In this episode, Dr. Randy Thornhill and Dr. Michaela Peterson discuss Dr. Thornhill's findings on the characteristics of attractiveness, as well as other subjects like cryptic female choice, asymmetry, and kerotenoid pigments, in regards to the perception of beauty and sexual selection in animals and humans. Dr. Thornehill is an American entomologist and evolutionary biologist. He s authored and co-authored about 250 scientific publications, and his work has been cited over 35,000 times. With decades of experience helping patients with depression and anxiety, Dr Jordan B. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way, and a roadmap towards healing. In his new series, "Daily Wire Plus," Dr. Peterson provides a roadmap toward healing, showing that while the journey isn't easy, it s absolutely possible to find your way forward. If you re suffering, please know you are not alone. There s hope, and there s a path to feeling better. Go to Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. B.B. Peterson on Depression and Anxiety. Let s take the first step towards the brighter future you deserve. This episode was recorded on May 10, 2021. This is Season 4, Episode 38. This is a season finale of Season 4 Episode 38, "My Dad's Joined by Dr. Randal Thornhill." Dr. Lynda Peterson is a distinguished professor of Biology Emeritus at the University of New Mexico, and is a founder of the research disciplines of behavioral ecology, evolutionary psychology, evolutionary aesthetics, and evolutionary aesthetics. She is an expert in the study of the experience of beauty, psychology, and human behavior and the modern study of sexual coercion, and she is a leading researcher in the field of psychological behavior. She is a pioneer in the modern evolutionary aesthetics and evolutionary ecology, and her work is widely known throughout the scientific literature. Her work is highly appreciated by the scientific community, and has been described in the scientific press. . This episode is a must-listen-to-be-listens-listenergies, not only by her peers, but also by her family and by her friends and colleagues. , and , and her blog post on her own blog posts on the book, "The Experience of Beauty: A Guide to Beauty and Attractiveness: A Handbook of Beauty and Sexual Selection: How to Find Your True Calling in the Human Experience.
00:00:00.940Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.
00:00:06.480Dr. Jordan Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety.
00:00:12.740We know how isolating and overwhelming these conditions can be, and we wanted to take a moment to reach out to those listening who may be struggling.
00:00:20.100With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way in his new series.
00:00:27.420He provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that while the journey isn't easy, it's absolutely possible to find your way forward.
00:00:35.360If you're suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better.
00:00:41.800Go to Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. Jordan B. Peterson on depression and anxiety.
00:00:47.460Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve.
00:00:51.040Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson podcast. I'm Michaela Peterson.
00:00:58.040This is season four, episode 38. This episode was recorded on May 10th, 2021.
00:01:04.380In this episode, my dad's joined by Dr. Randy Thornhill.
00:01:08.540Dr. Thornhill is an American entomologist and evolutionary biologist.
00:01:13.020He's authored and co-authored about 250 scientific publications, and his work has been cited over 35,000 times.
00:01:22.120Dad and Dr. Thornhill discuss Dr. Thornhill's findings on attractiveness, as well as other subjects like cryptic female choice, symmetry, kerotenoid pigments, and the characteristics of attractiveness.
00:01:37.440I hope you enjoy this episode and enjoy your week.
00:01:43.020Hello, everybody. I'm pleased to have with me today one of the world's great biologists, Dr. Randy Thornhill.
00:02:06.080He's an evolutionary biologist and distinguished professor of biology emeritus at the University of New Mexico, with a primary interest in animal behavior and psychology, as well as human behavior and psychology.
00:02:19.140Dr. Thornhill and his colleagues have authored or co-authored about 250 scientific publications, including four research monographs or books.
00:02:28.320His publications have been cited in the scientific literature more than 35,000 times.
00:02:33.720A citation score is the number of times a reference to a given piece of research is cited by another researcher or in another publication by the same author.
00:02:44.160A scientific citation count in the tens of thousands clearly indicates that a researcher occupies a position in the upper echelons of scientific influence.
00:02:52.980Dr. Thornhill is a founder of the research disciplines of behavioral ecology, evolutionary psychology, evolutionary aesthetics, that's the study of the experience of beauty from an evolutionary perspective, evolution and human behavior, the modern study of adaptation, and the study of sexual coercion.
00:03:13.400Dr. Thornhill, thank you very much for agreeing to talk to me today.
00:03:16.680Dr. Thornhill, thank you for inviting me. Pleasure to be here.
00:03:19.940Thank you. Thank you. So I've come across your research a number of times in my career, struck by its originality and its impact.
00:03:30.160I'd like to ask you first about something I probably ran into, maybe it's 20 years ago, maybe it's 15, something like that.
00:03:36.880You did some work on the perception of attractiveness, bilateral symmetry, averageness and sexual selection.
00:03:44.360Can you outline what you found and why?
00:03:48.020Yes. I did work some years ago now in human attractiveness, and that turned out to be very productive about attractiveness in general in animals.
00:04:04.420And one of the key traits that animals look at in judging physical attractiveness of partners, of mates, is bilateral symmetry.
00:04:19.420And a colleague and I, in the early 90s, came up with a way to measure facial symmetry in humans.
00:04:28.900It had been worked on before, but the measurements that they used didn't work.
00:04:36.640So we came up with a method that did work, measuring bilateral symmetry in the face.
00:04:41.580So that is the symmetry of the two sides of the face.
00:04:45.100Why is that important, and why is it a marker for attractiveness?
00:04:47.420It turns out that bilateral symmetry is a measure of developmental health.
00:04:54.120And so the organism, when it starts developing, it's designed by evolution, by selection, to achieve a bilaterally symmetric form.
00:05:09.500You can think of that, this is the case, when I say organisms, I mean all forward-moving organisms.
00:05:15.580All forward-moving organisms have adaptations, developmental adaptations, to achieve a bilaterally symmetric body because, first of all, that reduces drag.
00:05:30.540So if you're moving forward and you're bilaterally symmetric, you don't have any drag in your movement.
00:05:38.300You can think about a person with a leg a bit shorter than the other, and there's drag in the forward movement.
00:05:45.660The more of that asymmetry, the more drag.
00:06:38.080Think about it that way in driving down the road with an asymmetric car.
00:06:44.060But so this is one component of physical attractiveness, bilateral symmetry.
00:06:49.880And we looked first when we developed this way to measure facial symmetry.
00:06:56.860That became a very hot research topic.
00:07:00.540We did the first, and then others followed very quickly.
00:07:03.460Lots and lots of research has been done now.
00:07:07.340But there's, you know, symmetry of movement that's important in how fluid one's movement is and how attractive, therefore, one's movement is.
00:07:16.340You're not dragging your foot or whatever.
00:07:19.260And all that is really a component of the importance of health in physical attractiveness.
00:07:27.800So physical attractiveness fundamentally is a health certification.
00:07:33.460That's how we judge people's attractiveness.
00:08:19.280And so does it mean that if you show people symmetrical or asymmetrical faces that they obviously have a preference for the symmetrical faces?
00:08:27.440Will they look longer at the symmetrical faces?
00:08:29.960Will infants look longer at symmetrical faces?
00:08:33.980That's the way the infant beauty research is done.
00:08:37.380You just look at whether the baby, and they got it down now to almost newborns, you know, looking at faces and judging these faces, basically, on the basis of interest.
00:08:50.520How long they look at the face versus getting distracted to something else.
00:08:55.240And symmetry is one part of the beauty, whether you're talking about babies or kids or old people or young people or whatever.
00:09:16.780That research went on to look at how symmetry plays out in the everyday lives of people.
00:09:24.280And we did the initial studies on that.
00:09:26.920But again, that research bloomed and lots of people have done it and still it's an active part of research.
00:09:36.040But the first thing we did, not just attractiveness, we did a bunch of that in relation to symmetry, but we looked at the sex lives of people, romantically paired people, studies of couples, and looked at reports by men and women of sex partner numbers they've had in their lifetime.
00:10:02.180That was one component of them, because that's a measure in men in particular of what biologists call mating success.
00:10:12.180So a number of number of sexual partners one has and that that research showed that for men, the more symmetric the man, the more sex partners he had and a technical tale there after we, you know, initially started with facial symmetry.
00:10:32.500But then we moved to the body of people, we came up with a metric for body symmetry, measuring 11 traits on both sides of the body.
00:10:43.500These traits are ear length and then we measure elbow, there's elbow anatomy there that we measure some bones, wrists, fingers, all those men measured, of course, on both sides, measure foot width, ankle width, traits like that.
00:11:04.500And then we put that together in a composite as a measure of body bilateral symmetry, that correlates highly with facial symmetry, because the symmetry is a developmental health measure throughout the body.
00:11:18.500And that correlates with mating success of men, more symmetric men are physically more attractive, and they have more sex partners.
00:11:28.500We also got into looking at men's infidelities in their relationships and found that more symmetric men engage in more matings outside the pair bond as well.
00:11:42.500So that's part of their mating success.
00:11:45.500We did the first study of a kind of modern study, we would call it, of female orgasm in copulatory orgasm.
00:11:59.500So in part, looking at women, 200 romantically paired couples, and asking the women about their orgasm patterns during mating with their partner, and separately asking the men.
00:12:14.500And we found that the men's reports and the women's reports of frequency of copulatory orgasm by the women were very highly correlated.
00:12:23.500So men are paying attention to this phenomenon of whether the female is sexually aroused to the zenith level of orgasm, of course.
00:12:32.500And more symmetric men were firing more copulatory orgasms, too.
00:12:37.500That was a very classic study in human sex.
00:12:40.500So I have a specific question about that.
00:12:42.500I've always wanted to ask a biologist interested in sexual behavior, but I know that there's been a lot of discussion about the hypothetical evolutionary purpose of female orgasm.
00:12:50.500And I was wondering if female orgasm is disproportionately likely to trigger male orgasm.
00:12:58.500Because it could be an adaptation that's used to elicit pregnancy, essentially.
00:13:37.500So when a female has an orgasm, she has uterine contraction, of course.
00:13:44.500And that pull, it works like a suction.
00:13:47.500It pulls the content of the vagina up to the cervix.
00:13:52.500So it puts the puts the content of the vagina in a good place.
00:13:57.500And if that content includes the male's ejaculate, then she's pulling the male's ejaculate up to the cervix, where it's easier for him to get, you know, either for the ejaculate to get into the right place to conceive.
00:14:10.500So if she, imagine a female who has two mating partners.
00:14:15.500She orgasms with one, pulling his ejaculate up to the cervix.
00:14:20.500And she skips orgasm with the other partner.
00:14:23.500So she, in effect, is mated with both men.
00:14:26.500So that is, you know, same mating success of the two men, if you just look at mating success.
00:14:33.500But she's doing something more subtle that is differentially affecting the fertilizing capacity of the ejaculate of the two men.
00:14:42.500The men, the ejaculate she pulls up has more potential for fertilization.
00:14:47.500And that's a component of cryptic female choice.
00:14:50.500So in the 80s, I discovered what I labeled as cryptic female choice, first in insects.
00:14:58.500And then it applied to female orgasm, too, in humans.
00:15:07.500And cryptic female choice is just the kind of female choice that is invisible if you're only measuring mating success.
00:15:19.500So in the example we talked about, the two guys mating with this female had the same mating success.
00:15:24.500They both mated with her, but one was preferred over the other by the female's orgasmic capacity with him that pulled his ejaculate up.
00:15:36.500And so females, by showing this differential orgasm pattern that I described with symmetry, are favoring symmetric partners over other men.
00:15:49.500And hypothetically healthier partners, and hypothetically providing their kids with an advantage.
00:15:57.500And then that's an issue behind all this discussion so far, is that female organisms are after high genetic quality partners when they're, you know, to be fathers of their offspring.
00:16:57.500Well, what other elements are, what other elements make up cryptic choice?
00:17:00.500Well, my first discovery was in some insects called scorpion flies, and what the females do there is they adjust mating duration and hence the amount of ejaculate that the male transfers.
00:17:20.500There's no orgasm in these insects, but the longer the male can mate, the bigger his, the more sperm he transfers to the female.
00:17:29.500So females are adjusting ejaculate duration on the basis of body size of the male.
00:17:34.500So, and bigger males are more fit males and so forth, better growth and more resources growing up.
00:17:41.500The females are receiving more sperm from bigger males.
00:17:45.500That's one thing I did with these insects.
00:17:47.500Another was, the female, after she mates with a male, makes a choice of whether to lay eggs or not.
00:17:54.500If she chooses to lay eggs, then she will fertilize, we know from other research I've done, she will fertilize those eggs with the last male sperm she mated with.
00:18:06.500So if she makes the decision to lay eggs, she's going to use that last male sperm she and large males again are preferred in that component of cryptic female choice.
00:18:17.500So cryptically, these female scorpion flies are preferring large bodied males by both receiving more sperm from them and making decisions to lay eggs with them and not other males.
00:18:31.500So those kind of subtle things that females do that aren't apparent if you're just measuring classical males mating success, you know.
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00:24:19.500And there have been three or four repetitions of our initial research.
00:24:25.500We did it on 200 subjects, similar age, so university students, the psych pool kind of study, and measured IQ using a culture fair measure of IQ.
00:24:43.500Culture fair procedure and questionnaire measured the IQ and then measured the symmetry in it for both sexes.
00:24:53.500The higher the symmetry of the individual, the higher the IQ.
00:24:57.500Do you remember the size of the relationship by any chance?
00:25:02.500It's a, it's a moderate relationship for IQ.
00:25:06.500The, you know, there's measurement error and measuring IQ, there's measurement error and measuring developmental stability as symmetry too.
00:25:15.500So, you know, we measured 10, 11 traits.
00:25:19.500If we measured 50 traits, presumably we would get a correlation of, say, 0.8 with IQ.
00:25:27.500And the IQ relationship would exist, hypothetically, because the healthier individual would be prone to a more favorable pattern of neurological development over the course of life history.
00:25:41.500The, some colleagues went on to look at some brain features in relation to developmental stability of the outer body.
00:25:51.500So they did imaging, brain imaging studies to look at certain brain parts.
00:26:00.500Some brain parts are bilaterally asymmetric by design.
00:26:04.500So one bigger on one side than corpus callosum.
00:26:07.500Well, the corpus callosum is a tube, you know, that connects the two hemispheres.
00:26:12.500That's just a size factor, but you can measure the size of that circumference of the corpus callosum as they did.
00:26:19.500And the bigger the, bigger the tube, the higher the body symmetry of the person, bigger the corpus callosum.
00:26:27.500They measured a couple of other brain parts too, and showing that, showing that, so you can talk about a modal directionality for an asymmetric trait.
00:26:42.500So there's a, there's a mode, the most common degree of asymmetry in an asymmetric trait.
00:27:22.500Now you also did work on averageness and attractiveness.
00:27:25.500Get some stuff with averageness, but we're really just to control it because, uh, you can do average facial, uh, features, you know, nose size, eye size, lip size, uh, measurements of face.
00:28:15.500You can take a model and you can make, you know, make her.
00:28:19.500I'm not dropped dead by the, by the following computer manipulations.
00:28:25.500What you do if she's a female model, not a male model.
00:28:30.500If she's a female model, you do the estrogen modifications on her, on her face through computer techniques.
00:28:39.500So you, you reduce basically lower face size, chin size, jaw size, those kinds of things that are under estrogen control during puberty and adolescence.
00:28:50.500And for a male face, you manipulate in the opposite direction.
00:28:54.500So male faces are more attractive when testosterone, not estrogenized.
00:28:58.500And female faces are more attractive when estrogenized.
00:29:01.500So the female model, facial models get their, get their job because they're highly estrogenized faces.
00:29:07.500Are they neotenous, the female attractive faces?
00:29:46.500And so now is that just out of curiosity, do you think that the attractiveness of that neoteny is a consequence of the ability of the more childlike face to elicit care from a male?
00:31:16.500What they're talking about is estrogenization of the bones throughout the body, not just the face.
00:31:21.500But, uh, and that includes the, uh, the waist hip ratio is really a marker, uh, of degree of estrogenization of the female body, low waist hip ratio.
00:31:34.500So a small waist relative to a more expanded hips, the smaller, the waist relative to the hips is a marker of, uh, estrogenization of the female body.
00:31:45.500And that again is a, is a marker of female reproductive capacity through the estrogen effect.
00:32:16.500So the first thing that's really quite interesting is that your work points to, or this work, this, this entire line of work points to a profound biological basis for the.
00:32:25.500Uh, experience of aesthetic attraction, at least in relationship to the perception of other people.
00:32:31.500And of course the perception of ourselves.
00:32:56.500Uh, kids and down to, um, very recently born kids have been looked at in terms of their judgment of men's faces too.
00:33:08.500And that's, they're looking at testosterone features.
00:33:11.500They're mask, you know, you call it masculinity would be the common, but testosterone technically.
00:33:17.500And, um, these features that grow under the influence of testosterone during puberty and adolescence, um, in the male and in the female, they're growing under the influence of estrogen.
00:33:31.500Basically estrogen just capping the growth of those facial bones and the other bones too.
00:33:36.500And, uh, but testosterone along with growth hormone promotes the growth of the same bones in the face and body of the man.
00:33:44.500And, uh, so babies are judging men's faces the same as you and I, or a person off the street would.
00:33:50.500Uh, that's what the, that's what the research shows.
00:33:56.500There's a book called the beauty myth, for example, that purports to claim that conceptions of female beauty are, what would you say, uh, arbitrary social constructions.
00:34:17.500The bio, the biological research I'm referring to has been so abundant since the, uh, really starting in the nineties that what really kicked it off was, uh, stuff we did initially on symmetry.
00:34:31.500And then, and then, then, then researchers got into the hormone markers, uh, beauty markers involving hormonal health.
00:34:39.500And, um, then most recently there's been, there's been another drive to look at, uh, uh, some pigment issues, uh, in terms of a beauty marker, a carotenoid pigment, uh, in particular, but it's all health.
00:34:56.500Uh, it's all health and the beauty myth gal, I forgot her name.
00:35:27.500Well, cause you see this per the preferences that you've been describing, you see analogs of those and variants of them across the entire animal kingdom.
00:35:34.500And you see the preference in newborns.
00:35:36.500So it's pretty hard to construct a social constructionist view of the aesthetic experience of attractiveness given all that information.
00:35:43.500Well, the first study on symmetry that I did, uh, the role of symmetry and sexual selection, uh, competition for mates and mate choice, that was done on insects.
00:35:54.500And at the same time, unknown to me, uh, a Dane, a Danish biologist was studying barn swallows and tail symmetry and barn swallows.
00:36:14.500Uh, and then I got into humans too, but, uh, yeah.
00:36:19.500And then following that, uh, biologists working on all kinds of critters, you know, looked at the symmetry paradigm in their, um, in their, uh, favorite study animal.
00:36:32.500And, uh, I think by 19, let's see, about 1997, 98, there's 75 species of animals that have been shown in which symmetry plays an important role in the sexual selection system of the animals.
00:36:55.500So, so fundamentally we find we, we use markers of attractiveness for, for across both sexes to indicate general health and more than health.
00:37:08.500Is it also an indicator of general competence?
00:37:10.500It's associated with general cognitive ability.
00:37:23.500Uh, the guy did most of the research on sex and symmetry and humans.
00:37:29.500He's a, he's a, uh, psychologist and, um, you know, works in the psychology department.
00:37:36.500I'm a psychologist too, but I don't work in the psychology department.
00:37:39.500But, um, and we got right into looking at personality, thinking it might correlate with personality and nothing and others have tried it too.
00:37:47.500So it's not a symmetry is not a part of the personality paradigm.
00:37:55.500Well, it's not, it's not obvious that, that there's an optimal personality.
00:37:59.500Perhaps that's part of it is that there seems to be niches for personality that are useful for all sorts of different personalities.
00:38:06.500I mean, it looks all things considered like higher general cognitive ability is better across multiple domains, but it's not so obvious with personality.
00:38:15.500So maybe that's part of the reason that's not so robust.
00:38:17.500I was wondering more with sensitivity to negative emotion.
00:38:20.500Because I thought maybe that less healthy people would be higher in trait neuroticism and that might show up with symmetry, but you haven't found anything like that.
00:38:28.500No, we, we didn't, we didn't find anything that was convincing there.
00:38:55.500So the current knowledge, the reality about, uh, our judgments of physical attractiveness, uh, empiric, empirically based, uh, knowledge, you know, kind of knowledge.
00:39:10.500But empirically based knowledge of how we judge physical attractiveness in terms of facial and bodily attractiveness is we use health markers.
00:39:20.500And those health markers are developmental stability.
00:39:32.500So as we age, uh, we lose attractiveness, of course, and, and we lose function too.
00:39:40.500And so we pay attention to age and senescence effects when we judge attractiveness, of course.
00:39:46.500So symmetry, hormonal, uh, effects and, um, and senescence.
00:39:52.500Uh, then the final one is the most recent marker of physical attractiveness, uh, that has been discovered is the, uh, carotenoid pigment, uh, thing.
00:40:35.500If you've got a lot of carotenoids, then you, and you've got excess carotenoids.
00:40:41.500You put those carotenoids in your skin and then the yellow colors in skin.
00:40:46.500And the yellow tints in skin and doesn't have anything to do with, uh, what your, uh, uh, what your racial background is or whatever you there's, there's yellowness in the skin of, um, African Americans, uh, Caucasians or, uh, whatever Asians.
00:41:16.500When we look at, when we look at faces, the more yellow, the more carotenoid the person has, the more excess carotenoid the person has can put it in their skin.
00:41:26.500And what carotenoid says is that you have to, you have to have a healthy gut to absorb carotenoid.
00:41:37.500It's fat soluble and you can't absorb fat if your gut, uh, sick.
00:41:42.500So it's, uh, the yellowness in skin is a, uh, is a marker, another marker of health that we use.
00:41:48.500And that's only been discovered in the last 15 years or so.
00:41:51.500From what foods are carotenoids derived?
00:41:54.500Uh, your fruits and vegetables for the, you know, they're full of carotenoids.
00:42:00.500So you want to eat a lot of those, uh, and you get.
00:42:03.500So is it also a marker of your ability to provision yourself?
00:42:07.500Well, that too, but you can provision yourself with anything and you know, it doesn't show up in your skin.
00:42:21.500If you're, if you're, you know, healthy, uh, body looking and stuff, that that's a, that's a, that's a good indicator, but this is specifically, uh, related to your overall gut health and allow, you know.
00:42:33.500So is it reasonable to say now that we know enough about the biology of attractiveness that we could build an optimally attractive form purely based on the scientific data pertaining to health markers?
00:42:47.500That's what we, we, we look at ankle measurements and we, and symmetry and waist to hip ratio.
00:42:52.500I can take a female, I can take a female model, famous facial model and take that face, digitize that face into the computer, like off the cover of cosmopolitan or wherever.
00:43:06.500And I've done this and I can make that, make her even more attractive through, uh, through reducing, uh, the, uh, increasing the estrogenization components of her face.
00:43:22.500Then she, if I, if I want to be particularly successful on Tinder, I'd put up a representation of my face, but I'd make it bilaterally symmetrical.
00:43:30.500So I could duplicate maybe the left side of my face.
00:43:40.500I mean, the, the last, the most recent research on the yellowness thing, cryoness thing is people would, uh, do you do, they did experiments where.
00:43:49.500Uh, they put people on different diets.
00:43:52.500And then they measure their, you know, take their facial picture before the experiment.
00:43:57.500And six weeks after in six weeks, you can improve your facial attractiveness by carotenoid, including more carotenoid in your diet.
00:44:33.500And I ran across your parasite stress theory.
00:44:36.500And so, and you were looking to begin with that, the relationship between parasite stress and values.
00:44:40.500And so maybe we could delve first of all into, well, what parasite stress is and how you would study that in relationship to value and why you would ever think to do that because it's by no means obvious.
00:45:16.500And the theory is, um, a theory about both proximate causation and ultimate causation.
00:45:23.500So in biology, there are two general categories of causation, proximate and ultimate.
00:45:28.500Proximate causation has to do with causes of something that occurred during the lifetime of the, um, animal, uh, events during the lifetime that cause whatever effect you're looking at.
00:45:45.500Ultimate causation has to do with causes in the deep time past, evolutionary past.
00:45:50.500So ultimate equal evolutionary proximate equal causes, um, during the lifetime of the individual.
00:45:57.500And this theory of, um, parasite stress theory of values is both approximate ultimate theory about how we get our causes.
00:46:07.500So let's start, start with the proximate level of causation of our values and what I mean by values.
00:46:16.500So that's, that's, uh, kind of a big topic.
00:46:20.500Um, if you look at the history of research on values, um, it is, it is, uh, it is very large, but we could think we could, and, and almost, uh, unbounded what psychologists have called, uh, values.
00:46:38.500So value would be something like rank ordered preference.
00:46:41.500If we're going to define value itself, right?
00:46:43.500Because we have to choose between things.
00:47:50.500You can put that person on that continuum somewhere.
00:47:53.500Everybody can be put on that continuum from, uh, psychometric procedure questionnaires.
00:47:59.500So the political scientists have done values that way.
00:48:04.500Cross-cultural psychologists have done values in terms of collectivism and individualism.
00:48:11.500That dimension with collectivism, high collectivism being low individualism, high individualism being low, uh, collectivism.
00:48:20.500And it turns out if you look at these two dimensions, so one from, uh, psychology, collectivism, individualism, one from political scientists, uh, conservatism, liberalism, they correspond.
00:48:41.500And, uh, so you can, you can think about what I'm talking about in terms of core values by those, those two dimensions.
00:48:49.500Uh, conservatism, liberalism, and collectivism, individualism.
00:48:53.500And basically, as I show, uh, they are, as we show, uh, that those, those, uh, measures, uh, those dimensions are very, very similar, if not identical.
00:49:04.500Could you take them apart a little bit and talk about collectivism, conservatism, and, and liberalism, individualism, so everybody knows real?
00:50:16.500You don't like new, you don't like foreign, but that's a xenophobia component.
00:50:21.500So conservatives, um, have, um, have the xenophobia, uh, the traditionalism, parochialism.
00:50:30.500They also, uh, are high in ethnocentrism.
00:50:33.500Ethnocentrism, uh, is, uh, uh, a preference for people like you.
00:50:41.500You're in group, you know, define your in group.
00:50:44.500That starts with your, with your, um, with your nuclear family, but then extends to the extended family and others with like values like you.
00:50:55.500So that's your ethnocentric, uh, component.
00:50:58.500And another component of, uh, conservatism is, uh, liking to just stay home.
00:51:05.500So philipatric, uh, love of where you're born.
00:51:09.500You stay there your whole life and so forth under highly conservative, uh, highly conservative cultures.
00:51:32.500You like people that are different from you.
00:51:35.500You're comfortable with other kinds of people, even if they have different values, even if they have a different color.
00:51:41.500Even if they believe differently, you're more comfortable with those than you are, uh, if you're conservative.
00:51:47.500And, uh, ethnocentric, uh, esocentrism is low under individualism in, in, uh, more nuclear family oriented than extended family oriented.
00:52:00.500And, uh, you're, you're, you're in group is really composed of people with all kinds of different beliefs and maybe colors and so forth backgrounds as, as an individualistic or liberal.
00:52:13.500And you're more prone to moving around, you know, frontier spirit movement and adventure and going new places is, is a good idea.
00:52:22.500You got a passport, uh, if you're liberal.
00:52:25.500So those are, those are some, some big differences, uh, between the two and, you know, the two poles.
00:52:32.500And is it, is it how, how much is that?
00:52:35.500Do you suppose, is it preference for familiarity versus preference for novelty?
00:53:34.500I mean, the against, the against can go all the way to hate, you know, under, under high xenophobia, hate.
00:53:42.500And even, you know, we get into how conservatism and traditional societies and so forth promotes intergroup aggression warfare.
00:53:53.500So the point where you not only hate those outsiders, you want to kill them.
00:53:58.500And so you have both components that they're the, the out group, the avoidance, as well as the interest in, in, in socializing with people that are like you.
00:54:44.500And that's, that's tied to a very fundamental part of host parasite co-evolution.
00:54:51.500So the way host parasite co-evolution works is that it's, it's ongoing and it's antagonistic and the parasite is trying to evolve to eat the host.
00:55:07.500The host is evolving defenses against the parasite.
00:55:14.500You never get out of your host parasite co-evolutionary race.
00:55:17.500So you get this co-evolutionary race between hosts and parasites and much and much, much research shows how localized those co-evolutionary races are geographically localized.
00:55:31.500So you get different strains of TB in different neighborhoods in a big city in Morocco, for example.
00:55:38.500It's geographically very, very localized.
00:55:45.500These host parasite co-evolutionary races, which means that locally, you're relatively immune to the parasites, but the parasites on the outside, in those people on the outside, in the out groups, those parasites, you're not immune to.
00:56:23.500And, yeah, from parasites that you're not immune to, because you're relatively immune to the local, and you're safe with people that are just like you, okay?
00:56:34.500The local people, because they've got immunity like yours, and yours is relatively good against the local parasites, but not the foreign parasites, because of this localization of the host parasite co-evolutionary race.
00:56:51.500Right, and so you're saying that you don't have to go very far away before you get yourself in trouble.
00:56:55.500No, you don't have to go very far away.
00:56:57.500All these new strains of COVID popping up, they're, you know, they're going to be lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of strains.
00:57:05.500And the, you hear about some of the strains now, they're eight or 10 or something like that, but they're popping up and, you know, there are more of them.
00:57:17.500The surveillance on this new strains is pretty limited so far.
00:57:21.500They haven't done a lot of that because they've been doing other things with the pandemic.
00:57:25.500But still, you get that occurring with the COVID too, this localization of the strains.
00:57:30.500You know, there's a South African strain and so forth and so on, UK strain and all that.
00:57:36.500So, you don't have to go very far, okay, for the localization of the immunity you have to not work so well.
00:57:46.500And that's where the philipatry comes in too.
00:58:30.500And in ethnographic societies, traditional societies, anthropologists have done a lot of research on how important it is to have kin that will help you when you get sick.
00:58:42.500That's the only way you can, you can make it.
00:58:45.500You have kin and kid and friends locally that, that help you.
00:58:51.500So if there's a high probability of illness occurring, then you're more dependent in reality on your closest network.
00:59:01.500And the higher the higher the higher the parasite stress is in a region, the more likely those, those parasites are going to come eventually.
00:59:14.500And so you got to have that social support that's important for dealing and getting through you and your family getting through the parasite crunch.
00:59:24.500So that's why the ethnocentrism philipatry and xenophobia components, and those have, you know, the component and other part, you know, sub parts of that we talked about openness to experience new experiences.
00:59:39.500And all that that's part of part of really neophobia.
00:59:44.500Right. So we okay so there's a personality so in specific questions about that for you so the best predictors of conservatism from a personality perspective are openness to experience low.
00:59:58.500Yeah, and one sub aspect or one aspect of conscientiousness, which is orderliness.
01:00:04.500Now, I noticed in your research, you looked at extroversion and openness together, and you saw that the more collectivist slash conservative types who are protecting themselves, according to parasite stress theory from contamination, are likely to be more introverted and lower in openness.
01:00:23.500And that means less exploratory in general, because those two things together seem to maybe make up exploratory behavior.
01:00:30.500But there is good personality data showing that the orderly part of conscientiousness is also a predictor of conservatism and that I don't know if I don't know if there's been any data, because that's a micro more micro analysis in relation.
01:00:45.500Nobody's looked at that component, but absolutely orderliness is very fundamental to conservatism order disorder is chaos from the standpoint of a conservative mind you know you want order and everything.
01:00:59.500Yeah, and chaos is, see, I've thought and this is interesting too, because maybe we could talk a little bit about the emotions that are elicited here so for the longest time I was, I had been thinking about the conservative collectivist viewpoint.
01:01:14.500In relationship to novelty in two elements, two manners, one is that the more conservative mind doesn't get as much of a positive emotional kick out of novelty and exploration.
01:01:28.500Because that that's fundamentally motivating if you have the personality type that's associated with exploratory behavior.
01:01:33.500But then there's this idea of phobia to like neophobia, but you know, conservatives aren't higher in neuroticism.
01:01:40.500And so and that and that's really a striking finding because if anything, it turns out that at least under some conditions liberals seem to be higher in trait neuroticism.
01:01:49.500But there's a role of disgust that seems to be under examined.
01:01:53.500And is it is it is the neophobia a consequence of fear or is it a consequence of disgust, which seems more tightly associated with immunity, as opposed to say fear.
01:02:04.500Yeah, well, you I mean, you know, you can, you can get prejudice toward an out group that has fear components and disgust components.
01:02:17.500I mean, you can be absolutely disgusted, you know, how the conservative person who has to interact with an out group will might even have to discuss face, how to discuss it, but it's also I think you see that your food, for example.
01:02:31.500Yeah, right, you get it with food or, you know, any, any kind of pathogen threat can evoke disgust, just my motion of disgust in, you know, in a person and the more conservative they are, the more likely to get the actual disgust reaction.
01:02:52.500Yeah, well, in disgust, you know, moral violation, food, rotten food, dirty toilet, all that stuff.
01:03:00.500So that that's some account like people have struggled for a long time to make sense of dietary prohibitions in religious contexts, for example.
01:03:08.500And and I mean, if you have dietary restrictions and markers for in group identification, that's a good way of deciding or of determining consistently who's on your side and also marking who's on the other side.
01:03:21.500Yeah. All kinds of things come into play to indicate boundary between boundary.
01:03:28.500Well, okay, so when I was looking at thinking about the relationship, you know, there's there's five basic personality dimensions and 10 aspects and so but only two of them really, really strongly predict political affiliation and that's openness.
01:03:42.500So high openness is liberalism and and and and orderliness, which is less powerful predictor, but so the conservatives are low in openness and high in orderliness and I thought, why in the world do those two uncorrelated personality predictors co vary to predict political belief.
01:04:00.500And then I thought, and then I thought over a number of years that it has to be, it has to do with borders is the fundamental political question is the conservative likes thick borders between everything.
01:04:13.500And the liberal wants thin borders and the liberal wants thin borders because their niche is the locale where information is transferred.
01:04:20.500And but the cold, the, the, the, the counter tendency is the conservative tendency to say yeah, but if you're where the information is going to be transferred because the borders are thin, you're probably going to get sick and die.
01:04:42.500Well, sometimes the conservatives are right that you're going to die if you get if you expose yourself to what's new and sometimes the liberals are right in that you need what's new to renew you.
01:04:52.500Well, these, these values that we acquire are very strategic and they're, you know, they're, they're suitable for.
01:05:00.500Our understanding of the culture that we live in they're suitable for that they're optimal for that.
01:05:06.500So if you grow up, we haven't really talked about the evidence yet behind the parasite stress theory, but, and that'll get that your comments get get me into that.
01:05:16.500Um, so we looked at, we looked at, um, the theory in relation to, um, what it predicts to test it.
01:05:26.500So it predicts that the, you know, if you take measures of parasite stress across the world, uh, countries or states of the United States or whatever, that, that will correspond to conservative or collectivist values measured by, um, measured by political scientists.
01:05:46.500These measures and put in the literature for countries and states measures of, uh, psychologists of individualism collectivism put into the literature.
01:05:55.500So we pull those data and look for the predictive relationship between parasite stress and, uh, conservatism and liberalism and found, uh, what we expected and strongly.
01:06:07.500So the more parasites, the more conservative said differently, the more parasites, the more collectivists.
01:06:14.500And so does that broadly mean the more infectious diseases?
01:06:27.500So by parasite, I mean, any infectious agent, it doesn't mean just intestinal worms or something as any infectious agent.
01:06:35.500So virus, bacterium, worms, whatever level of parasites you're talking about is a parasite, um, infectious disease synonymous with infectious disease.
01:06:45.500So, uh, you can take number of infectious diseases per country.
01:06:50.500For example, you can take number of infectious diseases per state for the U S, um, or you can take the rate of infection.
01:07:00.500So the, the proportion of the population that has, uh, each of these infectious diseases in an area.
01:07:07.500So either number of infectious diseases or the prevalence of the infectious diseases.
01:07:12.500And either of those, uh, very strongly and similarly predicts, uh, the values with more infectious diseases, more conservatism.
01:07:21.500Uh, that is more collectivism, the fewer infectious diseases, the more liberalism that's done on just the geographic level.
01:07:29.500But then, and we did all that initially.
01:07:32.500And then, um, and then others came along quickly, actually, once it got started and it's still, it's still, um, really blooming out there.
01:07:43.500All the research on the parasite stress theory base done by people all over the world now, but, uh, people started doing it at the individual level.
01:07:52.500So you take a, bring a person into the lab and you show them cues of, uh, immediate parasite danger.
01:08:01.500So these are just like a slideshow with, uh, with, uh, disease cues in it.
01:08:07.500So dirty toilet, a person with skin pox, a person sneezing, uh, those kinds of, those kinds of cues.
01:08:14.500So they see these slots and then you measure their values before and after seeing the slots and, uh, you have an immediate effect.
01:08:43.500So staggering on unprecedented strength.
01:08:47.500That's the stronger than the relationship between general cognitive ability, or it's as strong as the relationship between general cognitive ability and learning, which is the strongest association I've ever seen in social sciences.
01:09:03.500I mean, there's very, very, in terms of what particular prediction we're looking at.
01:09:07.500And we've looked across so many domains of, um, human life that, you know, there's variation in effect size, but, but yeah, it's, some of these effects are tremendous.
01:09:18.500And of course we, uh, we do, you know, through standard statistical procedure, uh, we do controls to, uh, potential confounders in all these analyses.
01:09:29.500So that's, that's at the, you know, you can do the regional stuff with countries of the world, um, states of the United States in relation to values and parasite level.
01:09:40.500But then this stuff coming along with looking at individuals, um, really is, is, is nice too, because you've got the, you've got the same patterns and the regional level.
01:10:11.500And, uh, also in your analysis itself, you do, uh, you do statistical controls of things that potentially could be problematic confounds, whether you're looking at between countries or between states.
01:10:25.500Um, so we, we, we, uh, we, uh, we, uh, we have data from all, all those levels, some of the more recent stuff it's coming out.
01:10:35.500Now people are doing, um, they did a lot with the slide show that I mentioned.
01:10:40.500There were 10 slides it reliably will evoke, uh, greater conservatism.
01:10:45.500But then now they're looking at showing people like a short story about COVID. COVID's real serious in your neighborhood or something like that, you know, and that does it too.
01:11:03.860So do you think there'll be a swing towards conservative political belief across the world because of this pandemic? Will that shape the political beliefs? And is there a crucial period for that to be shaped? So, for example, will this have a bigger effect on, say, 14 to 16-year-olds or 16 to 18-year-olds who are catalyzing their identity? Would there be a cohort that would be most effective?
01:11:29.860That's a really interesting point. And I've thought a lot about it. There's no data on that now. So if you, I mean, the way that you could empirically attack such a thing would be to look at people of different ages in relation to, like, the effect of these experiments on them.
01:11:56.860Do you get a bigger effect size when you show slides, the disease slides, to one age group versus another?
01:12:07.760We don't know how long it lasts either. That research, surprisingly, has not been done. You bring people into the lab and you show them these slides and you get the effect.
01:12:18.420Also, one nuance of that is if you measure what we call the perceived vulnerability to disease, that's a 14-item questionnaire that's validated and measures a person's concern about infectious disease.
01:12:39.920And that's an individually variable thing. The more conservative people are, the higher their score on that, of course, and the worry about infectious disease.
01:12:49.320So people that are high on this going into the experiment show a bigger effect when they see the slides.
01:12:57.560They shift more in terms of degree of conservatism.
01:13:00.640Do you know if there's any effects of personality on that?
01:13:07.360But there would be some covariance there because the people that are high and worry about infectious disease are basically conservative people.
01:13:16.700So they're going to have less openness to, you know, new things and more introversion and all that kind of stuff already.
01:13:27.820So when I first came across your parasite stress hypothesis, I was reading a fair bit of the literature on disgust generated a fair bit of it by Jonathan Haidt and his research team.
01:13:38.100Because he was one of the first psychologists to look at disgust as an independent emotion.
01:13:42.280But I was reading a book called Hitler's Table Talk, which was a collection of his spontaneous utterances at mealtimes collected over about three years.
01:13:50.960And it really affected my reading of it because the number of times that he referred that he used parasite metaphors really stuck in my mind.
01:14:01.480And I started to look at all of the Nazi propaganda from before the Second World War in terms of parasite stress hypothesis, especially after I also realized that Hitler's extermination campaign arguably had its origins in public health policy.
01:14:18.340Because they started out with tuberculosis interventions and then they went to clean up the mental hospitals and so on.
01:14:26.160And like the, you know, and Hitler went on a factory cleanup binge, essentially, after coming to power and they used a variant of Zyklon gas as an insecticide in the factory cleanups.
01:14:39.580So this was all quite terrifying reading what you were writing and reading this at the same time.
01:14:44.840And I don't know what you, I mean, I'm going to ask you to comment about that, what you think about that, but the metaphor for parasites, that's, that's a fundamental metaphor.
01:14:53.980The Germans, the Germans, the Nazis, seem to view themselves as under assault by parasites.
01:15:40.040That's still going on in some parts of the world.
01:15:44.160And these 30 minute showers in the Middle East, people talk about, where you get the highly conservative people that really clean up.
01:15:53.060But with regard to fascism, I've been very interested in fascism, of course, because it's over there on the, on the extreme pole of conservative end of things, you know.
01:16:03.920It's got all, it's got all the components of conservatism in, writ large.
01:16:09.400And so I've been interested in the origin of fascism in, in, in Germany and in Italy and Japan about the same time.
01:16:19.760The three, the three big fascisms have been some other fascisms too.
01:16:23.400But a recent study you'll be interested to know has looked at infectious disease in, uh, German regions, cities in relation to, uh, voting for Nazi, for, for, for Hitler's party, nationalist, uh, socialist party.
01:16:46.000And, uh, the more, um, the more, the way it works is, so he, he had, he has data from, uh, 1918 to 1920, the number of Spanish flu cases in all his, I never thought about Spanish flu as a contributor.
01:17:06.360Cause that came right after world war one, of course.
01:17:08.940And yeah, right after world war one, it was one of the things that devastated, I'd already devastated Germany.
01:17:14.200Yeah, yeah, in Germany, yeah, in the world in general.
01:17:19.540But Germany was really hit hard by, uh, by the Spanish flu as Italy was, uh, too.
01:17:27.720And, um, and what this guy did, he got data.
01:17:32.100There's a, there's a, um, data collection managed by the University of Michigan on the third, the data from Third Reich.
01:17:42.680And before the third Reich became officially a third Reich in Germany.
01:17:49.020And these data include the number of cases of death due to, um, Spanish flu in all these German cities.
01:17:59.820Also, they got number of deaths from, um, from plague and tuberculosis and so forth, uh, too.
01:18:07.740Tuberculosis was, was still a big problem by that point, too.
01:18:11.940It wasn't just, it wasn't just Spanish flu, but it, Spanish flu was the main killer, but tuberculosis problem number two.
01:18:18.800Plague wasn't a big deal by that point.
01:18:21.260So, so these data, these data, uh, have number of votes, uh, in these different cities for the, uh, Nazi party.
01:18:34.860They had the number of votes for the communist party and number of votes for various things.
01:18:41.080So, the, the, the, the communist party was considered extremist then, as was the Nazi party.
01:18:50.240Um, and, uh, the votes are from, uh, let's see, the years 1930 to 1933, I think.
01:18:58.400So, uh, so the critical years, uh, for the rise of, uh, for really Nazism to get big there.
01:19:07.140And, uh, the more, the more people dying from the Spanish flu in 1918 to 1920 in a city, the greater the vote for the Nazi party in 1932-33.
01:19:22.680So, uh, so that's a connection that's, that was of interest to me.
01:19:28.400And this paper is just, uh, it's recently appeared.
01:19:32.440Any idea about the size of the relationship?
01:19:34.260And, and what about economic, are there, are there confounds of economic well-being in the cities?
01:19:41.660He controlled, he was able to control through the same data set for, uh, employment in those cities.
01:19:49.080And for average wages in those cities, two variables related to, related to economic state.
01:19:57.040I mean, that, that's the traditional thing.
01:19:59.080Historians will tell you, well, the Germans were so, uh, economically distraught that they bought this stuff, you know.
01:20:06.520But, uh, the parasite stress theory values adds a new, uh, new, new mirror here, I think, for, uh, for fascism.
01:20:14.240And Italy, I've searched and searched for data on, um, on, uh, flu death, uh, in Italy.
01:20:25.600Um, but I don't think there's going to be anything like it.
01:20:28.980For some reason, a third right is, you know, collected lots and lots of data.
01:20:33.000And, um, um, somehow University of Michigan, I don't know the history of, of the acquisition by the University of Michigan of these data, but it is a, uh, it is a reliable data source that is used now in sociological research.
01:20:49.080Now, you studied other elements of parasite stress theory, too.
01:20:54.540It's relationship with human cognitive abilities.
01:20:56.600Yeah, yeah, so, um, yeah, we did, uh, we did study of, um, IQ in relation to parasite stress and, um, across the world and across the states in the U.S., and that, uh, worked out very well.
01:21:12.120The, the thinking was, was simply that if you've got, um, you know, you think about that human immune system, it is tremendous.
01:21:20.680It's everywhere in the body, and it's a very, very costly, uh, system in terms of energy and in terms of, uh, tissue to, um, to make and maintain this immune system.
01:21:35.580Humans have this huge brain, too, very sophisticated nervous system that is very costly.
01:21:41.960So, we assumed that these two components of the body, immune system and nervous system, would trade off.
01:21:53.160And so, under, under high infectious disease, you got to make a good immune system or you're going to die.
01:22:00.960But that's going to cost you in terms of, uh, uh, neural development and so forth.
01:22:06.340So, we predicted that more infectious disease, lower IQ, predicted it for, across, uh, regions of the, of the world, uh, countries and, and states.
01:22:16.640And so, we went to the IQ literature, which is massive.
01:22:20.220That's a big topic in psychology, as you know, study of IQ.
01:22:24.680And, uh, there were data for essentially all the countries of the world.
01:22:57.280Okay, so, so let's, let's pull back just a bit for everybody.
01:23:01.360I mean, it's, it's important for everyone who's listening to realize just how important a role infectious disease actually plays in the shaping of human evolution, cultural evolution included.
01:23:11.560So, for example, there are estimates, correct me if I'm wrong, Dr. Thornhill, but there are estimates that 90 to 95% of the native inhabitants of North and South America died as a consequence of contact with Europeans
01:23:24.260because of the transmission of measles, smallpox, and mumps, primarily, although they were also prone to many other diseases that were brought in by the Europeans,
01:23:33.580who had lived in tight-packed cities, often with animals as close companions, had, had, had, uh, what would you say, exposure to a wide variety of extremely toxic diseases,
01:23:45.480developed immunity, but then brought those diseases to the new world, and basically decimated the entire population.
01:23:52.160So this is a non-trivial event by, by any, by any standard.
01:23:56.300The Europeans, by the time they started moving out of Europe into the new world, uh, the Europeans, uh, I mean, they had all their diseases,
01:24:04.320but they were, had relative immunity to lots of respiratory diseases, turns out.
01:24:08.620Uh, and, uh, so they brought all that stuff over here and kill most of the native, uh, new world people.
01:24:30.440Yeah, it was, uh, it was a mess, and continued to be a mess a long time.
01:24:34.840Right, so, so when, when isolated populations of human beings have come into contact in the past,
01:24:39.840the upside is the trading of cultural resources, essentially, and that can be a tremendous upside, but the downside is the exchange of infectious diseases.
01:24:48.760And we're caught between those two catastrophes, well, those two, an opportunity and a catastrophe, which present themselves simultaneously.
01:24:56.060Yes, openness and just liberalism, uh, is, is great, uh, in terms of its benefits.
01:25:04.260You've got interaction with lots of different kinds of people, you get a bigger social network, got a bigger mating pool, uh, you know, you don't care if, if they're different from you, you want to interact with them.
01:25:16.620And, and, uh, you can innovate out of catastrophe.
01:25:19.600Yeah, new ideas, new ideas, innovations, you, coming from the outside that you can use locally, uh, but that'll only work under low infectious disease,
01:25:30.140because we get high infectious disease, all that, uh, outgroup contact, uh, interaction will kill you.
01:25:46.800And the mortality, you know, the, the mortality, human mortality from infectious disease before the pandemic, uh, was still greater than any other measured source.
01:25:59.780So, there's, um, recent work that's looked at, well, you, you can just sort of summarize it this way.
01:26:06.680You can look at, you can look at, you can look at, at genes that are, that have, uh, that play known roles in human life.
01:26:19.120So, there are genes associated with immunity, and those have been described by immunologists, which, which genes are involved.
01:27:31.800And if you look at the anthropological evidence about the importance of infectious disease versus other things,
01:27:37.700um, there's a lot of evidence for that.
01:27:41.240A nice review recently that some people did, um, but infectious disease is the main killer of infants and older children, um, in the ethnographic records of, you know, traditional societies.
01:27:57.620Uh, infectious disease is the big one.
01:28:35.720What's, what, I read a paper recently, and I, I'm, I'm afraid I can't cite it in detail, but it'll serve as an example, claiming that with proper control for technological development, the causal or the effect of parasite stress on political belief vanished.
01:28:52.580Now, you cite many, many papers in your books and in your papers.
01:28:56.100So, I'm, by no means saying that this is a canonical study.
01:28:58.720But, it's very used, this is a very, very, very, very provocative theory.
01:29:26.360We, we, we had, we had, we've addressed them as they have come out.
01:29:30.840And the parasite stress theory of, of values has gotten, when it first came out, it got so much attention that that attracted a lot of people to try to falsify it, you know.
01:29:43.500And that's the way that works in science.
01:30:12.800That controls our, that's an old idea in, in the literature that, you know.
01:30:19.940You know, basically, people just get more modern, they get more liberal, and so forth.
01:30:25.680And we take that on in a number of ways.
01:30:29.440And the one way I'd like to, you might be interested in, we look at the, the cultural and social revolution of the 60s and 70s in the West.
01:30:40.520So what happened, and I was there, you had, you had a liberalization of Vegas, basically, is the bottom line.
01:30:52.240But you had more, you know, more, you know, the women's movement started then.
01:31:01.860There was a sexual revolution, same time.
01:31:11.160And, and ethnic groups, that, minority groups that had been ostracized and so forth, got more attention, positive attention.
01:31:21.500It was democratization of, of law, voter, voter laws, and all that changed.
01:31:27.800So you can, and it was, it was more than just, people talk about that time as the sexual revolution time, 60s and 70s.
01:31:35.120But really, it was a, it was a much broader social revolution involving human rights, increasing human rights and liberties, basically liberalization.
01:33:16.46040s, big, big changes with regard to emancipation from parasites.
01:33:20.92040s had child vaccination programs that began in the 40s.
01:33:27.000Also antibiotics, first good antibiotics right after World War II, 1945, in the 40s.
01:33:35.860So this was really, by that point, a new world in terms of lowered infectious disease compared to the world that all generations of humans had experienced in the West prior to those 20s and 40s.
01:33:50.920There were some antibiotics in the 30s, but sulfa drugs and so forth, but they had terrible side effects.
01:33:57.260So the real good antibiotics didn't come along until the 40s and broad spectrum kind of antibiotics.
01:34:03.660And, of course, that spread so rapidly that the use of antibiotics that they quickly saw resistance to antibiotics popping up.
01:34:12.900You know, the evolution of resistance in parasites.
01:34:15.400Yes, which is a serious problem we have now because we have diseases that are resistant to almost all the broad spectrum of antibiotics, even in combination.
01:34:24.180That's a looming catastrophe, which we should obviously pay attention to.
01:34:28.740Arms race between the parasites and the drug companies now with that.
01:34:32.200So up to the 40s and then also in the 40s, you had insecticides coming along, good insecticides, chlorinated hydrocarbons and organophosphate insecticides that killed pest species, including mosquitoes.
01:34:52.120So vectors, important vectors of disease in the West, mosquitoes, so they knocked out malaria, knocked out yellow fever with that.
01:35:06.060And so all that was going on to emancipate people.
01:35:12.220And then a generation two or two later, you get the rise of liberalism throughout the West.
01:35:18.700So all these liberal young people growing up in a relatively disease-free environment by all these health interventions became the hippies and so forth.
01:35:34.620And so that does really raise the question, again, of what this COVID pandemic and the lockdown is going to do to the political temperament of the West, or the world, for that matter.
01:35:44.480But it's a particular change in the West because we're not accustomed to this sort of thing anymore.
01:35:49.700So it's so interesting because, of course, I've thought of the liberalism revolution being a secondary derivative of the birth control pill, which is a biological revolution of immense magnitude.
01:35:59.620But I hadn't ever considered in depth, even after reading your work.
01:36:14.540That's a way away from tradition, you know, taking birth control.
01:36:18.220So there's another perverse implication of the theory that you've developed, too, which is that conservatism insistence upon hygiene and disease prevention is a precondition for liberalism.
01:36:49.900So if you've got high conservatism in a place, then those conservatives are doing things that promote, well, they're, you know, they're not using modern technology.
01:37:10.020They're not, you know, open to new ideas.
01:37:13.360They're not open to science and all that.
01:37:15.880So those are attitudes that help the infectious disease, really.
01:37:33.780I mean, if you're not, you know, pro-science and open to new ideas and innovations and all that kind of stuff, that has tremendous limitations.
01:37:42.980And so, you know, you don't even put in septic tanks and anything like that or chlorinate the water or, you know...
01:37:59.300And tell me what you think about this.
01:38:00.680The COVID has become a politicized issue in Canada and in the U.S., but it doesn't seem to have happened the way you might have predicted if you were relying on parasite stress theory.
01:38:13.200Because it seems to be that the conservative types are the ones who are objecting most strenuously to the lockdowns and to the inoculations, whereas the liberal types...
01:38:24.200I mean, and maybe I'm wrong about this, but seem to be more in favor of the restrictions of movement and so on.
01:38:47.040In the U.S. in particular, the conservative government at the time when COVID was getting off the ground, the Trump administration, was very negative about COVID.
01:39:05.480I mean, he called it a hoax and all that didn't believe it, and no problem.
01:39:32.240It's a hoax and all that kind of stuff.
01:39:33.880And that is the word from God, basically, to highly liberal, highly conservative people.
01:39:44.080And that's the way authoritarianism works.
01:39:46.300People that are highly authoritarian, and that's conservatives, there's a lot of evidence there, authoritarianism is very highly correlated with conservatism.
01:39:59.180The more authoritarian the people are, the more likely they will follow these guys that they label as their leader.
01:40:08.860And to the point that they'll follow them anywhere.
01:40:11.900They'll follow them off a cliff, basically, as they did in Germany, as they did in Italy, and as they did in the United States during this COVID thing.
01:40:23.440So you believe that what happened was that the evidence that there was, in fact, a dangerous epidemic was rendered non-credible.
01:40:33.560And so the conservative tendency to prevent the disease didn't kick in.
01:44:04.200And I will have, have any studies been done that are analogous to the, the political studies where, where people are shown images that are reminiscent of, of parasitic presence.
01:44:15.680And then asked about their sexual preferences with regards to monogamy or uncommitted relationships.
01:44:30.220We just did the, we just took the SOI data, social, uh, sexual orientation inventory data for men and women across these countries and looked at it in relation to parasite stress and, and values.
01:44:42.180And, uh, as I mentioned it, as, as, uh, infectious disease increases, women show more restriction as women specifically, women specifically, the effect for men is not reliable.
01:44:56.400This is not very big and probably not even reliable, statistically significant, but for women is highly significant, the more parasites, the more restricted women are.
01:45:06.960And that goes along with conservatism.
01:45:08.560So conservatism, there's a sexual purity and, um, protect the jewels kind of attitude that is instilled by, uh, conservative culture in women.
01:45:18.700So, but in women in, well, so there's a question.
01:45:24.160Well, when you get parasite stress increasing, then is the conservative proclivity manifested to begin with in the women and then spread to the men?
01:45:33.200I mean, because they're more primarily concerned, let's say with sexual contamination.
01:45:36.880I mean, the role of the genders in determining.
01:45:39.800But the men are, the men are changing, the men are changing in other components.
01:45:43.940Um, so they're, the men are hot to trot regardless.
01:46:15.900We did, uh, a big study of that, looking at religion scholars, uh, looking at their data on, uh, commitment and participation of people in religion across, um, basically all the countries of the world.
01:46:33.840And we had state data, uh, and we had state data on participation and, uh, commitment of people and, um, predicting that more parasites, more religiosity measured either as commitment or participation and, uh, more conservatism, of course, more religiosity.
01:46:54.680See, that's well-known already, more conservative, uh, people, uh, and those would be traditional markers of religiosity, like church attendance, such as church attendance, rather than spirituality per se.
01:47:05.600A number of times a month you go to church, uh, and stated commitment that you have.
01:47:10.660Do you believe, uh, do you believe in the local religion, that kind of thing?
01:47:14.820Uh, this religion scholars, you know, done that, done a good job and then published all that in the literature.
01:47:21.220So you can pull their data and then look at it in relation to, uh, parasite stress, more parasites, more religious people are.
01:47:29.560And we expected it from the following, uh, uh, ideas that it was known that religiosity is very tightly correlated with conservatism before that had been shown by lots of folks in the past, but religiosity has, uh, has, uh, uh, some couple of parts to it that were of interest to us from the standpoint of the parasite stress theory.
01:47:53.980One is the, uh, boundary issue that religions often show.
01:47:59.880So in fact, religion scholars, uh, define religions in terms of boundary.
01:48:05.180So this group over here believes in this God, the group over here believes in this God or gods and so forth.
01:48:13.920And so the boundary would, would be like a xenophobic kind of function, you know, to, to bound, to bound, to in-group, out-group kind of separation.
01:48:24.460The other part of religiosity that was an interest, uh, from the standpoint of the parasite stress theory is the ethnocentric part.
01:48:31.620So you get that in-group binding with your, with your colleagues at church and so forth that can be extremely strong.
01:48:39.620So, and, um, so that, there, we looked at it and found that, uh, you basically a new, new theory of religion, that more parasites, more religiosity across countries, the world and, and states of, uh.
01:48:55.700Uh, those, uh, I don't remember offhand, uh, big effects.
01:49:00.740Uh, I mean, it was, we published in a major, uh, brain and behavioral sciences, uh, major, you know, uh, top, top tier journal.
01:49:10.180Uh, but again, you could, you know, back to your earlier question about showing people these immediate parasite threats, the slides or some other way that they're manipulating that now.
01:49:19.960They're doing all kinds of things with that, um, and see if people get, believe in God more or something like that immediately.
01:49:39.200Well, you also wonder too, if, you know, I'm just thinking here, ideas are just flashing through my mind about beliefs in spirit to begin with.
01:49:49.400Because the belief in spirit causing illness, for example, is sort of a, an early analog of a disease theory, you know, you, yeah, yeah.
01:49:59.200I mean, people are, yeah, there's a study that, uh, I can't remember exactly what it is.
01:50:04.660I've got it on my pile over here, uh, that claims that the fundamental belief we have in a spiritual world really boils down to spirits as diseases.
01:54:00.060And, um, so I'm, I go back a long way in my interest in this and the, you know, it, it's just, it's been really satisfying to, to understand the cause, you know, to do the science on it and really understand the causal stuff and stuff that happened, uh, in my family and so forth.
01:54:23.440I mean, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm trying to do a popular book for the intelligent reader on all this, but, uh, there was one incident where in, in, in the old South, uh, middle-class and upper-class families, white families would hire, uh, um, a black woman to raise the kids or black women to raise the kids.
01:54:48.920And I was closer to this woman really in many ways than I was my birth mother.
01:54:54.760And she died when I was 13, my black mama died.
01:55:00.320And, um, she got sick and my family wouldn't let me go see her when she was sick because, uh, she was sick and they were conservative and they were worried about me.
01:55:12.920I mean, they were trying to protect me, but I didn't understand that at the time.
01:55:16.700Um, and, and, and my mind, she was my mother.
01:56:15.840And I'd go to her grave or something and catch a disease.
01:56:19.500But what this knowledge of values has helped me with is things like that.
01:56:24.620It means, and there are lots of them in my upbringing that were devastating, uh, because of the, you know, conservative values that I was dealing with.
01:56:51.880I mean, my high school, it was a high school, uh, Decatur, Alabama is where I grew up.
01:56:59.040My high school, graduating class of about 200.
01:57:01.700And there were about three liberals in the class.
01:57:06.120I was one, and, uh, one of my close friends, he was a liberal.
01:57:11.380He's, he's, uh, he's a civil rights lawyer in South Alabama now.
01:57:15.760And another one, friend, close friend of mine, she was liberal.
01:57:18.920She works for the Democratic Party in Washington, D.C.
01:57:22.040But most of the, most of the rest of them were, were pretty conservative.
01:57:27.420And, um, I wonder how I got out of this.
01:57:30.980And my hypothesis is, um, that I had an interesting genetic constitution because my, um, part of my family was Native American.
01:57:46.540And so Native American, uh, in North Alabama, Cherokee, and so those folks had the local immunity, uh, to the infectious diseases that were endemic to that region, the Native Americans.
01:58:16.540Um, but, um, so I got this, this odd genetic complement, Native American plus Northern European, the Thornhills and Northern European, and that, that reduced my interaction with infectious disease growing up.
01:58:33.500So, like, unlike the kids around me, I didn't have all those ear, ear infections.
01:58:39.180I didn't have all those eye infections growing up.
02:00:04.500It'd also be interesting to see if there's any relationship between even self-reported prevalence of amount of time ill during childhood and adolescence and trait openness.
02:00:16.720There is a, there is a, there is a scientific study of, of illness, two studies, of illness during childhood, reported illness during childhood is one of the studies, and conserved, some, some components of conservatism.
02:00:32.660I don't remember if the openness is there, but some, and that works.
02:00:36.680And then there's another one where they had, uh, they looked at, actually, health records, uh, of children who then became adults, you know, have adults, and then you have their health records.
02:00:49.440And they did that and showed that the, uh, uh, less health the kid had as a, as a child, the more conservative they were.
02:00:59.240So that kind of, that kind of stuff is out there.
02:01:02.180So then, okay, so maybe we could, we could, let me ask you what you think about this.
02:01:06.600When I first came across your work, I thought, is it possible that the human race could rescue itself from the worst excesses of the kind of conservatism that degenerates into malevolent fascism, essentially by wiping out infectious disease?
02:01:24.800I think the answer to that is straightforward, yes.
02:01:31.300Uh, the, uh, you know, I want to emphasize that the parasite stress theory of values, parasite stress theory of values and sociality is a scientific theory.
02:01:42.360And hence, it doesn't have any, doesn't make any moral judgments about, you know, it doesn't say conservatism is more moral than liberalism or vice versa, scientific theory.
02:01:53.480No, no value judgments involved there because it's scientific theory.
02:01:57.780But if one wanted to change the values of the future of people, uh, the, then you have to know, of course, what the causes of the, of values are.
02:02:12.520That's the way you change things, you know, you know, causes of things and you can change them.
02:02:17.540Then, uh, you, if you wanted to make the world more liberal, uh, you would reduce infectious disease.
02:02:23.740Well, you could say, let's imagine you wanted, you wanted to make the world a place where the cost for the free exchange of ideas and people was dramatically reduced so that the countervailing tendency to that was unnecessary.
02:02:39.260And, and the catastrophes that might go along with an excess of that countervailing proclivity, the most effective way forward would be to eradicate infectious disease.
02:02:49.960And so, and then you'd have the benefit of eradicating the disease, which would be non-trivial.
02:02:55.520Plus you'd have the political benefit.
02:02:57.500It would be healthier, lower morbidity and, uh, healthier throughout their lives.
02:03:02.440And, uh, also they'd be open and, uh, you know, sort of the reaching the goal of the true enlightenment, which was all about, you know, freedom of thought and individuality, um, science.
02:03:18.660Um, knowledge, um, knowledge, all that stuff.
02:03:28.680Well, so I've been talking to people like Bjorn Lomberg and Matt Ridley and the, and, and, and, you know, there, there are people who have a, a positive enlightenment view of the future and are having a hard time in some sense, along with the rest of us generating something like, what would you say?
02:03:46.580A noble vision for the future that moderates could get behind and be motivated by.
02:03:52.120And it certainly seems in light of this discussion that, and of what's happened with COVID-19, et cetera.
02:03:58.680And the fact that infectious diseases are still a primary killer and not only that crippler of people all around the world.
02:04:05.100And that they contribute radically to all sorts of political instability.
02:04:09.500That one thing we could all agree on would be that less infectious diseases would be better.
02:04:28.840He's in the same group in some sense as these other people that I just mentioned, you know, they're, they're optimistic enlightenment figures.
02:04:36.060I can be optimistic and, and, and, and he's, he's, he has data on how much things have improved over the last several centuries.
02:04:44.400And that's because of lower infectious disease.
02:05:39.620Well, uh, I may call on may well call on you again.
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