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- [00:01]
A
How do you describe the central thread of your work over the years?
- [00:06]
B
Well, I'm retired now, so the thread has sort of changed direction. But when I was a scientist, I call myself a superannuated scientist now. But when I was working in the lab, I worked on the problem of speciation or the Origin of Species, which is, of course the title of Darwin's 1859 book. It's a problem that Darwin didn't solve. So that's why I took it up when I was a graduate student. I think we know a lot more now. We certainly. Darwin knew almost nothing about speciation. So to call his book the Origin of Species is a bit of a misnomer. He should call it the origin of adaptations, which might be a natural selection, but in terms of species, that is the lumpiness of nature, the fact that creatures are not a spectrum, but they're discrete, more or less discrete entities. That's the problem with Darwin didn't solve. And that's the problem I was working on.
- [01:04]
A
Right. How do you. What's the layman's description of speciation?
- [01:09]
B
Well, are you talking about the. How it happens or what. How I define it?
- [01:13]
A
Give us both.
- [01:15]
B
Well, the definition is simply the speciation as the origin of species. If you look at nature, as I said, you don't find that it's a continuum all the way from bacteria to, you know, humans. If. But that's not a hierarchy. That's just what people perceive as a hierarchy. It's lumpy. So if you look at a bird out your window, you're going to know what it is instantly. You're not going to say, I don't know, it looks like a half blackbird and a half robin or whatever? No, they come in pretty discreet packages. And that is the problem of speciation. What on earth would make a continuous evolutionary process give rise to entities that are absolutely discontinuous? And that's really the problem of the Origin of Species, Right. That Darwin made almost no inroads on it whatsoever.
- [02:07]
A
Why was it a difficult circle to square for him?
- [02:10]
B
Well, because in order to attack the problem of speciation, you have to know what species are. And although we say nature is lumpy and these lumps are species, that's not really the problem. The question is, well, why do we get those lumps? And it was in about the 1930s that people realized that those lumps are kept separate by what we call reproductive isolated barriers. That is, barriers that keep the genes from one species from mixing with those of another species. For example, those barriers could be that the hybrids are sterile or inviolable. So even if they mate, you don't get any intermixing. Or they couldn't like each other. I mean like a lion and a tiger, they'll mate in the zoo and produce things like ligers or tiglons, which they have. But where they co occur or where they used to co occur and say the gear forest of India, they don't interbreed. And in nature there's a lot of animals that just simply don't like the way they look. They don't like the mating behavior of the species, they don't like the pheromones of the other species. Or in the case of plants, they produce pollen and eggs at different times. That's called temporal isolation. So there's all these barriers that keep members of different species apart. Now that immediately raises the problem that you want to solve, which is how do these barriers come about to keep species separate in a continuous evolutionary process? So that's what I was working on.
- [03:45]
A
I guess the Batman to your Bruce Wayne of work over the years has been advocating for evolutionary views, advocating for the evolutionary method overall, that this is something that is true and that people should believe in pushing back against anti evolutionary positions. Is that a, a fair assessment?
- [04:06]
B
Yeah. I spent a lot of my time, particularly when I was younger, arguing against creationists and creationism and it finally resulted in me having to write a book about it called why Evolution is True. Because when I taught my first evolution course, which was probably in about 1983, back in the Pleistocene, first thing any professor does when he or she writes a course is to see. Well, you pick up the textbook that's relevant to the course and you see how it's organized and you get ideas about how to write course. Well, when I did that for evolution, I looked at the evolution textbooks and none of them had anything about the evidence for evolution in them. They just assumed that you assumed that evolution was true. And then you go into things like population genetics and speciation, et cetera. But they left behind all the stuff that was so prominent in the textbooks of the 20s and 30s. Why biologists believe evolution is true and why it is a scientific fact as we call it, provisional truth and not just a mere speculation.
- [05:16]
A
Is it interestingly ironic in some way that you're pretty well known for pushing back on right wing anti evolutionary views? And it was funny that in the past left wing people used to use evolution as a cudgel to beat their right wing foes cherished beliefs. And now the right uses it for the same reason against their left wing foes to cudgel their cherished belief. Like in politics, it seems like, I don't know, a fact functions as a weapon that's laid out in the open and either side can pick it up. But you've got religious evolution deniers on the right and evolutionary psychology deniers on the left. You've got these two groups both arguing but, but also sometimes, I guess when it's convenient, certain members of certain groups using it to hit each other over the head with.
- [06:06]
B
Yeah, I mean there are. Well, evolutionary psychology is really only the, it's the purview of the right wing cudgels. But in general, if you look at right versus left, at least in America, and I think that's probably true in the UK as well, far more people on, on the left accept evolution as a fact there than the right. It's almost a touchstone of ignorance. And here I'm sharing my political predilections. But it's a touchstone of ignorance to deny that evolution is a scientific fact. And again, as fact in science, we don't have anything as a fact that's beyond acceptance. You know, we have things that are sort of somewhat acceptable and then we have things that are so widely accepted that you would bet your fortune on them. Like the formula of water is H2O. And so there's various degrees of fact hood, but in general the left accepts fact hood more than the right. But that in general, however, it's still both surprising and depressing how few Americans accept facts that evolution is true. If you look at the latest Gallup poll where they ask people just about the origin of humans, did humans evolve? Were they created by God in the biblical manner? Or did they sort of evolve but God tweaked the pathway here? And then maybe putting in consciousness or big brain. And you find out that only about 23% of Americans accept the fully naturalistic view of evolution, the one that I teach, that it's purely a materialistic process without any supernatural intervention. And about 30% of Americans accept the fact that humans sort of evolved but God had a hand in it now and then. And about 40% of Americans, by the biblical view, humans were created in seven days and haven't changed since then. And in fact all creatures have. And so basically about 71% of Americans reject naturalistic evolution. So this is what we're up against. And those include of course, both Democrats and Republicans, but the percentage is higher.
- [08:30]
A
Amongst the right on the scale of betting your entire finances on H2O to something that's a lot more spurious. Where would you place evolutionary psychology as a field?
- [08:43]
B
Well, that's problematic. I mean, I started off being a sort of a foe of evolutionary psychology because when it started off there was a lot of just so stories told. People would look at a human behavior that make up a reason, not the best ones. I mean, people like David Buss or 2B and cosmetics would, you know, approach it scientifically and say, well, you know, I'm not just going to make up a story, but I'm going to make up a testable story and make predictions. So to assess the field as a whole, all I can say is it's becoming less of a storytelling field and more of a scientifically mature field in which they make predictions. So it still has its problems. For example, it's not nearly as well founded as say, molecular evolutionary genetics is where you can sequence the DNA and come to absolute the conclusions that everybody can verify. Evolutionary psychology has the problem that if you're trying to explain a human behavior, like for example, the sort of step step parent effect, that step parents tend to kill their offspring or hurt them more than a natural born parent. How do you test that? You know, I mean, if you make up a story, well, those people left more up their step parents that killed off or hurt or injured their stepchildren left more offspring than those that didn't because they left more of their own children. Well, how do you verify that? There are predictions that you can make, however, about test stories like that, I'm not really familiar with that, but my own way to test it would be the pet theory. That is, if you have your own pet when you get married, then you tend to treat it really good. But if you marry somebody and they've already have your own pet, that's the equivalent of a stepchild. So my prediction, which I don't think has been tested at all, is that you would treat the step pet a lot worse than you would treat your own pet if you got married to somebody.
- [10:49]
A
We need to ring David. David, this is the next, this is your next piece of work. Put down the mating research. You don't need to be bothered with that.
- [10:57]
B
Yeah, well, I wrote David not long ago, I've been on him for a long time about this, to write a paper about testable predictions of evolutionary psychology just to quiet down those people, like for example, PZ Myers, the bloggers who said evolutionary psychology is not even a reputable scientific field because it is.
- [11:19]
A
It's taking an Awful lot of heat at the moment. I think it's very unpopular left of center. It's this sort of blank slatism, this denial of meritocracy. You know, if you're in a world where you can make anything of yourself, you can become whatever you want to be. And if you. You pick yourself up by your bootstraps, it's the same reason that behavioral genetics is wholly unpopular. It was a great study. I don't know whether you saw Corey Clark's thing. She sent an email survey to pretty much all of the psychology professors in the US Asking them, what are the topics that should be taught the least? What are the ones that require the most guardrails around? Shock, horror. Evolutionary psychology and behavioral genetics are kind of the. The two horsemen of the apocalypse when it comes to that. But, you know, back in the past, there was the just so story paper. Right. There was an actual paper that was around that. And David's grad student, William, who's currently in his lab, they have a paper in press at American Psychologist called Evolutionary Hypotheses are Testable and Falsifiable.
- [12:26]
B
But I didn't know it would have been accepted for publication. So I was really glad to see that because it's time that people realize that the field has reached a stage of explanatory maturity. And yeah, you're absolutely right that it's opposed by the left because it puts limits on the malleability of behavior, both of humans and of animals. And that's explicitly anti Marxist and it's anti leftist. But that's. That really is the reason. That's one reason why ideology is beginning to erode away certain areas of science. Evolutionary psychology is one of those areas.
- [13:06]
A
Yeah, it's that this sort of duality of what's going on. I'm aware maybe EP has only recently got to, how would you say, testable and falsifiability, escape velocity or, you know, the level with which you would consider it to be. You know, you're part of the real sciences now. But still there is this odd duality, this sort of symmetry going on. The right had an issue with an area of evolution because it killed one of their sacred cows. The left has an issue with an area of evolution because it's killed one of their sacred cows as well. And yeah, it's. It's. I know. I found that really, really interesting to think about when looking through your work.
- [13:46]
B
Yeah, that's Luana Miroja, my Brazilian colleague, and I wrote a paper called the Ideological Erosion of Biology in which we take six areas of our own field of evolutionary biology and show how they have been misguided, misrepresented by the mainstream media, by other scientists, by almost everybody in the interest of ideology. And one of those was that human behavior, evolutionary psychology is a worthless field. And we show that. No, it makes a lot of predictions and a lot of explanations. Another one which is related to that is that men and women are different not because of any evolutionary differences in our ancestry, but because of how they're socialized. That's another pernicious guideline. Men, yeah, there is socialization, but men and women are different to be a large degree because of evolution. Men are more risk taking, they're less choosy in terms of mates, they show more sexual jealousy. I mean, there's any number of behavioral differences between the sexes that are not only understood and predictable from evolution, but they're seen in other species. Our closest relatives, the, the great apes show many behaviors that we have. Males are larger than females, males are more warlike, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So you know, that's another. I mean, it's a shame these days that ideology is infecting science so much. And it's not just biology, it's in physics, even math. We have like progressive math.
- [15:34]
A
Now what does progressive math consist of?
- [15:39]
B
Well, it's basically using examples that are, that instantiate, say equity or something like that. You know, it hasn't affected really mathematics so much, except that there's one area in which people say that two plus two can equal five if you want it to. That's part of the sort of science that's been affected by postmodernism in which each person has their own truth and there's no absolute truth but just a warring of powers. And the two plus two of five is sort of the exemplar of that. People have made arguments that, yeah, you can say that if you think about it the right way. But math has been less infected than biology because it's a self contained system of axioms and deductions and stuff. But chemistry has, physics has. I mean the word black hole is now it's just like a brown bag lunch. You can't say that anymore to refer to your paper bag lunch because it's thought to be racist.
- [16:46]
A
I saw there was a degendering de masculinizing of different terms and one of them manhole, that was up for the chop.
- [17:04]
B
Yep, yep. Yeah, there's any number of terms that you can't use. And I just thank goodness that I don't teach anymore because I know that I would say something that would get me in trouble, it would just blurt out. Because almost anything could get you in trouble these days.
- [17:20]
A
Yeah, I guess it depends where you teach. And I would also guess that if someone's doing evolutionary biology now, you know, with the field being a bit more mature, especially if you're in an EP class and you're saying this is very judgmental. What? So you're saying that men are stronger than women? Like, it's like, what are you doing? What are you doing? Taking this course? Why are you taking this course? Right. Like if you're going to come in and debate the fundamental foundation, which is you can see MRI scans of in utero developing babies after three months can tell sex differences in the brain. Right. An FMRI is able to detect at age 10 with 90% accuracy the difference between a boy's brain and a girl's brain. By the way, that's about the same accuracy that humans have of detecting the difference between a man and a woman by looking at their face. So it's the same level of accuracy. Ish. So you go, and this is all just socialization. How many times do we need to like rid us, like wipe this slide slime off of us?
- [18:25]
B
Well, I think, I mean, at least this is a suggestion that why the Democrats didn't do well in the last presidential election. This kind of. We call it wokeness. I'm anti woke and yet I'm a left winger. I'm a classic Democrat, sort of liberal towards the center, but still on the left. And yet I could see our own party sabotaging itself by insisting, for example, that there is not two sexes or that there's no differences between males and females that aren't due to socialization. And anybody with two neurons to rub together knows that.
- [19:04]
A
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- [20:03]
B
I do.
- [20:03]
A
He's in Southeast Asia, I think Singapore maybe University of Singapore twinned with Nottingham or obviously the University of Singapore twinned with Nottingham. His new book, I think, I can't remember the working title, he's changed the title like five times. But his new book is all about sex differences. It's not out. I think he's currently, it's still in process, which is hence why he hasn't decided on a title. So you mentioned that you did this paper. I also saw a talk of yours where you attempted to juggle at least a couple of hot potatoes with regards to biology. What are the areas of evolution, evolutionary theory and biology that ideology has sort of come in and tried to pervert the most?
- [20:53]
B
Well, there were six. I mean the two hottest potatoes were. And I'll, I'll give the sentences that people say that are wrong. Very ideologically motivated. There are more than two sexes that sex is a spectrum and not binary. That's one of them. The other one is that race. And this comes straight out of, I think the, the American Medical Journal, but it could have been the Lancet, which is also way woke that that race is a human construct without any scientific basis whatsoever. That's two of them. Males and females are not biologically different from one another. That's another third misguided statement that indigenous science, that is the so called way of knowing of indigenous people like the Maori in New Zealand is just as good as modern science. That's another one that people don't differ from one another in any meaningful genetic ways. That the differences between you see between people, not the way they looked because obviously that's a genetic basis, but the way they behave as an autogenic basis. I'm not, I can't remember the sixth one, but that's.
- [22:13]
A
Oh wow. So I didn't know that behavioral genetics had snuck in as well. So. All right, okay. Right. This really is like the six, the, I don't know, six horsemen of the apocalypse this time. Yeah.
- [22:25]
B
The way we express behavioral genetics is a term called heritability, which is basically the proportion of a given behavior across members of a population that's due to differences in their genes. So, for example, there's a heritability of smoking. I mean, almost every human behavior has a non 0 genetic component to it. And most of the interesting ones have her beliefs of about 50%. This is explicitly denied by the very same people who deny evolutionary psychology. And for the same reason, because it, it implies that humans are not infinitely malleable, but are constrained by their genes.
- [23:04]
A
Yeah, those constraints brush up against a lot of what people want to believe, I think. This sense of freedom, this sense of autonomy. And I understand, you know, I got into evolutionary theory through Robert wright's book from 1993, 1992, the Moral Animal. And I read this, you know, only seven or eight years ago, and some stuff has a little. Looks a little silly in retrospect, but it still holds up so well, 30 years later, that book is still fucking fantastic. I love it. And you know, I started to see, huh, there's reasons for my behavior. Like, this isn't just some weird personal curse of mine or blessing or whatever, but it's adaptive. And oh, there's a reason for. And there's proximate and ultimate reasons for why we do things. There's the reason why you do it and there's the reason to do the thing. And there's a difference between those two. You have sex because it feels good. The reason that you don't to do it is so that you make babies, so that you keep. I'm like, huh, I'm kind of being puppeted by my genes. Isn't this interesting? But yeah, to consider that race and ethnicity are social constructs without biological meaning. And to get that published in jamma, to have that sentence published in jamma. I didn't realize that race or populations and ethnic groups were now socially constructed. It's like, did black people just spend more time in the sun? Like, where do you think that's come from?
- [24:40]
B
Well, you know, the people that say that it's socially constructed, I don't think they really know what they're saying because clearly there are biological differences between different human groups. Now, using the word race is what gets you in trouble because it implies A, you're racist and B, the old view of race, which was promulgated by some racist biologists, which is that there is a finite, well, demarcated number of human groups that are genetically quite distinct from One another. That's not right. That's not.
- [25:12]
A
Oh, that was. So they were almost using a speciation argument. Yes, with, with ethnic groups.
- [25:19]
B
Right.
- [25:19]
A
No, this is, this is all of your chickens come home to roost at once.
- [25:24]
B
Well, but the fact is, you know, I mean in my paper that I talked about, there's many, many bits of evidence that there are biological differences between human groups. Now granted there are in general more genetic differences within what we call a race. And I'm going to use the word race. I mean, I usually say ethnicity to avoid getting in trouble because the races are not well defined and they're sort of admex along the edges and stuff. But nevertheless, if you take. Well the example I like to use is if you take a group of Americans and you ask them to self identify themselves as the race. So you know, it's what they say their races are. And they're black, white, East Asian, Native Americans and Hispanic. There's like five of them. And you ask everybody to define their race that way and then you look at their DNA and you give all the DNA to the scientists and you don't tell them where it came from, which individual it came from. And you'll see that it falls into clusters and it happens to be about five clusters between the genetic position in a cluster and the self defined race of an individual is about 99.9%. If you have somebody's genome, you can basically. I mean, this is why 23andMe works so well and tells you what your ancestry is. People wouldn't do it if it wasn't at least some degree accurate. And that shows you right off the bat that there are genetic differences between human groups and it arises the same way speciation arises. People in isolation in the early human ancestry did not exchange genes so much, so they evolved in different directions. And that's why a, we have species because an animal can evolve in different directions to such an extent that it can't interbreed if it were to come back together with it again. And human populations or human races, we're on that same path.
- [27:32]
A
I was going to say how long? So we split off from the African plains. How long ago? 30,000 years ago? 40,000 years ago.
- [27:43]
B
People usually give the name about 50, 60,000 years ago was the big migration out of your, out of the Africa that spread throughout the world. So we're actually fairly young.
- [27:55]
A
Right. How long do you, how long do you think that would have had to have kept going for, without reglobalization for speciation to have occurred? Within humans.
- [28:05]
B
Good question. I have a book, 2F Speciation, which is what I wrote as my technical book, my. My real first book.
- [28:12]
A
I'm not. I'm not smart enough to understand that one, so I'll get you to explain it to me.
- [28:15]
B
My friends want to say, oh, you read this book, it's so great. Can I read it? I say, no, you don't want to read it. It's for graduate students. They buy it anyway, pay 50 bucks, and they say, I can't understand it. But it was an attempt, and I think a very good attempt because nobody's ever tried to duplicate it, to explain what we know about how species come about and how they're defined and stuff. I can't remember. Oh, how long would it take you to ask? And so. Well, we don't know in primates. Well, I mean, we know that chimpanzees and humans, which are definitely two different species, we know that because the experiment has been done of interbreeding without success. There are about 7, 8 million years separate. So we know that, at least at the outside, that's what it takes to make a species. In primates, we were only 60,000 years separated. So, I mean, that's only two figures. It varies. We did a study in fruit flies through Sophilos, saying how long it takes to make the species if they're separated, and it's something like 1 to 2 million years.
- [29:22]
A
Surely it's not based on time, it would be based on generations. Right. Because the mechanism that this is working on is genetic mutation. I have to imagine.
- [29:28]
B
Imagine, yeah. But there's the thing called the molecular clock, which runs on absolute time, not generation time. And so you can.
- [29:37]
A
I've never heard of this. What is it?
- [29:39]
B
Yeah. So the molecular clock is a way of calibrating how old a pair of species is by looking at the differences in their DNA. And it turns out, for reasons that I won't go into, because they're rather arcane, that the clock ticks with absolute time and not generation time. And it has to do with neutral mutation rates and population size and stuff. But at any rate, you can get a pretty accurate estimate of how old two species are by simply looking at the divergence between their DNA. So what we did was take Drosophila in all stages of speciation, different populations, species that could still interbreed but didn't like to, and then fully isolated species that couldn't produce hybrids. And we looked at the. At the genetic differences between those groups, and that way we could get a curve of reproductive isolation over time. Nobody had ever done that before because the data didn't exist for any group except for fruit flies. And it's still my most cited paper.
- [30:41]
A
Congratulations.
- [30:42]
B
Was that if you're geographically isolated, it's about a million, 2 million years until.
- [30:48]
A
You get to the point we had bags of time. We could have spent ages bringing the modern world around, and we would have still been okay. Do we know if the offspring of Homo sapiens and Neanderthals, if those two mated, do we know if they were viable?
- [31:07]
B
Not only were they viable, they were fertile. And we know that because we all carry. Well, not all of us, but most of us carry Neanderthal genesis.
- [31:16]
A
Right, of course.
- [31:18]
B
That are Homo sapiens sapiens and Homo sapiens Neanderthal ansis. I consider them the same species, although there's a big argument about. I consider them the same species because they mated with each other and some of the genes of those hybrids got back into Homo sapiens sapiens. And we carry them around. And that is an evolutionary remnant of the fact that, yes, we interbred with them. If Neanderthals were still around, I have little doubt that they would be carrying.
- [31:46]
A
Genes from Homo sapiens sapiens, an evolutionary artifact of the fact that people like to have sex and that if it looks about right, we'll probably make it work. Am I right in saying that the last remaining non Homo sapiens species, genotype, phenotype, whatever the word is for that, was it those pygmy, that really small Homo Homo floresiensis. Yeah. In Indonesia.
- [32:25]
B
Yeah.
- [32:26]
A
Is that because that was only 12,000 years ago, right? Ish.
- [32:29]
B
Yeah. Well, it's called the different species, which implies that it could not mate with. And there was Homo sapiens sapiens around it too. And these Homo sapiens, Fleury's ansis, were about this big or so. They're like three feet tall. Amazing. That's what they call them. I can't. God, I can't remember what they call them. That's human pygmies or something. They're called the different species on one basis only, which is that they're tiny and they look different. We don't know enough about them to know if they really are a different biological species.
- [33:03]
A
Do you know. Do you know this? Do you know the story of why they grew to be so small? Okay, so I'm gonna get into real, just so territory here, okay? But allow me. Allow me to pontificate so the proposed mechanism. As far as I'm aware that the Homo florensis Floresiensis. I'll let you do the technical language, I'll do the bro science. Um, the reason that they grew to be so small, if you look at the shape of Indonesia, very, very small islands. So you have this sort of Galapagos effect thing going on where you can quite easily be segmented off from a mainland. And what it seems like is that a group of Homo ancestors was separated off onto an island that had really, really sparse resources. So you kind of had this Malthusian Y type issue, upper bound. Which means that if there's not many resources, not many calories available, the people who need the fewest calories are going to be the ones that survive. But the funny thing about this story is that that effect obviously occurred across every animal. So apparently there are bones of miniaturized elephants also on this same island. So if you were able to go back 12,000 years ago, you would see miniature versions of humans running around with tiny little spears, chasing miniature versions of elephants running away with tiny little trunks.
- [34:35]
B
Well, it is true that in general, if a large species invades a distant island that doesn't have a lot of resources, it will evolutionarily shrink. We have pygmy elephants in the Mediterranean, by the way. Remnants of them, I guess they could swim back then, but there are exceptions like the Galapagos tortoise, which is small in South America, its ancestor, but it got to the Galapagos thing. Well, the reason it probably got big is that there was actually a plethora of resources. Lots of vegetation, no competitors, herbivores.
- [35:12]
A
Let's go to town.
- [35:13]
B
Big. Yeah. So you could get it either big or small. But in general, evolutionists tend to observe that animals that are large on the mainland, that are confined to a small, resource poor space, tend to get smaller. So. But I don't know if that applies to humans. I mean, Homo floresiensis, because we have so few specimens, we don't have a whole skeleton or anything, just a couple of maybe finger bones or something. We don't really know much about them except, excuse me, they were tiny and they have a full size replica in the Smithsonian. It was so amazingly small that I had somebody photograph me standing next to her. It came up to about my waist and that's an adult. So that's one of the many mysteries of human evolution. And there's more to come because specimens.
- [36:03]
A
Are hard to come by before we continue. Getting mobile data while traveling is still way harder than it should be. Public WI fi is sketchy, Roaming charges are the worst, and buying SIM cards in A foreign language after a 12 hour flight is about as fun as playing with a dead moth, which is where Saily comes in. It's an app that gives you instant access to ESIM data plans in over 190 countries so that you can get online the moment that you land. No more fumbling around with physical sims, no more talking to a human to set it up, and no more holding your phone in the air like Simba looking for a signal. Just open the app, choose a plan, and you are instantly connected. Best of all, the plans start at just a few bucks, there's no subscription, and you only pay for what you need. And, and if you haven't activated your data plan or installed the ESIM, Saily offers a full refund within 30 days, no questions asked. Right now you can get 15% off any data plan by going to the link in the description below or heading to saily.commodernwisdom and using the code modernwisdom a checkout that's S A I L Y.com Modernwisdom and Modern Wisdom A checkout when it comes to ethnic groups, have you looked at why it is Asians, East Asians, Africans, Caucasians, what is the reason for the, the main differences that we see either in the way that they present in the sort of shape, I don't know whether that's called morphology or whatever the shape of their bodies. Do you know the adaptive explanation for why different groups became that way?
- [37:32]
B
Well, for some traits, yeah, we think so. I mean, the most obvious one is skin pigmentation. Because you can draw a map of the world and look at the average degree of pigmentation and you can see that in the hottest areas or the sunniest areas, you get darker skin, which is probably a protection against melanoma. And the other side of the coin is, well, why do you get light skinned when you leave that area? Because you can still get melanomas from the sun. That's because you want to get vitamin D from the sun and you don't have to worry about, you know, the importance of getting vitamin D is more important than getting melanomas when you're in an area where there's not so much sun. So that's the explanation. That's just one trait though. There are many, many differences between humans. The shape of the hair, whether it's curly or straight eye color.
- [38:28]
A
Are those adaptive green eyes adaptive compared with brown?
- [38:32]
B
No idea. I mean, good.
- [38:34]
A
See for all of the people that say, evolutionary scientists, they never say, I don't know. Here we are Evolutionary scientists saying, I.
- [38:42]
B
Don'T know, we'll be a pretty pathetic scientist that never admitted ignorance when he or she didn't know the answer. There's a lot of things we don't. I mean physicists, why is there dark matter, you know, and dark energy? They, they have to say they don't know. Is string theory, right? We don't know, you know, but there are some traits that we do know. For example, the Tibetans have a higher, have a, have a genetic basis to, to hang on to oxygen more in their hemoglobin and clearly that's adaptive because they live in an oxygen poor environment. So that's a trait where we know. And there's probably about a dozen traits where we. But they're not the kind of things that interest people. We want to know, you know, why people have curly hair or another one that's probably true is that people who live in cold climates, like the Inuits in Alaska, Canada, tend to be short and stocky. And that that's a general rule in the animal kingdom because limbs and protruding parts tend to be heat, heat reservoirs given off heat. So you don't want to have long arms or you want to have a short stocky body to prevent heat loss. So that's probably another trait for which we think is probably due to natural selection because it's also true in other animals. Other animals, I mean, I think it's called Allen's Rule. That's what it is, that as you go through colder climates, the protruding parts which include the ears of jackrabbits, I mean, if you look at an Arctic rabbit, it's ears like this. If you look at a jackrabbit in the desert where they need to radiate heat, their ears are huge. So that's an example and that's probably a case in humans as well. But you know, things like hair color, eye color, I can't remember the politically correct word for the. Oh, the sun pygmies. They used to be called the sun and the bushman. Why they're small, I'm not sure. I mean they live in a hot environment, but they're small. And we don't know the explanation for that. It would be hard to test that.
- [40:55]
A
So I, I was told the other day, this may be a just so story again, I've got my bro science cap on. The reason that Irish and Scottish and English people get rosacea. So rosacea, this sort of ruddy cheeks, reddening of the face is the next step up in vitamin D production. So it's even, it's kind of beyond pale. So if you go from dark skinned to light skinned to slightly red skinned, it's a suppose, I think an indication that your body is able to generate its own vitamin D more effectively. And this comes from shock horror, a place that I was born in, which is pretty dark a lot of the time, pretty low on sunlight, a lot of cloud cover, a lot of rain, et cetera. And yeah, that was the proposed explanation for that that a friend told me about a couple of weeks ago.
- [41:57]
B
Well, I would look into that. It sounds a bit dubious to me because it would lead to the prediction that for example, the Inuit or the Siberians would all have rosacea because they're.
- [42:10]
A
Going to be in darkness for three months of the year.
- [42:12]
B
Yeah, that's true. Well, I just never heard that before. I mean my expression would be that they drink too much.
- [42:24]
A
Either might work, but it is true.
- [42:27]
B
That people drink a lot, tend to have their capillaries broken in their faces. No, I've never heard that one before.
- [42:36]
A
Going back to the state of academia, do you think science communicators have become too afraid of backlash to speak sort of plainly about their subject areas and data as well? What's the state of it now?
- [42:51]
B
Absolutely. I mean there's self censorship all over the media. One example of that I suppose is that, and this is in the uk, I think that guy who was in Liverpool, who drove his van into a crowd, he was identified in the Times, I think it was in the Telegraph, I call it the Tory graph. He was identified as a 52 year old white man. But the British newspapers never give ethnicity when they give a suspect. Now why does, why is that, you know, even if the person's on the lam, hasn't been cut, they're not going to say that, well, this is a black man or this is a Hispanic man or whatever because it's considered racist to do that. And so that's the most obvious example of how the media has been, you know, has been censored, self censored. Also when, if you read in the New York Times, sorry, in the New York Times, you'll see that the word white is in small letters when describing somebody's ethnicity. And black is in the B has a capital B, which is a way of valorizing a minority group. I find that sort of inconsistent. The Washington Post, by the way, uses, I think it's either big letters for both or small letters for both. Either way it should be consistent. So these are just the most obvious things that Stand out. I don't think that answers your question, though. I think you're asking more about science than journalism or.
- [44:26]
A
I honestly don't mind at all. One thing that I want to bring in here. Do you know what gamma bias is?
- [44:33]
B
No.
- [44:35]
A
So good. So this is Dr. John Barry from the center for Male Psychology. Uh, so there's alpha bias, which is exaggerating or magnifying gender differences. There's beta bias, which is ignoring or minimizing gender differences. And then there's gamma bias, which is a combination of the two, but it's sexed. So if a female is in active mode and does good, then it's a celebration. If a female is in active mode, a male is in active mode and does harm, then it's perpetration. So, for instance, if you have a. If domestic violence happens against women, it's highlighted as a gender issue. If domestic violence happens against men, it's played down or completely ignored. Men make up the majority victims of suicide. The issues aren't highlighted or portrayed as gender issues. So there's the minimization of gender if men are the victims, and there's the minimization. There's the maximization of gender if men are the perpetrators. There's the maximization of gender if women are the successful perpetrators, if they're doing good. And there's the minimization of gender if women are the perpetrators and they're doing harm. It's like an interesting new dynamic.
- [45:48]
B
We call that virtue signaling. If you do that, it stamps you as a good person, basically. And there's no penalty to. To being pro male. I mean, sorry, there's no advantage to being pro male because you're just seen as a sexist and you don't even have to be pro male. There's a penalty to telling the truth, which is the point of our paper. There's a penalty to saying that races exist. There's especially a penalty to saying that there's only two sexes in humans. People have lost their jobs for saying that. God wora. There are only two. This is a kid and probably about 15 or 16 in American high school. It's just last week he wore a shirt to school that said there are only two sexes. And he was. He was asked to go home. They told him to pick up his foot. Well, you know, at the same school, you can wear a gay pride shirt, which is, I think, just about as well. First of all, that there are only two sexes. There's a statement of biological fact. Gay pride is more of an ideological position. I'm in favor of it. But it's okay to wear a Gay Pride shirt. It's not okay to wear a shirt that gives a biological truth because that truth is invidious. Yeah, because it implies that there's something wrong with people who feel that they're not a member of their natal sex. It's just the biological fact that keeps saying this over and over again. Sex with people recognized that there were males and females years before we even identified chromosomes. Every animal in every plant, vascular plant, has just two sexes, the male sex and the female sex. And sometimes you have them both in one individual. But the reproductive systems are still. There's only two producing one, a large immobile gamete, which is female, a small mobile gamete, which is male. But if you say that, you get in big trouble. I mean, I got in big trouble because, you know, I was working for the. I was on the honorary board of the Freedom from Religion foundation, which is a organization with a good mission to keep religion and government separate in the United States. That's our First Amendment. And they worked hard to do that. But one of their members decided that she. I guess she. It would be a they because this person named Kat Grant called it, considers herself to be of both sexes. Anyway, she wrote a piece in that newsletter of that organization saying, what is a woman? That's the title of it. And she goes through all these things about, well, you can't use this and you can't use that. And the ad, what is a woman? A woman is whoever feels that she's a woman. Okay? It's a psychological thing, not a biological thing. Well, it's like saying, I feel like I'm a horse today, so you got to call me a horse. You know, that's a bit of an exaggeration, but not too far of an exaggeration. Anyway, that offended me as a biologist. I was on the arm directors, and so I asked permission to rebut it, and they said, okay, you can write something. So I wrote a thing saying, this is the biological definition of sex. It doesn't have any implications for the moral or legal rights of people who feel that they're not firmly embedded in one of the two sexes. You know, they have different genders, and a woman is an adult human female that produces or has the ability or the equipment to produce eggs. And they published that, and it disappeared within a day. They didn't even tell me they took that down because they considered it offensive. Just the state of biological.
- [49:55]
A
I'm kind of torn.
- [49:56]
B
Right?
- [49:56]
A
I. On the show have spoken about a variety of topics pertaining to evolution, behavioral genetics, psychology, sex differences. And I, I kind of like, it feels a little bit like a high wire walking, right? To sort of do play the game appropriately, to be able to get across what you mean, but to not step on too many landmines that cause you to get completely blown up. Maybe you could lose a toe, but that's, that's an acceptable cost of war or whatever. But even I find myself, you know, when we start talking about like, what is a woman? You know, the question that often gets put against people that think gender, sex is a social construct. They say gender is a social construct, but they push it into sex as well. And even I find myself going like, I know that it's a useful rhetorical tool. I know it might even be a useful biological teaching tool to ask this question, to sort of allow people encourage people to arrive at this sort of non sequitur, recursive loop thing that they're in. But I find myself going like, I don't really want to use that because it's. It sort of becomes so captured by a group of people who really want to use it again as a cudgel, to sort of beat down and creep out what it is that they mean. They don't just mean this. They mean, and what are your beliefs about marriage? And what are your beliefs about reproduction? And what are your beliefs? You know, it sort of starts to get into this kind of icky world because good arguments are very, very good. The like, evolution of the meme, I suppose, but this is like an academic meme or an intellectually useful meme. And it propagates. And I find myself, I'm like, well, how. Having this conversation in a way that is persuasive, that is accurate, that is. I don't want to say the word sensitive, but speaks to the cultural temperature in a manner that allows people to get on board without getting their defenses up too much. You know, I find myself tiptoeing through this in a little bit of a way. For instance, if I ever want to talk about the issues that are facing boys and men, there's this weird social land acknowledgement that I need to do beforehand where I say, well, we must remember that women have had it, women and girls have had it bad for a long time. And I'm not minimizing the issues that are faced. We must remember that domestic violence and what about the subjects of gender pay? And after I've done this thing, like, you know, I've prostrated myself speak the truth. Yeah. Now I'm allowed to actually say the thing that I wanted to say. And unfortunately, there's no, there's no disclaimer, you know, research peptides and stuff that people can buy on the Internet. It says, like, these are not for human use, or like this website is for entertainment purposes only. Whatever. There's like one disclaimer that sits there, unfortunately, in the world of communication on the Internet. Like this kind of communication. You need to do that disclaimer every single time you're like an Australian plane coming into land, that every time you land, the first thing you say, we must remember that we're here on the ground of the heebie jeebie tribe, that this was ancestral land and blah, blah, blah. But it needs to happen every single time. And I, especially around the. In the conversation around men and boys disparities, socioeconomic status, men and boys falling behind, suicidality, domestic violence, all of this stuff, it really gets to me because I'm like, for fuck's sake, like, have I got to do this weird rain dance? I've got to like, wave sage around myself in order to.
- [53:38]
B
Is what you're doing? My answer would be no, you don't have to do that. All you have to do is be civil and speak the truth. I mean, the whole purpose of college in America, at least as stated by the American association of University Professors, is to allow people to have disagreements about factual matters without feeling offended by them. You know, so, you know, a long time, a long time ago, with one exception I'll mention, I've given up putting these disclaimers in, on about, you know, in my paper that I wrote about these things, like I. I will put it in this time. Or for example, when I'm talking about the two sexes, I will say, well, just because there are two sexes doesn't mean the people that feel that they're male when they're biologically female, there's something wrong with them. Okay. It's important to show that what I call the reverse naturalistic fallacy, that nature is what you want it to be, is wrong. But when every time you now have these disclaimers, you're sort of buying into that mindset that, yeah, you know, I have to satisfy the other side before I can speak the truth. And so I, you know, I've just given that up, more or less. And the way I deal with that is just to be civil and polite and, you know, not heated. Because the whole point is to. To have a difference of opinion and try to Persuade the other person, if you think you're right, of your viewpoint. So I used to do that when I would. On my website, I would cite a paper like the Telegraph, which is, I think, considered right wing in England, although not as right wing as it would be in America or the Daily news in America. The equivalent of the Wall Street Journal opinion section. Right wing. And I would say, well, you know, this comes from the Wall Street Journal op eds, but it speaks the truth anyway. Just buying into that mentality that you have to qualify the truth if it's set by the wrong people.
- [55:44]
A
Yeah. Wow, that's. And you've called that the reverse naturalistic fallacy.
- [55:47]
B
Reverse naturalistic fallacy, which underlies all these six examples that I gave before, is the ideal of ideologues that nature is how you want it to be. So, for example, if you feel like you're a transsexual, or if you feel like you waver between the sexes, I guess gender fluid is the word for that, then it must be true that there are not two sexes. That's an example of that. Or if you think that humans are infinitely malleable in their behavior, then you have to say that there are no such things as biological differences between men and women or ideological groups because nature has to conform to your political sensibilities. That's the object. That's the reverse of the naturalist, the naturalistic fallacy, which is what is in nature is what is good. I've just reversed that and said, well, what is good is what you must see in nature. That's the reason for the whole ideological erosion of science these days. Making. And it comes from postmodernism, I think the idea that there's a pluck. Rose and Lindsay wrote a book about this. I can't remember the title. It was quite good where they pin it all on postmodernism and its idea that there is no absolute truth. There are only personal truths of different groups. And who wins is based on how much power they have. And that's sort of the thing behind this view that nature conforms to what you want it to be. If you're a scientist, you have to believe there's an external reality. And you have to believe because it has. I mean, it works. We don't have to believe that it didn't come about because this, you know, we had an ideology that there is a good external world that we can find out about. It just happens to be that there is. And that, you know, Covid is caused by a small viral particle. And we can attack it this way and here's its DNA sequence. That happens to be the truth, you know, it's not a personal truth, it happens to be a truth that scientists of any stripe can agree on. So. So, you know, the whole, I mean this is what's happened to the whole world in the last 15 years or so is that ideology has taken over almost every discipline. Fortunately, it hasn't completely consumed science, but it's starting to.
- [58:19]
A
A quick aside, I've been drinking AG1 every morning for years now and it just got even better. AG1 Next Gen keeps the same simplicity, one scoop once a day, but now comes with four clinical trials backing it. In those trials, AG1 Next Gen was clinically shown to fill common nutrient gaps, improve key nutrient levels within three months and, and increase healthy gut bacteria by 10 times, even in healthy adults. Basically, they've upgraded the formula with better probiotics, more bioavailable nutrients and clinical validation. And it's still NSF certified for sport, so you know that the quality is legit. AG1 genuinely care about holistic health, which is why I've got my mum to take it, my dad to take it, and tons of my friends too, and why I put it inside of my body every single day. And if I found something better I would switch, but I haven't, which is why I still use it. And if you're still unsure, they've got a 90 day money back guarantee. So you can buy it and try it for three months and if you don't like it, I'll just give you your money back right now. You can get a year's free supply of vitamin D, 3K2 and 5 free AG1 travel packs, plus that 90 day money back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to drinkag1.commodernwisdom that's drinkag1.com modernwisdom I don't know how I, I don't know where my position is on this now because I got not embroiled but I certainly got interested in this world, this slow march through the institutions, this sort of progressive overreach that I think was doing a lot of damage to a lot of academia and that maybe reached fever pitch in 2020, 2021, something like that. And now I don't quite know what's going on. I think when the right are in power in America, there is much less of an impetus to talk about the sort of the crazy overreaches of the left because the right feel like they've already won. They're kind of still inside of the tent pissing out, as we would say in the uk. And I don't know whether this also that fever pitch that reached in 2020, is that a genuine pullback, is that this march has been slowed. Is it. We've kind of realized that some of this stuff was a little bit kooky and people kind of went along with the social contagion idea thing that made them seem cool or seem trendy and now the trend seems to have swung in another direction a little bit or whatever. Is it that this is a genuine pullback or is it that there is a smarter game afoot from the people who are trying to encroach on science with ideology, where they're doing it in a much smarter way that doesn't get as many headlines? They're continuing to try and repurpose. Repurpose maths, repurpose chemistry, repurpose biology. I'm not really too sure, but I certainly see fewer and fewer of those crazy woke lunatic story things. I also think I certainly had a ton of news fatigue, like how many right wing articles and stories and videos do I need to see about the excesses of wokeness? And they always seem justified, right? They always seem by the people that are trying to push back against them. This is the over. This shows the overreach that we've said was always going up. And there's this Cassandra complex. We told you about this before. This is going to go, but I'm not seeing as much anymore. And I wonder what that indicates.
- [61:51]
B
Well, it could be that, you know, they're winning. I mean, you're asking me to predict the future and I don't really know, but I think a bellwether for that is the loss of Kamala Harris in the United States in the election. She was a real virtue signaler to the point where she. That's all she did. She never said anything true or anything rational or anything like that. I was not a fan of hers. I did vote Democratic, but I wasn't happy about it. And she lost pretty big time, you know, and at least some of that came from her rejection of the sex binary. I mean, that's. You can find that out by asking in the polls. So I don't think the right is winning because they're smarter. I think the right is winning and I don't think that the pendulum has started swinging the other way. I think the right is winning simply because something happened to the left and it may be the death of George Floyd. I Don't know. That was about five years ago. That instilled us with a deep sense of guilt for being responsible for treating every marginalized group very badly. And so we're hesitant to fight against this kind of wokeness because it makes us look like we're right wingers too. So when I say, I mean, sex is a binary, I will swear to that. You know, I mean, when you look at lions or you look at kangaroos, you don't say, well, there's a male kangaroo, there's a female kangaroo. That kangaroo looks like he's gender fluid to me. I mean, it's only in humans that you see this kind of stuff, which gives you a clue that it has something to do with human psychology rather than biological reality. But I can't forgotten that question.
- [63:53]
A
I guess.
- [63:54]
B
Oh, but yeah, about where woteness is going. Yeah. So for some reason, the left has been deeply imbued with a sense of guilt. And of course the marginalized groups, I mean, they want that to happen because it means more stuff for them. And to some extent it's true. I mean, they were treated horribly. Native Americans were treated horribly. Blacks were made slaves. And you know, when I was a kid, I still remember when I arrived at college, there were two men's rooms and two women's rooms in the bus station. When I took the. And I said, well, why is that? I was from Northern Virginia, I went to Southern Virginia, and then I realized that one was for black people and one was for white people. So yeah, they were treated badly. But I think that people realize that and they're trying to make amends for it. The problem is they're going too far in the other direction now to valorize people that don't deserve to be valorized or to give unwarranted advantages to members of different groups. Equity, it's called. Where my view is that everybody should have equal opportunity to achieve from birth, but that's almost impossible to achieve. I mean, imagine a United States in which every person had the same resources, had two parents, had good schools, so they all had started out at the same point. I can't imagine that it would take so much money to do that. And yet that I think is the ultimate solution. You don't solve the problem by after the groups become different in different ways, largely due to culture, by trying to make them equal, by giving equal representation and groups. I guess we've gone far off the topic.
- [65:43]
A
No, not at all. I'm interested in what you've learned about human nature from engaging with Critics of your work.
- [65:51]
B
Well, about the reverse naturalistic fallacy that people really don't, aren't deeply wedded to what's true about the world. I guess people, you know, it's always been known that that's true, that people like religion. To me, I mean, I'm an atheist. I have no bones about admitting that. And I don't believe in God because there's no errands for God. I've never seen anything supernatural or any sign of divinity. And yet the vast majority of the world believes in God. I think 85% of Americans do. Not so many Brits, because they're more sensible, I guess. And religion has almost vanished in Scandinavia and Iceland. But that shows an example of how people will believe something is true about the universe when there's not a whit of evidence for it. So I'm only now, as I speak to you, coming to realize that this is not just something that's unique to science or to American society since the death of George Floyd, that people always believe what makes them feel good, what gives them consolation. I think Karl Marx said that, right? What was his famous statement? Religion is the opium in the masses. Yeah, it's because what he meant when he said that was that he wanted. He wasn't, he wasn't tiring religion, of course, because he was an atheist. He was just saying that people that have it really bad in the world find their source in a non existent sky deity. And it's the same, I guess, that you could draw a line between that and the people that find their solace who are, say, gender dysphoric and thinking that sex is a spectrum. You know, you believe what makes you feel good. Unfortunately, in science we have such a thing as empirical truth which comes smack up against what many people want to be true.
- [67:55]
A
So what would you say, given that we're, you know, an hour deep now, we can talk about whatever we want. The only people left are the reasonable ones. What would you say is a theory that you believe in and stand behind but is currently the most publicly inflammatory or cantankerous? I've got one, but I'm interested in hearing yours as well.
- [68:21]
B
Oh yeah, but I want to hear yours too. Well, a theory or a fact?
- [68:28]
A
You can pick. You can pick between the two.
- [68:30]
B
Well, the one that's got me in the most trouble lately is my assertion that there's two sexes and no more. I mean, you know, to me that's an indubitable fact because it, and not only is it indubitable but it's explanatory. First of all, it's universal because every animal and plant vest to a plant species has two reproductive systems. Where the startling, the reason I want to tout it, it's not just because I'm trying to force that down the throat of people that are gender dysphoric. It's because it's explanatory. It explains the notion of sexual selection, why males and females behave differently, why males compete for the attention of females. Which explains so much in the animal kingdom, from the larger sizes of gorillas to the tail of the peacock to the fact that when one sex is usually ornamented or brightly colored, it's almost always the male. I mean, it was Darwin in 1871 who raised that theory. So that's one reason why it behooves us to believe what the truth is. Because it's, you know, I guess some people don't get this feeling of wonder when they finally realize by God, that is the explanation. Certainly Darwin did, but he was reluctant to publish it. I mean, it was in the 1830s or early 1840s when he hit on natural selection. But he didn't publish it until 1859 because he was so worried about being damned for that. But you know, scientists, and we become scientists because of this sense of wonder, wonder at the truth of what really is out there in the universe. And we can understand it. There's some people, I mean, I guess it just doesn't move. Some people, you know, they'd rather have their own personal truth even if there's no evidence for it because it makes them feel good. All right.
- [70:25]
A
Okay. Let me give you, let me give you mine. Let me give you mine. So you mentioned earlier on, you mentioned John Tooby. I very fortunately got to meet him at hbess a couple of years ago. I was, you say I was the least credentialed person in the room speaking at a, speaking at a part of a symposium. And he came up after and he said some really lovely things about the show, which was super nice to meet him. And you know, it was only a few months later that he passed away. He's got his theory, I think it's the dysgenic theory of gene erosion with regards to mutational load that I don't know. Okay, so this is, this is one of those, this is me doing a high wire act. Okay, are you ready? Okay, let me, let me do the, Let me do this dance in front of you, Jerry. So all species, but we're talking about humans accumulate Mutational load as you go generation to generation. Stop me when I get the technicalities wrong, but the principle is correct. Mutations occur. Many of these mutations are junk. Make the species less effective, make the next generation less effective, they're less adapted to their environment. And when you have heavy selection pressures, small changes in the animal are selected out. If they're suboptimal, if they're not as good, you're less likely to survive and reproduce and pass on your genesis. The issue in the modern world is that we have removed a lot of those selection pressures with healthcare. So there are a lot of examples. The one that's the least controversial that I can see you suffer with would be myopia or some sort of eye issue. Now, ancestrally, a mild blurring of the eyes, maybe, you know, you wouldn't be able to read the grains of sand on your hand. Probably not that big of a deal. But as you start to push it a bit, I would guess, and even the grains of sand, I'm going to guess it's not that adaptive. I'm going to guess that over time, people who couldn't see quite as well would be less likely to survive and reproduce than people who could see well. But now we have glasses. So people who can't see particularly well have had the selection pressure on their eyesight removed to, to a degree. Which means some people find glasses sexy. Maybe that's even. Maybe it's even an advantage for you to wear glasses. Maybe it frames the face in a manner, maybe it makes you seem a little bit more intellectual and academic and considered or something. But what that means is that you are accumulating a load, genetic mutations that makes further eye degeneration more likely over time. And it was his belief that this occurs across everything because we have life support systems and asthma inhalers and wheelchairs and all sorts of things. And that if you remove the selection pressure, you will start to accumulate dysgenic mutational load. Which means that the crumbling genome, I think, as it's. As it's referred to, starts to get worse over time. And when he first proposed this, I think this was before genetic engineering was that likely. Could this be fixed by some gene therapies assisted by AI and advanced technologies at some point over the next 200 years? I would guess that seems probably at least partly likely. You're smiling.
- [74:04]
B
Many conditions, like heart disease and general decrepitude as you get older are caused by many, many genes. So you'd have to fix each one of them. And you had to fix them in the, your mother's DNA, not in your own DNA because you can't fix, you can't edit every cell in your own body. But I think what is indubitably true, with the caveat that a lot of the conditions like wheelchairs and stuff did not obtain early in human evolution because we never got that old to be able to show these symptoms. So the decrepitude was probably built in a lot of it before. Right. Because we didn't live that long.
- [74:48]
A
So you also need to have a. There is early onset decrepitude in a variety of different ways. Right. And that, you know, you could say people at 30 are the way that they in 500 years time are the way that people at 60 would have been in 2025. Let's say something like that because we, well, we've just got all of this technology to support them and we can continue to keep them living and so on and so forth. So unless you intervene in that regard, maybe that is. But I mean, that is, you're getting perilously close to the E word of eugenics when you start talking about this, which is a topic actually that, that actually gets us to probably like the, whatever the point of no return of the black hole when it comes to talking about anything in, in this realm.
- [75:38]
B
Yeah, we didn't even mention that. There's a lot of things to say about it. But I haven't studied eugenics in much. Certainly in the UK eugenics was always, it wasn't like the Nazis practiced and it wasn't like in the US where people were involuntarily sterilized. The Brits just wanted to up the reproduction of the upper classes. You know, that was their former eugenics. And you know, I don't believe that certain people should be rewarded for having kids and others penalized. But what happened in Britain is different from what happened in, in Nazi Germany and what happened in the uk. But getting back to what you said, yeah, I think you're absolutely right. There's no penalty now pre reproductively for mutations that can be fixed medically. Now this of course only applies to humans because animals and other species don't have the, you know, the workarounds to fix, you know, mutations.
- [76:37]
A
Well, you know, so interestingly here, one other animal group that I think you could say you're observing this, although this was more to do with selective breeding, would be dogs. You know, you look at English, British bulldogs, the shortening of the note, we're going to make them cuter, we're going to make the hind legs shorter. We're going to do the whatever. Like look at the shape of an Alsatian over the last hundred years due to selective breeding and you have these weird spinal problems. Dachshunds have got progressively lower and longer and they end up snapping their own spines because they can't support them because, oh, it's so cute. He's exactly like a hot dog. And obviously that's being done selectively, but that is a kind of dysgenic breeding in a way.
- [77:21]
B
Yeah, it's. But it's. Yeah, as you said, it's due to artificial selection, whereas what you were talking about is just due to the accumulation of mutations that have no clear penalty.
- [77:35]
A
Or the penalty can be offset somehow by technology.
- [77:39]
B
Yeah, but once you reached the post reproductive age, which is earlier for women than it is for men, I guess men can keep having babies till the 80 years. 90 women have to stop at menopause. So mutations that arise after that post reproductive stage carry no penalty at all. Fix them by. With wheelchairs and, and catheters and stuff like that. But you know that, I suppose.
- [78:07]
A
Well, no, you're right. You're right. I was about to say something like, I was about to say post reproductively, if, if this was happening ancestrally, somebody that was a. That was less robust would be a larger drain on resources, which would be maladaptive. But there is no mechanism for that person to be selected out of the gene pool because they are past their reproductive age. So there's no. It's like. It's like a line has been drawn into the future from their impact on what's happening from a genetic standpoint. Is that a fair way to put it?
- [78:47]
B
Yeah. And the other alternative is the sort of grandparent effect that, you know, even though if you're not robust or healthy, it's the advantage of your genes to hang around and take care of your parents or your grandchildren, et cetera. But we don't know anything about that really. So.
- [79:08]
A
Jerry Coyne, ladies and gentlemen. Jerry, you're awesome. I really enjoyed today. Today's been so much fun. You actually might be the most prolific blogger that I know. It is terrifying the amount of words that you put out on the Internet. So where should people go if they want to keep up to date with your work?
- [79:25]
B
Yeah. So the name of the website is why Evolution is True, which is the title of my first book. And I'd still recommend it because I really, really like that book. I don't think I could write it again. Why Evolution is True. But if you want to come to the website, you just string all those together into one word. Www.why? evolutionistrue.com and you can see the website. It's very eclectic. I write about biology, but I also write about whatever. It started out as a way to publicize the book, the eponymous book. That same day, after my agent said, well, you know, maybe you should do what Neil Shubin did. He wrote an awesome book called the your Inner Fish about how we show the remnants of our fishy ancestry. And he started a website to publicize that. And so my agent said, why don't you do that too? I did it. And that was a monster. I discovered that I like writing. Not I envisioned it as every couple of weeks I prep a piece of evidence for evolution. Well, now I discovered it's going to become a chronicle of my existence or my thoughts. And it's, yeah, put three or four pieces a day maybe, and it's a big time sink. But I've gotten a lot more out of it than I have putting into it because I get feedback from readers. I've made friends all over the world, even. I've even had two views from North Korea. Although I don't know who would have the Internet in North Korea look at my website. But yeah, it's a good thing and I have not yet grown tired of it.
- [80:59]
A
Well, long may you continue doing it. Gerry, you're great. And we didn't even talk about why evolution's true. We can do an entire another episode on all of the stuff around that, but for now, well, you can buy the book and you can buy the book now. And then when we do the next episode, you'll be a few steps ahead and you'll understand what we're talking about.
- [81:16]
B
Well, thanks for having me on.
- [81:17]
A
I appreciate you. Thank you.
- [81:19]
B
Sure.
- [81:22]
A
When I first started doing personal growth, I really wanted to read the best books. The most impactful ones, the most entertaining ones, the ones that were the easiest to read and the most dense and interesting, but there wasn't a list of them. So I scoured and scoured and scoured and then gave up and just started reading on my own. And then I made a list of 100 of the best books that I've ever found. And you can get that for free right now. So if you want to spend more time around great books that aren't going to completely kill your memory and your attention just trying to get through a single page, go to chriswillx.combooks to get my list completely free. Of 100 books you should read before you die. That's chriswillx.combooks.