Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1959 - David Buss
Uploaded: 2023-03-23T00:00:00.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1959 - David Buss' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-03-23. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1959 - David Buss' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-03-23. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1959 - David Buss

All right, Dave. Well, thank you very much for being here, man. Appreciate it.
Thank you. I'm delighted to be here, and it's a great honor to be here talking
to you, man.
Well, it's very nice to meet you with Jordan. He speaks so highly of you,
and we had such a fun conversation at dinner that I said, well, we definitely
should do this publicly.
Yeah, yeah. It's terrific, and I've been catching up on your podcast.
You have so many that it's really impossible, but I watched the recent one you
did with Jordan when he was here in Austin,
and also the one that you did with Russell Brand, and I was on his podcast, and
I was just saying, man, he talks so fast.
I know.
That it's like, I'm glad you were kind of a calming influence to slow him down
a little bit.
And he's sober. The guy's completely clean and sober. You would imagine that he's
definitely on Adderall or something.
Yeah.
He just ran on off.
That's what I was thinking. Maybe when he was on heroin, maybe it calmed him
down a little bit or slowed him down.
Maybe. Yeah, maybe that's why he was interested in that stuff.
So what we started talking about was your life's work, which was your life's
work is human mating strategies.
Yes.
As a psychologist, first of all, why was that so appealing to you? Why did you
choose that as a field of study?
Yeah. Well, it wasn't a field of study when I did choose it, and it wasn't like
I had a plan going in.
But a little bit of back story on this is I'm a psychologist by training, so
trained at UC Berkeley, Ph.D., and there was nothing of this sort going on
there or no research.
But I started reading because I have fairly broad interest.
I started reading in different areas like evolutionary biology, and I was
reading in evolutionary biology.
I came across these amazing theories of evolution like Hamilton's theory of
inclusive fitness, Trevor's theory of parental investment, of course, Darwin's
theory of sexual selection.
That's really the one that blew me away, Darwin's theory of sexual selection.
And then I realized, man, these theories have so much applicability to humans,
but nobody is studying them.
And they lead to, at least the then theories, lead to some pretty clear
predictions that could be tested.
And so I was trained as an empirical scientist where, you know, you take the
hypotheses, generate predictions, do the studies.
And if the studies, if the empirical findings support the predictions, then you
say, OK, this looks promising, you know, we'll go further.
And so I did some initial studies of human mate preferences.
So one of the core things, maybe to back up just a second, if I could, Darwin's
theory of sexual selection.
So this is Darwin, 1871.
And it's one of the most brilliant and then unrecognized theory, evolutionary
theories in existence.
And so most people, when they think about evolution, they think about survival
of the fittest, you know, nature red in tooth and claw, you know.
And, of course, that's really what Darwin's first book on the origin of species
was all about, survival, adaptations to survival.
And he came up with this brilliant phrase called the hostile forces of nature
and that organisms have these adaptations to deal with these hostile forces of
nature in order to survive.
So there were basically threats from the environment, things like, you know,
fall off a cliff, you drown in the ocean, food shortages, threats from
predators, you know, the lions and tigers and bears, threats from parasites
that can eat you from within.
And so that's really what his first book was all about.
And so people equated natural selection with survival selection.
But there were, in fact, phenomena that Darwin could not explain on this theory.
And he was very troubled by them.
He noticed that something that all scientists do, scientists develop funds for
their pet hypotheses, right, their pet theories.
And so – but he noticed that he had a tendency to forget facts that were
inconsistent with his theory of natural selection.
And so he forced himself to write them down in a separate notebook because he
didn't want to forget them.
He was – you know.
So one was like the brilliant plumage of peacocks.
And he asked, how could this weird structure possibly lead to a survival
advantage?
It's like, first of all, metabolically expensive and it's like a neon sign to
predators advertising fast food.
How could this weird structure possibly have evolved?
He even said in his notebook that the sight of a peacock gives me nightmares.
He couldn't explain it on his theory of natural selection.
And he also noticed other phenomena, sexual dimorphism, differences in the size,
shape, morphology of males and females of the same species.
And the reason this troubled him was because he thought, well, both sexes face
the same survival problems, right?
Both sexes have to eat.
Both sexes have to fend off predators.
Both sexes have to fend off parasites.
So why would they differ in morphology, size, strength, et cetera?
And moreover, why would different species vary so dramatically?
So you have like elephant seals, for example.
Males are four times the size of females.
Chimpanzees, less so, twice the size of females.
Humans, it's complicated because it depends on which aspect of morphology you're
talking about.
So men are only, say, 10%, 11% taller than women.
But things like upper body strength, it's like monumentally powerful sex
differences there.
And so all this is a long-winded way of saying that in response to these anomalies,
you know, things like the brilliant plumage of peacocks, the elaborate bird
song, and so forth, and the sex differences,
he came up with a theory of sexual selection.
And sexual selection deals not with the evolution of characteristics that lead
to survival advantage, but rather those characteristics that lead to a mating
advantage.
And he identified two causal pathways.
Sorry for monologuing here.
No, no, please.
I'll get to a pause here.
Don't pause if you don't want to.
In a second, but so mating advantage.
So he identified two causal pathways, which are still the pillars of sexual
selection theory, by which mating advantage could occur.
Okay, one is intrasexual competition or same-sex competition.
So battles, the stereotype is two stags locking horns in combat, and the victor
gains sexual access to the female.
A loser ambles off with a broken antler, dejected, suffering low self-esteem,
and needing psychotherapy for some of my clinical psychology colleagues, mate
value rehabilitation therapy, or something like that.
And so the logic was very simple but very clear, and that is that qualities
that led to success in these same-sex battles, what biologists call contest
competition, those got passed on in greater numbers because of the sexual
access that the victors gained.
Quality associated with losing the competition basically bit the evolutionary
dust.
And the logic of that intrasexual competition is actually more general.
So what I've described is what's called contest competition, where there's a
little physical battle, but it's more general in that, for example, with humans,
we sometimes do contest competition.
In fact, there's somewhat of a long evolutionary history of males doing these
physical contests in warfare and sometimes within groups.
But we also compete for status, and for competing for status, status gives you
a mating advantage, but we don't necessarily have to fight.
So I always say, like, I teach at University of Texas and all the time, and I've
previously taught at University of Michigan, Harvard University, Berkeley.
In all my years in academia, I've never walked across campus and one time seen
two guys duking it out, you know, in public, surrounded by a ring of females
who are watching to see who's going to be the winner and then having sex with
the winner.
Not once have I observed this.
Now, maybe they do it in private, but I haven't seen that.
So that's the first component is same-sex competition.
Second process is intersexual selection, which is intermeaning between the sexes.
So it's basically preferential mate choice.
And there, the issue is what are the qualities that men and women or males and
females desire in the opposite sex?
And the logic there is that you need some variability in those qualities, and
so they could be anything.
They could be physical appearance.
They could be sense of humor.
They could be intelligence.
They could be personality characteristics.
So first, there has to be variability.
Second, there has to be some heritability to the variability.
And then third, there has to be some consensus.
It doesn't have to be total, but some agreement on what qualities are desired.
And so, for example, just hypothetically, if it were the case that all women
preferred to mate with men who had red hair, okay, it actually doesn't occur.
Red-headed is not typically a dominant preference.
But if they did, then over time, you would see an increase in the frequency of
red-headedness in the population because those with red hair would have a
mating advantage.
They would be selectively chosen.
Those lacking red hair would be, you know, kind of banished or do less well on
the mating market.
And so, again, you can see evolution, which simply means change over time,
either due to qualities that lead to success in same-sex battles or due to
possessing qualities that are valued by the opposite sex.
Okay, so let's talk about peacocks then.
Yeah.
What could possibly have caused a peacock to develop that insane plumage?
And how would that be preferential?
And why would that be preferential to the opposite sex?
Yeah, it's a great question, Joe.
And it basically – we know that it is preferred by the opposite sex.
So the more brilliant the plumage, the more luminescent the plumage, the more
females like it.
And there are a couple different hypotheses that have been put forward to
explain it.
We don't know totally the answer to it.
But one is that it has to do with parasite load.
So parasites decrease the luminescence of the plumage.
So a peacock that had a high parasite load would be less healthy.
And so one hypothesis is that females are cueing into a health cue.
Another hypothesis was put forward by an Israeli biologist named Zahavi called
the handicap hypothesis.
And the idea there is that the peacocks are saying, I am so big and strong and
fit that I can carry around this massive structure and still survive and still
thrive.
And so I must have pretty good genes.
And so we don't know.
And it could, of course, be some combination of those or a third factor.
But we do know females prefer it and probably link to a health cue, possibly
link to a handicap.
Well, it's interesting because it exists in turkeys as well.
Like turkeys have that big plumage that they puff out when they're trying to
attract the ladies.
Have you seen that?
Yeah, I have.
Yeah, many species do.
And you raise an interesting issue having to do with the sex difference in this.
So why does it seem to be the males who are always doing this and not the
females?
Which is interesting because in our species, if you ask which sex devotes the
most attention to changing their physical appearance, it's actually females.
So women, for example, spend nine times more money on cosmetic enhancements,
makeup and so forth compared to men.
The sex difference in who does the choosing, who does the competing was so
pronounced that Darwin even called the preferential mate choice component
female choice simply because he observed that it seemed to be the females who
were more choosy about who they mated with and the males were more indiscriminate.
They would basically mate with almost any female who would have them.
But what's interesting is when we get to humans, we find that both components
of sexual selection apply to both sexes.
So that is, in our species, both males compete with other males for access to
females and females compete with other females for access to desirable males.
And both men and women 