Edward Dutton & The Naked Classroom
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Summary
In this episode, Dr. Ed Dutton joins us to talk about his new book, The Naked Classroom: The Evolutionary Psychology of Your Time at School, and his thesis that the education system is to blame for the failure of the modern education system.
Transcript
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I suspect that what has happened with those, so there's two kinds of, it's simplistic to say it, but there's two kinds of religiosity.
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William James, I think, hits the snail on the head with that.
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And that is the religion of healthy mindedness and the religion of the sick soul.
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And those two sets of religiosity are quite quantitatively different.
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And the religion of healthy mindedness tends to be, you know, that you're normally born into it and you believe all of the different ideas and whatever.
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And that's associated with being high in agreeableness, high in conscientiousness and low in mental instability, so highly mentally stable.
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And those associations, at least the association between, sorry, and mental health seems to be genetic in nature.
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There was a study by a guy called Koenig and they could find no environmental reason why this was the case.
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Now, the religion of the sick soul, that's quite different.
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And that is associated with the opposite personality profile, basically.
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And today we have a very special guest, Jolly Heredict, or Ed Dutton, or Professor Dutton.
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I'm sure I would guess 80% of our followers probably also follow you or know broadly your work.
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He's very well known for controversial, much more controversial than us, mind you, takes within the field of human genetics and human evolution.
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But today we're going to be talking about another shared interest, which is the failure of the education system.
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I'm going to try to do the I Can Only Count to Four song.
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Yeah, Let the Bodies Hit the Floor, but it's Sesame Street.
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But I want to hear your thesis on where the educational system has gone wrong, and sort
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of the thesis that you lay out in this recent book that you laid out, while also giving the
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title of the book and where listeners can find it.
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The book is called The Naked Classroom, The Evolutionary Psychology of Your Time at School.
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Basically, I suppose it's a sort of introduction to based science.
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And as you know, I don't have a formal science qualification.
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I'm an honorary professor of psychology at various places.
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But I was always at school a humanities person.
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I very quickly came to the conclusion that science is boring.
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You know, history, I could look around England.
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And I could imagine the kings and queens of England walking there and their ghosts that
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You know, English literature, if you wanted to go back in time and know how they spoke,
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you could read, I don't know, the works of Thomas Hardy.
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And there you are, immersed in the 19th century.
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Even geography, you know, how a river's formed or whatever.
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Or even when I was at school, how humans have sex was not really of interest to me.
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And I just thought it was terribly, terribly badly taught.
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And I think that that's the fundamental problem, that you quite quickly divide between being
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a humanities person and a science person at school.
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And when you do that, then the ignorance of science and scientific concepts and scientific
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thinking among, and mathematical thinking among humanities people can be quite staggering.
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So, for example, I, there was a video I did recently of British members of parliament,
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more than half of British members of parliament thought the probability, if you toss a coin
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of getting heads or other than tails is half, but if you toss twice, they also thought it
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I thought I'd offer some clarification on what he meant by this statement, because it's so
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You wouldn't expect it to mean what it actually means, which is they were asked if you flip
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a coin, what's the probability it turns out on head?
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And then they were asked, if you flip a coin twice, what is the probability it comes up
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These people thought that there was a 50% probability that it came up on heads twice and a 50% probability
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They said, well, that's not a sign of stupidity.
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I've got a friend who's got a PhD in whatever, and she got that wrong.
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So science is not, is not integrated into the curriculum.
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And it struck me, everything was based in science, because it should be.
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The idea that every, if you make an assertion in sociology, it has to be reducible to psychology.
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If you make it in psychology, it has to be reducible to biology.
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If you make it in biology, it has to be reducible to chemistry.
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That's, and so if it was taught in that way, then first of all, a lot of questions that
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are unanswered in humanity's subjects would be parsimoniously answered.
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For example, I always thought to myself when I was younger, well, why was it that people
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in World War I were prepared to lay down their lives for their country and die, but were not
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Right, right, why is it that you get these people that would be prepared to be burnt
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You just learn the information and then you write your essay and you get your A and whatever.
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But first of all, I think it should be reduced down.
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All these questions need to be answered in a scientific way.
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And secondly, and the other thing I thought was, well, think of all the questions that you
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All the things that are going to occur to you when you're at school.
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Why, why, why, why do, why do some boys give women the ick and they find them disgusting?
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Why, why, why is, why do some people have sex with the teacher?
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Why, you know, frankly, when I was at school, when a lot of people in my school, why were there
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some teachers, male teachers, they're a bit, you know, yeah, even if you had done a degree
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in science, they wouldn't have touched on these issues.
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So, so I, and these are the things that are going to fascinate you at school.
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Why is it that girls have these cliques at school that are complete bitches to each
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You know, why, why, why is there this anorexia and lesbianism and transsexuality among girls?
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Why, why do the kids that are, that are retarded, like literally look physically different?
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All of these kinds of, these, these, these, these kinds of questions.
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And so it struck me that that could, that could get kids into science.
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If you understand that the base questions that you're going to ask at school and if other
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subjects are reduced down to the science, then you realize the importance of science,
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that science could really answer harmoniously all of these questions.
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And therefore you don't make the mistake, which so many of us make, which is a young age,
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really quite a young age to just stop thinking in a scientific way.
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I mean, when I did my theology degree and you try to understand what causes some people
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I was in my late twenties, like six years after I got my degree, when I found this information
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indicating that there was a genetic component to religion, it had never occurred to me and
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it had seemingly never occurred to any of the people that taught me at Durham university
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or whatever, that you just didn't look at these things.
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So that was the idea of the book, basically to show that science needs to be based.
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You can do this by showing its relevance to other subjects and all of us just by showing
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its relevance to your life at school, answering the question scientifically that you might
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It seems like all the things that like a little kid is not allowed, like if, if the little kid
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And the mom's like, shh, that's what, that's what science should be about.
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Those are to go back to school, put your tar, if it's an English school, not an American
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school, put your tar at a jaunty angle, put your satchel on, go back to school and, and
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look at these questions that would have occurred to you at school.
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I want to pull on two of these ideas you talked about because there are things that we haven't
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And I don't think some of this stuff that you talked about, I think generically, if people
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are familiar with like manosphere stuff or they're familiar with like genetics nerd stuff, they're
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going to have some vague idea of what the answers are going to be.
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But other things you mentioned, I don't even see talked about in these communities and they're
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One of them that is, is being able to predict people's personality and things like their
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level of testosterone based on their facial characteristics.
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I think people would be really surprised the extent to which humans can accurately do that.
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I mean, what's more interesting now is the extent to which AI can do it.
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Which is, which is, which is way, way beyond what humans can do.
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But yeah, because of course it's, it's adaptive, isn't it?
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So it's inherently going to be adaptive to be able to make correct judgments from appearances.
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Now, at the same time, it's also going to be adaptive to be able to evolve in such a
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way as to mask whatever it is that is suboptimal about you with an appearance, which tells,
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which doesn't indicate to people that's the case.
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So there's going to be a kind of arms race all the time.
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Whereas on the, on the one hand, you're going to be, you're going to be evolving to be able
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And on the other hand, you're going to be evolving to not be accurately judged by appearances.
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So, you know, you can, you can get around those problems and that kind of thing.
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So, but what we end up with is that certainly a level of a, I look at this in an earlier
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book I did called how to judge people by what they look like.
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But I also look at this again, with regard to school in the new book, is that, is that
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with a level that is significantly exceeds chance, we can, we can note intelligence from
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We can, particularly the face, because the face is a huge number of genes involved in
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So it's a very good indicator of basically, you know, your, your level of genetic health
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And a good, I mean, good example, it doesn't sound very pleasant to put it like this, but
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if you think about what is an example of a low intelligence person, well, it's a person
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Now that's low, now that's low intelligence beyond the normal range.
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These people have an IQ of about, it depends on the severity of the condition, but they
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have an IQ of between 100 and 50, something like that, but often about sort of 60, something
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So it's, it's way out, it's way out of the normal range, which is 70 to 100, 130.
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And what you see there is that the, the, the developmental pathways have been interfered
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with at a very young age, you know, a very young age of development.
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And this has predictable results in what they look like, i.e.
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they have small, they have small noses, they have sort of short faces, they have narrow
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eyes, and they have various examples of, of, of minor physical abnormalities and whatever
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Now it follows from that, that if, that, that you're going to get, um, that in a much
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diluted form among, among people that have low intelligence within the normal range, and
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you're going to get the opposite of that among people that have high intelligence.
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Wait, you're saying that smart people have giant schnauzes.
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That's, that's, no, no, that would, that, that would, if it was a giant schnauz, as you
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put it, that would perhaps be a mutation, and mutational load tends to be associated
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But, but, but, but, within the normal range of the, the studies indicate that being intelligent
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is associated with having a longer face, with having a narrower face, with having, you
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know, basically a more horsey-like face, a more kind of an adult, you know, sort of face.
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You know, she's lovely, but you know what I mean.
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And so things like bitchy wrestling face may just be a sign that someone's a bitch.
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Which, one of the, and also the pupil size at rest is larger, eyes are larger, pupil
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People are more intelligent, they like have a base level of more, more interest in their
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It's the interface between the world and the brain.
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And so it follows that you're going to, you're going to have a base level, a larger pupil.
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And also, I mean, I know you both wear glasses.
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Well, I think Simone does so for pretentious reasons.
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But one of the, one of the, one of the indicators of intelligence is short-sightedness.
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And the reason for that is that the eye is part of the brain.
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So obviously if you, if you've got a bigger brain, your eyes are more kind of convex basically.
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You can't make those kinds of assertions between race, but that, that's the, that's
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So we were talking about the, the pupils, right?
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And so somebody's pupils being at, because they might not understand the implications of what
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Typically your pupils dilate when you're showing interest in something.
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And, and we even have a natural response when some of these pupils dilate when they're talking
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And this is why the deadly nightshade scientific name is Tropa Belladonna, the beautiful woman.
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You'd put little droplets of it in your eye before you would go on a date with somebody.
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Women would do this and it would paralyze some of the muscles in the eye and cause the pupils
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So they'd look like little, you know, anime girls.
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And so what you're literally seeing is more persistent interest in their environments
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in, in this intelligent group, which is really interesting within the face category.
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One of the jokes we persistently make on this show, because I think just as a scientist,
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And again, we have nothing against Andrew Tate, but his face is, if you're familiar with
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face models, almost the cliche of somebody who developed in a very low testosterone environment.
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And it's really interesting that that's so antagonistic to his brand.
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And we point out that likely now he's high testosterone because of his lifestyle, because
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he's sleeping around a lot, which increases testosterone because he's living with competitive
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Not that he's a naturally high testosterone person.
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You know, he, he got to it honestly, rather than by birth.
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But the other thing you touched on that I really want to pull on, because I think that
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it's really interesting too, is I totally forgot.
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But why, why are teachers disproportionately women?
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I mean, that's, that's one of the more obvious ones, isn't it?
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I mean, it's a, it's a very interesting process.
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Basically, you, if you open up a profession to women and it's the kind of, which it wasn't
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previously, and that is the kind of profession that is attractive to women, then it becomes
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overwhelmingly female very quickly because women are within, apart from that there's out
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women, males have more outliers, both in terms of low IQ people and high IQ people and
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And women are higher in conscientiousness, higher in rule following and harder working,
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basically, and higher in agreeableness and things like this.
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And so this means that they will be able to get into that profession that they want to
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get into, particularly if it's not particularly intellectually challenging.
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Obviously, they're higher in a general desire to look after children and be with children.
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And then you get more and more and more women teachers.
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And then at some sort of tipping point, it becomes seen as a kind of a girl's game.
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And then when it's seen as a girl's game, then it loses status.
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And the salary goes down, commensurate to other professions.
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And then it becomes even more of a female profession.
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And at the moment, in England, it's something like 65% of secondary school teachers are
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And then in the book I did in the Naked Classroom, when you interview men who are teachers and
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why have you gone into teaching, they basically come across as quite unambitious men.
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And I've gone into teaching because you get long holidays.
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You know, I've gone into teaching because I can spend my time doing my hobbies in the
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It is clearly an evolutionary mismatch in all societies for young women in their early
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20s to be hanging around 16-year-old boys, 17-year-old boys, 18-year-old boys.
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That's not how it's done in any tribal society.
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Boys of that age are taken away from the society.
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So naturally, you're going to end up with relationships between the boys and the teachers,
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I've heard an interesting theory around this, that one of the reasons why education rates
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rose so much for a period is because teachers were one of the only jobs available to women.
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Respectable jobs available to women, which meant that for a low price, below market, what you
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could get somebody at that competence level, we were able to get many of the most competent
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It seems to me the standard of teachers has gone, the standard, the quality of teachers
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has gone down precipitously for a number of reasons.
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And so men in the old days, like my RE teacher, Mr. Sussman, who was highly intelligent, you
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know, that would go into the teaching profession.
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So you could imagine a situation where a person who was born into the working class or something
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like that, and he goes to grammar school and he becomes a schoolteacher.
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There's no, even though he's probably sufficiently intelligent to become, I don't know, an academic
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in whatever subject he teaches, but it's not a very meritocratic society.
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That person these days is more likely to become an academic, particularly as well, considering
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the expansion of higher education in tandem with that.
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And then with the women, of course, I mean, I had a teacher at school and she was a very
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And they said to her, this is in the 50s, in the 40s.
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Now, that generation of women that became teachers, they're gone.
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And the women that are capable of becoming lawyers or doctors or whatever are likely to
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become that, whereas in the old days they would have become a schoolteacher.
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We probably had a substantial period of time where you have women that were quite good that
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It's just going to be overwhelmingly midwit times that go into teaching.
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Unfortunately, this is not unlike what a lot of people think, something that you can easily
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fix just by raising teacher salaries or something like that.
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You would need to have a major cultural shift or just replace the profession, which is what
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Well, that's a good point you make there because studies indicate this whole idea of raise
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There's a lot of evidence that indicates that people will trade money for prestige.
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And once it's got low, it's like people are being a plumber.
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You can earn way more being a plumber than you can being a schoolteacher or whatever,
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Well, being a schoolteacher has got to that point because it's so female dominated because
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there's this exodus of high quality people from it, but it's just got low prestige.
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And I don't know how the, it's very hard to reverse that, I think.
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Another thing when we talk about men and women having different biological tendencies in terms
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of the types of jobs they take, that is actually really important from the perspective of pronatalist
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And there was a great piece called The Baby Boom by Arctotherium that we did an episode
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It was in Aporia where he basically argued a strategy that you could use to help fertility
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rates is to lower the amount of bureaucratic jobs within the government because those are
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predominantly held by women because they disproportionately take those jobs, which would allow and put
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pressure on people to be more, you know, stay-at-home moms.
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It wasn't like, let's force stay-at-home motherhood.
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It's let's give men the ability to be higher in status than women because women won't get married
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if they don't have access to higher status than the men.
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It's like, how do we enable men to have relatively higher status than women?
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And a lot of that involves reducing the extent to which women have an unfair advantage in
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really, really common and major like job segments.
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One thing I wanted to ask you though, is if you've read, you probably have Paul Lockhart's
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A Mathematician's Lament because it really changed how I looked at mathematics.
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And like sort of to like recap it for people who haven't read this essay, basically Paul
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Lockhart argues that we teach mathematics to kids as though for the entire like grade school,
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middle school, high school experience until you hit college, you're basically only studying
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You're not allowed to like read books or discuss literature or build narratives.
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You're only allowed to just look at grammar and punctuation and the rules and it's terrible
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and you hate it and it ruins math for everyone.
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And what really math is all about is imagination and sort of building imaginary worlds and constraints
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and seeing how things behave with those constraints.
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What would be the equivalent of applying this kind of reasoning?
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I said, why don't the schools teach pure, like logical thinking?
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I can only think of a few times when I did maths at school where there was, for example,
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there was one, I mentioned this in the book, where there was one, a test we did was sat
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And there was this question where you had to, there was a wardrobe and you had to work
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Well, you were given the proportions and you were given the, and I realized, ah, Pythagoras
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And that's the, and that's the, that will give me the answer.
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And that was in the math test, not a real life situation where Pythagoras theorem came,
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I think they are, what mathematics teaches you at school is the, is the sort of the grammar
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And I think you can go a level further than that and just take that down to the level
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of logic, of, of formal logic, obviously, and then of informal logic.
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And when I was doing my maths GCSE, that was the height of new labor.
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That was the height of all of this emotional nonsense, you know, new labor, new Britain,
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And I thought, well, wouldn't it be good if they had sat and said, look boys, that we've
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got this political party saying new labor, new Britain.
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The fact, the fact that the party is called new labor, it does not follow and it cannot
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And there were, and there were many other examples of these kinds of manipulative slogans
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that I think you could ultimately be reduced down to basically something like maths, basically
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And if, and if you teach kids that, if you teach kids the benefit of, of, of informal logic
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and then a formal logic, then they can start to understand the benefit of maths because it's
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an extension of that basically, and then they can start to see the maths is not just some
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It's actually extremely important and vital to everything.
00:24:06.160
The new modern way that you teach a language, I think is an improvement in when they, you
00:24:11.900
can, you can teach French by teaching everybody the grammar and stuff like this, where you
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can just immerse them in it and say, okay, here's some French, get on with it.
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So, so I remembered the thing I wanted to talk about, which was the genetics of religion.
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Because it's a very interesting topic and it is really undersold one, how heretical
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religiosity is, but a really interesting phenomenon.
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And for us, this was actually drove us on our path to pronatalism is we had originally
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thought that what was being selected for, like the way humanity was changing was that
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people were being selected to be higher levels of religiosity.
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And then when we looked at the data, this doesn't appear to be what's actually happening.
00:24:48.940
And it's really interesting, which is the historic research.
00:24:53.200
And you're one of the few people who's going to immediately be like, oh yes, I've seen this
00:24:57.060
When it looked at the religiosity and heredibility, it would always point out, it does not determine
00:25:03.560
what religion you are, just your fervor in terms of how much you follow that religion.
00:25:08.400
And it looks like this fervor, like this genetic fervor for religion is not protective
00:25:17.180
And this is why when you look at the new atheist community, which you were, you know, on the
00:25:22.580
edge of, I think, along with us for a while, a lot, like disproportionately, they were incredibly
00:25:29.780
fervent within their religion before deconverting and joining the movement.
00:25:33.840
It was not that they were like loosey-goosey religious types.
00:25:40.340
Well, I don't know if that's necessarily a good example of people that are pronatal, though.
00:25:47.220
But it's interesting because historically, this genetic fervor for religion kept people
00:25:52.480
within their cultural group, but just made them extreme advocates of that cultural group.
00:25:56.700
Yeah, well, yeah, I suspect that what has happened with those, so there's two kinds of, it's
00:26:02.540
simplistic to say it, but there's two kinds of religiosity.
00:26:05.240
William James, I think, hits the snail on the head with that.
00:26:11.940
And that is the religion of healthy-mindedness and the religion of the sick soul.
00:26:18.360
And those two sets of religiosity are quite quantitatively different.
00:26:22.380
And the religion of healthy-mindedness tends to be, you know, that you're normally born into it
00:26:26.620
and you believe all of the different ideas and whatever.
00:26:29.740
And that's associated with being high in agreeableness, with high in conscientiousness
00:26:34.200
and low in mental instability, so highly mentally stable.
00:26:38.440
And those associations, at least the association between religion, sorry, and mental health
00:26:44.320
There was a study by a guy called Koenig, and they could find no environmental reason
00:26:48.720
Now, the religion of the sick soul, that's quite different.
00:26:54.340
And that is associated with the opposite personality profile, basically, and in particular
00:27:01.900
So going through a period of religious fervor, really extreme, really extreme religiousness,
00:27:08.680
or changing religion, so that is to say extrinsic religiousness, socially conformist
00:27:13.700
religiousness, as opposed to intrinsic, and going through a period of religious fervor,
00:27:17.160
i.e. a conversion, that's associated with mental instability.
00:27:22.660
What you would actually expect is that you would get people that, if they had, let's
00:27:26.680
say, something like one of the things that's associated with mental instability is a borderline
00:27:30.360
personality, where you have a weak sense of self, and you're very fickle and changeable,
00:27:36.120
and you fundamentally fear abandonment, and you have feelings very strongly, and these kinds
00:27:41.940
And you can see that someone like that could have a dramatic conversion experience, where
00:27:46.620
they would move from being extreme in terms of, let's say, being a fundamentalist Christian,
00:27:51.280
to being extreme in terms of being an atheist, or vice versa.
00:27:57.620
But I would expect that personality type, to a certain extent, to be associated with just
00:28:01.460
general sickness, just sort of problems, mental illness and physical illness.
00:28:05.420
It's the religion of the healthy-mindedness that's more interesting, because that seems
00:28:09.640
to be associated with fertility, and that seems to be associated with, you know, pro-social
00:28:15.920
But yeah, there's a definite distinction between those two, and it was very interesting when
00:28:20.160
I was at university, I did my research, and I think about the kind of people that converted
00:28:26.920
And it was always, as you say, to the most extreme manifestation.
00:28:30.180
I can think of one example, a person who's a fundamentalist Christian, and now it's like
00:28:33.240
she just hates God, and God doesn't exist, and is just totally woke.
00:28:38.220
And that seems to me to betoken, you can think of a sort of a religious bundle that we
00:28:43.720
were selected for, a bundle of traits that is religiousness, that then come together and
00:28:48.820
become platypically related, and then are associated with other things which are adaptive
00:28:54.600
as well, such as mental health and physical health and pro-natalism and whatever.
00:29:02.740
And equally, you would think that if any deviation from that would be associated with negative
00:29:08.900
And I think that if you have the breakup of the religious bundle, you have one element
00:29:12.980
of it, I extreme fervor and desire for black and white certainty, for example, whether
00:29:17.720
you get that from trad Catholicism, or you get that from wokeness, but you get it from
00:29:24.880
somewhere, and you can move between the two, as your sense of self is weak, and oh, this
00:29:35.340
And you think these are two different genetic clusters, and one's being sort of bred out of
00:29:39.600
Yeah, my reading is that the personality involved is so different, it's so fundamentally different,
00:29:49.420
that you're dealing with two separate kinds of people.
00:29:54.400
Of course, you're going to get some people that are converts and are religiously fervent,
00:30:00.080
But my understanding is that neuroticism tends to be negatively associated with fertility,
00:30:07.920
And so, you know, overall, I would think they would be quite separate.
00:30:10.940
I mean, one thing, for example, that could predict conversion and having being a fundamentalist
00:30:17.280
Christian, for example, would be some kinds of narcissism.
00:30:20.600
So borderline personality predicts dramatic changes in the nature of the self.
00:30:24.740
One example of a kind of borderline personality is narcissism, and some kinds of narcissism
00:30:33.140
are positively associated with having children.
00:30:37.960
I don't know if the mediating factor is socioeconomic.
00:30:40.940
It could be that, to some extent, we still look up to those that have children, and say,
00:30:45.660
if you're narcissistic, you want to have lots of them.
00:30:50.220
I mean, I'm thinking now about, like, the eight-passengers lady and stuff like that,
00:30:53.800
when children are a status symbol within their community, which is-
00:30:59.900
We found, I mean, we've got a study at the moment we're doing, we found a number of indicators
00:31:04.000
that among Mormons, there is a eugenic, among white Mormons in America, there is a eugenic
00:31:09.500
fertility, because more intelligent people tend to be more socially conformist.
00:31:16.160
And so, and therefore, you want to have kids to show that God is heavenly father, is blessing
00:31:23.880
I'm going to unpack what you said there, just because I think, what he's saying is that
00:31:26.960
if you look within most communities and most cultural groups in the world right now, you
00:31:30.740
have what is called dysgenic fertility, which means that they are selecting for traits that
00:31:35.640
we would think of as non-competitive traits, i.e. low IQ and stuff like that, but that lead
00:31:40.220
to higher competitive within reproductive markets, within our existing socioeconomic condition.
00:31:45.560
He's saying within this one rare community, there is, and I've seen the studies on this,
00:31:49.780
it's a very slight eugenic effect, but a eugenic effect within these Mormon communities.
00:31:54.560
But this has been a great way to end this episode.
00:31:57.240
And I really would encourage people to check out this book if you liked some of the topics
00:32:06.240
Dissident science is what I call it, real science, the last real science that's left.
00:32:10.080
And it has been great to have you on, and we would love to have you on in the future.
00:32:18.200
Oh, and do check out his podcast as well, Jolly Heretic.
00:32:24.260
Speaking of people who really sex up science well, acapella science, I have just had one
00:32:28.800
of their songs stuck in my head recently, so I have to share a little clip from them
00:32:38.460
And if you want, after this clip, I'm going to have a sort of an outtake from us just chatting
00:32:45.000
We are built of modules combined in a planned-out way.
00:32:56.040
Oh, now there's a science helping us to understand how our cells encode this architectural plan.
00:33:13.000
What then are the switches, circuit boards, and boot code?
00:33:25.220
Proteins that can activate and enhance or veto.
00:33:30.460
The signals are controlled by other genes that signal.
00:33:35.860
Where the heart and liver and the hands and feet go.
00:33:40.280
Signal, signal, signal tells each region what it ought to be, yo.
00:33:51.520
In a crucial pathway, changes tend to get torpedoed.
00:34:05.960
What are we supposed to be doing on boxing day?
00:34:10.760
Well, traditionally, isn't it that you fill boxes with meat for the downtrodden of the community and leave them outside?
00:34:27.000
There's a toy in the background that I definitely need to turn off.
00:34:29.460
My wife got me this cravat, which I was quite pleased with.
00:34:50.160
So our cat is incredibly sociable, ridiculously sociable, like a dog.
00:35:10.880
He doesn't pester us anymore for attention or anything like that.
00:35:13.260
He's got his cat that he can basically dominate.
00:35:18.960
This whole situation is a very cat thing to do.
00:35:21.500
I'm going to keep that cat anecdote in the start here.