i had my right flank were the syrian forces that had the same tanks that saddam had, which was always kind of interesting. [laughter] so, for 30 days i'm running up with thousands of soldiers trying to elicit a response, and were clearing the mines and going through the fire trenches and getting trying to make it look like the main coalition attack was going to come right out. this is not the way to the west and schwarzkopf didn't want saddam's folks to see that so they kept running my brigade up, and every kind we were in mach iii, which is everything on our gas lines. we had a rubber booties, we had our suits, we had gloves on and that our masks out of the carriers ready to put them on because we knew we were going to get slimed one of these times.

you know, it just never happened. so if diplomatic moves of this letter from the president to saddam talked about, may be interpreted that also to be she better not slimed us. they had released the chemicals down to battalion levels, we knew that. anybody over there who we were threatening could have retaliated with chemical weapons. so it was, again, there's so many levels. you listen to this, listen, for all you cadets better here, thank you for coming. because the levels of interacting here today has been just unbelievable. you've got what the president was thinking about, what he was doing, all these different levels, and then i was just out there, you know, at the end, you

know, point, you know, tell me what to do, boss. >> i will jump in as the boss. [laughter] and i say thank you very much to dr. engel. [applause] general house. [applause] >> i happened to be on the trip that you saw highlighted in this video with the president and mrs. bush went to saudi arabia to see the troops before the ground war started. and the white house staff was trained to use gas masks and put on clothing. so we were very concerned about the use of chemicals and very bad things. with that, you are about to have some very good things. if you would please join us outside, we have some refreshments and you will have a chance to buy the book and have it autographed by the author or the editor it and we thank you very much for coming.

we are very proud of the bush school. we're very proud to be part of the texas a&m community. so i will leave you, reminding you that all things at texas a&m center of excellence, integrity, leadership, loyalty, respect and self service -- selfless service. and they're all personified in president george h. w. bush. thank you. [applause] >> you're watching booktv on c-span2. 48 hours of nonfiction authors and books every weekend. author jared diamond is next on booktv. he talks about what we can learn from traditional societies that exist in only a very few places around the world today. he also reflects on the way people lived for the vast majority of the millions of years of human existence. this is just under one hour.

>> it's my great privilege to introduce an invite dr. diamond to the stage to tell us all about the world until yesterday. let's give him a wonderful philadelphia well. [applause] notice he has a red coat with a red tie. >> let me first check whether you will be able to hear me okay in back. can you hear in back? it's a great pleasure to be back in philadelphia today and to be back in this wonderful library to talk about subjects other than gall bladders. [laughter] instead, to getting an idea, how many this evening may find what

i will tie you a practical value, i'd like you to raise your hands to one or the other two questions that i will pose. first, could those of you raise your hand who either are over age 65, or hope to live past age 65, or have a parent or grandparent over 65? [laughter] >> many of you, all right. then the second group, let me ask, please raise your hand if you are under 65, have no intention of living past 65, had had no parent or grandparent who lived past 65? raise your hand. all right. those of you in this group your the one student i think my talk this evening will be of practical value. [laughter] those of you in the second group my talk will not be of practical value but i think you'll still find the subject fascinating. i'm going to talk about growing older in traditional societies. this subject is just one chapter

of my latest book which covers traditional small societies with our big modern societies. with respect to many aspect of society such as growing old, bringing up children, health, dealing with the danger, settling disputes, war, religion and speaking more than one language. this book is my most personal book. my books of the most practical value to our daily lives, and as a shameless author i hope they it's about what i've learned it will be my best selling book. about spending a lot of my time in traditional tribal societies over the past 50 years. and it's about what friends and other scholars have learned from other tribal societies around the world. all of us here are accustomed to living in big industrial societies, in permanent housing with central governments to make decision, with writing and books and internet.

where most people live past age 60, where we regulate and counter strangers just as i am encountering you this evening, and where most of our food is grown by older people, we forget that every one of those things a -- arose recently in history. humans have constituted a separate line of biological evolution, about 6 million years. but all of the things i just mentioned didn't exist anywhere in the world 11,000 years ago. they rose only within the last 11,000 years, and some of them such as the internet and the phenomenon most people living past age 60 arose only within the last century. that is, the ancestors for all of us here were living under traditional tribal conditions virtually into yesterday, measured by 6 million your time scale of human evolution. until europeans started to expand around the world 500 years ago, tribal society still

occupied large parts of all of the continents. but tribal societies have recently been coming under the control of modern societies with state governments. to the point where today the last tribal society not yet undertaken control, small areas of new guinea and amazon basin. those tribal societies which constitute all human societies in human history are far more diverse than our modern societies. all big societies have governments where most people are strangers to each other, are similar to each other, and different from tribal societies, in many basic ways regardless of whether how big societies are america, german, chinese, israeli or whatever. tribes constitute thousands of natural experiments. in how to run a human society. they constitute experiments in which we ourselves may be able to learn. for example, today if you think the modern american children

enjoy too much freedom, or else if you think modern american children are not given enough freedom you cannot perform a despised of excrement designates a big america american states ws had remained strictly subservient to their parents and grandparents. 17 other states will be given the freedom to make their decisions to play, to play with sharp knives from the age of two onward. and 15 other states, their children continue to be treated as they are treated today. it would only carry out that controlled expand we could come back in 40 years, compared to children from all the states and quickly settled the question whether it's better to raise kids with more freedom, less freedom, or the same freedom that they enjoy today. unfortunately, it's impossible to carry out that size of experiment in the u.s., but there are thousands of traditional societies in which children already did group of with even much more freedom or

much less freedom than in the modern u.s. by examining what actually does or did happen in traditional societies that are much more varied than modern american society, we maybe able to learn things of practical value to us in deciding how to raise our kids, how to treat our older people, how to remain healthy and other things that we care a lot about. tribal society shouldn't be scorned as primitive and miserable, but also they shouldn't be idealized as happy and peaceful. when we learn of tribal practices, some of them will glorify us but there are other tribal factors of which when we hear about them we may admire and envy them and wonder whether we could adopt those practices ourselves. to get some perspective on how we treat elderly people in western modern societies, let me tell you the opinion of a friend of mine from the fiji islands in

the pacific who had this idea of the united states. there were some things he liked about this, some things he didn't like about the u.s. the thing he this float most obvious was how we treated our older people. he almost shouted, you americans throw away your older people, those were his words. by that he meant that most old by that he meant most all people in u.s. end up living separately from the children, and separately for most of the friends of their earlier years, and all that in separate time and homes for the only. in fiji and other traditional societies older people instead live out their lives among the children. or other relatives and their lifelong friends. nevertheless, the treatment of the elderly varies enormously amongst traditional societies, for much worse to much better than in our modern society. at the worst extreme, many traditional societies get rid of their elderly in increasingly

direct ways. the most indirect method to get rid of the elderly is just to neglect them an and not to feedm for clean until they die. the second method is to abandon them when the group moves on. the third method is to encourage older people to meet -- to commit suicide. a fourth more direct method is to kill older people with their own cooperation. for example, among the people of top of new guinea a widow whose husband has just died asks her brother or son to, strangled or. the fifth and most direct message to get rid of the elderly is to kill them without their consent or cooperation. in what tribal societies to children of and and/or kill their parents? it happens mainly under two conditions. one is in nomadic hunter gatherer societies that often shifts hands and end up physically incapable of

transporting old people who can't walk when the able bodied young people already have to carry their young children and their physical possessions. the other condition for getting rid of older people is in societies living in marginal or deteriorating environments such as deserts where the art dramatic food shortages, and occasionally they just isn't enough food to keep everyone alive. whatever food is available has to be reserved for able-bodied people still capable of contributing to the tribe -- the tribes survival. and to the children who gro will grow up to be the tribes future adults. can you still here okay? okay, good. to us modern americans it sounds horrible to think of abandoning or killing your own sick spouse or your own elderly parent. but what else could those societies do? they face a cruel choice.

their old people had to do with their own parents, and the old people know what now is going to happen to them. for any of you who nevertheless are still inclined to blame those tribal societies for abandoning or killing the elderly, let me quote the words of winston churchill about the behavior of the japanese admiral at the battle in october 1944 when the admiral had to choose between two equally horrible options. winston churchill said of him, those of you who have endured a similar ordeal may judge you. in fact many of you, many of us here have already faced or will face an ordeal similar to the ordeal faced i those nomadic or desert tribal societies when you are the physician or the relative responsible for the medical care of an old person. and when you're the one who has to decide whether and when to halt further medical

intervention, and win just to administer painkillers and sedatives for a sick spouse or parent. at the opposite extreme in the treatment of the elderly, a happy extreme, new guinea farming societies where i have into my fieldwork for the past 15 years. and the society of my friends and many other sedentary traditional societies around the world. in the societies older people are cared for, they are fed, their remain valuable, and they continue to live in the same hud or else in a nearby hut near their children, their relatives and their lifelong friends. and tradition that any societies whether or not dennis and older people gradually lose their teeth and go no longer choose -- can no longer choose their food, their adult children choose the food until it's soft, spent the food into the cup and give that soft pre-chewed food to the

toothless old person to be. i don't know of any modern western society in which such devoted care of older parents is routine. there are two main sets of reasons for this variation among societies and their treatment of old people. variations tends especially on the usefulness of old people and on the societies values. first as regards usefulness, older people continue to perform useful services and traditional societies, and also in our modern society. one use of older people in traditional societies is that often their skill at producing food. for example, among the hunter gatherers of tanzania, grandmothers are the most productive women of finding and digging up wild, edible roots. grandmothers have much more experience than younger women of finding roots, and they often still have enough strength to dig them up. hints, measurements show the

growth rate of a grand job increases with the amount of time the grandmothers spends scourging to get food. while older hunter gathering men, they no longer have the strength needed to steer a line. the men may still be useful in their old age, following animal tracks and of capturing slow or small prey. the lifetime experience of older men, dating know much more than younger men about habits that each specie of prey animal know how to best time that animal. that value of the experience of older people in traditional societies have sold so been confirmed to modern farming societies. among 19th century canadian farmers and 19th century finnish farmers, each decade that a grandmother survived past age 50 is correlated with two extra grandchildren of that

grandmother eventually surviving. because of the grandmothers contribution to resources while still alive. another traditional use of old people consist of babysitting their grandchildren. thereby, cleaning up their own adult children, parents of those grandchildren to go hunting and gathering food for the grandchildren. still another traditional value of older people is in making tools, weapons, pots and textiles. in fact, older people are usually the people who are best at those things. older people usually are the leaders of traditional societies, and the people most knowledgeable about madison, religion, politics, so one, and dances. to some extent that is still true today. the average age of american president, not assume the presidency, his 54 years old. finally, older people and traditional societies have one more huge significance that

would never occur to us in our modern literate societies where our source of information our books and the internet. in contrast, in traditional societies without writing, older people are the repositories of information. their knowledge spells the difference between survival and death to the whole society in a time of crisis caused by rare events in which the old people alive have had experience. for example, in 1976 i visited a remote polynesian island in the pacific ocean, in order to do an environmental impact study for proposed mining project. as part of my study i asked the islanders to tell me the name of each species of forest tree in their polynesian language, and tell me each tree species whether it's food or seedless edible. the islanders began answering me.

this tree fruit is eaten by people. that treats food is eaten by bats and not by people. this tree fruit is eaten by birds, not bats or people. but that fruit i isn't edible to people looking animal, and so on. then the islanders came to retreat in which they said, people eat this tree is fruit only after -- i didn't know what that was, but i let the islanders keep talking about eaten by people or birds or by bats, and then they came to another fruit, just eaten by people after -- then several more fruits even only after -- i was now really curious why asked them, so, what is that? why are there some fruits that you eat only after that? to anthony, the islanders took me to a cut in side which city was a woman around 80 years old, blind and unable to walk. the islanders explained to me

that when that woman, that old woman was only a teenager, the island had been hit by an enormous cyclone, and which destroyed all the gardens and much of the forest on the island. that left people at risk of starving, so they survived by eating certain species of wild fruits that they normally wouldn't eat, but that old people alive at the time of the cyclone remembered having eaten at the time of the previous cyclone. from historical records, the cyclones, i calculated that it'd hit the island around the uniting 10 when the old woman the people were showing me was just a teenager. she was the oldest person still alive on the island at the time of my visit. if another big cyclone should hit the island now, and he can destroy the gardens and much of the forest, the only thing that was a the population of the island from starving to death would be the memories of that

one old woman, the sole person alive who remember what fruits that were normally considered inedible for safety when nothing else was available. her knowledge which is what we keep her fellow islanders alive until the gardens begin to produce again. in the u.s. that we don't rely on oral memory. instead, we look at the answers in a book or we googled it. more than any incident in all my years working on the island, that story of that old blind and lame woman made me appreciate the overwhelming importance of the knowledge of older people throughout human history. before there was writing and non-literary traditional societies where a knowledge of older people spell the difference between life and death to their entire society. those then are the ways in which older people are useful in

traditional societies. their usefulness varies among traditional societies, and then she beats to variations in the society's treatment of the elderly. the other set of reasons for variation in treatment of the elderly is the society's cultural values, which varies somewhat independently of the usefulness of the elderly. for example, among large societies that have centralized governments for thousands of years, there is a particular emphasis on respect for the elderly in east asia associated with the philosophy of confucius and with this doctrine. obedience, respect and support for elderly parents. cultural values emphasize respect for older people contrast with the status of the elderly in the united states. older americans are at a disadvantage in getting jobs.

for example, a sociologist at boston university carried out the experiment of submitting dozens of job applications in response to ads by prospective employees. all of the applications gave the tissues names of women and all of the applications were identical, except that half of the applications give the woman applicants age is 25-40, while the other half of the avocation gave her age as 45-60. the result of the experiment was that employers were twice as likely to call a woman aged 25-40 for a job interview as a woman aged 45-60. another example of the low status of the elderly in the u.s. is an explicit policy in our hospitals called age-based allocation of health care resources. listen to those words. age-based allocation of health care resources. that expression is a cruel

euphemism. it means that if hospital resources are limited, if there's only a certain number of hospital beds available, or only one donor heart becomes available for transplant or face certain has time to operate on only a certain number of patients, technical glitch. [inaudible] >> some of you may have seen a james bond movie of about 15 years ago in which the evil head of a media network has the lights turned out in the whole building by james bond and the evil head says short technical interruption. i'm not an evil media hit, but we got a short technical interruption.

[laughter] i was just talking then about age-based allocation health care resources. american hospitals have an explicit policy of giving preference to younger patients over older patients on the grounds that the younger patients are more valuable to society, supposedly, because they have more years of life ahead of them, even though the younger patients have fewer years of valuable life experience behind them. the are several reasons for this low status of the elderly in the united states. the high status of the elderly in east asia is based on the asian emphasis on -- the low status of americans rises in several american values that is replaced. one is our work ethic which places high value on work so that older people are no longer working are not respected. another reason is our american emphasis on the virtues of

self-reliance and independence, so that we instinctively score in older people are no longer self-reliant. still a third reason is our american cult of youth, that coulter just shows up in our advertising, ads for coca-cola or beer. just picture them. they always depict smiling young people, even though old people as well as young people buy and drink coca-cola and beer. just ask yourself, when is the last time you saw a coke or a beer ad depicting smiling people 75 or 80 years old? never. instead, the only american ads featuring wider old people are ads for retirement homes, ads for financial planning. well, what has changed in the status of the elderly today? compared to their status in traditional society. there have been few changes for the better and more changes for the worse. big changes for the better include the fact that they enjoy

much longer lives, much better health in our old age, and much better recreational opportunities. also our older people rarely have had to experience grief from the death of their own child. whereas in traditional societies parents routinely have to grieve over the death of many or most of their children. another change for the better in the lives of older people is that we now have specialized retirement facilities and programs to take care of older people. changes for the worst begin with the cruel reality that we now have far more old people and fewer young people than at any time in the past. that means that all those old people are more of a burden on a few young people and that each old person is less individual values. on the island when i visited in 1976, there was only that one old woman still alive to remember how to survive after

the cyclone of 1910. if there have been hundreds of survivors of the 1910 cyclone, still alive in 1976, any single one of those hundreds of survivors would not have been individually valuable. another big change for the worse in the status of the elderly is the breaking of social ties with age because older people, their children and their friends, move and scatter independently of each other many times during their lives. the average american moves every five years. and so our older people are very likely to end up living a distance from their children and letting distance from their friends of their youth. yet another change for the worse for the status of the elderly is formal retirement from the workforce, carrying with it a loss of work friendship and a loss of the self-esteem associated with work. perhaps the biggest of all the changes of the work in the status of our elderly is that they are objectively less useful

than in traditional societies. widespread literacy means that they are no longer useful as the repositories of knowledge. when we want information we look it up in a book or we google it instead of buying some -- instead of findings of old person to ask. ..

i was considered as candidly good at malt line two-tiered digit numbers because i memorize the multiplication tables and i know how to use logarithms that quick at manipulating the site. today, the skills and psychos is utterly useless because any can not write the digit numbers accurately and instantly with a calculator. income to debt skills for everyday life. many families first television had only three knobs that he quickly mastered. it was an on-off switch, a volume knob and a channel selection now. today, just to watch television programs in my living room, i have to operate a 41 button tv remote that is utterly confusing

out of my children explain it. i have to telephone may 25 euros fine and asked them to talk me through it or try to push these wretched for doing buttons. what do we do to improve the lives of the elderly in the u.s. and the use of their value? in my remaining few minutes today, i can offer just a few suggestions. one value of older people is they are increasingly useful for a very high quality child care if they choose to do it. as more and more younger women enter the workforce in theory you. stay home as full-time caretakers of their children compared to the usual alternatives of paid babysitters in day care centers, grandparents offers superior motivated experienced childcare. they party gain experience from

raising their kids, and usually they let their grandchildren and are eager to be permitted to spend time with the children unlike other caregivers, grandparents stock with a babysitting job because they found another job with higher pay in social security and medical benefits. but there's also a downside to grandparents and babysitters. but the increasing age at which couples have babies today, the couple's parents often though grandparents until they're in their 70s and 80s where they may no longer have necessary physical stamina to babysit grandchildren. a second value of older people today is paradoxically related to the loss of value as a result of changing road conditions and technology. older people have keyed in value today precisely because their unique experience of conditions that have now become rare because of rapid change but

could come back. for example, only people now in their 70s or older today can be asked. a living through great depression. the experience of living through world war, the experience of living through prudent aimed in debating whether or not dropping atomic bombs would be more horrible than the consequences of not dropping homes. most of our current voters and leaders of politicians have no personal experience of any existing, but millions of older americans do. unfortunately, all of those situations would come back. even if they don't come back, we have to be what you plan on the basis of the experience of what they were like. older politicians and voters have that experience. younger people, younger politicians and voters don't have that experience. the remaining value of older people that i will mention

involves recognizing mothers anything sold or people can no longer do, there's other things they can do much better than younger people. a challenge for societies to make use for this to insult people are better at doing. some abilities of course decrease with age. they include ability at tasks, requiring physical strength and stamina, ambition and the power of novel reasoning and a narrowly circumscribed situation such as figuring out the structure of dna best left assigned to someone under the age of 30. conversely, valuable attributes that increase the page include experience, understanding of people and human relationships, ability to help other people without your own ego getting in the way of your advice and interdisciplinary thinking about large databases such as biogeography income. if history, best lefty scholars over the age of 60 or best of

all over the age of 75. hence, older people are better than younger people as supervising, administrating, advising, strategizing and synthesizing. i've seen values of older people were so many friends and 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s as farmers, lawyers and surgeons. in short, many traditional societies make better use of their elderly and give there ultimately more satisfying lives than we do in under a societies. paradoxically nowadays and therefore alter the people than before living healthier lives and with better medical care than ever before, old age is in many respects more miserable than ever before. the lives of the elderly are widely considered a disaster area of modern american society. we can surely do better by

learning the lives of the elderly in traditional society. but what's true of the lives of the elderly in traditional society is true of many other features of traditional society as well. of course i am not advocating that we all give up agriculture and metal tools, return to hunting and gathering, live in small tribes and resume making tribal war against neighbors tribes. as many respects in which our laws today are far happier than those a small traditional societies. to mention a few examples, our lives are longer, materially much richer and plagued by violence than people in traditional societies. but there's also things to be admired about people in traditional societies and learn from there. their lives in traditional society or social in much richer than our lives, on the materially poorer. children in traditional

societies are more self-confident, more socially skilled in her crochets then are the lives of our children. today in traditional societies essentially never die of diabetes, help disease, high blood pressure, stroke of non-communicable diseases could be the cause of most of his hearing mr. today and that is not just because traditional societies don't live long enough to get diabetes and other diseases contiguity may compare cents at the same age, people living lifestyles are further split it to get diabetes and heart disease and other non-communicable diseases of the same age. teachers at the modern lifestyles predispose us to this disease is, what each of the traditional lifestyles protect us against those diseases. other chapters of my book view with other aspects of society besides old age. i have a chapter on dispute

resolution, which in traditional society aims at emotional closure, reconciliation between the parties involved in the dispute race and if you are involved in the civil war, criminal work case of the united states can any of you who know divorcing couple are brother and sister, parents and children involved know that the last thing the american court system cares about his emotional reconciliation. instead, the government cares about right and wrong and people into the surplus or resold. chronic society involves killing not just young man, but women and children. child rearing is quite different than traditional societies that's why send exit price contributes to children in traditional societies are more

independent, self-assured and capable of making decisions. babies in traditional societies are carried vertically upright facing forward, not horizontally as in a baby carriage or facing backwards and that affects development of newer motor skills. they respond quickly within 10 seconds, probably three seconds to an infant crying with none of the nonsense about setting the baby cry south of. traditional societies have parent novels. every although it's a model, so more social romanos to learn from the parents. djs play it differently in traditional society. people in traditional societies without one and police and doctors are much more attentive and to the risks of events, which each time they carry a low

risk of getting hurt, you're going to repeat that event many times in your lifetime. people in traditional societies judge dangers realistically. for example, the most interesting i did was to take a shower. you may say was so dangerous about that? my chances of slipping out less than one in 1000. just read the obituary column of the newspaper and you'll see a common cause is slipping in the shower or on the sidewalk or stepladder. and if your chance of getting her slip in the shower only one among us and come me think that's good. forget it. i intend to take a shower every day for the next 15 or so years of my life. that means 5475 showers and their families is slipping is one of the dozen rocket killed five times before i get out of the shower the next 15 years. religion plays different functions than modern societies

have not lets one imagine what is going to be the future of religion in the next century. ultimate was some is often geared. multilingualism is in traditional society and one surprising discovery of the last five years is the protection they now know of against alzheimer's disease is not bridge or any medicine, the best protection is bilingual. being bilingual gives you five years protection and we don't know yet whether the multilingual gives you protection multiplied. those are just some examples of what we can learn from traditional society. i hope you find it fascinating to read a book about traditional societies as i have found it to lebanon. [applause]

>> thank you very much, dr. diamond. the way it works is you raise your hand and i will call on you can get a microphone to you. who would like to start us off? a lady in orange on the i/o they are. >> thank you for the really fascinating. your book about what we can learn from societies, some of which are beneficial to learn and some of which are. i was wondering if you had a rule or something for deciding which things we should imitate. >> it is true but i'm not saying we should imitate everything in

traditional society, nor am i saying we should despise everything in traditional society. some things are nonobvious. we should not mst strangling our parents. we should not imitate starving to death. we should not imitate killing a baby if a baby is born weak. anything that is likely to result in children being more self-confident and socially skilled. we should certainly imitate anything that results diabetes, heart disease or anything that makes this attempt to the correct to the dangers rather than obsessing about terrorism playing caches that killed very few people. is a middle ground where it's not so clear what to imitate. for example, the case in traditional society people never

spent their children and yet there is a debate in american society in european society whether or not you should spank your kids. in sweden it is a criminal act. when i lived in germany, is considered not criminal. so that just illustrates where we have to figure out whether it makes sense out whether you're going to take your infant to bed with you. it's debate. some pediatricians advise against it and yet every baby in human history slept in bed with his parents until the last five or 10,000 years. so that's a long way of saying some things are obviously good, some bad, some things we have to figure out. >> radio in the corner. >> talking about the freedoms

and i was interested in working about history yesterday and it's better to have more freedom for the kid or less freedom. >> is a really good question to follow up on your question because how much freedom should a baby have a nuke in a society. i noticed virtually all have scars, fire scars like they had gotten burned. most of them got for as an fence. they were capable people making decisions, it's also the baby play next to fire can decide whether it's going to roll into the fire or not. babies learn from that, but i think few americans would argue would argue that a baby should have the freedom to roll into a fire. among traditional societies commit babies are permitted to play with sharp knives.

most of us certainly -- my wife and i did not put her babies to a sharp knives. there's anything they should do in traditional societies, which could fairly against our micromanaging children. so your question as to the previous question. some things we certainly should permit our children to do. other things other traditional societies do. >> against the wall on our left. >> you've been talking about how traditional societies in activists. what about the other direction of a place like new guinea where people are emerging as a pizza places throughout and many people have a very difficult time with this. can you make any suggestions

about what would work better? >> the flipside of that going about the significance of the traditional societies for us is with the impact the modern world is having on traditional society? every traditional society that i know of with the outside world wants to acquire some of that stock. traditional people when the thieves steal acts instead a stone ax because steel axes are sharper and hold blogger. they want closing instead of shivering in the rain. they want many things, educational opportunities. so throughout the world, traditional societies acquire some things from modern outside society. but the acquisition of select it. the important thing the traditional societies should be

free to make their own choice rather than be dragged into the modern world against their will, notably by being exterminated, driven off the land, concord, dispossessed. >> i have a huge voice. one thing that i noted when i lived for 20 years is that many parents who are raising their children, their children's children -- excuse me, their grandchildren in effect. my mother was 42 when she had as, which has almost been possibly a fashionable age. i noted the same two things that the older the parent was -- the grandparent was in many instances, the children wound up

almost losing a generation of prospective alternative because of their grandparents grew up more racist frankly. they grew up more superstitious and they grew up with the kind of eat those that didn't necessarily suit down for the generation they were and during. that's the one caution i had when i look at what was suggesting. >> fair enough. all of you parents of young children have to figure out, how much caregiving do you want to turn over to your parent, grandparents and children. in many cases among my friends, many friends are utterly thrilled to have their children but dr. becker and parent and

others of my friends say there is no way that my kids are going to get looked after by grandparents. so i'm not making a universal recommendation. i'm saying nowadays under modern circumstances if they want them to do it are more valuable because of the demographic changes. >> question in the front row. >> just as a follow-up, when you are can. roles, somebody came the bad much younger age in many traditional societies then you have perhaps become a grand other. so that can affect roll to. in your studies, how did you compensate for age-related roles? >> i acknowledge that in my

lecture that a caveat with an upside of grandparenting today with more and more childbearing age people out of the workforce. the downside is exactly as you say, people becoming grandparents not in their 35, 40, 45 cc two, but i'm 75 and not a grandparent. hopefully when i become a program. i'll have less energy than when i was 40. >> gentleman on our left in the second row. >> i heard some gain which suggests the human brain develop and was encouraging long ago when grandmothers took over care of children to the other

foraging at dvds. i'm thinking about that precedes the changes now for the grandmother isn't necessarily part of the dictation. >> grandparents, grandmothers taking over responsibility for the kid. that observation is wide spread. it's also the case i mentioned for the hearts and i would say the case in most, maybe all hunter gatherer societies observed that grandparents if they are still alive are capable of doing it, often take responsibility looking after the children, looking after their grandchildren, thereby freeing up their own to go off hunting and gathering. not just taiwan.

[inaudible] >> the general thing for brain development. idea mike >> we know parents don't do as much as grandparents do. >> grandparents acquire information to pass on to their grandchildren. >> jones in right behind you in the blue. >> you touched briefly on the differences in warfare between traditional and unearned societies. could you say more about that, please click >> has come a in warfare, it's a big surprise to people who hear about them. often traditional societies are idealized as peaceful, but

there's lots of studies of traditional tribal societies in the cool reality is the percentage of traditional people who died violent deaths are higher than any most a society for which we have information. if you want to compare the worst of the worst, germany, russia and poland during during the 20th century, the chance of the dawning of lord or violent deaths in any of those countries during the 20th century are several times slower than the chance of dying a violent deaths in most traditional society. it's not that people in traditional societies are more vicious. it is were is instrumented in modern societies because the government declares war and peace in the government declares peace, hotheaded young men who want to start a war are restrained from starting the war was in traditional society, there isn't a government are

restrained sarcasm going back to work in. traditional societies are most cosmically. modern societies intermittently in the number shows the chance of dying a violent death in traditional societies have been the 10 times the chance. that's been a big surprise. >> another question. yes, gentleman to your right they are. >> with attention for more, we see in our own country in recent months just to much pure evil if you will. could you imagine in a traditional society and not killing of children, the virtues of the traditional society prevent that. >> not only can i imagine it, sadly it is common.

sadly it is common to do killings of children and friends of mine has that of course are going to kill the women and of course were going to kill the children because the women are going to get her to warriors and the children will grow up. yes, unfortunately it is true. >> but is there ever is the indiscriminate killing the way the race here, where we are not worried about warriors. just an act of insanity or availability to weaponry, so somebody has an opportunity for whatever reason. it seems to be more recently more prevalent in the culture. >> if you read chapter three of my book, which relates to a kerry supporter -- this is an unhappy sub deck. read chapter three of my book, but the reality is many scholars

didn't want to believe that the societies they have a dead guy. it's not that the people are nasty. it's governments can do things. they can declare war and make peace in traditional society can do that. >> culturally, you have -- you've seen some societies value older people and you kind of expanded upon not to some length. i wonder if they do things were not atomically efficiently at a certain level appeared to be better at taking care of their elderly that we are? >> are they better at taking care of the elderly that we are? it depends what you mean by better. our society certainly can give medical care to the elderly, the

traditional society cannot. our societies by and large failed at providing satisfying life for the elderly because of moving every 25 years, it's very difficult to reconstruct the lifelong social circle for about person whereas in traditional societies, people spend their lives where they grew up in so you're going to spend your last years surrounded by your children and relatives and friends. nothing special is required to produce that result. >> we have a lot of questions and not a lot of time. >> i wonder if you can say anything about the relationship that each socieas