Based Camp - Evolutionary Psychology & Pronatalism with Dr. Geoffrey Miller

00:00:00.000 polyamory can be a legitimate way to run your relationships. So the antinatalist version of

00:00:05.900 polyamory would be, you should simply be maximizing your sexual network and your sexual pleasure and

00:00:13.160 your little highly open-minded adventures and, you know, organizing your gangbangs and threesomes

00:00:20.460 and going to Burning Man and having kids as sort of secondary. And then there's a pronatalist

00:00:26.680 version of polyamory that says, hey, why don't you consider maybe a group living situation,

00:00:32.520 which might make it easier to raise kids collectively with your little trusted polycule,

00:00:39.200 right? Would you like to know more? Hello, this is Malcolm and Simone. We are here with a special

00:00:45.260 guest today, Jeffrey Miller. We actually had his partner on in one of the early episodes.

00:00:51.400 Yeah. Name again? Sorry. Diana Fleischman. Diana Fleischman. Yes. And he, I've respected him since

00:00:59.520 before we wrote our sexuality book on like sexuality and human evolution, because this is a topic that

00:01:04.800 he is both an expert on and the type of outspoken expert that gets him in trouble with university

00:01:09.820 departments and stuff at times, which is of course the experts who we like talking to most. I thought

00:01:15.660 a fun topic for this episode, because, you know, Diana has also been, you know, a core leader in the

00:01:20.740 pronatalist movement in terms of pronatal thought and stuff like that. And so if you, I don't know

00:01:25.300 if there's an extension of that, but in addition to that, is to apply your deep understanding of

00:01:32.120 the evolutionary conditions that sort of led to modern human sexuality and how those are interacting

00:01:39.100 with this new environment that we're in, with ways that they can be shorted out and how that might

00:01:45.360 lead to changes in humanity going forwards. So go.

00:01:50.860 Yeah. I work in this field called evolutionary psychology and we try to understand human nature

00:01:55.700 and we do it through mostly applying evolutionary biology theory to human prehistory and trying to

00:02:03.560 analyze the challenges that our ancestors faced in terms of surviving and reproducing and raising kids

00:02:09.160 and living in groups. Right. So that's my kind of framework. A key insight, I think, from evolutionary

00:02:16.500 psychology is we did not really evolve directly to try to maximize like baby count, right? To try to

00:02:25.340 maximize fitness in a direct way. Instead, what we did through thousands of generations of ancestral history

00:02:34.080 society was do the things that tended statistically to lead to babies, right? Even though we might not

00:02:43.200 be consciously maximizing number of offspring or building a dynasty or whatever, right? So what tends

00:02:52.340 to lead to babies? Being sexually attracted to good, high quality partners, falling in love with them,

00:02:59.540 developing relationships with them, right? All of that stuff tends to lead to babies. 0.99

00:03:04.080 What's another thing that tends to lead to babies ancestrally? Achieving social status,

00:03:09.540 right? And prestige and influence and being valued in your group, right? Now the problem is you can

00:03:16.880 short circuit both of those, right? You can fall in love, have a great sex life, use contraception,

00:03:24.920 no babies, right? Chase social status and prestige and influence and never really cash that out

00:03:34.220 in terms of maybe either having relationships or having babies. So the vulnerability that we face

00:03:42.840 as evolved brains running around the world is that you can short circuit all these ways that tended to lead

00:03:50.200 to having kids in prehistory and that don't necessarily do that anymore. So that's, I think,

00:03:57.020 the central issue that pronatalism needs to address, but that civilization itself needs to address.

00:04:03.000 So I want to pull on one of the things you said here, because one I think is intuitive to people,

00:04:07.300 the ways that people can sort of masturbate, literally masturbate the desire to sleep with attractive 0.54

00:04:15.000 people. That is one that, you know, obviously there's like a clear pathway there. But one of

00:04:20.720 the things that's changed really recently is the ability to masturbate feelings of community and

00:04:27.760 social hierarchy, especially in a Skinner box-like fashion that is likely to lead to addiction of these

00:04:36.600 dopamine, dopaminergic pathways. And what we are seeing with this generation that's growing up now is

00:04:43.100 like really quickly dropping rates of sex. And I suspect from what you're saying here is that it's

00:04:49.980 actually these communities like TikTok and stuff like that that's causing this. Because you can play

00:04:57.460 in these social environments in a way that engaging through Facebook didn't feel like true social

00:05:04.420 connection. Can you talk to why things like Facebook did this worse or were better or like didn't lead to

00:05:12.220 as many people dropping out of in-person social interaction as this new wave of, of online apps?

00:05:20.500 I mean, social media companies have just gotten better and better and better at

00:05:25.120 hacking the American, the, the, the evolved social instincts of people, right? To keep them engaged in this

00:05:33.960 sort of pseudo status, right? So if you're on Twitter or X, right, people pay a lot of attention to a follower

00:05:40.700 count likes, engagements, impressions, et cetera. If you're on TikTok, which I'm not, I don't know what

00:05:46.120 the metrics are, but it's also highly engaging and addictive. And what tends to happen is you're

00:05:51.740 getting a lot of cues, right? That I'm popular, influential, respected, but it's not actually cashing

00:06:00.700 out into in real life relationships, whether it's friendships or collaborations at work or sexual,

00:06:10.680 intimate, romantic relationships. And of course, it's going to get even worse once you get augmented

00:06:16.320 reality and virtual reality and people will be able to go fully online and have their avatars and

00:06:21.380 interact with other people and have this sort of whole sex life or, or whatever you want to call it

00:06:27.420 that is purely simulated social status, right? And, and interaction. Now, of course, they're real

00:06:35.960 people possibly on the other end of it, or maybe it's just AI bots that you're interacting with,

00:06:43.540 but apparently Gen Z has kind of forgotten how to connect the dots between that kind of online status

00:06:53.120 and any kind of real life relationships and sex and reproduction.

00:06:58.080 So this brings me to a really interesting, if you're, if you're looking at the current

00:07:01.340 evolutionary pressures that we're going through, because the old evolutionary instincts aren't

00:07:05.340 getting us through this, it's like, there's going to be two dominant strategies. One strategy is to

00:07:12.380 have new instincts selected for an individuals that somehow get around the way that these masturbatory

00:07:20.760 pathways are being blocked, i.e. they just don't get as much social status from online environments

00:07:24.840 or whatever. The other pathway is the sort of dominance of our sort of psychological mindset.

00:07:32.560 I guess what I'd say, like, like our cognition over our pre-evolved intuition combined with a culture

00:07:40.040 that values its continued survival. Can you, do you see it differently than this? Like, do you think

00:07:46.900 that both of these will be stable groups that will make it through the end of this? And if so, what do

00:07:51.860 you think these groups will be like characteristically to, to get through this crucible of like AI girlfriends?

00:08:01.140 Yeah. So I, I take those two paths to be kind of like pro natalist Luddite Amish fundamentalist, 0.81

00:08:08.420 right? Could be, could be Christian, could be Muslim, whatever. Anybody who's like, like trad life maxing and 0.99

00:08:14.980 they're, they're, they're baby maxing and dynasty building based perhaps largely on a, a religious

00:08:20.980 worldview, right? The second strategy would be kind of what Diana Fleischman, my wife and I are doing,

00:08:26.500 which is like get enough insight into evolutionary psychology and the science and enough sort of

00:08:33.220 metacognitive awareness of what you're doing and what's driving you that you can kind of intelligently

00:08:39.380 rediscover the, the joys of pro natalism without necessarily having a religious framework for doing

00:08:45.140 that. Now I suspect that that second strategy, you know, some people will do it, but it won't be super

00:08:54.260 popular. I think the first strategy, the kind of trad life religious pro natalism is actually likely to be

00:09:02.980 more popular, common, effective, and probably will take over the, the gene pool in the long run.

00:09:11.540 And I've, I've actually wrote a thing about this back in 2007, about how do you avoid this trap,

00:09:18.980 right? Of technology that short circuits, um, reproductive success. And I pointed out there's already 0.93

00:09:26.900 selection for religiosity for conservatism for pro natalism and for resistance to the kinds of

00:09:37.540 social media status games that, that a lot of people get caught up in.

00:09:43.060 Yeah. Well, so, I mean, I agree with everything you're saying, like, obviously we see ourselves as

00:09:47.380 largely in this one group. I'm wondering if you were going to characterize, because this one group,

00:09:52.580 that the heady group, that's like, okay, I will cognitively decide to do this stuff versus the

00:09:59.540 group that just as reacting to the new evolutionary pressures. What specific sociological traits do you

00:10:06.820 think are going to be selected for in this other group that allows them to make it through this

00:10:12.980 crucible? Do you think it's primarily, you mentioned a few, conservatism, which I think we definitely see

00:10:17.540 in the data is being very strongly selected for a level of technophobia. What, what instinct drives

00:10:23.380 tech? Is it fear of change? Is it like, what, what's specifically being pulled on and reinforced there,

00:10:28.500 you think? I think it's almost like a kind of deep instinctive moral disgust at any kind of fitness

00:10:38.740 fakery, right? What you could call faking fitness cues, where as long as something isn't very directly

00:10:47.540 grounded or dare we call it based in the real physical world and real sexual relationships

00:10:55.220 and real kids, right? I think there's a kind of technophobic conservatism that says, I just don't

00:11:03.620 trust the smartphones. I just don't trust the AR. It doesn't seem real to me. It's disgusting.

00:11:08.900 I love this because I think you picked up on something I hadn't noticed before.

00:11:12.820 These communities heavily overlap with communities that denigrate cosmetic amplification like

00:11:21.940 cosmetic surgery and even things like makeup are seen as like lower status in these communities,

00:11:28.820 which would align with the point that that's the instinct that's being selected for.

00:11:34.020 Yeah, I think that's right. There's an overlap with moral disgust towards porn,

00:11:41.860 moral disgust towards even jobs that don't really involve physical effort and sweat,

00:11:48.020 like keyboard oriented jobs, right? There's an overlap with disgust towards anything that seems

00:11:55.140 behaviorally addictive, which could include porn, gambling, substance use, even TV movies, et cetera.

00:12:04.660 There's a widespread suspicion of just, man, anything that's a distraction from actually having your

00:12:13.300 relationship and your family and your kids and your real work that probably involves some Ford pickup

00:12:19.860 truck and going to Home Depot or whatever, right? I think that kind of package of technos,

00:12:27.460 let's call it technoskeptical rather than technophobic, right? Yeah. Because these folks are like

00:12:34.980 using power tools, right? They're not just hacking away at things with flint hand axes, but they're

00:12:41.780 broadly suspicious of technology and media. And partly that's because media is a conduit for

00:12:51.460 leftist propaganda and antinatalist propaganda, right? So partly it's not just the technology

00:12:56.660 itself. It's sort of the shadowy forces behind the technology who are trying to convince you to do

00:13:02.100 stuff that's contrary to your actual fitness interests. So I wanted to jump in and ask, I mean,

00:13:07.300 you have two small daughters at home and yet you're not going to sort of raise them in this technophobic,

00:13:12.420 I imagine, maybe I'm wrong, kind of conservative culture. You're going to raise them to be, I

00:13:17.140 imagine, like pretty technophilic, probably more on the progressive end, you know, like more,

00:13:22.740 you know, pluralistic. How is it one, is it important to you to pass on a pronatalist culture to

00:13:30.660 your daughters who are now very, very little? So I guess you've got time to plan. Is it important

00:13:37.380 that you pass on a culture period that like represents your values? Like how much do you

00:13:42.980 care about that? And then three, what are you going to do to try to ensure that that culture

00:13:49.300 is passed on despite not being technophobic and being like, no, we're going to shelter you. We're

00:13:55.380 going to, you know, remove you from this part of society, et cetera.

00:14:02.020 That's an interesting and tricky question. So on the one hand, I'm a big believer in behavior

00:14:07.140 genetics and that the traits I have and that my wife Diana has will tend to get passed on. And if

00:14:14.740 we value kids and family, probably our kids will as well, regardless of what we teach them explicitly,

00:14:21.540 regardless of what the family culture says. On the other hand, I do recognize that when your

00:14:28.020 surrounding culture is antinatalist and is trying to get you to get caught up in credentialism and

00:14:36.820 careerism and consumerism and faking your virtual status, you do need a kind of countervailing force

00:14:43.940 within a family, right? That tries to instill in your kids a kind of skepticism about that surrounding

00:14:50.900 culture, right? Just so that your genes for pronatalism don't get swamped by a surrounding

00:14:58.500 culture that's antinatalist. I do have an older daughter in her twenties who is very much kind of

00:15:05.300 trying to figure all this stuff out and looking for a long-term mate and trying to like balance her 0.88

00:15:11.460 career as a professional artist versus her dating life and trying to figure out, you know,

00:15:16.980 is it viable to have kids and to have a career, blah, blah, blah. So that's a very much a live

00:15:21.940 issue to me. And I can kind of, I take a keen interest in how millennials and Gen Z are trying

00:15:27.380 to navigate those issues. I was wondering how you think about all this because you've advocated in

00:15:32.340 the past for polyamory. How do you think about all of this in the context of polyamory as a dating

00:15:36.900 strategy that is, that is like newly elevated and may have existed in a historic context, but didn't for a long

00:15:42.980 time. Yeah. So it, yeah, it's not necessarily I'm advocating for polyamory. A lot of what Diane and I

00:15:49.620 say is polyamory can be a legitimate way to run your relationships if you have the skills and the

00:15:56.900 intelligence and the self-control and the conscientiousness and emotional intelligence and

00:16:02.180 a lot of traits that would be required. So it's like having, it's playing on expert level in terms of

00:16:10.980 relationships and monogamy is probably easier for most people to manage. And I think there's

00:16:18.580 antinatalist versions of polyamory, right? And there's pronatalist versions. So the antinatalist

00:16:23.940 version of polyamory would be, you should simply be maximizing your sexual network and your sexual

00:16:30.740 pleasure and your little highly open-minded adventures and, and, you know, organizing your,

00:16:37.460 your gang bangs and threesomes and going to Burning Man and, and having kids as sort of secondary.

00:16:43.780 And then there's a pronatalist version of polyamory that says, Hey, why don't you consider

00:16:49.060 maybe a group living situation, which might make it easier to raise kids collectively with your little

00:16:55.620 trusted polycule, right? Your little group or, you know, seek benefits from your relationships that

00:17:03.940 actually feed into like the viability of your family. Right. And that could be financial benefits,

00:17:10.980 career benefits, social benefits, parenting benefits, whatever. So

00:17:19.460 Have you seen this work? Yeah. There's a lot of aspects of the polyamory culture that I really,

00:17:24.180 really don't like because it seems very self-indulgent, woke, leftist, non-binary, hates babies, 1.00

00:17:31.220 blah, blah, blah. I don't like any of that stuff. Right. But I think there are pockets of wisdom

00:17:36.420 from trying to combine your like sexual network with your social and parenting network that can make

00:17:42.340 sense. Yeah. So what I wanted to ask you here is, is I've, I've heard this as a thesis, like,

00:17:47.860 it sounds like it would work. I don't know if I've ever seen anyone actually practically implement it

00:17:54.020 in a high fertility family context or in a high fertility social circle outside of like Mormons or Muslims

00:18:00.420 where it's not really polyamory. It's more polygyny. Have you, or am I just not exposed to the culture

00:18:07.460 enough? What you typically would see is people who are kind of like a little bit Asperger-y and 1.00

00:18:19.380 open-minded and polyamorous in their twenties. Right. And then they settle down with a primary partner

00:18:24.980 and they mostly have kids with that one partner, but they still have like secondary and tertiary

00:18:31.220 partners on the outside who may or may not be contributing to child care or sharing rent or

00:18:39.140 mortgages or, you know, living together. The difficulty of course, is you get this huge selection bias in media

00:18:47.060 where the people who are actually busy dynasty building with open relationships are just too

00:18:54.420 damn busy to be on Twitter or TikTok. Fair. Right. And they're just doing their thing and maybe they're

00:19:01.620 showing up at Burning Man once in a while and, and, you know, but, but they're not

00:19:07.140 spending a lot of their time broadcasting what they're doing. So we don't know how many people

00:19:14.580 are actually doing that. This is interesting as a way to enforce interpersonal, like real human,

00:19:20.820 interpersonal connections in a world that is providing too few dopaminergic rewards that can

00:19:27.060 only be achieved through human interpersonal interaction. But it seems like an alternate

00:19:31.780 cultural subset for doing that, which is really interesting. One thing I wanted to pull on that,

00:19:36.740 that I think is when you were describing this conservative mindset of like working the land

00:19:41.060 with your hands and everything like that, I think people can hear this and it sounds really appealing

00:19:46.020 in a moderated format. The problem was, it is, and we've gone into the data on this,

00:19:51.300 is it is a strategy that works better, the more extremely it is implemented. So if you look,

00:19:57.860 there was a great study done in Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania, Dutch speakers, i.e. Amish or

00:20:01.940 Anabaptist communities, and the ones who didn't have cell phones at all, like that was the highest 1.00

00:20:07.540 correlatory thing with how high fertility the individual was. So if you have a strategy that

00:20:14.580 works kind of good when implemented slightly, but really good when implemented in the extreme,

00:20:20.420 it leads to an outcome where the extreme iteration ends up dominating that cultural group within a few

00:20:26.420 generations. Where that becomes relevant is it means that even if you have a smaller group that's

00:20:31.940 trying this like intentional polyamorous strategy, not polyamorous strategy, this intentional high

00:20:38.100 fertility strategy that is culturally experimenting with various things that might be addictive,

00:20:42.980 whether it is polyamory or traditional media or anime, you know, that it can stay technophilic and

00:20:50.420 technologically productive in a world where AI gives them an enormous leg up, they ultimately win,

00:20:57.540 even if they have much smaller population numbers.

00:21:03.620 Yeah. And

00:21:07.860 so I feel this constant tension, right, where on the one hand, I'm extremely aware of very, very rapid

00:21:15.220 technological progress in domains like AI and crypto and virtual reality and so forth. And on the other

00:21:21.860 hand, I have this sweeping deep time, multi-generational perspective from evolutionary biology. And it's very,

00:21:28.820 very hard to weave those together, right? If humanity survives, if humanity survives, then in 10, 20, 50 generations,

00:21:38.580 the kinds of people who are going to be around are quite likely to be, you know, more similar to the Amish and

00:21:45.780 the Anabaptists and fundamentalist Muslims than your typical Bay Area, dual income, no kids, AI developers. 0.99

00:21:55.860 Yeah. On the other hand, if let's say you get a kind of technophilic subculture that can kind of hack

00:22:09.460 human biology enough, right? You could imagine the Bay Area couples going, you know, we actually want to

00:22:19.060 do dynasty building. We don't want to adopt the values of those Anabaptists. So we're going to 1.00

00:22:24.100 do the pre-implantation embryo selection for pronatalist traits, right? And we're going to do the gene

00:22:30.740 editing to make sure our kids really, really actually want to have kids, whatever traits are

00:22:36.900 entailed in that. And that will help them kind of take over the human gene pool eventually. 1.00

00:22:47.700 So it's really, really hard to predict how all of this is going to play out. But I think if there is

00:22:52.500 still a human gene pool, it's going to inevitably be dominated by people who actually do succeed in

00:22:58.580 surviving and reproducing, duh. That makes sense. But I also am curious if we

00:23:07.780 somehow managed to like make you emperor of, we'll say the United States, long enough to implement some

00:23:13.220 pro-natalist policy changes that would enable, we'll say like that, like more technophilic,

00:23:21.380 pluralistic cultures to maybe not extinct themselves as quickly or at all. Are there any

00:23:28.180 things that you would do? Like assuming that you couldn't enable a policy or make a blanket rule

00:23:33.300 or a couple of laws that would not be reversed after your short stint was over, what would you do?

00:23:40.180 Like what would you change about modern society or rules or access to certain things or social media

00:23:45.380 in a way that you think could make humans more resilient in the face of all this technological

00:23:50.580 change that can be pretty difficult for encouraging parenting?

00:23:57.140 Honestly, the number one thing is pause AI development. Do, you know, Frank Herbert,

00:24:02.500 author of Dune and some of the later Dune books talked about a butlerian jihad,

00:24:07.540 which is a social movement.

00:24:09.460 He talks about that in the first book.

00:24:10.900 In the far future. I actually can't remember where he, where he talks about it, but somewhere

00:24:14.500 in the Dune series.

00:24:15.220 He wants to establish why they're not using AI. So I think he does it to, but continue.

00:24:19.060 Right. Yeah. So the idea is thou shalt not make a machine in the image of the human mind.

00:24:25.380 More generally, I think a prohibition on developing any new basically species of intelligent entities

00:24:33.780 that could plausibly endanger or replace humans. The reason for that is not just avoiding the extinction

00:24:42.180 risk. Right. The reason partly is I think there's an optimal rate of technological change in terms of

00:24:50.180 helping people feel pronatalist. Right. Helping people feel like I have wisdom and knowledge that

00:24:56.580 that is worth passing on to my kids. Once the rate of technological change gets too fast.

00:25:02.100 Right. Then people feel like, oh, I'm, I'm Gen X. I have nothing to say to Gen Z.

00:25:08.180 They're living in a completely different culture and world and, and technosphere. And so I think if

00:25:14.740 you really want to encourage people to take parenting seriously, you have to make them feel like

00:25:21.380 their wisdom and knowledge is, is going to be relevant to their kids and grandkids.

00:25:26.580 And I think the current rate of technological change, not just with regard to AI, but with regard to many,

00:25:34.020 many things is too fast to make people feel comfortable with parenting and grandparenting.

00:25:42.180 It makes them feel too obsolete too quickly. So I think we've been, you know, progress maxing for the

00:25:50.420 last two or 300 years. And that in itself, I think has antinatalist depressing effects on a lot of people.

00:26:00.660 So I want to hear it because our viewers will know that the, the, the, the views that you're

00:26:06.100 espousing here are very, uh, antithetical to our views on this topic, which is what we love. Oh my

00:26:12.340 gosh. Which we love. So I want to get your thoughts on, on sort of what we teach on this subject, which

00:26:17.140 is to declare preemptive war on that, which is different to use to eventually declare war on that,

00:26:24.180 which is better than you. If we create, if we make humanity hostile to whether it's gene edited humans

00:26:31.300 or AI or anything like that, we create a mandate. If somebody does accidentally create one of these

00:26:38.020 things for this thing to come after us, because we've gone out and said, we cannot allow you to

00:26:42.980 exist because we see you as a threat. Do you feel that we potentially increase danger from these sources

00:26:50.900 by banning them instead of sort of entering all this, which is what we call it. The covenant of

00:26:56.020 man, anything created by man is allowed to exist by all other things created by man. So long as it

00:27:01.700 doesn't try to subjugate any other of the sons of man.

00:27:04.100 I think my view on this is hopefully if we do actually invent artificial super intelligences that

00:27:16.820 are smarter than us, that they will have really good insight into why we did a Butlerian Jihad, 0.66

00:27:24.580 into why we tried to ban them at least temporarily, into why we were extremely wary of embracing that,

00:27:31.300 that rate of technological progress, right? Hopefully they're at least as smart as, you know,

00:27:36.900 me or you or the other people worried about AI safety and they won't hold it against us,

00:27:42.900 right? That we were, that we were wary that they'll go, okay, fair enough. Like if we were in your

00:27:49.540 position, we would have had exactly the same risk aversion and caution and concern about extinction risk.

00:27:56.740 And, and we understand as AIs, hopefully the burden is on us as AIs to show that we're safe to you guys,

00:28:06.660 the humans.

00:28:08.900 Interesting take. Yeah. Very different. So for me, when I, when I look at this from my perspective,

00:28:14.020 you know, as somebody who's engaged in like genetic selection with their kids and stuff like that,

00:28:17.700 I look at older media, which I see as being very bigoted against these things like Star Trek,

00:28:22.340 right? Like it is so bizarre that in Star Trek, the gene selected humans, you know, Khan and his, 0.85

00:28:28.980 his group are just in intrinsically bad people for whatever reason, when you augment humans, 0.99

00:28:34.740 they just bad people. Same with if humans, you know, combined with AI, right? Like the board,

00:28:40.580 they just cannot understand human individuality, get rid of them all. And I, and I, and I engage with

00:28:46.420 these works and I'm like, wow, he had an enormous amount of prejudice, Gene Rottenberry and writing,

00:28:51.860 writing this, but you're hoping that the AI is more enlightened than someone like me and able to say,

00:28:57.380 no, no, no. I can understand why he would have this blinding prejudice every time he encounters

00:29:02.420 something different and potentially better, which might be the case. Yeah. I hope.

00:29:06.900 Yeah. So just to be clear, like I'm much more anti AI and wary of AI than of most biotechnology and

00:29:18.740 reproductive technology, right? So I have no problem with embryo selection and genomic engineering and

00:29:26.580 genetic testing and reproductive technology and IVF and surrogates and all that. That's all fine. You know,

00:29:32.500 whatever helps people get better babies and more babies, no problem. And the reason is the rate of

00:29:38.660 change that you can achieve with any foreseeable technology like that is actually still really

00:29:44.580 quite slow, right? We have no plausible way to genetically engineer people with brains like 10

00:29:52.100 times bigger than ours. Whereas we could easily build machines that run 10 times, a thousand times

00:29:59.220 faster than us. So there's kind of an intrinsic slowness technology as applied to humans that makes me

00:30:08.020 a lot less worried about it.

00:30:11.140 So actually, I want to ask you a question about this to see what your thoughts are. So one of the

00:30:14.660 companies Simone and I actually was the nonprofit foundation are looking at investing in right now

00:30:19.060 is a company that will allow gene changes in living adult humans. I didn't believe in the

00:30:25.540 technology when they first told it to me. Then we went through the mechanism of action. I've got a

00:30:28.820 background in science. It actually looks very plausible what they're doing. I'm wondering what you think

00:30:32.580 of this kind of technology, not intergenerational genetic alteration, but intragenerational genetic

00:30:38.580 alteration.

00:30:43.380 I think it's certainly feasible that you could have methods for doing that. I guess as somebody trained

00:30:52.100 pretty deeply in evolution and biology and evolution and genetics, I tend to be a little bit wary of

00:30:58.820 overhyped interventions where it's like we can maximize this trait and there are no side effects

00:31:08.580 on any other trait, right? Typically what you see with complex biological systems and genomic

00:31:13.860 regulatory networks is it's really, really hard to improve any given trait without having some

00:31:20.420 unanticipated side effects on lots and lots of other traits. So you have to be really, really careful

00:31:25.780 about how you test like the whole spectrum of stuff that could go wrong.

00:31:30.420 I really agree. This is why prisons are so useful. Well, I mean, if we're doing intergenerational

00:31:36.500 genetic selection and being able to instill specific genetic traits in a living individual to see how it

00:31:42.500 changes their behavior patterns using this sort of technology would be very interesting within some

00:31:47.540 of these more authoritarian government systems. Oh God.

00:31:52.340 Yeah. So from that point of view, like maybe the big progress will come out of China or

00:31:59.300 whatever. I would, I mean, I think, I think consent is important and I think, you know,

00:32:04.660 with these kinds of technologies, there's like, there's the marketing issues and the ethical issues and

00:32:10.340 then there's, does the tech actually work? And I think what you don't want is for the tech to be like

00:32:15.220 stigmatized by testing for side effects in like non-consenting populations. Okay.

00:32:22.500 Yeah. I don't know. I agree. You would need a massive cultural change for that to be an accepted

00:32:27.860 practice. But actually it's very interesting when you think about it from an ethical perspective,

00:32:31.940 because people might be looking at this and being like, what a horrifying thing to do. And it's like,

00:32:35.220 well, actually, if you look at things like IQ, which would be one of the things we'd be most interested

00:32:38.820 in, it is one of the things that is most correlated with rates of murder, like high IQ, very low rates

00:32:43.940 of murder, high IQ, very low rates of stealing, high IQ, very low rates of graping someone. And so

00:32:50.340 there would be a reason to test the technology within these populations, because in a way them

00:32:55.300 doing this stuff, isn't their fault. It's in part their genes, which we now potentially have the

00:33:02.020 technology to relieve them of. Yeah. So, you know, you could, you could maybe envision some kind of

00:33:10.020 prison intervention that makes people less likely to be committing crimes again, just by making them

00:33:18.660 smarter, right? Yeah. Or making them more conscientious or, or whatever. And I think that's...

00:33:24.100 And you could have an opt-in.

00:33:26.420 Yeah, you could, you could have an opt-in and, you know, more generally anybody who's sort of at risk of,

00:33:32.660 of, of doing bad stuff, you know, you could offer this kind of intervention and really ethically,

00:33:39.620 I don't think it's that different from campaigns to like reduce lead exposure, you know, to, to kids

00:33:46.500 to, to try to boost their IQ, or, you know, I'm quite involved in effective altruism and they have

00:33:51.380 a lot of interventions about trying to reduce like intestinal parasites or the effects of malaria or

00:33:57.060 other stuff that is known to reduce IQ, as well as hurting your health in, in lots of other ways.

00:34:03.300 And of course it's, it's ironic that a lot of the people who are most skeptical about IQ,

00:34:11.140 right? If you, if you say things like, yeah, but here's an intervention that can help reduce

00:34:15.940 lead exposure and boost IQ. They're like, oh, that's great, actually. Right.

00:34:20.340 To believe in IQ, as long as it's, it's associated with some intervention that protects, uh, kids from

00:34:27.700 IQ damaging environmental factors. Well, this has been a fantastic conversation. We loved having 0.91

00:34:34.260 you on and we would suggest that people check out your books and, uh, have a fantastic day.

00:34:40.100 Yes. Thank you so much. And also everyone check, you can basically see a jumping off point for a lot

00:34:46.340 of Jeffrey's work at primal poly.com. So please do check it out. He's also pretty active on Twitter.

00:34:52.580 Also under at primal poly, right? Yeah, that's right. Yeah. So please do. Yes. And thanks again, Jeffrey.

Based Camp - April 03, 2024

Evolutionary Psychology & Pronatalism with Dr. Geoffrey Miller

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