Based Camp - December 27, 2023


Edward Dutton & The Naked Classroom

Topics
science curriculum integration
Hosted by
Malcolm Collins Simone Collins
Mentioned
Simone William James Paul Lockhart Ed Dutton Tropa Belladonna Jordan Peterson Jolly Heredict Thomas Hardiman E.O. Wilson Andrew Tate Sussman Mormons Koenig
Why is the Pro-Natalist Movement Disproportionally Autistic？ Tradwife Learns She Can Buy Murder Spells on Etsy

Episode Stats


Length

36 minutes

Words per minute

196.12

Word count

7,068

Sentence count

517

Harmful content

Misogyny

32

sentences flagged

Toxicity

18

sentences flagged

Hate speech

32

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

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

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 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.
00:00:07.280 William James, I think, hits the snail on the head with that.
00:00:11.400 I like that phrase, hits the snail.
00:00:13.940 And that is the religion of healthy mindedness and the religion of the sick soul.
00:00:20.400 And those two sets of religiosity are quite quantitatively different.
00:00:24.440 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.
00:00:31.780 And that's associated with being high in agreeableness, high in conscientiousness and low in mental instability, so highly mentally stable.
00:00:40.500 And those associations, at least the association between, sorry, and mental health seems to be genetic in nature.
00:00:46.360 There was a study by a guy called Koenig and they could find no environmental reason why this was the case.
00:00:50.780 Now, the religion of the sick soul, that's quite different.
00:00:54.120 That's the religion of the convert.
00:00:56.340 And that is associated with the opposite personality profile, basically.
00:01:01.360 And in particular, with high neuroticism.
00:01:04.000 Would you like to know more?
00:01:05.220 Hello, Simone. 0.69
00:01:06.320 It is wonderful to have you here today.
00:01:08.020 And today we have a very special guest, Jolly Heredict, or Ed Dutton, or Professor Dutton.
00:01:13.860 I'm sure I would guess 80% of our followers probably also follow you or know broadly your work.
00:01:21.200 He's very well known for controversial, much more controversial than us, mind you, takes within the field of human genetics and human evolution.
00:01:31.840 But today we're going to be talking about another shared interest, which is the failure of the education system.
00:01:38.500 I'm going to try to do the I Can Only Count to Four song.
00:01:41.280 Which our son is obsessed with.
00:01:42.780 What comes after one?
00:01:43.780 Two.
00:01:44.360 What comes after two?
00:01:45.700 Three.
00:01:46.220 What comes after three?
00:01:47.620 Four.
00:01:49.860 I can only count to four.
00:01:51.740 I can only count to four.
00:01:53.600 I can only count to four.
00:01:56.920 Wait, have you seen this?
00:01:58.360 No.
00:01:58.860 Sorry, no.
00:01:59.620 It's a song where they redid.
00:02:02.160 The Bodies Hit the Floor.
00:02:03.220 Yeah, Let the Bodies Hit the Floor, but it's Sesame Street. 0.66
00:02:05.340 Your edumacation failed your mind.
00:02:09.080 Now the numbers are left.
00:02:11.120 You'll break behind.
00:02:13.540 I can only count to four.
00:02:15.360 I can only count to four.
00:02:17.200 I can only count to four.
00:02:19.100 I can only count to four.
00:02:20.980 But I want to hear your thesis on where the educational system has gone wrong, and sort
00:02:29.920 of the thesis that you lay out in this recent book that you laid out, while also giving the
00:02:33.380 title of the book and where listeners can find it.
00:02:35.360 The book is called The Naked Classroom, The Evolutionary Psychology of Your Time at School.
00:02:39.960 I published it on Amazon KDP.
00:02:42.120 It's quite a short book.
00:02:43.780 Basically, I suppose it's a sort of introduction to based science.
00:02:47.840 And that's what someone suggested I should do.
00:02:49.960 And as you know, I don't have a formal science qualification.
00:02:53.460 I'm an honorary professor of psychology at various places.
00:02:57.660 But I was always at school a humanities person.
00:03:00.840 I very quickly came to the conclusion that science is boring.
00:03:04.760 I could see no benefit in science.
00:03:07.000 You know, history, I could look around England.
00:03:09.260 I lived near Hampton Court Palace.
00:03:10.980 And I could imagine the kings and queens of England walking there and their ghosts that
00:03:14.460 haunt the place at night.
00:03:15.600 You know, English literature, if you wanted to go back in time and know how they spoke,
00:03:19.380 you could read, I don't know, the works of Thomas Hardy.
00:03:21.420 And there you are, immersed in the 19th century.
00:03:23.600 Even geography, you know, how a river's formed or whatever.
00:03:26.340 But how flowers have sex. 1.00
00:03:28.560 Or even when I was at school, how humans have sex was not really of interest to me.
00:03:33.820 And I just thought it was terribly, terribly badly taught.
00:03:37.540 And I think that that's the fundamental problem, that you quite quickly divide between being
00:03:42.100 a humanities person and a science person at school.
00:03:45.500 And when you do that, then the ignorance of science and scientific concepts and scientific
00:03:51.580 thinking among, and mathematical thinking among humanities people can be quite staggering.
00:03:57.820 So, for example, I, there was a video I did recently of British members of parliament,
00:04:02.200 more than half of British members of parliament thought the probability, if you toss a coin
00:04:07.020 of getting heads or other than tails is half, but if you toss twice, they also thought it
00:04:13.300 was half.
00:04:14.440 I thought I'd offer some clarification on what he meant by this statement, because it's so 0.99
00:04:19.540 dumb. 0.85
00:04:20.880 You wouldn't expect it to mean what it actually means, which is they were asked if you flip 0.99
00:04:26.780 a coin, what's the probability it turns out on head?
00:04:29.320 And then they were asked, if you flip a coin twice, what is the probability it comes up
00:04:34.700 on heads twice?
00:04:36.180 These people thought that there was a 50% probability that it came up on heads twice and a 50% probability
00:04:43.480 that it came up on heads individually.
00:04:47.800 Now, that's obviously wrong.
00:04:50.620 And, and that is so obviously wrong.
00:04:53.560 And somebody gave me an example today. 1.00
00:04:54.960 They said, well, that's not a sign of stupidity. 0.99
00:04:56.620 I've got a friend who's got a PhD in whatever, and she got that wrong. 0.99
00:04:59.800 I'm like, no, right.
00:05:00.340 That's the problem.
00:05:01.500 So science is not, is not integrated into the curriculum.
00:05:07.680 It's not taught in an interesting way.
00:05:10.080 And it struck me, everything was based in science, because it should be.
00:05:14.600 I mean, ultimately, there's this idea of E.O.
00:05:17.000 Wilson, consilience.
00:05:18.160 The idea that every, if you make an assertion in sociology, it has to be reducible to psychology.
00:05:23.480 If you make it in psychology, it has to be reducible to biology.
00:05:25.620 If you make it in biology, it has to be reducible to chemistry.
00:05:28.340 That's, and so if it was taught in that way, then first of all, a lot of questions that
00:05:34.480 are unanswered in humanity's subjects would be parsimoniously answered.
00:05:39.580 For example, I always thought to myself when I was younger, well, why was it that people
00:05:43.040 in World War I were prepared to lay down their lives for their country and die, but were not
00:05:47.340 prepared to now?
00:05:48.580 What's, what's changed?
00:05:50.320 Why is, what, what, why is it that people-
00:05:52.100 That's an interesting question.
00:05:53.460 Right, right, why is it that you get these people that would be prepared to be burnt
00:05:57.180 at the stake?
00:05:58.320 But then what possible, have they gone mad?
00:06:01.060 You know, that wasn't answered.
00:06:02.500 You just learn the information and then you write your essay and you get your A and whatever.
00:06:06.940 But first of all, I think it should be reduced down.
00:06:09.640 All these questions need to be answered in a scientific way.
00:06:12.440 And secondly, and the other thing I thought was, well, think of all the questions that you
00:06:16.640 ask when you're at school.
00:06:18.700 All the things that are going to occur to you when you're at school.
00:06:20.740 Why are so many of the teachers women? 1.00
00:06:23.600 Why, why, why, why do, why do some boys give women the ick and they find them disgusting? 0.99
00:06:29.740 Why, why, why is, why do some people have sex with the teacher? 0.99
00:06:34.160 Why are the science teachers often male?
00:06:35.960 Why are teachers so left wing?
00:06:38.840 Why are so many male teachers gay? 1.00
00:06:41.780 Why, you know, frankly, when I was at school, when a lot of people in my school, why were there
00:06:45.460 some teachers, male teachers, they're a bit, you know, yeah, even if you had done a degree
00:06:50.380 in science, they wouldn't have touched on these issues.
00:06:53.420 They wouldn't have touched on these issues.
00:06:54.760 No.
00:06:55.200 So, so I, and these are the things that are going to fascinate you at school. 0.99
00:06:58.200 Why is it that girls have these cliques at school that are complete bitches to each 1.00
00:07:01.600 other? 0.99
00:07:01.860 You know, why, why, why is there this anorexia and lesbianism and transsexuality among girls? 0.92
00:07:07.700 Why, why do the kids that are, that are retarded, like literally look physically different? 1.00
00:07:13.400 All of these kinds of, these, these, these, these kinds of questions.
00:07:16.480 And so it struck me that that could, that could get kids into science.
00:07:19.660 If you understand that the base questions that you're going to ask at school and if other
00:07:23.820 subjects are reduced down to the science, then you realize the importance of science,
00:07:28.340 that science could really answer harmoniously all of these questions.
00:07:32.960 And therefore you don't make the mistake, which so many of us make, which is a young age,
00:07:36.620 really quite a young age to just stop thinking in a scientific way.
00:07:39.900 I mean, when I did my theology degree and you try to understand what causes some people
00:07:44.460 to be religious and others not to be right.
00:07:47.260 I was in my late twenties, like six years after I got my degree, when I found this information
00:07:54.040 indicating that there was a genetic component to religion, it had never occurred to me and
00:08:00.040 it had seemingly never occurred to any of the people that taught me at Durham university
00:08:04.260 or whatever, that you just didn't look at these things.
00:08:07.300 They were separate subjects.
00:08:08.740 So that was the idea of the book, basically to show that science needs to be based.
00:08:12.260 It needs to be taught in a based way.
00:08:13.800 You can do this by showing its relevance to other subjects and all of us just by showing
00:08:17.540 its relevance to your life at school, answering the question scientifically that you might
00:08:21.420 have thought about at school.
00:08:22.640 It seems like all the things that like a little kid is not allowed, like if, if the little kid
00:08:27.040 says like, why is this?
00:08:28.140 Why is that?
00:08:28.580 And the mom's like, shh, that's what, that's what science should be about. 0.99
00:08:31.760 That's an idea.
00:08:32.380 Those are to go back to school, put your tar, if it's an English school, not an American 0.99
00:08:35.740 school, put your tar at a jaunty angle, put your satchel on, go back to school and, and
00:08:41.200 look at these questions that would have occurred to you at school.
00:08:43.680 Well, that was the idea.
00:08:44.580 I want to pull on two of these ideas you talked about because there are things that we haven't
00:08:48.220 talked about on the show yet.
00:08:49.180 And I don't think some of this stuff that you talked about, I think generically, if people
00:08:52.860 are familiar with like manosphere stuff or they're familiar with like genetics nerd stuff, they're
00:08:57.880 going to have some vague idea of what the answers are going to be.
00:09:00.720 But other things you mentioned, I don't even see talked about in these communities and they're
00:09:04.420 really interesting.
00:09:05.480 One of them that is, is being able to predict people's personality and things like their
00:09:11.860 level of testosterone based on their facial characteristics.
00:09:15.720 Yeah.
00:09:16.340 Yeah.
00:09:16.740 I think people would be really surprised the extent to which humans can accurately do that.
00:09:23.360 Yeah.
00:09:23.780 You're going to say.
00:09:24.420 Well, I was going to say, yeah.
00:09:25.380 I mean, what's more interesting now is the extent to which AI can do it.
00:09:29.540 Yeah.
00:09:29.760 Which is, which is, which is way, way beyond what humans can do.
00:09:32.720 But yeah, because of course it's, it's adaptive, isn't it?
00:09:34.600 We, we are a social animal.
00:09:36.300 So it's inherently going to be adaptive to be able to make correct judgments from appearances.
00:09:40.940 Now, at the same time, it's also going to be adaptive to be able to evolve in such a
00:09:44.660 way as to mask whatever it is that is suboptimal about you with an appearance, which tells,
00:09:50.520 which doesn't indicate to people that's the case.
00:09:52.080 So there's going to be a kind of arms race all the time.
00:09:54.460 Whereas on the, on the one hand, you're going to be, you're going to be evolving to be able
00:09:56.940 to accurately judge by appearances.
00:09:58.860 And on the other hand, you're going to be evolving to not be accurately judged by appearances.
00:10:02.680 So, you know, you can, you can get around those problems and that kind of thing.
00:10:05.580 So, but what we end up with is that certainly a level of a, I look at this in an earlier
00:10:09.700 book I did called how to judge people by what they look like.
00:10:12.520 But I also look at this again, with regard to school in the new book, is that, is that
00:10:17.600 with a level that is significantly exceeds chance, we can, we can note intelligence from
00:10:23.160 appearance.
00:10:24.040 We can, particularly the face, because the face is a huge number of genes involved in
00:10:28.000 the face.
00:10:28.420 So it's a very good indicator of basically, you know, your, your level of genetic health
00:10:32.540 or whatever, and, and personality.
00:10:34.580 And a good, I mean, good example, it doesn't sound very pleasant to put it like this, but
00:10:38.640 if you think about what is an example of a low intelligence person, well, it's a person
00:10:43.480 with Down syndrome.
00:10:44.720 Now that's low, now that's low intelligence beyond the normal range.
00:10:48.240 That's outside the normal range.
00:10:49.960 These people have an IQ of about, it depends on the severity of the condition, but they
00:10:54.060 have an IQ of between 100 and 50, something like that, but often about sort of 60, something
00:10:58.740 like that.
00:10:59.180 So it's, it's way out, it's way out of the normal range, which is 70 to 100, 130.
00:11:03.820 And what you see there is that the, the, the developmental pathways have been interfered
00:11:08.840 with at a very young age, you know, a very young age of development.
00:11:12.620 And this has predictable results in what they look like, i.e.
00:11:16.420 they have small, they have small noses, they have sort of short faces, they have narrow
00:11:23.200 eyes, and they have various examples of, of, of minor physical abnormalities and whatever
00:11:28.820 in, in the face.
00:11:29.820 Now it follows from that, that if, that, that you're going to get, um, that in a much
00:11:35.460 diluted form among, among people that have low intelligence within the normal range, and
00:11:43.740 you're going to get the opposite of that among people that have high intelligence.
00:11:47.460 And that's exactly what we see.
00:11:49.620 Wait, you're saying that smart people have giant schnauzes.
00:11:53.560 Uh-oh, Simone, I think you're getting into...
00:11:56.260 That's, that's, no, no, that would, that, that would, if it was a giant schnauz, as you 0.94
00:11:59.900 put it, that would perhaps be a mutation, and mutational load tends to be associated
00:12:03.200 with low IQ.
00:12:04.360 But, but, but, but, within the normal range of the, the studies indicate that being intelligent
00:12:08.820 is associated with having a longer face, with having a narrower face, with having, you
00:12:14.440 know, basically a more horsey-like face, a more kind of an adult, you know, sort of face.
00:12:18.720 You know, she's lovely, but you know what I mean. 0.99
00:12:21.000 And so things like bitchy wrestling face may just be a sign that someone's a bitch. 1.00
00:12:24.340 Which, one of the, and also the pupil size at rest is larger, eyes are larger, pupil 0.98
00:12:31.580 size at rest is larger, which makes sense.
00:12:33.660 Really?
00:12:33.720 People are more intelligent, they like have a base level of more, more interest in their
00:12:37.720 environment?
00:12:38.340 Exactly, exactly.
00:12:39.240 So the, I mean, what is intelligence?
00:12:40.980 Intelligence is solving problems.
00:12:42.360 What is the pupil?
00:12:43.140 It's the interface between the world and the brain.
00:12:46.000 And so it follows that you're going to, you're going to have a base level, a larger pupil.
00:12:52.320 And also, I mean, I know you both wear glasses.
00:12:54.060 Well, I think Simone does so for pretentious reasons. 0.99
00:12:56.780 But one of the, one of the, one of the indicators of intelligence is short-sightedness.
00:13:02.020 And the, the, there's a weak correlation.
00:13:04.680 And the reason for that is that the eye is part of the brain.
00:13:09.160 So obviously if you, if you've got a bigger brain, your eyes are more kind of convex basically.
00:13:15.100 And so they're pushed out.
00:13:16.480 And so you're short-sighted.
00:13:17.560 Obviously these things only work within race.
00:13:19.300 You can't make those kinds of assertions between race, but that, that's the, that's 0.97
00:13:23.420 the face.
00:13:23.920 Yeah.
00:13:24.140 And there's other things, personality as well.
00:13:26.600 Fun, fun, sciency divergence here.
00:13:28.860 So we were talking about the, the pupils, right?
00:13:31.120 And so somebody's pupils being at, because they might not understand the implications of what
00:13:34.780 I was saying there.
00:13:35.780 Somebody's pupils being constantly dilated.
00:13:37.420 Typically your pupils dilate when you're showing interest in something.
00:13:40.520 And, and we even have a natural response when some of these pupils dilate when they're talking
00:13:44.100 to us to believe that they like us more.
00:13:46.400 And this is why the deadly nightshade scientific name is Tropa Belladonna, the beautiful woman.
00:13:52.540 It's because it used to be used.
00:13:53.700 You'd put little droplets of it in your eye before you would go on a date with somebody.
00:13:57.040 Women would do this and it would paralyze some of the muscles in the eye and cause the pupils 1.00
00:14:02.580 to dilate an extra large amount.
00:14:04.800 So they'd look like little, you know, anime girls. 1.00
00:14:06.820 And so what you're literally seeing is more persistent interest in their environments
00:14:12.500 in, in this intelligent group, which is really interesting within the face category.
00:14:16.580 One of the jokes we persistently make on this show, because I think just as a scientist,
00:14:21.040 it really jumps out to you.
00:14:22.340 And again, we have nothing against Andrew Tate, but his face is, if you're familiar with
00:14:27.300 face models, almost the cliche of somebody who developed in a very low testosterone environment.
00:14:33.720 It's a very, very low testosterone phase.
00:14:36.480 And it's really interesting that that's so antagonistic to his brand.
00:14:39.980 And we point out that likely now he's high testosterone because of his lifestyle, because
00:14:45.220 he's sleeping around a lot, which increases testosterone because he's living with competitive
00:14:48.720 males, which increases testosterone.
00:14:50.520 Not that he's a naturally high testosterone person.
00:14:52.700 And in many ways, that's almost better.
00:14:54.780 You know, he, he got to it honestly, rather than by birth.
00:14:57.880 But the other thing you touched on that I really want to pull on, because I think that
00:15:00.760 it's really interesting too, is I totally forgot.
00:15:03.300 Let's talk about the teacher one.
00:15:04.900 That could be an interesting one to dig into.
00:15:06.700 Yeah.
00:15:07.060 But why, why are teachers disproportionately women? 1.00
00:15:10.560 That would be an interesting one.
00:15:11.880 Well, that's, yeah.
00:15:12.600 I mean, that's, that's one of the more obvious ones, isn't it?
00:15:15.060 I mean, it's a, it's a very interesting process.
00:15:17.580 Basically, you, if you open up a profession to women and it's the kind of, which it wasn't 0.95
00:15:22.340 previously, and that is the kind of profession that is attractive to women, then it becomes 1.00
00:15:26.320 overwhelmingly female very quickly because women are within, apart from that there's out 1.00
00:15:32.800 women, males have more outliers, both in terms of low IQ people and high IQ people and 0.90
00:15:38.020 a slight IQ advantage in adulthood.
00:15:40.420 But basically intelligence is about the same.
00:15:42.320 And women are higher in conscientiousness, higher in rule following and harder working, 1.00
00:15:47.680 basically, and higher in agreeableness and things like this.
00:15:50.920 And so this means that they will be able to get into that profession that they want to
00:15:54.900 get into, particularly if it's not particularly intellectually challenging.
00:15:57.860 Obviously, they're higher in a general desire to look after children and be with children.
00:16:01.340 So they're attracted to that profession.
00:16:02.980 And then they get into that profession.
00:16:04.500 And then you get more and more and more women teachers. 1.00
00:16:06.440 And then at some sort of tipping point, it becomes seen as a kind of a girl's game.
00:16:11.220 As Jordan Peterson summarised it.
00:16:13.800 And then when it's seen as a girl's game, then it loses status.
00:16:17.320 It loses status.
00:16:18.760 And the salary goes down, commensurate to other professions.
00:16:21.700 And then men stop being interested in this.
00:16:23.700 And then it becomes even more of a female profession. 1.00
00:16:26.460 And at the moment, in England, it's something like 65% of secondary school teachers are
00:16:30.480 women and about 85% of primary school.
00:16:33.020 So you're really, really young kids are women. 0.99
00:16:34.900 And that's just going to go up.
00:16:35.960 And then in the book I did in the Naked Classroom, when you interview men who are teachers and
00:16:41.880 why have you gone into teaching, they basically come across as quite unambitious men.
00:16:48.760 I've gone into teaching.
00:16:49.980 I've got my degree in whatever history.
00:16:51.720 And I've gone into teaching because you get long holidays.
00:16:53.680 It's good.
00:16:54.600 You know, I've gone into teaching because I can spend my time doing my hobbies in the
00:16:57.880 holidays.
00:16:58.500 And it's a sort of stable job and whatever.
00:17:00.620 So they're not very ambitious kind of men.
00:17:02.780 And it's just overwhelmingly female. 0.71
00:17:05.440 And it's an evolutionary mismatch.
00:17:06.900 It is clearly an evolutionary mismatch in all societies for young women in their early 0.96
00:17:11.840 20s to be hanging around 16-year-old boys, 17-year-old boys, 18-year-old boys.
00:17:19.080 That's just not how it's supposed to work.
00:17:21.080 That's not how it's done in any tribal society.
00:17:23.320 Boys of that age are taken away from the society. 0.97
00:17:25.540 They go through their rite of passage.
00:17:27.540 They become men.
00:17:28.240 They come back.
00:17:29.080 This is their rite of passage.
00:17:30.520 And the instructors are women.
00:17:32.260 So naturally, you're going to end up with relationships between the boys and the teachers,
00:17:35.540 as you do.
00:17:37.240 I've heard an interesting theory around this, that one of the reasons why education rates
00:17:41.600 rose so much for a period is because teachers were one of the only jobs available to women. 1.00
00:17:47.060 Respectable jobs.
00:17:48.420 Respectable jobs available to women, which meant that for a low price, below market, what you 1.00
00:17:54.460 could get somebody at that competence level, we were able to get many of the most competent
00:17:58.160 women in our society. 0.99
00:17:59.020 It's absolutely true.
00:17:59.980 And I look at this in the book.
00:18:01.060 It's in The Naked Classroom.
00:18:02.460 It's very interesting, this.
00:18:03.580 It seems to me the standard of teachers has gone, the standard, the quality of teachers
00:18:06.840 has gone down precipitously for a number of reasons.
00:18:09.040 First of all, it's lost prestige.
00:18:10.860 It's just lost prestige.
00:18:11.920 And so men in the old days, like my RE teacher, Mr. Sussman, who was highly intelligent, you
00:18:16.180 know, that would go into the teaching profession.
00:18:18.240 They're not going to do that now.
00:18:19.280 They're going to go somewhere else.
00:18:20.860 Secondly, we have a more meritocratic society.
00:18:22.760 So you could imagine a situation where a person who was born into the working class or something
00:18:26.580 like that, and he goes to grammar school and he becomes a schoolteacher.
00:18:30.100 There's no, even though he's probably sufficiently intelligent to become, I don't know, an academic
00:18:34.020 in whatever subject he teaches, but it's not a very meritocratic society.
00:18:37.720 So he's not going to do that.
00:18:38.620 He's going to become a schoolteacher.
00:18:39.800 That person these days is more likely to become an academic, particularly as well, considering
00:18:43.980 the expansion of higher education in tandem with that.
00:18:47.120 So he's eliminated.
00:18:48.760 And then with the women, of course, I mean, I had a teacher at school and she was a very 1.00
00:18:52.120 intelligent woman.
00:18:52.880 She wanted to be a lawyer. 0.95
00:18:54.000 And they said to her, this is in the 50s, in the 40s.
00:18:56.340 Of course, you can't be a lawyer.
00:18:57.160 You're a girl.
00:18:58.420 So she became an English teacher.
00:19:01.000 Now, that generation of women that became teachers, they're gone. 1.00
00:19:04.220 And the women that are capable of becoming lawyers or doctors or whatever are likely to 1.00
00:19:07.640 become that, whereas in the old days they would have become a schoolteacher.
00:19:10.980 So you're quite right.
00:19:12.400 We probably had a substantial period of time where you have women that were quite good that 1.00
00:19:16.740 were going into teaching.
00:19:17.960 And now they're not.
00:19:18.700 It's just going to be overwhelmingly midwit times that go into teaching.
00:19:21.600 Unfortunately, this is not unlike what a lot of people think, something that you can easily
00:19:24.600 fix just by raising teacher salaries or something like that.
00:19:27.800 The boat has already sailed.
00:19:29.820 You would need to have a major cultural shift or just replace the profession, which is what
00:19:33.360 we're trying to do as our institution.
00:19:35.520 Well, that's a good point you make there because studies indicate this whole idea of raise
00:19:38.780 the salary, raise the salary.
00:19:40.160 There's a lot of evidence that indicates that people will trade money for prestige.
00:19:43.920 So the problem is not, it's the prestige.
00:19:47.940 It's got low prestige.
00:19:49.480 Right, right.
00:19:50.440 And once it's got low, it's like people are being a plumber.
00:19:55.580 You can earn way more being a plumber than you can being a schoolteacher or whatever,
00:19:59.320 but it has lower prestige.
00:20:00.900 Well, being a schoolteacher has got to that point because it's so female dominated because 1.00
00:20:05.080 there's this exodus of high quality people from it, but it's just got low prestige.
00:20:10.380 And I don't know how the, it's very hard to reverse that, I think.
00:20:14.080 That's really interesting.
00:20:15.520 Another thing when we talk about men and women having different biological tendencies in terms
00:20:19.760 of the types of jobs they take, that is actually really important from the perspective of pronatalist
00:20:23.620 advocacy.
00:20:24.140 And there was a great piece called The Baby Boom by Arctotherium that we did an episode
00:20:27.760 on recently.
00:20:28.440 I don't know if you read this.
00:20:29.180 It was in Aporia where he basically argued a strategy that you could use to help fertility
00:20:33.960 rates is to lower the amount of bureaucratic jobs within the government because those are
00:20:38.140 predominantly held by women because they disproportionately take those jobs, which would allow and put 1.00
00:20:43.420 pressure on people to be more, you know, stay-at-home moms. 0.89
00:20:47.520 It's an interesting theory.
00:20:48.720 Well, and it wasn't just that.
00:20:49.720 It wasn't like, let's force stay-at-home motherhood.
00:20:51.640 It's let's give men the ability to be higher in status than women because women won't get married 1.00
00:20:58.820 if they don't have access to higher status than the men.
00:21:02.760 So that was like the bigger thing.
00:21:03.980 It's like, how do we enable men to have relatively higher status than women?
00:21:07.760 And a lot of that involves reducing the extent to which women have an unfair advantage in 1.00
00:21:12.140 really, really common and major like job segments.
00:21:15.180 One thing I wanted to ask you though, is if you've read, you probably have Paul Lockhart's
00:21:20.660 A Mathematician's Lament because it really changed how I looked at mathematics.
00:21:23.500 And like sort of to like recap it for people who haven't read this essay, basically Paul
00:21:30.540 Lockhart argues that we teach mathematics to kids as though for the entire like grade school,
00:21:37.400 middle school, high school experience until you hit college, you're basically only studying
00:21:43.160 grammar.
00:21:43.820 You're not allowed to write a sentence.
00:21:45.240 You're not allowed to like read books or discuss literature or build narratives.
00:21:49.280 You're only allowed to just look at grammar and punctuation and the rules and it's terrible
00:21:54.580 and you hate it and it ruins math for everyone.
00:21:57.440 And that's why people hate math.
00:21:59.220 And what really math is all about is imagination and sort of building imaginary worlds and constraints
00:22:05.020 and seeing how things behave with those constraints.
00:22:07.420 What would be the equivalent of applying this kind of reasoning?
00:22:11.080 That's what I argue in the book.
00:22:12.320 I said, why don't the schools teach pure, like logical thinking?
00:22:17.980 So just usable, usable stuff.
00:22:21.080 That's usable maths.
00:22:22.420 I can only think of a few times when I did maths at school where there was, for example,
00:22:26.140 there was one, I mentioned this in the book, where there was one, a test we did was sat
00:22:29.800 when you're 14.
00:22:30.820 And there was this question where you had to, there was a wardrobe and you had to work
00:22:35.180 out if you could get it out of the door.
00:22:37.060 Well, you were given the proportions and you were given the, and I realized, ah, Pythagoras
00:22:42.940 theorem, that will solve that.
00:22:46.160 And that's the, and that's the, that will give me the answer.
00:22:48.760 And that's the one time in my life.
00:22:50.720 And that was in the math test, not a real life situation where Pythagoras theorem came,
00:22:54.360 you know, became useful.
00:22:55.400 And so I think that what they, you're right.
00:22:57.220 I think they are, what mathematics teaches you at school is the, is the sort of the grammar
00:23:01.340 as I said, the grammar.
00:23:02.500 And I think you can go a level further than that and just take that down to the level
00:23:06.440 of logic, of, of formal logic, obviously, and then of informal logic.
00:23:11.680 And when I was doing my maths GCSE, that was the height of new labor.
00:23:15.620 That was the height of all of this emotional nonsense, you know, new labor, new Britain, 0.97
00:23:20.400 all this.
00:23:21.040 And I thought, well, wouldn't it be good if they had sat and said, look boys, that we've
00:23:23.680 got this political party saying new labor, new Britain.
00:23:25.720 That's a fallacy.
00:23:27.000 Okay.
00:23:27.300 The fact, the fact that the party is called new labor, it does not follow and it cannot
00:23:31.740 follow that it's going to renew Britain.
00:23:33.740 That's insane.
00:23:35.040 And there were, and there were many other examples of these kinds of manipulative slogans
00:23:38.740 that I think you could ultimately be reduced down to basically something like maths, basically
00:23:42.860 formal or informal logic.
00:23:45.080 And if, and if you teach kids that, if you teach kids the benefit of, of, of informal logic
00:23:49.960 and then a formal logic, then they can start to understand the benefit of maths because it's
00:23:54.340 an extension of that basically, and then they can start to see the maths is not just some
00:23:58.020 boring grammar.
00:23:58.780 It's actually extremely important and vital to everything.
00:24:01.100 That's not, it's not taught in that way.
00:24:03.100 It's not taught in a way that is useful.
00:24:04.680 It's like teaching languages.
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
00:24:15.100 can just immerse them in it and say, okay, here's some French, get on with it.
00:24:19.240 And that's what they should do with maths.
00:24:20.300 So, so I remembered the thing I wanted to talk about, which was the genetics of religion.
00:24:25.080 Oh, yes.
00:24:26.160 Because it's a very interesting topic and it is really undersold one, how heretical
00:24:30.900 religiosity is, but a really interesting phenomenon.
00:24:33.940 And for us, this was actually drove us on our path to pronatalism is we had originally
00:24:38.920 thought that what was being selected for, like the way humanity was changing was that
00:24:42.900 people were being selected to be higher levels of religiosity.
00:24:46.040 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
00:24:56.420 phenomenon.
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
00:25:14.300 of the religion that people are born into.
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.
00:25:37.000 They were like extremely religious types.
00:25:40.340 Well, I don't know if that's necessarily a good example of people that are pronatal, though.
00:25:46.040 No, no, no, it's not.
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.
00:26:09.340 I like that phrase, hits the snail.
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
00:26:42.780 seems to be genetic in nature.
00:26:44.320 There was a study by a guy called Koenig, and they could find no environmental reason
00:26:47.440 why this was the case.
00:26:48.720 Now, the religion of the sick soul, that's quite different.
00:26:52.080 That's the religion of the convert.
00:26:54.340 And that is associated with the opposite personality profile, basically, and in particular
00:26:59.940 with high neuroticism.
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.
00:27:20.100 And so there's no reason.
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
00:27:41.740 of things.
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.
00:27:54.740 And I know of many cases of this.
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
00:28:14.620 nature, and so on.
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
00:28:25.240 one way or the other.
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.
00:29:00.860 And they all become bundled together.
00:29:02.740 And equally, you would think that if any deviation from that would be associated with negative
00:29:08.100 things.
00:29:08.900 And I think that if you have the breakup of the religious bundle, you have one element 0.93
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
00:29:31.980 isn't working, break down, or maybe this.
00:29:35.340 And you think these are two different genetic clusters, and one's being sort of bred out of
00:29:39.140 the population?
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.
00:29:53.220 I mean, there's all kinds of nuance.
00:29:54.400 Of course, you're going to get some people that are converts and are religiously fervent,
00:29:57.480 and therefore have loads of kids, or whatever.
00:30:00.080 But my understanding is that neuroticism tends to be negatively associated with fertility,
00:30:04.680 except in certain subsections of it.
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. 1.00
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.
00:30:36.340 Quite why, I'm not sure.
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.
00:30:47.740 I don't know.
00:30:48.260 I mean, within specific sub-communities.
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-
00:30:56.000 Yeah, answer any mommy blogger.
00:30:57.400 Like, kids are good props in many cases.
00:30:59.460 That's right.
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 0.57
00:31:09.500 fertility, because more intelligent people tend to be more socially conformist.
00:31:13.780 And in that community, it's pro-natal.
00:31:16.160 And so, and therefore, you want to have kids to show that God is heavenly father, is blessing
00:31:21.260 you, or whatever.
00:31:22.380 And so, Mormons will do that. 1.00
00:31:23.420 Sorry.
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
00:32:00.420 that he was talking about.
00:32:01.540 Or what's the word that I'm looking for here?
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.
00:32:13.820 Great, it was a pleasure to talk to you both.
00:32:16.580 Bye-bye.
00:32:17.740 Bye.
00:32:18.200 Oh, and do check out his podcast as well, Jolly Heretic.
00:32:20.860 Or YouTube channel, or whatever.
00:32:22.620 The Jolly Heretic.
00:32:23.000 All right.
00:32:23.880 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
00:32:34.420 to share the infection with you guys.
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
00:32:44.440 with Ed.
00:32:45.000 We are built of modules combined in a planned-out way.
00:32:51.480 Each new piece must be told where to go.
00:32:56.040 Oh, now there's a science helping us to understand how our cells encode this architectural plan.
00:33:03.140 Signaling each other with genetic tools, oh.
00:33:06.540 Oh, yeah.
00:33:07.880 Wow.
00:33:08.560 Phenotype the interface for mouse and man.
00:33:11.260 Genotype the files and the subprograms.
00:33:13.000 What then are the switches, circuit boards, and boot code?
00:33:17.420 E-V-O-D-V-O. 1.00
00:33:19.800 Looking at the logic in the ways that we grow.
00:33:22.420 Every gene directed by a signal key code.
00:33:25.220 Proteins that can activate and enhance or veto.
00:33:28.200 E-V-O-D-V-O. 1.00
00:33:30.460 The signals are controlled by other genes that signal.
00:33:33.480 Calculating in a network labyrinth, though.
00:33:35.860 Where the heart and liver and the hands and feet go.
00:33:38.340 Signal, signal, signal, signal, signal.
00:33:40.280 Signal, signal, signal tells each region what it ought to be, yo.
00:33:44.280 With circuits so deep, they build up on.
00:33:47.160 They're older than the paleo.
00:33:49.460 The paleo's awake and red, baby.
00:33:51.520 In a crucial pathway, changes tend to get torpedoed.
00:33:55.120 Where they go, calamity goes.
00:33:58.380 As the side-to-v-O-D-V-O. 0.88
00:34:00.120 It's been maxed.
00:34:01.080 Boxing day, really.
00:34:02.920 This is sort of a second boxing day.
00:34:05.960 What are we supposed to be doing on boxing day?
00:34:09.680 I can't remember.
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?
00:34:19.080 And then there's the boxes.
00:34:20.580 That's why it's called boxing.
00:34:21.420 That is my understanding.
00:34:22.300 Oh, that's what Wobblies is thought. 0.88
00:34:24.640 I can see why we forgot about this.
00:34:26.740 Hold on.
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.
00:34:33.100 Oh, so that's a Christmas cravat.
00:34:34.620 That's a Christmas cravat, yeah.
00:34:36.640 That is very – well, there you go.
00:34:38.520 You're already benefiting from the holiday.
00:34:40.340 That is very nice.
00:34:41.900 Okay.
00:34:42.680 Yeah.
00:34:43.320 I got her a book about feral cats.
00:34:46.000 Because we've just got our cat a cat.
00:34:50.160 So our cat is incredibly sociable, ridiculously sociable, like a dog.
00:34:54.740 Okay.
00:34:55.480 It has to be entertained.
00:34:57.060 So we got him a cat.
00:34:58.400 It's his cat.
00:34:59.700 We can't touch it.
00:35:00.620 It's feral.
00:35:01.160 It won't let us touch it.
00:35:02.560 But they're okay with each other.
00:35:04.560 They're okay with each other, yeah.
00:35:05.360 But it's his cat.
00:35:07.100 So my cat has a cat.
00:35:09.700 And that's all going very well.
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.
00:35:14.960 That's a very cat thing to do.
00:35:18.140 That is very cat.
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.
00:35:25.040 I think that's a good one.
00:35:26.080 Oh, Divo, Divo.
00:35:27.560 This is how we go from single cells to people.
00:35:30.240 Every generation and in life primeval.
00:35:32.640 Life and variations and the sand beautiful.
00:35:36.360 From Divo to Evo.
00:35:38.340 Lirving a mosquito.
00:35:39.680 Patterns are resolved as the signals proceed.
00:35:41.800 Never a chicken with a gluten. 0.79
00:35:44.340 Kill it with a morpherlino. 0.83
00:35:46.280 Should a legal morpherlino. 1.00
00:35:47.780 From Divo to Evo.
00:35:49.140 Voyage of the Beagle.
00:35:50.500 Body plans evolve when proteins to the genome.
00:35:52.660 There's not a life's beauty grows.
00:35:54.680 Hot sleep.
00:35:55.360 Aesthetic and vivo.
00:35:57.100 Evo, Divo.
00:36:00.440 Acapella science.