Hello and welcome to Under the Skin from Luminary. This week I spoke with David Bus, an American

evolutionary psychologist at the University of Texas in Austin. He's one of the founders of

the field he works in. He talks a lot about sex and sexual jealousy and mating stuff.

In the part that we're going to play now, David and I talked about how our evolutionary systems are

sometimes hijacked by corporations. We talk about diabetes and obesity. But what interested me is how

we're not evolving in a natural condition. We're animals in a zoo. We are the occupants of a

prison planet and I wanted to try and express that idea and get his expertise. Like a lot of

academics, he wasn't 100% comfortable talking about something that he's not qualified to talk

about. But as you know, that's never bothered me. So I have a little listen to this conversation and

let's know what you think. Trying to achieve a quality with the annihilation of category

is not successful. That's exactly right. We're in this era where it turns out we were never

the boss. What's beneath the surface of people with my ideas that define our time, the history

we're told? Welcome to Russell Brand. Under this game. What magnetic forces create the kind of

structures that we live within now where power is centralized, where people live in urban

conurbations, from agriculture onwards, through the various revolutions of agriculture industry and

technology, the advantages to individuals while obvious and evident, particularly in instances

where there would be a financial and economic advantage to those centralized forces,

that the progress is easily be charted. When it comes to the subject such as isolation, alienation,

despair, drug dependency, it's clear that we are creatures now that live in a kind of captivity,

in a kind of open prison. Do you ever become frustrated that we don't socially and politically

enact in responsible and sensible ways the obvious findings from your particular area of expertise?

Yeah, I do. I think that one way that I would phrase it broadly before trying to get

...