00:05:44.400um there's one more thing to be said it's not that just intellectuals long for some kind of
00:05:52.000utopia it's that achieving utopia gives intellectuals a lot of work to do it allows
00:05:57.920them to preach it allows them to have political careers uh it allows them to um pretend to great
00:06:05.260knowledge in universities that they don't really have so there are as a good darwinist would think
00:06:11.260uh there are um fitness benefits for intellectuals in these utopian ideas yeah fair enough i mean
00:06:19.860this book i i guess we would classify it as an academic book right it's it's meant for other
00:06:25.660professionals in the relevant disciplines yes yes so does do you do have you already received
00:06:34.520any feedback not from evolutionists right not from the folks that would be sympathetic to your
00:06:39.880arguing but from some other folks that you would think a priori would be resistant to your ideas
00:06:45.720and has it been positive has it been negative are you surprised by it where are we in the feedback
00:06:51.820trajectory we're very early um the book i got my first copies of the book in may
00:06:59.220so i have been kind of circulating it i think they're going to be a variety of reviews in
00:07:07.000different kinds of journals i'm expecting uh i mean i'm i'm taking on a lot of sacred cows and
00:07:14.620doing what i'm doing so i expect that there's going to be a lot of negativity but you know
00:07:19.960you do what you want to you you do what you feel you need to do when what was your i mean almost
00:07:25.900all evolutionists that i can think of when i this is not for you but for our listeners and viewers
00:07:32.420When I say evolutionist in this context, I mean any scholar that is using the evolutionary lens
00:07:38.780within their particular area. So you could be a political science who's an evolutionist,
00:07:43.040or you could be a physician who's an evolutionist, or you could study consumer psychology and
00:07:47.960economic behavior as I do, and you could be an evolutionary psychologist. All of those folks
00:07:53.200typically can point to a particular moment where they had their evolutionary epiphany.
00:07:59.420Mine was when I was assigned as a first semester doctoral student at Cornell, the book Homicide by Martin Daly and Margo Wilson that looked at patterns of criminality via an evolutionary lens.
00:08:12.280What's, if you have one, what is your evolutionary epiphany?
00:08:17.120Well, it's way back when. It's probably when I read Richard Dawkins' Self-Esteem.
00:08:53.180So, you know, in the interim, I created this organization, National Association of Scholars, and ran it. And I immediately started thinking, to answer your question, what could be done with these ideas? And I had a lot. I published a few early articles before I got deeply involved in the NAS.
00:09:11.180But once I was in the National Association of Scholars, I could engage in my free time in capital, intellectual capital accumulation, but I didn't think it was my duty for running an organization to express myself on matters that were just outside the domain of the National Association of Scholars, and with which my members might disagree.
00:09:37.440I mean, it wasn't seemed to me the responsible thing to do.
00:09:41.180So I bided my time to my great old age.
00:09:44.920And now, having thought about it for decades and decades, I've now put it down on people.
00:09:51.400Would you have, so given the fact, and let me put it back up again, people naturalizing history, right,
00:09:58.540applying a framework from the natural sciences to understand historical patterns, historical trends, human progress.
00:10:05.320did it require to you be at the current stage in your career for you to say i don't care what
00:10:13.940people say i'm already too seasoned to care but i wouldn't have tried it 20 years ago
00:10:19.460is that what happened or you just didn't have the time to write it earlier why now versus 20 years
00:10:25.900ago had i not founded the national association of scholars i probably would have started doing
00:10:30.840this back in the 70s and 80s as a scholar. I was at the City University of New York.
00:10:36.620It was the responsibility, heavy burden of responsibility in building an organization
00:10:43.220that kept me from doing it. You're right, now it doesn't really, I mean, what can people do to me?
00:10:51.400I think a lot of folks who were my colleagues in the National Association of Scholars will say
00:10:59.380themselves he believed this i don't think i'll make them enemies i mean i i'm they're they're
00:11:05.440nice people but uh i think a lot of people will be surprised but you know if you have something to say
00:11:12.040before your your run comes to an end say it and so i did yeah very well uh i'm trying to think of
00:11:20.180all of the people that i could think of that i would properly call darwinian historians in the
00:11:28.020sense that they are applying the evolutionary lens to some historical trend. And the first one that
00:11:33.440comes to mind, I wonder if you know her, is Laura Betsy. Is that someone that you know?
00:11:39.780Yeah, I read her paper on, it looks at hereditary nobility and argues that, you know,
00:11:49.880the ability in the past at higher fitness. Yeah, I read that.
00:11:53.160Yeah, there's that. And there's also one which is the one that I typically cite when I'm talking about how to do a content analysis via the scientific method is she looked, she did a content analysis of the Old Testament to demonstrate that male protagonists in the Old Testament, we could identify their social rank based on the title that they held or occupation.
00:12:23.160that they had, and then linked that to how successful they were in garnering access to
00:12:32.000women. And not surprisingly, as we know from Evolutionary Psychology 101, that the greatest
00:12:37.620predictor of a man having sexual access to women is his status. And it turns out that the Old
00:12:43.060Testament is a book or written by a Darwinist, because it's exactly what you would expect.
00:12:49.220So it amazes me. And here I'm speaking to you. I'm obviously preaching to the converted. You and I think alike on these issues. It amazes me that there are centuries, if not millennia of study of history that are perfectly decoupled from that B word called biology.
00:13:11.720It really is an extraordinary thing that we could study every other species on Earth, never not invoking biology, but Homo sapiens, no biology for you.
00:13:24.400Well, that's the title of my book, Naturalizing History, right?
00:15:12.020And in an egalitarian society, constitutionalism, distribution of powers, democracy is easier.
00:15:20.220Yeah, well, there's a great paper. I'm trying to remember who wrote it. Maybe Joe Henrich was in that paper, where they looked at the relationship sort of between, I think, the stability of a society and the mating arrangements.
00:15:35.660And not surprisingly, if very few men monopolize the sexual access to most women, so an extreme case of polygyny, and if a lot of men are sexually frustrated, you know, twiddling their thumbs, it's probably not going to lead to a very stable society.
00:15:55.300And so I love the fact that you are linking, you know, a very fundamental human drive, sexuality mating systems, to political orientation.
00:16:06.480So I know you said that you weren't the only one to say this.
00:16:08.780Is this something that is frequently discussed within?
00:16:25.860And you also could argue that monogamy leads to more international community, because if you look at Europe, if you want to make diplomatic marriages, you have to know who the next guy in line is.
00:16:37.840You can't do that very easily with polygamy.
00:16:41.820So all the houses of Europe became marriage united in a way that didn't occur outside.
00:16:47.800How did you decide which historical phenomena you would put under the evolutionary lens, right? There's a million historical trends, patterns, trajectories. You obviously didn't cover all of them. What was your inclusionary versus exclusionary, you know, algorithm in deciding what you're going to focus on?
00:17:10.960My notion of human nature and how that would affect politics and history.
00:17:15.900And my notion of human nature is really a function of my notion of what inclusive fitness means in kind of structuring a personality and motivation.
00:17:29.740So that points you in the direction of looking at marriage patterns.
00:17:33.700It points you in the direction of wondering how common good aims are ever achieved at all.
00:17:40.880I tend to think they're achieved when doing well and doing good equate with each other.
00:17:46.420You have a social arrangement in which you can prosper by contributing to the community.
00:17:52.000Then you will have a prosperous, relatively harmonious, as far as humans can, and mutualistic society.
00:18:00.280So I think it's starting with the notion of human nature and what that would suggest you should look at in the largest spheres of human activity.
00:18:11.680I asked the question because many years ago, I had written a paper, which regrettably, I never ended up publishing, but maybe I'll revive at some point. I was trying to look at creating a meta framework to understand which consumer phenomena fall under the human universals category, which consumer phenomena are within the behavioral ecology domain,
00:18:39.600meaning that there are cross-cultural differences, but due to adaptive reasons? And then which
00:18:45.360consumer phenomena are culturally idiosyncratic because they have nothing to do with evolution?
00:18:50.640And so therefore, you could give me any consumer phenomena and I could say, well, that one is
00:18:56.060absolutely an indelible feature of our shared biological heritage. So it's going under human
00:19:02.120universals. And so I'm wondering if there is a similar exercise that could eventually be done
00:19:39.420i think uh you know human mating patterns uh are are absolutely central to understanding how
00:19:49.340society works and what the limits are uh the constraints ultimate constraints on on human
00:19:55.160behavior um there are other kinds of phenomena uh i don't want to uh talk too much at length but
00:20:05.260i i developed the idea of phenocracy which i'm not sure gets that the question you're asking
00:20:13.040but phenocracy occurs in societies when people decide almost self-consciously to override
00:20:20.140their adaptive programs uh and simply pursue a phenocratic pleasures where pleasure becomes an
00:20:27.600end in itself uh or some kind of life satisfaction behind minded saintliness so humans can do that
00:20:35.380uh it's not typical you wouldn't want to count on it and creating a social order but humans can do
00:20:40.760that kind of thing uh perhaps i'm not answering your question maybe you should uh push a little
00:20:45.000harder so when you say that you're pursuing something that overrides your uh you know your
00:20:52.980adaptive impulse. Is that linked to the mismatch hypothesis whereby something that used to be
00:21:04.640adaptively beneficial in the past becomes maladaptive in the current environment? Is that
00:21:10.420mismatch hypothesis linked to what you just said? Mismatch occurs, but this is different.
00:21:15.880This is where people decide that their phenotypes decide, that there are more important things in life than replicating genes.
00:21:28.780Now, you might say that this is self-correcting.
00:21:32.620If you don't replicate your genes, your capacity to have these strange cravings are going to be slugged out.
00:21:38.620But, you know, humans operate in our conception of history is short term. So in the short term, that could be very important. It seems to me we live in a very phenocratic society nowadays.
00:21:53.660uh we you know uh tell women that motherhood isn't a great thing um that you know being
00:22:02.360having too many kids is going to uh lock you up uh in your house and you won't be the person you
00:22:08.640could be uh we tell people that you know they can engage in non-procreative sex if it feels good
00:22:15.260do it um so there are there are there are things that people choose that the kind of society we
00:22:25.780have offers to them as behavioral opportunities as courses of life um and it's not because of
00:22:33.980mismatch it's because of a culture that puts life satisfactions ahead of genetic interest
00:22:43.060Interesting. So as you were defining what I love the term finocracy, one could argue at the civilizational level that the impulse for suicidal empathy is the ultimate manifestation of a finocracy because you are literally not just you're deciding not to procreate, although I do discuss that in suicidal empathy, right?
00:23:09.520So the birthers or the birth, whatever it's called, they don't wish to procreate because they wish to be empathetic to Mother Earth.
00:23:18.760If they put more children, then they are raping Mother Earth.
00:23:21.900It's a form of, you know, misguided empathy.
00:23:24.180So could that be a bridge between your term and my term and concept, namely that the infinity pool that the West is currently swimming in, the suicidal empathy pool, is the ultimate manifestation of a finocracy?
00:23:40.560Because it's resulting in the entire civilization jumping off into the abyss of infinite darkness.
00:23:47.640Well, you have to, but it makes you feel good.
00:23:50.160And that's the critical thing in finocracy.
00:29:12.900I mentioned the fact that, you know, he introduced this idea.
00:29:17.320I can't remember if it was in this chat or maybe the previous chat I had.
00:29:20.600I was talking about the term consilience, which is so important to my own thinking, right?
00:29:25.800Much of the behavioral sciences don't accomplish as much as some of the natural sciences
00:29:31.620because the natural sciences have an organized tree of knowledge where, you know, we could
00:29:36.500all agree that, okay, the periodic table is true, and at least we could agree on that.
00:29:41.020But if we can't agree on what constitutes male or female, or whether there's objective truth or not, then the bifurcation happens very quickly, and we're never going to have consilience. So those kinds of ways of thinking, which is, even though I haven't yet read the book, I certainly look through the chapters, it seems to involve a lot of consilience, bringing a lot of things, unifying knowledge.
00:30:05.640Do you think that that's because, and if I could speak for both of us, because I exhibit those same traits, there are folks, there are scholars that are innately broad, right? They don't like to be stay in your lane folks. They are looking for the bridges to tie together because that's how our brains are wired.
00:30:25.260So when I was told, don't publish in medicine and in politics and in consumer behavior, that makes you look scattered. I go, what do you mean? Isn't it more impressive to publish in many disciplines and make contributions across disciplines? Well, no, you should be a stay in your lane guy.
00:30:42.360So your synthetic abilities, is this something that you've had throughout your career or is it something that you had to sort of develop in order to actually accomplish the feat of writing this book?
00:30:55.260I didn't want an intellectual or scholarly career.
00:30:59.220I wanted to, it sounds presumptuous, but I wanted to understand.
00:31:03.820I wanted to know what world I was living in and how it operated.
00:31:09.680And in a way, you know, being out of academia for 30 or 40 years running the National Association of Scholars
00:31:16.260kept me from dropping into specialization.
00:31:21.680It allowed me to think broadly on my own time.
00:31:25.260But I've wanted to understand. And if you want to understand, you have to be synthetic.
00:31:31.580You know, I have two things going for me, I think. There are brighter people than myself.
00:31:37.260But A, I understand evolutionary theory and evolutionary psychology.
00:31:43.820And B, I have read very, very broadly in history, history of all sorts of places, global history.
00:31:51.180uh you know i'm not an expert in any of those areas but i have a lot of range um and that's
00:31:58.140allowed me i think based taking the evolutionary paradigm to feed the data in and do things with
00:32:04.320it that most other people uh perhaps couldn't do well i love that you said it this way because i
00:32:10.060often tell my students once i'm going to unleash the evolutionary paradigm upon you it's going to
00:32:18.700be a universal explanatory key, you'll be able to say, wait a minute, he mentioned this particular
00:32:25.820mechanism from evolutionary theory. I could apply it in organizational behavior. I could apply it in
00:32:30.720behavioral game theory. I could apply it in consumer behavior. I could apply it in politics.
00:32:36.080That's the consilient power of evolutionary theory. Yet one of the things that most frustrates me,
00:32:41.380and I understand that you haven't been as steeped in academia as I have, one of the things that
00:32:45.920frustrates me most is when fellow academics say that evolutionary theory is the ultimate form of
00:32:54.020post-hot, just-so storytelling, when the exact opposite is true. Before I'm able to definitively
00:33:01.720state that something is an adaptation, I have to build this big normological network of cumulative
00:33:08.860evidence spanning across cultures, across species, across time periods to prove my point. So I'm
00:33:15.620doing the opposite of what you're accusing me of of doing well what are your thoughts on that
00:33:20.380well i i stand i stand with you on that um there are always going to be limitations that perhaps
00:33:28.800don't apply in physics or chemistry to what we can know about human beings uh they're much more
00:33:34.860complicated but you could know a lot more than many people would think uh by hearkening back to
00:33:42.760the basic paradigm of evolution and cultural learning, which I think goes hand in hand,
00:33:48.380is an extension of it. And as I also said, it also tells you what you can't expect in human
00:33:56.280behavior. An awful lot of social science is based on showing why things that have never happened
00:34:03.840could still happen if we just did it right. That's not a very safe way, intellectually or
00:34:10.820politically uh to proceed um it seems to me that the evolutionary perspective uh while not
00:34:18.380determining things uh does show and warn against the pursuit of stuff that is inherently unlikely
00:34:25.120and of course we have many examples where recent times where that pursuit pursuit led to disaster
00:34:31.680so um uh i i think it's a very useful tool i think there's a lot to be said
00:34:39.360My book tries to say as much as I could within the space of maybe 130,000 words or so.
00:34:47.980You know, I think you're absolutely right.