How Civilization Alters DNA： New Study
Episode Stats
Summary
In this episode, we discuss a new study and a write-up on the study by David Reich and his team, the pervasive findings of directional selection. They looked at the genetics of the European population and compared it to other populations throughout history. They found that the genetic correlates of various things we know have genetic correlates today, and how genetic correlates have changed throughout history, including how the genetics have changed over time.
Transcript
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hello simone this is going to be a spicy episode with a lot of data we are going to be talking
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about a study and a write-up on the study the study was called pervasive findings of directional
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selection realize the promise of ancient dna to elucidate human adaptation specifically they took
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8 433 corpses from a period that went from 14 000 years ago to to modern times and then 510
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contemporary people to develop baselines and they determined how much various things that we know
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have genetic correlates today how those genetic correlates changed throughout history wow we're
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going to be talking about things like intelligence earning potential schizophrenia potential
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ratio how white people were how because this was all done in the european population
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in an article that was bemoaning this called david reich vindicates corin and harpen's 10 000 year
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explosion they were bemoaning that they're like it's so funny that like you cannot do this sort
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of work even though we have tons and tons and tons of like native american skeletons and stuff like
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that or skeletons from different regions they're all like now like reburying them and stuff like
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destroying these historic artifacts because it's like oh this is all like western supremacy what it
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means is like nobody cares when you mess with like white people skeletons so that they with all these
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other skeletons they're just not going to have good data and we're destroying the data to know about
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ethnic minorities but we will know what happened with white people and one of the interesting things
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i guess i can go into first with some of the first graphs i shared with you simone if you go to
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whatsapp yeah white people being white is actually a fairly modern thing what okay historically we
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probably did not look that white specifically if you go 4 000 years ago or earlier a lot of the genes
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and and this is just like across genes here the so you can look at this in the first look at that
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yeah associate with whiteness or a darker skin color were just significantly more common and actually a
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big part of this happened in the last 2 000 years it was like like big spikes there and so the idea
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of for example jesus being black or dark-skinned may he was almost certainly more dark-skinned
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than the most dark-skinned europeans today all those morven jesus paintings don't really he was
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definitely not fair-skinned yes well very interesting though that that white skin is a fairly modern
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evolutionary phenomenon but one that has been regularly selected for since about 6 000 years ago
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huh interesting you also see a similar phenomenon here with hair yeah look at that so straight hair
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slash baldness increase so you've seen the hair within the european population becoming much much
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straighter over time you would have had hair or is that an offensive word here i do not know
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maybe we can say more textured hair more textured hair in a historic phenomenon and they they yeah
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the the but also baldness came along with this that is interesting are baldness and straight hair
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known to be correlated genetically the genetics that code for them are correlated yeah that is
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interesting all right the same was was a light hair this didn't start really getting selected for
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until about 4 000 years ago so we probably all had black hair similar to asians or africans before
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this that is interesting so like so pale blonde people are like these these new offshoot mutants and
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everyone else is yeah the norm genuinely new mutants that over a certain period of history became
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common because they out-competed other neighboring populations so body fat percentage i found really
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interesting if you're looking at this one here one is that in the past it looks like a few hundred
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years there has just been this really sharp rapid decline in the genetics we correlate with body fat
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percentage since industrialization so we're we're we're thinner now is am i reading this right i'm yeah
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now obviously this has changed if you look at the recent genetic data actually body fat percentage
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predictors alongside iq predictors are the two things that are most tied to the low fertility of
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a person like if i'm not iq but low educational attainment so low educational attainment and high
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body fat correlate to having lots of kids in the current context right but it looks like post the
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industrial revolution you had an opposite pressure and you had a very strong pressure as you can see here
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against body fat since the agricultural revolution from a period of about 10 000 to 8 000 years ago
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that is interesting it's hard for me to imagine a world in which we wouldn't be selecting for higher
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body fat why would we be selecting for leaner people is it perhaps that body fat gets in the way of
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agricultural collection i mean we would need to be leaner when we were hunting and corriger
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is granaries is really what you're seeing the first selection event is do the people have the
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capacity to survive the winter and other lean periods with stores of food like do they have
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in other words is is the is the food storage exogenous or endogenous is it outside the body or
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inside the body i see that's interesting okay that makes sense i think that that's likely also
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what we're seeing with the industrial revolution with canned foods and everything like that
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you're always better if you're trying to you know optimize for like the fitness and ability to do
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physical tasks of being very lean you don't want to keep a lot of this it's an expensive way to store
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your calories that's true yeah yeah i guess that there are the hazards and the downsides both from a
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constrained movement standpoint and from the health burdens but if you don't have a choice then you do
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need to store it that's very interesting wow right yeah and i also think here what what is causing us to
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be selecting for fatness now i think it's that basically within our current society the less
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wealth you are when you're in this desperate degree of poverty a certain degree of maladaptiveness to
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competing within our society leads to genetic fitness within this society i.e the ability to
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um so if you're the type of person who's living off of medicare or the government and staying at home
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24 7 you're just gonna have a lot more kids and you can see this in the data and so that's what ends
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up selecting for like high body fat again now that we have this pathologically caring society that just
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won't say well you know obviously they they are not you know we shouldn't be supporting somebody who is
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so fat that they've grown into their bed you know anyway so we'll go to the next one here waist to hip
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ratio i found really interesting so it was waist to hip ratio you can see it going down over time
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but the big drop in waist to hip ratio happened with the agricultural revolution where it basically
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went down to about a third of what it used to maybe even like a tenth of what it used to be
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and then back up for a period so that's so interesting because i the thing i immediately
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think of are those venus statues that have yes and they they've got the huge weight to hip ratio
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quite sizable hips and fat yes they were fat and excited and this checks out now well they were
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they may not be as cartoony as we imagine them to be today yeah they may have been describing what
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women actually looked like or the idealized or high status woman yeah which was and another thing
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about the venus statues which i've noticed and i hadn't noticed before now that you mentioned this
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is even the european ones had like i don't know what to call it african style hair i'm trying to find
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a lot of them having heads they mostly did not have heads no no many of them had uh like a heads was
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like it it almost looks like like really um little like grown-in micro dreads is i guess what i'd call
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it oh interesting which was probably common in the europeans at the time and i'd also note that a lot
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of the venus statues are done on darker stone which may have been intentional they they may have just
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been depicting yeah because everyone had darker skin yeah yeah yeah yeah and so the the guys who like
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the big waist to hip ratio they are primeval men you could say now why did this change happen it
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might have been due to survival rates of wives after like basically level of medical technology
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where it's okay to risk a woman's wife in childbirth it makes her more because somebody with these really
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wide hips it causes problems in humans walking that's the core reason why our hips shrunk oh yeah i guess
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because men men don't have wide hips so basically if you don't need to give birth to children
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there seems to be no reason to have very wide hips i mean we risk the child and the mother's wife
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with our smaller narrow hips yeah yes and this was something that we evolved out of after you know
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descending from the trees but what was the real pressure that caused this and when we say medical
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technology people would be like what sort of medical technology coincides with the invention of
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farming right and this is and i think it's what many people real like the the ability to stay in one
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place with somebody who is injured and bring them water and food like you may not see that as a the
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miraculous medical technology that's a pretty big medical technology to somebody who's just undergone
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a very difficult pregnancy can they rest for two weeks in one location and and that is it appears to
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be what led to the reduction here interesting right that is fascinating any thoughts before i go further
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on any of this no i want to hear more now we're getting into some really spicy stuff bipolar disorder
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so bipolar disorder you see go down a ton in the early agricultural period just continue to go down
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until modern times was this accelerating yeah what's going on why why would there be more bipolar people
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in the past i'm assuming like manic periods are really good for food storage i'm pulling here i'm
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assuming the risky decision making led to higher amounts of pregnancy or or or because you know maybe
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there were more expendable people in a population at least some of them were going to make risky bets
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it really paid off high risk high reward yeah so that could be it well i mean a high risk is running
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away with somebody starting a new tribe having way too many kids you know yeah all of those things may
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have been rewarded historically now it also might be tied to bipolar's correlation to schizophrenia so you
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could which also went down over time that's so interesting but i see that more as like oh maybe
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schizophrenic people in the past had more of a role in society because they were seen as spiritual
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leaders they heard voices they saw things no i think that's absolutely what we're seeing here is
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historically speaking schizophrenic people were spiritual leaders and the currently schizophrenic
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there's just like almost no advantage right now i think to having a ton of schizophrenia um
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maybe a better ability to read other people if you have like prodromal levels of it i.e.
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prodromal levels of the genetic precursors whereas the opposite of schizophrenia you can see
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our autism versus schizophrenia what actually causes this video where i go into as somebody
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who studied these spaces as a scientist as a neuroscientist somebody got so mad about that
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video when i argued that they're essentially opposites they're like you need to take this down
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this narrative this is malpractice this is but anyway the that particular video we we argue that these
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things are genetically like very distant from each other and might actually be opposites in in like a
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really high theory of mind and a very low theory of mind now i have a different understanding of
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autism which is autism is partially a low theory of mind but it's mostly caused by genetic by neural
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density in certain regions which we'll do a separate episode on when one of our fans sends
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us i told him to email us the piece that he did on this because it was really good but i just didn't
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put up my notes because it's like he's gonna email it to us anyway but it causes hypersensitization
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really easily so if you're in any sort of environment where you have a lot of stimuli you're going to do
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very badly and you're going to need to separate yourself from that and you're not going to fully
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process everything but you're able to process narrow bands of stimuli much better and longer and with less
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burnout and that this is hyper optimized for the online world to the extent where like again my wife is
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diagnosed autistic my kids are diagnosed autistic i will say i think a few things are are called
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autism right now but i think that one of the things we call autism whatever the thing is that you have
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and elon has and a lot of other like really successful people have is like the most optimized
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iteration of the human condition right now for the online environment and the the work at home environment
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that that's created and i think when we joke about like at the
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prenatalist convention a really disproportionate of autistic people like are autists going to replace
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other people i don't know but i could see that happening with schizophrenics being less and less
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useful in our current population and we can see the downsides to this you know i've pointed out where
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i would point out simone on like one side of like the extreme autism spectrum and i might be in the
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middle if you go to the side of me on the schizophrenia spectrum you're going to get like a ruby yard
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type character who i really really really respect as an intellectual but i think we can see the
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negative consequences which can come from having like basically telling your ai ai to creativity max
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every decision they're making it's going to lead to some interesting ideas you hadn't thought of
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but it's going to also lead to some very poor decisions occasionally which shows why that's selected
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against in modern times and i note here that i don't even see what happened with him as that big
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of a deal i mean first you've got to remember ruby yard's like 23 he's basically a kid like imagine if
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every bad ayahuasca trip you ever took at 23 was videotaped for the entire internet to see with a lot
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of this is just like oh we caught a kid doing kid like things like somebody like pearl davis right like
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pearl davis is a kid okay she she makes the types of mistakes that kids make when they're exploring
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the boundaries of what's normal i'd actually say that i'm actually disconcerted by the young
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influencers who don't make these kinds of mistakes like brett cooper like it's weird that brett cooper
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never accidentally pushes things too far so in a way i find this stuff uh humanizing to the young
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influencers who make the types of mistakes i would have made if i had this level of no or notoriety
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at their age in fact i'd go farther and find it shocking that he hasn't gotten involved in more
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scandals i just ask you to think if you were 23 and had half a million people watching like almost
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every video that you're uploading would would you not push it too hard and flirting with some of your
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fans would you not you know is there no boundary that you would cross how is this is the only time
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he's really fucked up and and overcrossed a boundary how is the only boundary that he's crossed the very
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boundary that people show up to his his show for which is drawing insane connections between things
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and out there ideas i mean that's what you signed up for if you're following him but i i think the greater
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replacement theory has a lot more weight than other people might want to feel comfortable might feel
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comfortable admitting with the autist replacing yeah i mean it's just hyper-optimized if you're in an
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interview cast within today's well i just i love this idea too of having a lot of kids being a lot of
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autists new special interests i am here for that well here's one that you're going to find really
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interesting is walking pace yes why would why would we why would we start walking faster i mean i guess
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this this i would assume there is no point to energy conservation in an industrialized society
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and little point to energy conservation in a uh society once you have agriculture okay so this is
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about energy conservation that makes a lot more sense and you can see like me i'm hyper on walking
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to speed like just everything i remember thinking as a kid like why don't people run out everywhere
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and i and i did that for a long time just whenever i have to go places that i always run because i
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really go out why wouldn't you run it's faster it's healthy you know and you have to go between two
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locations just run um yeah and your family constantly harringing you about the fact you're constantly
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like twitching and fidgeting and that ultimately burning calories burning calories yeah yeah
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now this next one is one of the most controversial from this but i found it really interesting is
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intelligence you can see a huge spike of intelligence post agriculture and all this i just feel like is
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humans optimizing more i mean i would expect on on average for humans to to broadly get more fit over
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time because you have more time to select for stuff that is more competitive and intelligence seems to be
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one of those things that is broadly more competitive is that what you think is not you
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have something else well no it's about calorie conservation again intelligence is actually really
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calorie heavy and so once you have the calories to begin optimizing around intelligence and i also
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think intelligence is more useful to you know if you're a hunter-gatherer people you just have to be
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good at catching the prey right you know and spending less calories than your neighbor and calorie
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conservation is really important to hunter-gatherers in a way that i do not think that people really
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think through just how you know you don't get the game that week you may eat once a week you know at
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times you may eat once a month at times right like you need to be able to be that snake if you want
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to survive especially in the winter when you don't have full food preservation methods and stuff like that
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so it made sense to really uh be restrictive on this stuff where as soon as we became sedentary and
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farming intelligence allowed you to for example in business interactions in local politics you know
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begin interacting in these large groups to outcompete your rivals and here i'd note that what does this
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mean about groups that didn't develop farming sorry i didn't ask that question i'm just saying if there
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were any groups what conclusions could we draw from europeans before they developed farming
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um which is okay now i hear this good controversial but i guess one one theme that you're pointing out
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here that i didn't think was going to be the theme was basically what effect does the presence of
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agriculture or civilization in general have on our genetics and it seems to be more about energy
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conservation and where we store our energy and less about a bunch of other factors that i would generally
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expect like if you'd ask me to make predictions around the trends that we're showing i would
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expect to just see okay in general people are getting smarter and more healthy and more fit and
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instead it is more like humans are adapting to their environment and they are living now in an
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environment that has exogenous food storage an environment where they don't need to conserve energy
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as much and they have to compete on other factors and that is really interesting because
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we can start asking questions about what our future environment is going to put in terms of
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selective pressures on us and how we're going to change in the future because of that
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yes now the next one very spicy as well as household income so this is what's correlated so these are the
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genetic correlates to household income within a 24th century environment obviously we don't know if these
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had the same correlation to whatever the equivalent of household income would have been 6 000 10 000
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years ago well actually i think we can see by this and we do know we do know that they were less
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correlated with this they were less correlated with genetic success historically uh because they
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began to become selected for more and more recently and what's really interesting here is you see
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basically after the fall of rome do you see the big dip in this so after the fall of rome they began
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to have genetic selection for whatever the inverse of of yeah yeah and you see this that showed up in
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kirkegaard's research as well when they were looking wasn't it kirkegaard or was it someone else when
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they're looking at polygenic risk scores adjacent to educational attainment and found that around the fall of rome
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that dropped so that this this is showing up in other people's research as well as you can sort of
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genetically exhaust a population and create an environment why the fall of rome matters is because
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there's a lot of analogs to the fall of rome and the genetic effects that may have been had at the
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peak of roman civilization in our current civilization of the you know the wealthy or elite cast having very
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very few kids because they can just indulge in the pleasures of this world instead of focusing
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on the next generation or society or any sort of true moral good you'll also notice a drop in
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walking pace after the fall of the roman empire hold on i want to look did we get a drop in whiteness
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no didn't affect pigmentation interesting now where the fall of the roman empire was really big in its
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effects is the genetic correlates to being a current smoker yeah this just seems out of left field why
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were they looking at this i mean is does it have to do oral fixations that people have or the need
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for stimulation i imagine it's it's it's addiction to specific pathways my family for example has a
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lot of addictive tendencies but not to smoking naltrexone does not work on smoking it's a unique
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addictive pathway something about this pathway was very advantageous in times of difficulty you see it
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shooting up after the fall of the roman empire and you see it shooting up you know when some
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groups are beginning to develop agriculture but before they all had which is really interesting
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pattern here i'd also note that with schizophrenia we also see a big jump in the schizophrenia genes was
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the fall of the roman empire which is interesting yeah i feel like super soft religion to your point
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right sorry i realize this requires some context so super soft religion what she's talking about here
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is in the pragmat described to crafting religion we describe religions existing on a spectrum from
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hard to soft where a hard religion is you know has a strict dress code maybe even has a different
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language associated with it has a very large differentiators from the rest of society and a lot
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of very strict rules whereas softer religions would be something like unitarian universalism would be a
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great example of a soft religion or reformed judaism would be a soft religion now a
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super soft religion is a very specific religion so super soft is what we argue happens when you drain
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all of the religion out of a pool and you basically are looking at the pre-evolved religious instincts
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in humans where you'll get fetish worship and by this i don't mean like sexual fetishes i mean like
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figures that you assign spiritual value to you begin to categorize people very similar to uh star signs
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stuff like that you begin to basically modern wiccanism is very similar to a super soft religion
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but these will reappear whenever you drain the built-up religious foundation of a region and look at
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what's underneath that ocean and we saw a period of flourishing super soft religions after the collapse
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of the roman empire and as i suppose should be obvious people will assume of somebody seeing visions and
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they're of a super soft religion that that person has access to some sort of extra degree of truth
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that other people do not have access to and so they will elevate people with schizophrenia or schizophrenia
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related symptoms to higher social status allowing these genes to be adaptive rather than maladaptive
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whereas we are currently i think civilizationally moving into a period where people who have fallen for
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super soft religions are having virtually no children and the only people who can really
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motivate reproduction are those who are incredibly mentally disciplined and ignore random errant mental
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signals of the type that are associated with schizophrenia yeah and now to the final one here years of
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schooling or educational attainment so you see here it goes up a ton with the agricultural revolution then
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continues to go up and then you get the collapse in it as the fall of the roman empire
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and then you get it rising again in modern times now no all of these things intelligence
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years of schooling all this are declining in their genetic pool like all of these markers right here we can
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look at how many people these kids these people are having and they're declining dramatically
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if you look at our video of is an integrocracy possible we're likely looking at a one standard deviation decline
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in things like iq was in just the next 75 years so dramatic dramatic dramatic but historically they've
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been going up and there was this narrative which i you know i kind of believed it i was like
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is it true that people become sort of civilized and the civilizing forces tame them and leave them impotent
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right because historically whenever people like blew up onto the stage they typically came from a
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population that civilization hadn't overly molested yet but you know whether they are the arabs with
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the islamic revolution or the vikings or the well the original romans or the like the people like what
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the romans didn't you've read the greek and and miss and the you know the miss from the uh middle east and
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the miss from the nobody was talking about what was going on freaking rome back then it was like a
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total barbarian backwater place or the macedonians coming out of a backwater place it seemed to me that
00:27:00.860
genetic fitness was hampered by civilization which the rome timeline here could be arguing but i actually
00:27:08.460
noticed that a lot of the hits from rome well they seem to start a bit before 2000 years ago so a bit
00:27:15.340
before the time of christ so yeah it does seem that like the ultra bureaucracy of rome ended up
00:27:20.460
with a collapse of a lot of the a lot of dysgenic collapse here and i love when people are feeling
00:27:25.740
like oh that's so arrogant to say it's dysgenic because it was eugenic was in that particular
00:27:32.540
context and i can mean well yeah but like it's obviously dysgenic in a broader world context like
00:27:40.220
you know you can be like oh when the bunnies have no natural parasites it is eugenic to become bigger
00:27:46.300
culture cancerous blobs that have no you know it's like yeah but the moment a predator comes in they're
00:27:52.220
all going to go extinct that that adapted those genes so thoughts simone i'm a little concerned about
00:27:59.660
where we are in society now then i mean if we're talking about generally not healthy things being more
00:28:06.700
likely to be prevalent in future populations but where we are with science means that we can
00:28:14.620
intervene yeah with anything from germline germline editing to pgtp so maybe i'm not so worried i don't
00:28:22.220
know but that is interesting yeah i mean hopefully hopefully we can fix this before the you know
00:28:29.900
civilization falls off a cliff here well yeah i mean theoretically relatively soon we can just edit
00:28:38.140
out baldness we can just edit out predisposition to be unhealthily overweight predisposition to be
00:28:45.500
addicted to smoking predisposition to have damaging low levels of intelligence etc yeah by the way an
00:28:54.460
interesting one here is over 6 000 years blood type b also exploded in commonality huh yeah what's
00:29:01.900
going on there it's not like anyone was doing well it has to do something probably some disease risk
00:29:07.660
but here's a fun one you're talking about editing genes that's one of the things that people are like
00:29:12.060
what sort of things is the hardy a foundation if i was going to donate money to this foundation what
00:29:17.020
sort of things are you investing in one of the things that we have already funded is a project
00:29:22.540
designed to edit adult human dna so whether you want to invest in that project you can let us know
00:29:29.100
and we can connect you with the team or and i think it's one of the more competent efforts right
00:29:32.940
now there's a number of efforts and we're aware of them and we invested in this one because we think
00:29:36.220
it's one of the most likely to be promising i think we might be actually invested in two companies
00:29:41.180
doing that with the non-profit but point being is we are trying to make this stuff a reality
00:29:47.100
not just talking about making it a reality and hardy a.org by the way
00:29:53.420
yeah that stuff matters we have to rise above it it is clear especially given how i think plausible
00:30:02.060
your theories are around these different tendencies and traits arising mostly reactively in response to
00:30:10.300
our environments that again like you say in the pragmatist guide to crafting religion and in other
00:30:17.500
books of ours that that um evolution is a a lazy or dumb programmer like it's it's not it's going to
00:30:23.740
reuse stuff it's not going to be very efficient or intentional about anything we should be intentional
00:30:29.900
about it we should be yeah thinking thoughtfully what not what will the future shape us to be but what
00:30:37.420
do we want to be what should we be and in the discussion of things like germline editing and
00:30:44.060
designer babies and polygenic risk score selection there's a lot of discussion about oh won't it be
00:30:49.660
terrible if people select for this or that and people make a lot of assumptions around what we what
00:30:55.580
people will select for but i don't think people are having a lot of very productive conversations about what
00:31:00.940
people should or likely will be selecting for there are concerns people are going to select for only
00:31:07.980
super intelligence and height and aggression and
00:31:12.780
sort of specials in scott westerfield's ugly series just these like terrifying strong
00:31:19.740
sociopathic superhuman i mean we will be but you know obviously that's our thing but
00:31:25.820
but like jonathan anomaly has found in his research people are primarily selecting for
00:31:30.700
kindness pro-sociality and i mean intelligence certainly correlates with that but that's also
00:31:35.020
because you know intelligence correlates with higher health whether that be because it's tied to those
00:31:41.020
things just in general or because also intelligent people are more conscientious more likely to go
00:31:47.100
you know brush their teeth every night and go to doctor checkups and try to eat healthy foods
00:31:51.660
so there's actually a research that i found last night that i was reviewing that was going over
00:31:57.420
basically that rationality and intelligence are extremely correlated if someone behaves rationally
00:32:03.340
it is it is probably because they are very intelligent so yeah i mean people should be selecting for
00:32:10.700
intelligence but people are also going to be selecting for kindness and pro-sociality and all these things
00:32:14.620
in the end are connected so if someone just wanted someone who was super kind they were probably going to
00:32:18.540
end up with one of their more intelligent or a more intelligent human anyway it's just kind of going
00:32:24.620
to work out that way but yeah i i don't know i i would rather we take ownership of what we want
00:32:33.740
rather than reactively become things just because you humanity is next to a refrigerator now or now that
00:32:42.220
humanity has smart and this is a great thing about them being like well that's not really eugenic whatever
00:32:47.100
wins in the moment is eugenic and i what i would say is okay your population can take that hypothesis
00:32:53.260
and our population will take the hypothesis that eventually these things will be eugenic
00:32:57.980
and we'll see in a thousand years which population ends up going to the stars and which one returns to
00:33:04.380
the woods you know like it's it doesn't take a big you don't have to be big brain to see where this
00:33:09.740
is heading long term if you take this incredibly lackadaisical approach to something that i think that we
00:33:15.820
really now that we have the capacity to have a responsibility to take responsibility for
00:33:22.540
yeah rise above people we don't have to be animals well anyway love you did us simone what are we doing
00:33:31.900
for dinner tonight i was going to saute some onions and add some of the slow cooker meat that we have
00:33:39.900
sort of saved add that to coconut rice and could you cook that with coconut milk and penang
00:33:48.780
i can remember to mix up the penang in the coconut coconut milk before i add anything else i can do that
00:33:57.340
do you still want sauteed onion and if so do you want ribbons that sauteed i'm okay if the onion adds a
00:34:05.100
bit of crunch like onion is not something you need to go overboard about making sure it's cooked
00:34:10.140
if you're doing caramelized onion yes but no like nobody and this is the big the conspiracy of
00:34:14.940
caramelized onion it's something i've gone on about before but people need to know it takes 30 minutes
00:34:19.980
to caramelize any recipe that tells you you're caramelizing an onion before 30 minutes is just
00:34:25.740
creating a soggy well anyway okay so you want lightly sauteed onion added to the the meat and coconut
00:34:34.780
milk after the penang is fully dissolved within it do you want ribbons or confetti for onion ribbon
00:34:42.300
confetti confetti okay cool all right well then i will get that started i love you so much
00:34:48.380
and i'll see you as a reminder everyone please don't miss natal con this march in austin it is
00:34:57.500
going to be amazing we're going to be there a lot of really incredible cool people are going to be there
00:35:03.340
and you can get a 10 discount on your registration by entering the word collins at checkout all right
00:35:11.980
anything you learned today simone actually i thought this was really interesting because it's
00:35:16.700
this is relevant from the perspective of where culture and religion has an impact that actually
00:35:22.140
matters so there's a preprint i don't know how they actually pronounce their name but it's titled
00:35:28.780
the freedom to believe in free will evidence from an adoption study against the first law of behavioral
00:35:33.900
genetics so as you and i know and most of our listeners know most most of the things that we do and
00:35:41.340
believe end up being really heritable yeah somebody thought we were blank slatist in in the in the
00:35:47.020
discord that's like wild that is from the truth possible we acknowledge that we are definitely not
00:35:53.340
blank slatists and most research has found most of the stuff people end up doing is really heritable
00:35:59.420
when you when you separate twins at birth i understand what he meant by that oh yeah well yeah so i think
00:36:06.540
that some hbd bros are so obsessed with ethnic non-blank slatism oh they are confused when
00:36:14.460
somebody isn't an ethnocentrist non-blank slatus that's interesting anyway what this research found
00:36:22.220
was one of the few things that is not genetically determined is at very best very very weakly correlated
00:36:28.860
to our genetics is belief in free will so the context and culture in which you're raised the religion
00:36:34.300
in which you're raised is going to affect your belief in free will and um predetermination and i
00:36:41.500
think something you can extrapolate from that too is i think to a certain extent that will affect your
00:36:48.300
internal or external locus of control and it means that religion and culture really does matter from
00:36:53.500
that perspective because you're the way that you contextualize and believe in and think about things
00:36:59.580
like free will predetermination and your role in the larger universe really does affect your
00:37:04.780
action uh regardless of other things that you could have calvinist cultural clusters uh which
00:37:10.140
believes in predestination and some people see that as invalidating free will is you could have cultural
00:37:15.420
clusters where individuals who lived alongside these communities and they often lived alongside different
00:37:19.900
christian factions would disproportionately convert to the community where people who didn't have this
00:37:23.900
genetic cluster would disproportionately convert out which can lead to a genetic vortex really quickly really
00:37:29.180
really strengthening a view like this which i think is why some people like us find it so easy to hold
00:37:36.300
views around predestination where other people who haven't been through this genetic washing machine
00:37:41.260
around this find it to be so absolutely perplexing um and difficult to engage with as a concept
00:37:49.020
yeah very interesting well so here's what he said i thought was interesting so one of our most hated
00:37:53.820
episodes ever we did today did you get to the comments by the way no that's gonna have to be tonight
00:37:58.380
thing it turns out okay well anyway it was the h1bp third episode and i did not expect i thought like
00:38:05.580
people knew our stance on this like i've been like we've signaled this many times but what i've come to
00:38:10.620
realize is the real reason why this is so spicy because like our audience is like the tech right right you
00:38:17.340
know like it's it's not like you know and that video only had an 80 upvote ratio which is very low for us we
00:38:24.540
almost never break below 90 percent yeah and a normal is like 97 to 95 of them so and we do
00:38:30.860
controversial topics too you know so this was like why why and then i got it i was like oh my god when
00:38:36.620
i was talking about this h1b visas seem like the smartest thing ever if you are a tech right elite
00:38:44.620
i.e you are you are a vc or you run a company but if you are a tech right rank and file you are it's
00:38:55.660
literally about your job and your income yeah but because the tech right sorts it's sort of like who
00:39:03.260
you're going to hear from in the movement based on their proven competency at building and running
00:39:09.020
companies the ones with the pro h1bd visa are the ones you're going to hear from where all of the
00:39:14.700
masses like on twitter or among our fans are going to be the ones who are predominantly affected by this
00:39:20.460
that's rich because what i've seen a lot of people on twitter talking about is well that we also need
00:39:26.700
low-skilled workers too who's gonna you know i can't do my job as a tech worker if there isn't some
00:39:33.660
nanny to watch my kids and i need an immigrant to do that work and they're just they just want
00:39:41.340
someone else's job to be taken it seems like they i don't know i honestly think that when it comes to
00:39:46.380
a lot of the domestic work or whatever like unwanted jobs that people want immigrants to complete
00:39:55.180
i'm more of the mind that either you should be doing that yourself or you should be doing that
00:39:59.820
domestically leaving that for low-skilled people in the united states because we've taken all those
00:40:04.860
jobs away and i'm i'm much more of the mind that we really need to bring in high-skilled high-tax paying
00:40:13.500
i don't know i'm actually moderating my views on this in response to the comments because they're like
00:40:18.140
like you've got to look into how many of these people are lowering the price that you would pay to
00:40:23.580
american coders but here i wonder if that's really true you know like large bureaucratic forms it
00:40:31.660
probably is whereas like for us like we hire our coding teams in africa you know like i'm like why
00:40:36.620
not just outsource entirely right you know their living costs are in africa but the thing i was going
00:40:44.220
to ask you or no the other thing he mentioned which i thought was really big for me is he was pointing
00:40:50.060
out and like i didn't realize this but it's totally true is it was in like the center of the trans
00:40:55.260
community they've already accepted that this is mostly a social phenomenon and this happened with
00:41:01.900
the fight between the two cutes and the true scums and we'll do a separate episode on this but the
00:41:07.820
true scums were the ones who wanted to medicalize transness and the two cutes were the ones who say no
00:41:11.580
anyone who chooses to be trans can choose to be trans okay and i was like oh that's really true i do
00:41:19.820
remember that fight but i hadn't contextualized it as them accepting that this is a social phenomenon
00:41:24.940
and then or i realized and he was pointing out to me he goes yeah but also what this creates is a
00:41:31.420
phenomenon in which the two cutes who ended up winning you you can't have something like transness
00:41:38.780
where you can't actively talk about targeting someone for recruitment like this idea of an egg and
00:41:44.220
then potentially recruiting them and you're not doing that you know if you if you believe that this is
00:41:49.340
all biological you're not going to target people for recruitment in the same way because you're
00:41:52.700
going to think well they'll come to it if you know but if you're you're going to go out there
00:41:56.540
and basically hunt for people and you can you can see this in their internal message boards
00:42:00.780
it makes a lot of sense and i was like yeah actually that's that's true that's going to grow
00:42:04.540
much faster as a movement than the iterations that denied that like you can really convert anyone
00:42:09.660
who's socially isolated and autistic if you try hard enough hmm oh that's fascinating all right
00:42:14.700
okay i don't like our talks all right all right let's go whoa what did you make here
00:42:20.540
oh that's your fire exit in case there's a fire yeah hey you're breaking it oh dear