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- [00:00]
A
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- [00:32]
B
You basically did something that I've been trying to explain for a very long time. The biological reasons for why communism worked. And you give a fascinating example of voluntary communism, which was the kibbutz system in Israel.
- [00:46]
A
That was a wonderful natural experiment. So the founders who decided in Israel they would not just start anew, but they would build a whole new world based on a new kind of person who would be a good, unselfish person. It's a very dangerous system when you don't reward people on the basis of their merit. This is one of the big problems of not taking human nature seriously and not accepting the fact that we have certain behaviors written into our genome by evolution because of our survival values. Our instinct is entirely warlike. Our. I mean, we have genocide written into our genes.
- [01:30]
B
Nicholas Wade, welcome to Trigonometry.
- [01:32]
A
Thanks for having me.
- [01:33]
B
It's so good to have you on. Francis and I picked up your book a few days ago. You know, to be honest, we have to read a lot of books because we interview a lot of people, so it can sometimes feel like a chore. But the moment we opened your book, we were like, whoa, give me more of this. Because he was so fascinating. You talk. You called the the Origin of Politics, and it's about evolution and how evolutionary history shapes the way we do everything, actually in a way that we've totally forgotten in our society now. So we're going to talk about all of that, but before we do, tell us a little bit about you. What's your story? How. How. What's been your journey through life?
- [02:10]
A
Well, I grew up in England and I worked for Nature, the scientific journal who sent me out to Washington to be their Washington correspondent. And after a year, I was asked by our big rival, science, to join them. So I worked for science for 10 years, and then I joined the New York Times as an editorial writer covering scientific environmental subjects. And I worked for the times, I guess, 30, 40 years.
- [02:41]
C
Wow.
- [02:43]
A
That's it. Very brief biography.
- [02:45]
B
Yeah. Well, you've Written a number of books. Some of them have caused a bunch of controversies as well. We'll maybe talk about that later, but let's talk about what you are actually talking about. In Origin of Politics. You give this. You basically did something that I've been trying to explain for a very long time as someone who was born in the Soviet Union, which you basically explained why communism never works, the biological reasons for why communism works. And you give a fascinating example of, of voluntary communism, which was the kibbutz system in Israel. Talk to us about that.
- [03:17]
A
That was a wonderful natural experiment. So the, the founders who were, you know, fleeing the anti Semitism in their homelands, decided in Israel they would not just start anew, but they would build a whole new world and based on a new kind of person who would be a good, unselfish person. So it was a really great and noble ideal, but it required doing things that run right against the grain of human nature. So the first astounding thing they did was to abolish the family. So the family has been sort of the basic unit of human society since the dawn of time. So the kibbutzes arranged that the children would live apart from their families in dormitories. They were allowed to see their families just at the end of the day for a brief period. But otherwise they were raised communally. And the idea was that you would, the woman would be released from the patriarchy of the father. So these guys came from sort of patriarchal Jewish families that they really wanted to get rid of entirely. So women didn't depend on their husbands for anything and they could have whatever jobs they chose. Those were the features of that was one big thing kibbutz. And the other was to abolish pay. So everyone got the same pay, whether they worked hard or slacked off. And the reason was to make sure that you had a condition of total equality. No one was richer or better than anyone else. No one could boss anyone else around. So on paper it was ideal. Women weren't dependent on men. No one was superior to anyone else. And it's a great tribute to the idealism of the founders. The system did last, at least while they were alive. But when a second generation grew up who weren't imbued with the founders ideology, they started to reject all these things. The women wanted to have their children with them. During the day, the families were reconstituted. The kibbusim had to go through a massive rebuilding program to build apartments instead of these communal living arrangements. And they also had to drop the equal pay system because when they were founded, Israel was quite a poor economy and it didn't really matter what wages were outside the kibbutzim, they weren't much better. But as Israel grew more prosperous, people started leaving the kibbutzim for much better paying jobs. So pay differentials were reinstituted and the kibbutz been in a very bad way then started to get more prosperous. So the interest of the whole experiment was that this was a pure test of socialism. Defenders of socialists often say, well, it's never really been tried, meaning that the communist governments that operated it were so corrupt and inefficient, that wasn't a fair test. But the kibbutzim were a fair test. It was voluntary entered into and it was voluntarily rejected when people saw it simply didn't work.
- [06:35]
B
And you do a brilliant job in the book explaining where the tension between the desire for equality expressed ultimately in something like the kibbutzim, and the desire for merit based hierarchy, let's say it like that, right where they come from evolutionarily. Can you, can you share that with our viewers and listeners?
- [06:58]
A
Yes. The root of that is that, is that men had to compete very hard to survive. So in early societies it wasn't sort of one man, one woman. It was the, the chief guy got most of the wives and many men were left without a wife at all. So unless you competed like hell, you had no chance of, of having a family and leaving any descendants. So your Darwinian fitness was zero. Men have, we are the descendants of the men who survived this system by being highly competitive with each other. For women, then they had to turn around and be very cooperative with the other men in their society for the society's defense.
- [07:45]
B
So, so that another tribe wouldn't come and take, kill all of you and take all of your women.
- [07:49]
A
Right. Which is what happened if you, if you failed to defend your country, the men would be killed and the women and the children as well sometimes and the women would become the property of the conquerors. So it was a really bad thing to be defeated. So that's why men have these sort of two very strong drives in them to compete with each other and yet to cooperate for reasons of defense. And this, to answer your question, I think this comes back to why an equal pay system goes so against the grain of human nature. People don't want to just have a system where their efforts aren't rewarded. They are sort of programmed to fight as hard as they can for the means to sustain and protect their family.
- [08:35]
C
And Nicholas, the thing That, I mean, there's lots of things that are interesting about your book, and I'm gonna use colloquial English language to describe this, but I found your theory about this fascinating. Is the theory of the skiver and how essentially skivers, and for our American audience and listeners, that means people who shirk their responsibilities and don't work very hard. That was one of the main problems with the kibud system and actually probably one of the main issues with the Soviet Union as well, wasn't it?
- [09:09]
A
That's right, because the system is set up for freeloading. You. You come into a kibbutz. If you get into a kibbutz, then you don't have to work anymore. You can slack off. The only thing that stops you, I guess, is. Is. Is public disapproval. But. But nonetheless that can go only so far. So it's a. It's a very dangerous system when, when you don't reward people on the basis of their merit.
- [09:37]
C
And that also leads to resentment as well, doesn't it? Which also means that the harmony within the kibbutz is disrupted.
- [09:44]
A
Yeah, it's very destabilizing for society, I think, because people have a strong sense of whether they're being fairly treated or not. And if you work your heart out but get the same pay as the Skyver next to you, then you feel wronged, and indeed, you have been wronged.
- [10:02]
C
So the kibbutz went through this phase of, you know, basically this is a socialist utopia. Everybody is going to get on great. And what were the reasons why it started to, let's say, become, how shall I put it, more realistic in its outlook? Was it just because of the skiver? Was it because of resentment within the actual kibbutz ecosystem, or were there other things going on?
- [10:26]
A
I think it was partly the. The passing of generations. So the. The guys who'd grown up in the kibbutz didn't have the same sort of zeal as their parents who'd founded the kibbutz. Second thing was that the kibbutz were somewhat protected from the outside environment. As long as the Israeli economy remained poor, they weren't too much affected in a general way by skivers because they recognized the danger and they screened people very carefully before they were let into the kibbutz.
- [10:58]
B
But once you have a generation of children, you can't control that anymore. And that's. That's part of the generational impact.
- [11:04]
A
Right, Right. So the next generation, you insisted that things become more. More normal, as it were, and less idealistic. They wanted to sort of Reconstitute themselves as families. They wanted to be paid according to how much they worked.
- [11:18]
B
Yeah. And coming back to the discussion we started about competitiveness versus cooperation, you talked about men. And while you and Francis were talking, it sort of became quite obvious to me that there's probably quite a big difference between the way men and women have evolved to think about these things. Is that fair to say?
- [11:36]
A
Yes, it's very fair. And there's a current movement to on the left to say that men and women are no different. That apart from a few minor physiological differences with reproduction, they are exactly the same thing. But this couldn't be further from the truth. Their minds are as different as their bodies because evolution has shaped them for very different roles. You gain a lot by specialization. And evolution hasn't specialized us to the extent it has done say with ant societies because we haven't been around as long as they have. But it has taken every chance to specialize men and women. So women are specialized for bearing and raising children and for sort of relationships within the, in the family and the neighborhood. And men are specialized for essentially for defense, for fighting and for organizing the largest scale institutions of society.
- [12:38]
B
And would it be fair to say that the female, stereotypically speaking, the female role in addition to raising children, is also to manage the conflict orientation of men within the, within the tribe? Because if all the men are killing each other when the other tribe comes along, you're in a bad place. So are they a natural regulator of male competitive and competitiveness and violence in that way, the news doesn't just tell you what's happening, it often tells you what to think is happening. And these days the biggest red flag isn't what's said, it's what gets left out. That's why I use Ground News. If you it's the only app that compares how the same story is covered across the political spectrum and show you what whole audiences are not being told. The Blindsport feed is one of my favorite features. Every day it flags upwards of 20 stories that are being ignored either by the left or the right. Follow along at Ground news. Trigonometry like this, A new study from UC San Diego found that climate change cost almost twice as much as we thought because earlier estimates left out damage to the oceans. That's a pretty big update. And yet no coverage, literally zero, came from right leaning outlets. All this, a recent Gallup poll found trust in the media has hit a record low with just 28% of Americans saying they trust newspapers, radio and TV to report the News accurately and fairly, that's a staggering result. But if you only read left leaning news, you likely never saw it at all. Go to ground news trigonometry to get 40% off their unlimited vantage, plan the same one we use and stop being managed by the media.
- [14:12]
A
That's certainly the case among chimpanzees who are uncannily similar to us in their societies. You see female chimps sort of prising the stones away from male chimps who are about to batter their skulls in because they know that if the males kill each other the community will be so weak that the chimps next door will come in and invade them and kill all their children. So I can imagine the same instinct being there in women, but I haven't thought to what extent it may operate because at least in early societies women didn't have a lot of political power.
- [14:48]
B
Yeah, I know, but women don't exert political power only through politics, as we all know if we're married, right? Like my wife is not remotely political, but she exerts a lot of power on me. I guess the reason I'm asking this, we just had this lady on called Helen Andrews who wrote an article about, you know, her thesis is the feminization of society has caused the woke explosion that we've seen for the last 10 years. And we had a back and forth, you know, I don't know that I agree with everything that she puts forward, but it's a perspective that made me think about how some of the recent cultural trends are to do with the fact that men and women evolved and were optimized for different roles. And as the ratios of these two groups change in different institutions, it is quite likely and natural that those institutions will see things differently and operate in different ways.
- [15:40]
A
Yes, I think this is a tremendously important issue because the two roles I was describing to you are what evolution has shaped. But of course culture is enormously strong in our society, so culture can sort of reshape and modulate what evolution has done. And, and one of the most notable aspects of human societies is that women have been liberated from the home and in fact they're now better educated than men. More of them go to universities, so they have no problem getting jobs and they are no longer dependent on men. And the most serious side effect of that is they no longer bear as many children. So our societies are in fact headed for extinction unless women somehow are persuaded to go back to bearing more children. But another aspect of this is the running of institutions. So I think I might Say all institutions historically have been set up and designed by men. So are women going to do as good a job as they sort of demand to take over evil institutions or be represented 50% on corporate boards? And you know, I think the jury is still out on that, but I don't think really it's a very promising experiment. If you look, for example, at the way American higher education has been taken over by women presidents and they are not all of them terrible. But Claudine Gay, for example, who Harvard chose to be their president, has a very small bibliography as a scholar and much of it is written with plagiary. She's not a good poster child for women running institutions. So one shouldn't generalize from that. It doesn't mean that women cannot run institutions. There are many fine women business leaders and politicians. It's just, I suspect, you know, when the dust settles down and we're sort of mature enough as a society to let everyone be appointed on merit, I suspect we will find that there will be more men running institutions than women. It won't be a 5050 ratio.
- [18:04]
B
I'm just going to stress test that argument because obviously a lot of people are going to be triggered by this. The show is called trigonometry for a reason. But I guess the stress test of that would be why do you talk about it as merit? Because the question I posed you, posed to you was more about value systems, right? Is it what I was asking more is more. Are women likely to bring a different set of values to an institution? Or do you believe that actually collectively speaking at the population level, the big institutions, women didn't evolve to, to operate things like that and so they're just not going to be as good? Or is it a question of they'll just bring a different value set and the institutions will produce a different set of outcomes. It's not about better or worse, it's about imposing their kind of default value set on the world. Do you see what I'm getting at?
- [18:54]
A
Yes. I mean, I think it's probably fair to say women do have a slightly different value set and that it's sort of less aggressive than men's, more oriented toward, toward peaceful solutions to softer approaches. But merit is a separate question. It's of how well do you run an institution? So I think the way evolution has equipped us is that men are more used to long range relationships or relationships outside the family. And I think it will turn out that they are generally better at managing them than, than women are. But there is, there's no hard data on that. We're in the middle of this sort of grand experiment and we're going to find out.
- [19:34]
C
Nicholas, there's a really illuminating chapter in your book where you talk about chimps, chimpanzees, you talk about the male chimpanzee, you talk about the female chimpanzee, you talk about the difference in behaviors and aggressiveness and all the rest of it. Why is it that we can talk about female and male chimpanzees in this way, yet when it comes to female and male human beings, we pretend as if there's no difference?
- [20:00]
A
Well, it's because there's a strong tradition, particularly on the left, to deny that evolution has anything to do with human behavior. They assert that the mind is a blank slate at birth and that everything that we know is learned from culture and that nothing comes from genetics. But it seems to me this is a very foolish view for the reason you allude to. If you look at chimp societies and chimps are our closest living cousins, there clearly is a genetic basis for what they do. All chimp societies have the same organization. All chimps will behave in much the same way, and female chimps behave in a very different way from male chimps. And chimp societies have a very specific
- [20:47]
B
structure, all of which tell us about that. What are some societies like and how do they operate?
- [20:55]
A
Well, they are very hierarchical. There's a male hierarchy and beneath that there's a female hierarchy. So all females are subordinate to all males?
- [21:05]
C
As it should be.
- [21:06]
A
Absolutely.
- [21:08]
B
Someone's gonna clip that.
- [21:11]
A
The male hierarchy is established by pure intimidation. As a young male, you sort of work your way up. You first, you, you intimidate all the females and then you start with the males. They're basically sort of trials of strength. But outright hostilities are avoided by sort of substitute effects like you, you sort of. There's lots of vocalizations, there are lots of fascinating chimp behaviors. But basically, when one male chimp meets another, the degree of dominance has to be established. So the inferior chimp will sort of kowtow or make a sort of particular pant, hooting noise, also present his rear to show he's sort of vulnerable to the male. And so the hierarchy, however horrible it sounds to our ears, is good in the sense that it creates a stable society. There aren't permanent fights because everyone knows who is boss. So once you get to the top of the hierarchy, then something very important happens. As alpha male, you get to score most of the matings. Now, you can't do this yourself. You need a coalition. So this is the beginning of politics. The alpha male distributes mating opportunities to the guys in his coalition. And human societies are just the same because the autocrat, certainly in an early human society will sort of distribute land and wealth to his followers, which of course, are the means to attract females. So it's not sort of direct sexual award, it's an indirect sexual award, but toward the same end.
- [22:53]
C
Nicholas, it seems to me, and correct me if I'm wrong, that we're denying our fundamental biology, which means that doesn't that make us more miserable? Doesn't that make us more prone to illnesses, depression, et cetera? If we're trying to be something that we're not, for instance, females, human females trying to appear more masculine and also vice versa as well?
- [23:20]
A
Well, I think this is where. So where, where culture comes in. Our culture is so rich that we live primarily in a world created by our culture. And the genetic framework is invisible to us. I think where we get into trouble is where we violate some of these genetic structures that nature has put in place. So I think the kibbutzim are a good example of what happens when you destroy the family. It simply doesn't work. And there are lots of ways in which you can successfully modulate human nature. It seems to be, I mean, it's like, it's like remodeling a house. You can, you can change a lot of things around as long as you don't touch the load bearing walls. So you need to know what the load bearing walls are. And they're very interesting examples in our history, I think, of where we have successfully modulated our innate instincts. So one good example is, is monogamy. So most early societies were polygamous. The top guy got the most girls, but we changed that to monogamy. I think essentially because it's a very unstable situation to have a lot of young men who have no prospect of getting a wife. They become very disaffected. So what do you do with them? The traditional policy is to send them off to fight the neighbor and have them die in battle. But you, if you start wars, it doesn't always turn out the way you hope. So it's much more stable, in fact, to distribute women equally, which is what monogamy does for you. So, so, so Europe became monogamous, essentially under the influence of the church and then you. In quite recent times, monogamy sort of spread, presumably by example, to India and China. So now almost all the world is monogamous. And all this represents a Sort of great big constraint on the natural male impulse to have as many wives and children as possible.
- [25:25]
C
And you also talk in your book about how this monogamy that has been imposed or implemented, however you want to describe it, on societies, it leads to a flourishing of society both in terms of, you know, culture and economically, etc.
- [25:44]
A
That's right. And this is one way in which we have transcended our evolution to great advantage. These monogamous societies are much more stable and more productive. And another major example of the same thing is tribalism. So the whole world used to be tribal in between. When hunter gatherers settled down at the beginning of agriculture some 10,000 years ago to one or two millennia ago now, all human societies were tribal. And tribalism is a very successful way and effectively of running a society because it sort of keeps law and order without any police force or courts or laws, and it's very good at defense. And it's has many superb advantages such that it is very hard to get rid of. So there's a wonderful book by Francis Fukuyama, the political scientist. She describes how the major civilizations of the world, in different ways, got rid of their tribal structure and instituted a single ruler with a sort of state bureaucracy. In Europe, it was done by the church. So the early Europeans were all tribal. And in those days, it was often quite hard to produce a male heir because people died very young. So you very much needed to keep the wealth inside the tribe. So there is stratagems for, like, adoption or marrying your cousin for keeping wealth inside the tribe. So the church came along and said, no, all that is incestuous and absolutely forbidden. And so when people were on their deathbeds, the church would say, well, you should leave all your money to the poor. Meaning the church and the church became fantastically wealthy. At one stage, it owned, like, half of Germany and a third of France. The net result of this policy was that the tribes lost all their money and just disappeared.
- [27:52]
C
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- [28:22]
B
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C
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B
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- [29:43]
C
That's shopify.co.uk trigger and that's so interesting because we're talking about tribes now and how the power of the tribe was essentially taken away. But you look at America today, I mean it feels like we're more tribal than ever. Not only in America, but right the way through the western world.
- [30:06]
A
Well, these basic instincts don't go away, they just get sort of modulated. So tribalism no longer exists. And if you ask an American what his tribe was, unless he was an American Indian, he would have no idea what you meant. But you can still see tribalism operate in the form of nepotism. So people do anything to help their families, give them a leg up. And wherever possible, people will will arrange as much of their wealth as possible goes to their surviving relatives so that they maximize the number of children they put in the next generation.
- [30:44]
B
Well, it's interesting because there clearly some pretty healthy adaptations to fill these voids. For example, it's not just Americans, as you well know, British people are very tribal about sport as well. But that seems like one way of channeling those instincts that's quite healthy. What's interesting is I think perhaps due to social media, but maybe to due to other things. I'd be curious to hear your opinion. Politics has now become very, very tribal in the way that I just don't feel it was 20 years ago.
- [31:15]
A
You mean Based on race or just based on ideology?
- [31:19]
B
Just based on ideology. Like, people now treat their political party as their football team. Whereas it felt to me like in the late 90s, early 2000s, yeah, people had some kind of political allegiance, but. But it's in the same way that, like, if you're a fan of the Green Bay packers, you're not going to hate Patriots fans. It was like, well, look, I'm a Democrat, he's a Republican, but we sort of are going to be able to get on now. It's become tribal in the sense of, like, this is warfare almost is what it feels like to me.
- [31:50]
A
Yeah, I think tribalism can sort of break out in almost any context because it's so inbuilt. In our systems, you. You embrace your friends and you hate or despise or kill your enemies. And tribalism itself hasn't really gone away. It's just been transformed into the nation state. So the nation state, I think, has emerged as the most effective way for humans to organize themselves. And yet it really is just an extended tribe. It's got everything except kinship. And what it has is. And kinship is the glue of tribes. A nation state has. Has various surrogates, like people usually. Well, they have. Usually have a common language, a common religion, a common ethnicity, a common sort of founding narrative of how their nation came to be. And. And these things are very effective because nations are so effective. Their problem often is not that they're too weak, but they're too strong, so they will make war against their neighbors. I definitely think, though, that nations are the best way we have yet evolved of organizing ourselves. And it seems to me a great shame that the sinews of nationhood are often ignored or rejected or repudiated, particularly by the left. So this is a particular serious problem, I would think, for the US because many countries are sort of natural nations, and they have a. And if you look at the little Scandinavian democracies, they all speak the same language, they have the same religion, they have contiguous borders. So the US Used to be like that when it was primarily settled by English Protestants very early on, because. Because of its wonderfully flexible constitution, it was then able to embrace lots of other nations, mostly Christian nations, mostly Europeans, and while retaining its cohesiveness. But if you look at it now, many of the sinews of nationhood are fading. Americans used to be very religious. They're not. Not so religious now. They're following Europe in that pattern. The ethnicity is quite mixed and changing. It's so stable at the moment. You never know how long that's going to last for. There used to be a common language, but now they're sort of Spanish speaking enclaves that resist adopting English. You have to ask, well, what is it that holds Americans together? It seems to be, you know, money right now seems to be prosperity. Prosperity holds everyone together. No need to sort of rock the boat if everyone is reasonably prosperous, as at least in relative terms they are. But if that should fade for any reason, what would happen? I don't know. I don't see the natural bonds of a nation state being so cohesive that one needn't worry about them. I think we should start to worry about them.
- [35:11]
B
Yeah, well, it makes a lot of sense. Although interestingly, I would have thought in many ways Europe is in a worse place in relation to all of this because at least in America you have a history of immigration. It's kind of understood that this is a nation of people who've come from different parts of the world, different cultures, who've come here and bought into the American dream, which as you say, is kind of prosperity. I mean, the American dream is we all get to come here and be prosperous effectively. Right. If you boil it down to its basics. Whereas in Europe, and I said this as someone who myself immigrated to Europe from outside, you had a society which was very monocultural, very cohesive in terms of all the things that you talk about, language, ethnicity, etc. That now doesn't even have any structure to explain what a nation state is because it used to be based on common heritage and common culture and common religion. So now you have lots and lots of people come from other parts of the world who do not buy into that. But they also don't have any story that they tell that they are being told or their children are being told at school, at they don't stand for national anthem, they don't salute the flag, whatever it is that Americans are taught to do. And that seems to me like an even bigger challenge, I would argue.
- [36:32]
A
Yeah, I think Europe has definitely mishandled immigration in that, as you say, the American rule was to, was to integrate everyone. And it worked. I think it still worked. Whereas in Europe there's been, I think it's been a general failure of integration. You have large Muslim communities and there's nothing wrong with Islam, but here you have a community that doesn't buy into the current ethos. So. And religion is extremely important in sort of shaping a nation and interpersonal relations. And these large Muslim enclaves, I think are not well integrated are not, well, happy. They're too large for the country to handle easily. I think the thing about immigration is it needs to be done on a sort of more on a trickle basis than a sort of great big flow because otherwise you can't, you don't give people time to adjust. Immigrants become so threatening if people think they're taking their jobs or all the usual sort of anti immigrant feelings that are sort of always latent will get stirred up the larger the immigrant population is.
- [37:48]
B
And what is the biological and evolutionary source of those concerns?
- [37:56]
A
Well, it's simply sort of the, the, the inside outside dichotomy. I mean anyone who's not like you is an outsider. So, so the best kind of person is someone sort of related to you because you know you can trust them. But, but the more people, the more people become sort of different of different religion, different language, different ethnicity, the harder it is to establish the bond of trust which is the essential glue of human societies.
- [38:27]
B
But you talked about culture being a very powerful force. Are there not cultural adaptations that can help us overcome these things or is it just something that you feel that's one of the load bearing walls of, of human society?
- [38:39]
A
No, I think there are cultural adaptations and there are, there are multiracial societies that work very well. Now Singapore leaps to mind because I, but I think you have to recognize that you have a, you have one ethnicity that the Chinese that essentially are in control. I have to be careful in phrasing this, but is definitely one doesn't want a situation which any one ethnicity claims to be superior to others. But it's also the case that if you have one ethnicity able to govern, then that ethnicity can make things safe for everyone else. And you don't have vicious intercommunal warfare as you do for example, in multi ethnic states like Afghanistan or Lebanon. So states work best when you know one. You have a dominant ethnicity that treats everyone justly, which is the case in the US and in many European countries.
- [39:45]
C
Nicholas, it seems to me that our elite, so the people in charge, the politicians, they have become more and more alienated from the very things that make us human. You know, the fact that we have tribalism clearly imprinted into us. We are tribal creatures, yet they don't seem to understand that if you import millions of people into a particular country, that's gonna have a profound destabilizing effect. Even if every single person who comes in is a net positive to society, which they're not. Yeah, yeah.
- [40:23]
A
I mean this is one of the big problems of not Taking human nature seriously and not accepting the fact that we have certain behaviors written into our genome by evolution because of our survival value. So acting like a member of a tribe is one of them. So if you ignore that as a politician, then you're going to run into trouble. If you say, well, all people are alike, all people are equal or should be equal, and what we want is a global society with no national borders and everyone loving each other, that's fine. But our nation won't let us operate a society like that. We need to live in sort of smaller definable systems such as a nation. We're not ready for one global society because there's no way of organizing it that is written into our genome.
- [41:21]
C
And it also shows a fundamental ignorance of history because if you look at history doesn't matter what period of history, it's mainly defined by wars.
- [41:31]
A
Yes, that's right. Of pursuant to the fact that our instinct is, is entirely warlike. I mean, we have genocide written into our genes. And we in chimpanzees are the only species smart enough to figure out that the way to sort of finally solve the problem of the enemy is to eliminate him. So we are basically genocidal. But this is another example, I think, where culture has successfully sort of curbed and restrained our influence. And it does so on quite a wide level. And if you think of the sort of Westphalian piece that you ended the religious wars in Europe and there were sort of schemes that have succeeded it, you know, the Pax, the Congress of Vienna, you know, again, re established peace. After Napoleon's wars, you had the Pax Britannica, that sort of kept European countries from war. And after the Second World, since the Second World War, we've essentially had the Pax Americana. So America doesn't really like playing this role, but it really helps to have someone who polices a sort of world order in which states accept they do not fight each other or invade each other's countries. So this is a great example of a sort of cultural curb on natural human instincts. And again, is vastly for the better.
- [43:02]
C
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- [45:11]
A
No, we're not. You're right. We are basically primates. But I think there's a reason for a little more optimism than you suggest.
- [45:18]
C
Sorry, I've just. I've come from South London. I.
- [45:23]
A
Over the big sweep of history, we've become less violent. I mean, within societies, you know, we don't treat each other so horribly, cruelly as we used to. We didn't have public hangings or debtors, prisons or child labor. So the level of violence has, within societies has gone down. I don't think anyone really knows why, but. And there could be a genetic explanation, which is simply the people who are very violent are sort of ostracized. People don't want Moran. And maybe people are very violent, have less children than people who are peacefully inclined, looking Outside societies, we have far fewer wars than we used to have. Or rather we have far fewer men as a proportion of the population killed in wars. I mean, in primitive societies, people used to go to war every day. I mean, they didn't have mass casualties, but if you, if you lost one guy a week, then you know, pretty soon men over the course of their lives, it was like a 30% chance of dying in, in battle in hunter gatherer societies. So our chances of dying in battle, thankfully are very small.
- [46:36]
C
And it's, it appears that we kind of need this balance, don't we, when we're talking about the human being and our societies. On the one hand we need to be pragmatic and accept that we're tribal and we still have these instincts and impulses to go to war, for example, for resources. We're still hierarchical in nature, but we still need perhaps that progressive element which is, look, we're not as violent as we used to be. We're not maybe not as tribal as we used to be. So we can work on the human being whilst also accepting that there's going to be some fundamental, fundamental aspects of our biology that can never be changed.
- [47:16]
A
Yeah, I think that's exactly right. We should, we should understand and acknowledge what is there and sort of work with it rather than against it.
- [47:24]
B
And what does that look like in our society today? What would, what would that look like in terms of changes to how we think about things?
- [47:33]
A
I think that's. There are two big ways in which we are running into trouble. One is, one is the fertility crisis. We have undermined the human family and the way evolution organized it to produce, nurture and raise children. And it's been first of a good reason, it was sort of to free women from all the duties of the home and looking after children. And it's true, looking after children is a great show. I would have a joy. They may be. It requires a lot of effort to bring them up and many women are deciding not, not to do it. Fine, but that road does lead to extinction and it's very hard to reverse. And you might think it's easy to make more babies if more babies were needed. But in fact, many governments have had strong pronatalist policies. The Soviet Union for most of its existence had strong pronatalist policies, banned abortion and banned and contraceptives. And nothing that any government has found has reversed this trend. With one exception, which is the former Soviet Republic of Georgia that has an archbishop, he's called Ilya ii. And he announced that for Any couple married in the Orthodox church who had a. And had two children, had a third child, he personally would baptize it and be its godfather. He said this in 2005. And the next year, the birth rate took off like a rocket. Everyone started having children. This is the only known example of a government policy that has reversed a declining birth rate.
- [49:23]
B
That's really interesting. I've been to Georgia a number of times. People, People in Georgia are very. They're not aggressively religious, but they're very faithful and it's a big part of their lives. I imagine in America that would be like, I don't know, LeBron James sending you a sign, something for every third child. You know, something like that. This is a question that we've dealt with a lot on the show. We've interviewed all sorts of people about the fertility crisis and there are different perspectives on it. Young people like us. Well, what?
- [49:55]
C
No, no, young. We're young. We're young.
- [49:56]
B
We used to be young. There was a time when we could say young people like us. But people of our generation and below will say, housing is so expensive. We're sitting here in New York. You look around at the property prices here. As a young person, you know, someone under 30 like you are so screwed unless you've got millionaire parents. So how are you going to pair up and have kids if you are living four to a tiny apartment and you're spending 50% of your income on. On rent? There are other people who will say, well, as society declines in religiosity, people have fewer children. There are other people who will say, Louise Perry, for example, who we've had on the show a couple of times, she wrote a book called the Case against the Sexual Revolution, in which she basically said, look, once you invent the abortion pill and washing machines and all of this other stuff, women are free and they go into the workplace, which is. Might be great, but then they don't have kids. And your books just falling over. Then this is inevitable product of this. There are the people who say it's actually the education of women that. Cause like all of these things are going on and that's maybe why it's so hard to turn around. But is it your thesis of fundamentally sounds like a weird question to ask, but I think it's worth asking if it's true. If women participate in the labor force more, this will. This is the inevitable consequence, rightly or wrongly.
- [51:17]
A
Well, all those things you mentioned, every important factors. I think that the most important way of looking at this problem is that the one thing that in one, in one country after another correlates with the fertility rate is what women want is the number of women, number of children, women in each country say they want. So that is a perfect correlation. So that it seems to me is the sort of place to start looking for answers. And, and that is something that's very hard to, to change. I mean, women are not taking this decision lightly, I assume. But, but for all the reasons in any society they, this is what they decide. And I don't know how, no one knows how you make them change their minds on this.
- [52:07]
B
Well, I'm not sure you can. I've tried to change many women's minds. It's never happened. But the reason, I think it's maybe some optimism. Like a lot of people I talk to now are sort of going, all right, well like we should do this, we should have kids, men and women. And so there will be, you know, every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Maybe on the one hand, on the other hand, I worry about, it's, you know, there was this myth of like runaway climate change for a long time. It's like runaway infertility or lack of fertility. Because if you're not constantly surrounded by young children, you get further and further distance from that experience. And then you, you only imagine, you just look on Instagram and you see a yet another parent complaining about how hard it is. And what you don't know is, well, actually being a parent's great, but also very, very hard. So yeah, you go on Instagram to complain about it, but you've got all these moments and days and weeks of joy that stays in the background. So I just wonder how all of this is ultimately going to get resolved. But I guess we'll find out.
- [53:09]
A
Yeah. If people will start to recognize it as a true crisis. Which I think is the problem is it's a slow moving crisis and we're not going to go extinct tomorrow. It's just that things will get steadily worse. We'll have an ever dwindling workforce supporting an ever larger group of old people and we won't be able to have the soldiers to defend our borders. It's, it's a very slippery slope and very insidious to recover from.
- [53:39]
B
Yeah, I, the thing is, I don't think people are ever going to have kids to save the country. No, I think people, what people might discover and we, we've had lots of conversations on, on this trip around the US with people, women in particular, our generation, sort of late 30s, early 40s who just, they feel like they've missed out on something important. And I think as, as we move forward in society and people increasingly lack meaning and purpose in their lives, that might be actually the reason that people do think about this differently over time.
- [54:13]
A
Right, that's very interesting.
- [54:14]
B
Might be. Or we could be completely screwed.
- [54:17]
A
Well, this of course is the purpose that even evolution has created for us to, to breed and have children. I mean, we don't like to admit it, we look in our culture for all other kinds of purposes, but this is the root purpose.
- [54:30]
B
But, but the thing is it's hardwired into us. So when you, like I have a three year old, when you have kids, like all these little things that have been built into us for millennia, activate that. And this is really the core of your book, that's what you're really saying is all of this, all of our politics, all of our issues, it goes back to the basic fundamental instinct, which is to have children and to have them live in childhood and to reproduce and the way we think about everything ultimately boils down to that original source. Isn't that right?
- [54:59]
A
That's exactly right. That's a very good thing, I would think, for politicians to focus on. They should try and make each stage of life easier for people who are having children. As you mentioned, reducing the cost of education would be a very good thing to do, and housing and so forth. There are lots of sort of tweaks you can make. None of them have been, have worked in the past, maybe because they haven't been applied in a wholesale and systematic way. But if this were recognized as an important function of government, then we might
- [55:31]
C
be able to turn it around and we talk about genetics, the origin of politics. There's been a discussion that's been happening online, which I'd love to get your opinion on, which is ever since women have got the vote, we tend to vote for, as a nation or as a society for more left leaning politicians, more left leaning parties. Is that something that you would agree with broadly or do you think it's far more complex than Reddit would like to appear?
- [56:00]
A
I don't have any empirical data. I don't know if women do in fact vote more often to the left.
- [56:07]
B
It's not women. That was much cruder than I think. I think married women and unmarried young women vote very, very differently and, and men too, I think it's much more about that. I think people become more conservative as they have something to protect. Which comes back to the conversation we were having. I was wondering, we always are extra interested in people who, who seem sensible but have been embroiled in some sort of controversy and been canceled or whatever. Because that was an area that really I found very interesting but also confusing for a long time. And you had that with the previous book, did you not?
- [56:45]
A
My book on the evolution of race was, was attacked by a bunch of, of geneticists. They didn't find any error in the book. So I paid no, I didn't pay any particularly serious attention to them. It did me no harm because the book had already been out for a year and a half by that stage. It may have increased sales a little and I retired from the times. So there were no repercussions of works and say didn't have any work.
- [57:21]
B
And what was it that, what was your central argument of that book and why did people disagree with it as strongly as they did?
- [57:29]
C
Look, we spend a lot of time on trigonometry talking about things that matter and I'd argue this matters more than most of them because you are wearing underwear right now and there is a reasonable chance. Sorry. And there's a reasonable chance it's not doing its job. I'm talking about Sheath. S H E a t h sheath.com it's underwear built around a dual pouch system. What that means in plain English, everything stays where it should be. No sticking, no chafing, no shifting around mid sentence while trying to maintain an air of gravitas. The fabric breathes, the design separates. There is apparently a technical term for what this creates and that term is Zen, like separation, which sounds ridiculous and is also completely accurate. It was developed by a veteran on his second tour, which means it was designed under conditions where comfort was not a luxury. Over 10,000 5 star reviews from people who are not messing about. And I'll be honest, the difference to my day to day comfort is bigger than I'm comfortable telling you about on a politics podcast. If you know, you know, go to sheath.com that's S H-E-A-T-H.com use code trigonometry at checkout for 20% off. First pair comes with a full money back guarantee, so there's no reason not to try them. Sheath.com Once you sheath, you won't go back. Sheath.com
- [58:51]
A
well, essential argument was simply that if you're interested in human evolution, nothing is more fascinating than seeing how the population adapts to different localities as it spreads out from Africa, as any species will. So the book gave you a biological explanation of race. Sometimes in Very great detail which was then becoming possible. Like, for example, we know that both Chinese and Europeans have pale skin, but they do so for entirely different genetic reasons. There's one set of genes that produces pale skin in Europeans and a mostly different set that produces pale skin in Chinese. So, you know, if you look at all these genes, often you can sort of tell their history when they, when they sort of develop. So you can sort of put a date on when, when we acquired pale skin and blue eyes. Just from the point of view of natural history, which was really all my book was concerned about. I didn't. I had no interest in the politics of race and didn't touch it. And all this was, you know, my job at the time was to cover the human genome. So this is one of the first. These are one of the first results that came flowing out of the human genome. How, you know, the different sort of. The different variations on the genome that have occurred throughout history. So that's when I started writing it up. Also because I found that academics were petrified of discussing these fascinating results. There's a great taboo in talking about race. Well, here we. Generating all this information. You shouldn't someone report to the public what it says? So that was the only motivation of my book. It was just a sort of straight. As I viewed it, it was just a straightforward science book saying, this is what we know. However, it's remained unique in the field because no one has since dad write about it. There's a complete taboo on saying anything about race. And the reason it annoyed people was that it went to the heart of the left's position, which is that there is no biological basis to race or indeed to sex. Both race and sex are cultural concepts, not biological in the view of the left. So this is a profoundly evolutionary, utterly nutty position. But my book was a direct challenge to it because, well, here is the biological basis of race and you're down to the nearest nucleotide. This is why Chinese are different from Europeans.
- [61:29]
B
Do you think that it's not? I wonder if it's just that, because I understand your argument. If the political worldview that you advocate for relies on pretending there are no differences between population groups, then it's very advantageous to you to shut down any evidence to the contrary. But do you think there's also quite a reasonable concern based on history, that quite on the number of occasions in, in the last 150 years, but probably prior to that as well, people have come along and said, well, the science says that this group of people is superior to that group of people. Therefore, here's a bunch of discriminatory policies that often lead to very, very negative and unpleasant outcomes. And then we later learn actually that wasn't scientifically accurate at all. We have a new theory that explains certain things that people were claiming at the time.
- [62:18]
A
That's certainly a real danger. But what do you do about it? You just suppress the scientific knowledge you're gaining, Surely what you should try and do is let everyone know what the science says so that people can then make informed views as to what implications they should draw from it. I mean, just because we have races that sort of differ in various aspects, that gives you no basis for saying one race is superior to another.
- [62:50]
B
Is that really true, though? Because if you say black people are better at basketball, I mean, they are superior at basketball. So if you make claims about other metrics that determine people's success in various aspects of life, you can very easily see how when you get to things like intelligence or other things, it becomes very easy to use that as a discriminatory piece of information. And there are lots of people who would.
- [63:15]
A
Well, it's true, and you could. Tibetans are adapted to living at high altitudes. So you could say Tibetans are genetically better than lowlanders at living at high altitudes. Yeah, but it's a pretty useless observation. The thing is, you can't. You can't prevent people going around making claims like this. But should that mean you don't discuss these things at all? I think you can get into difficulties if you don't. If you did discuss racial differences that may be relevant in some aspects of social policy.
- [63:55]
C
What do you mean by that, Nicholas?
- [63:57]
A
Well, I don't want to get too far into this because I'm really not an expert in the politics of race and have no real interest in it. But I assume, for example, if you look at education, it's very important to give everyone the best educational experience you can so that everyone has a sort of fair chance of living there tonight. Now, if some people are less educable than others, you surely need to recognize that and give them a different and appropriate treatment to the ones who are more easily educable. Now, this lack of educability can come from a lot of causes, many of them environmental. You have parents who don't make the kids do the homework, who neglect their kids, kids live in poverty, and so on and so forth. And that can be a genetic element. Doesn't really matter. You still got two groups say that required different treatment. If you are going to make the best use of your educational facilities.
- [65:02]
B
Yeah, I can see why this is controversial.
- [65:05]
C
I think the thing that will worry people, and worry particularly black people in the US and in the uk, but more so in the US, is look, you know, if we start pointing out racial differences, we fought long and hard to get equality and this is just going to be used as a cudgel to beat us with.
- [65:24]
A
That's a legitimate fear. But surely if you look at the history of civil rights in the us, the trend has gone the other way. We knew the Voting Rights act enfranchised everyone and discrimination, it may not be a thing of the past, but it's certainly you can't discriminate in public in any way. So, in fact, Americans have done everything a government reasonably can to lift up its black population and give them an equal chance and equal opportunities. It hasn't done so perfectly, but at least you can point to all the efforts it has made. I'm starting with the civil rights, what ends? Slavery. So it doesn't necessarily mean that people are going to make the worst, the most divisive possible use of this information.
- [66:14]
B
Yeah, I guess all I'm saying is I think I can see why people are very touchy about the subject.
- [66:19]
A
Absolutely.
- [66:19]
B
Yeah. Well, listen, it's been great having you on the show. We're going to ask you some questions from our supporters in a second. But before we do, the last question we always ask is, what's the one thing we're not talking about that you think we really should be as society?
- [66:31]
A
I. I think that. I think the thing we should have talked about if we had time was the very deep problem of inequality. So inequality is very destabilizing for society. But if you have an open society, merit based, particularly in this era of very fast technological advance, where enormous fortunes get made over overnight, you are going to have a lot of inequality and you have to find some way of making that acceptable to a population.
- [67:03]
B
Well, we have time, actually, so if you want to delve further into that, we definitely can. Are you talking about, for example, we've just come from San Francisco talking to people there who work in the AI field. It is very clear to me that even though there's very high levels of inequality in Western countries already, we ain't seen nothing yet. I mean, over time the majority of new wealth will be created in one small area of one small city. Effectively, that has got to be a recipe A for disaster. But B, then also, you know, I was sort of saying to one of these guys, only half Joking. Like, you know, I wrote a whole book about how communism is evil, but like, we might need it if the. This carries on.
- [67:50]
A
Well, we might need a universal basic income if this guy. If people get put out of jobs, which is not yet. Yeah, I think one aspect of inequality that is important to keep in mind is that you shouldn't really mind if, if Bill Gates is a lot richer than you or I are. The, the question is, do we have enough to eat? And, and you know, almost everyone in, in this country has enough to eat. They have a roof over their heads, most of them have iPhones. So why does inequality matter?
- [68:19]
B
Well, hold on a second. You are someone who's an expert in evolution. You know why that matters? Because human beings don't operate on absolute basis, they operate on a comparative basis.
- [68:30]
A
Yeah, that's absolutely right. So why do we want status? Status is important to people because it gives you a bigger claim on society's resources, especially sort of in early days when, you know, people were living on the edge of starvation. So if you were a big cheese in a small society, you are more likely to survive than if you had very low status. So this, I think, is the reason why inequality is so sort of jarring to us. It shouldn't, there's. No, there isn't really a good logical reason in a country that has a decent welfare system why we should be bothered about inequality. It's, it's our inherent yearning for status and feeling that we're diminishing our chances of survival if we don't have it. Another aspect of inequality, I think, which I have a chapter in the book, is that it's much harder to get rid of than you might think for purely genetic reasons. And that is that human societies, I think, are much more mobile, have been much more mobile in the past than we imagine. So even in aristocratic societies, you know, the, the aristocrats would, was, you know, half of them would die in battle every generation. So their rank, how did they replace their, their fulfill their ranks? Well, it was sort of rich commoners could buy a title or, or marry a, a duke's daughter. And so there was new blood constantly infusing into the aristocracy. So there's a fascinating series of papers by an economist called Gregory Clark in which he measures mobility in English societies over the centuries. And it's very slow. The people at the top do gradually descend in the social scale, presumably because they are sort of merit, whatever merit got to them to the top is sort of diluted genetically. But the societies are pretty much stable his basis for this is he follows people who attended Oxford and Cambridge, which are the only places you get educated then. And he looks at people with very rare surnames who, because the surnames are so rare, they're very likely to be related to each other. So he look at the sort of shuffledores in the 13th century attending Oxford, and lo and behold, in the 17th century, the shuffledores are still there. So this is a family that has sort of kept itself at the. At the top. So if that is the case, if our societies are in fact stratified by some kind of genetic merit to a much greater extent than we recognize, then it's going to be very hard to sort of shuffle them up short of war or revolution.
- [71:21]
C
Do you think? Also, part of the, the problem that America is facing is in a society that is as consumerist as this one, and with social media, you judge essentially your status on the acquirement of material possessions. So if you are constantly comparing yourself to other people, that's gonna put you in a place of resentment and anger, which will then lead to destructive impulses and behaviors.
- [71:45]
B
Right. Well, and your point about social media is so important as well, because 100 years ago, you couldn't go inside the Rockefeller mansion and have a good look around. Now you just open your phone and you're right there.
- [71:55]
A
Right. And. And if you're rich, I guess you're so pleased that you don't hide your wealth and you, you constantly see the rich competing with each other in terms of the size of their yacht or, or whatever it is. So their wealth is not hidden from the lower orders.
- [72:11]
B
Well, if you're a billionaire watching this, put your yacht in the hangar or whatever, there's number. There's probably a different word for it, a boat hanger. I don't know. Fantastic. Thank you so much for coming on. Head on over to triggerpod.co.uk where we're going to ask Nicholas your question.
- [72:26]
C
Is there any evidence that our ways of thinking about politics and other social issues is linked to how much genetically we have of other hominid species such as Neanderthals, within us?
- [72:59]
B
Guys, let us take a minute to recommend another podcast.
- [73:02]
C
Did you know the average podcast listener has six shows in rotation, so you're most likely not. Not just listening to trigonometry. Wait, so we know you're cheating on us? This is a.
- [73:14]
B
Describe, Francis, it's okay. The Jordan Harbinger show is a perfect complement to trigonometry.
- [73:19]
C
Really?
- [73:19]
B
Absolutely. Just like trigonometry, Jordan hosts weekly mind broadening conversations with some of the most fascinating people in the world. But a key difference that I'm a big fan of is that Jordan is focused on pulling actionable, growth orientated advice from his guests.
- [73:34]
C
I'm looking at his episode list now. There's an episode here where Jordan talks to a hostage negotiator from the FBI who lays out his techniques on how to get people to do what you want them to do by making them like and trust you. Sounds just like me, except, you know, I'm more sas.
- [73:50]
B
You can't go wrong with adding the Jordan Harbinger show to your podcast rotation. Search for the Jordan Harbinger Show. That's H A R B I N G E R on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.