the worst because we go along with the crowd. Could that explain that and millions of people follow nasserism to the task but they get it they did it ask a ship just doing what everyone. Around well the interesting thing very is sort of by the time he gets humans if youre looking at a hamster a. Hampster cooperates more with a full civil laying than it does with a stranger how does the hamster know this this could be a sibling from a different litter or whatever they 2 never clee connect recognize row with factory signature schumanns dont do yet how do we figure out who is a relative we have to think about it and assumes we think about it we can be manipulated into thinking that this person feels so close to me theyre practically a relative or that person feels so different from a that they hardly even count as she. And the jerk in used for it is pseudo kinship and no speciation kinship with every little experience earth is really good to have whether you are looking at high tech armies or you know nomadic pastoralists heres what they do is the military is trained to think of each other as brothers brothers an army english cliche that is you become a band of brothers when you join the military serial kinship so very critical moments youre willing to give yourself your life for this other person and normally theres a fair degree of like related is everyone who joined the nazis was german nerve german gene stock but during world war 2 you had american troops fighting the nazis where one guy in this American Group would be an Italian American guy in a polish american car in a russian Jewish American guy in a black. And you would have a guy fighting on the american side whos german american and he was more related to the guy he was trying to shoot at the other in the field than he was to the black guy or the jewish guy or the italian guy right next to him. And you would be willing to give up this life for this showing when you do this shooter can ship it is very easy to manipulate us into feeling so related unconsciously implicitly to each other if thats where you get some great schuman moments and some turbulence but its kind of scary when you think about it the whole scenario so you know i cant shake because as opposed suter kingship visit parks and forests that makes human with rice and marks to kill each other in droves i mean when you look at the past the war a spatial test they go a little bit more in the whole human race could have been wiped out. Yup. You know pseudo kinship could have its good moments if youre a dalai lama and you can say that every person on earth feels like a sibling to you it is far as you can tell he actually feels that way and you can have great moments like that but yes for the most part pseudo kinship is a scary thing and even scarier is pseudo speciation if you want to have a genocide go successfully against the people you dont like convince everyone in your side that those people are like rodents those people are like cancers those people are like vermin and theyre like viruses there are like they hardly even kill this year and the nazis were brilliant at that all of nazi propaganda posters were about jews as rats used as rodents when the tutsis in rwanda were killed genocidally by the hoochie there the who to consider all of them this conqueror as vernon when donald trump tries to make americans turn against immigrants trying to come to the country he refers to them as a disease as an infection mexicans coming to the United States or coming to infect the country thats what every good. You know demagogue and fascist leader of that sort whos headed to you is if you could make your followers think of them as less than human you think youre 3 quarters of the way towards completing your genocide. Task because we have that machine weapon at all tension that of the apollo and the pandemic that were living through right now maybe also. Indicate ship but 1st i think many psychologists say that the current code 970 has put us in a survival mode. Would you agree with that i mean actually realize that right now and im in a pretty comfortable situation in my home no ones holding a gun to my hat its not Like Alliance chasing us about how exactly does this situation change for their survival mode one of the most ancient actually basic instincts and how we humans well if if you had a zebra in your room with you and the zebra was getting all the same news that you were about ku that 19 it would not be having stress response it doesnt have the capacity to abstract over space and time and we can sit here and we can think about all the people who have died we can think about what it must feel like to have your lungs fill up with fluid what it must feel like to go to an emergency room and they dont have a ventilator for you we can think about what it must feel like to be in the United States one of the 20000000 people who have lost their jobs in the last 2 months who are thinking about the shortages that could well be happening or any version of this and we can think about how somebody else is emotions and we can think about a scenario thats imaginary at this point but has a decent chance of occurring in the future and we can be as panicked at that point and as sickens and as feeling as if were being hunted by a lion as the zebra would feel what he really was being a concert on iran. So if you look at this point demi in terms of his pseudo kinship which she said could be a horrible thing they call also be a wonderful thing would you think this seed of kinship was brought out in us in a good way or in a bad wager independently because i do feel like a lot of people are consolidating and the whole world has put aside their differences im not even talking about the president s im talking about people to sort of be in this together and fight this together and i see people helping each other volunteers helping old people that i never thought i dont see and normal environment what are your impressions of what this thing debbie has brought out in us. For were its been surprisingly good impression you have. The people risking their lives in the Emergency Rooms the people risking their lives delivering food to people and working as pharmacists for the sick who come in there coughing and although weve seen some incredibly her work stuff and you know this is going to a good time for people pulling together after the 911 attack in the United States and 2100 people in new york city home from new york city originally in people there are like trained to be rotten in the newsroom. Because thats what all new yorkers are like and for months afterward people were trying to each other it was so under your finger and yes at times like this people pull together but then there are the people who are refusing to wear face masks and there are the people who are refusing to go along with Public Health measures and because they dont care if they get somebody else sick so we have this like initially assume contributes to humans who pretty great great stuff my guess would be has this pandemic osama longer and longer and has more people lose their jobs and as more people die were going to start seeing far less of the goods to go kinship or more of the bad stuff. In the now im also considering the dark side and i see how the Domestic Violence has risen at 35 percent with number couple of weeks ago it could be even more now. What do you think could be there are bad moments that could resurface then asked because of uncertainty because of strasser it has a fast fear and an artistic sense survival what can we extract. Well at her worst moments in terms of stress her memory gets better we get anxious and we get depressed whats probably most mccort and is what stressed to the frontal cortex in the brain what stress is make the frontal cortex work less effectively and what the frontal cortex i