Nature & Nurture #52: Dr. Bill von Hippel - The Evolution of Social Intelligence

Dr. Bill von Hippel is an evolutionarily social psychologist and a Professor of Psychology at the University of Queensland, Australia. He is also the author of The Social Leap: The New Evolutionary Science of Who We Are, Where We Come From, and What Makes Us Happy.
In this episode we discuss The Social Leap, a journey through over 6 million years of human evolution: from our moderately intelligent, moderately social chimpanzee-like ancestors, to the hyper-intelligent, hyper-social species we are today. Bill and I discuss a number of revolutions and selection pressures that led to our evolution, including environmental changes, the rise of bipedalism and tool use, long-distance hunting, mastery of fire and cooking, and most importantly, the social intelligence necessary to communicate and cooperate.

[@MaryKDayPetrano]

This was great ! I would love to see the two of you follow up with a discussion for why there are autistic people with autistic differences living today and expanding in numbers.

[@kimjin-hyub3413]

Great stuff !!