The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - Harvard University and the Culture⧸Science Wars of the 1970s (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_632)

00:00:00.180 Hi everybody, this is Gatsad. I just got back last night from speaking at the AmericaFest

00:00:10.340 2023 event, which is organized by Turning Point USA. The organization and movement that

00:00:19.560 was founded by Charlie Kirk had a great time. I talked about prescriptions for a happy and

00:00:27.140 good life. I will be posting that talk in the next couple of days once I receive it. It

00:00:36.020 was truly an incredible event in that this might have been the largest crowd that I've

00:00:42.420 ever spoken in front of live. I think the previous one was in Mexico, maybe 5,000 people, and

00:00:51.500 this one I think had quite a bit more. It was really quite something. In any case, what

00:00:58.200 I thought I would do today, what primed me to do today's episode is the ongoing stuff that's

00:01:07.520 happening at Harvard University with the president of Harvard, Claudine Gay, and some of the craziness

00:01:15.020 that's taking place at Harvard. Some of you might remember that in a recent X Spaces session,

00:01:23.440 I discussed the ranking of 248 universities on free inquiry and free speech, and as conducted

00:01:37.340 by FIRE Foundation individual rights and expression, Harvard came out last 248 out of 248. Now, I don't

00:01:50.340 mean to just pilot on Harvard, but that made me think about a very famous set of debates, part of the

00:01:59.380 greater culture wars, and certainly the science wars that took place between two opposing camps at

00:02:08.300 Harvard beginning in the 1970s. And so this is really taking me back to my scientific work in evolutionary

00:02:17.780 psychology and sociobiology. And so I wanted to introduce you to just an absolutely unbelievable book,

00:02:25.080 book, So Defenders of the Truth, by Ulika Segestrale, whom I've communicated with, and I had been meaning

00:02:36.380 to invite her on the sad truth, and I never followed up. So I definitely need to correct that

00:02:48.000 mishap or that oversight on my part. So Defenders of the Truth by Segestrale is a book, I think if I

00:02:59.900 remember, I'm going on memory, it's from 2001. I read this book, I devoured it. It talks about the wars

00:03:06.900 that were, by the way, before I go on to tell you about what it talks about, here's another book by

00:03:13.600 Segestrale. This is actually the one that I was going to invite her to Nature's Oracle, the life and

00:03:22.740 work of Bill Hamilton. Bill Hamilton is the gentleman, many people have said that he is arguably the biggest

00:03:31.760 evolutionary biologist since none other than Darwin. He came up with the mechanisms of kin selection.

00:03:40.640 Incidentally, his doctoral dissertation at the time, I think it was at Harvard, was going to be

00:03:48.800 rejected. And then eventually, the paper that arose from that doctoral dissertation, which forms the

00:03:57.860 basis of kin selection, the idea that altruistic behavior can develop, can evolve between kin, and

00:04:06.600 there's an evolutionary mechanism by which these altruistic behavior can evolve between kin, is now

00:04:14.360 known as kin selection. And it is one of the four Darwinian modules that I use when I try to explain

00:04:20.700 a wide range of consumer behavior. The survival module, the mating module, the kin selection module,

00:04:28.920 and the reciprocal altruism module, which is from Robert Trivers, one of the other great evolutionary

00:04:35.300 biologists whom I tried to get on my show, but it didn't go too well. In any case, I won't get into that.

00:04:43.180 So the reason why I'm going to talk about this is because these culture wars and science wars that

00:04:49.080 are talked about in this book, in the Defenders of the Truth, took place at Harvard. And so continuing the

00:04:58.960 long tradition of not being tolerant of opposing views, I'm going to discuss the story at Harvard.

00:05:07.020 But in any case, so also don't forget, this is the biography of Bill Hamilton, also written by

00:05:13.820 Segestrales. I would highly recommend you check it out. But let's come back to this book here.

00:05:19.200 Defenders of the Truth, it recounts the story of the battle that unfolded when E.O. Wilson,

00:05:27.640 this is the book Sociobiology. Sociobiology is the book that was written, a classic book,

00:05:34.480 the social basis basically of behavior, of which kin selection would be one such example.

00:05:41.300 It was a book that was published in 1975 by E.O. Wilson. For those of you who don't know E.O. Wilson,

00:05:47.260 I'm hitting you with a lot of books. Unbelievable. E.O. Wilson, this is called Naturalist, his autobiography.

00:05:55.920 E.O. Wilson was, of course, an entomologist at Harvard who studied social ants. He is also the one

00:06:03.080 who wrote one of my favorite books of all time. I keep mentioning it, Consilience, Unity of Knowledge.

00:06:10.400 Consilience is the idea that you can build bridges between, say, the humanities, the social sciences,

00:06:17.760 and the natural sciences, and hence create consilience between them. And it forms the basis.

00:06:23.400 So, for example, in my first academic book, The Evolutionary Basis of Consumption,

00:06:28.040 in the last chapter, I talk about how evolutionary psychology is the framework that can offer

00:06:34.380 consilience, not only to the behavioral sciences, but to consumer behavior specifically. In other words,

00:06:41.720 in order to have a unifying theory to explain human behavior, you need some meta framework that offers

00:06:51.000 you consilience, which you often have in the natural sciences, you have much less of in the

00:06:56.160 social sciences. And, of course, consilience can be achieved only through the application of

00:07:02.780 evolutionary psychology, evolutionary theory to understand human behavior. Okay? This is actually

00:07:09.120 very relevant to what happens here at Harvard back in the 1970s. And so, Consilience is a book that

00:07:16.000 you want to read by E.O. Wilson. Okay. So, let me move on. So, these are the five books that

00:07:21.120 I thought were relevant to the story. So, in Defenders of the Truth, E.O. Wilson is, after publishing

00:07:28.760 his book, Sociobiology, in 1975, the last chapter of that book takes the sociobiological approach,

00:07:39.320 which he used to explain the social behavior, the biological basis of social behavior across

00:07:47.140 countless species. And he said, oh, and here's how we could apply it to humans. This was in chapter

00:07:53.200 26, I think, the last chapter of the book. And then the world went crazy. What are you talking,

00:07:59.920 Wilson? How dare you say that biology explains human behavior? And this, as some of you who follow my

00:08:08.720 work know, became eventually known as the human reticence effect. So, that scientists, social

00:08:15.720 scientists certainly, but even natural scientists, are perfectly happy to accept that evolution explains

00:08:21.120 the behavior of every species except one species called human beings. And so, when E.O. Wilson

00:08:27.420 dared to apply the sociobiological principles to humans, that created great outrage. And many people

00:08:38.000 were irate, including, so now we come to Harvard, two of his illustrious Harvard colleagues,

00:08:45.000 there were others, but the two most famous ones were Stephen Jay Gould. Some of you may know him,

00:08:51.980 the paleontologist who wrote many best-selling books meant for the masses. He's known for his theory of

00:09:00.600 punctuated equilibria. But Stephen Jay Gould understood evolution, yet he wasn't willing to accept that it

00:09:12.100 applied to human behavior in the way that E.O. Wilson was purporting. And another one was Richard

00:09:20.920 Lewington, who was also a natural scientist, but who was a Marxist, who then thought, well, many of these

00:09:27.000 evolutionary explanations would be contrary to Marxist doctrines, and therefore, it must be defeated.

00:09:34.600 And so, of course, my entire academic career was nothing but a reflection of the fact that,

00:09:41.580 or a manifestation of the fact that many of my social scientist colleagues and people who are housed in

00:09:47.640 the business schools, you know, some economists, some organizational behavioral folks, some, you know,

00:09:53.920 consumer psychologists, some behavioral decision-making folks, all of the people in the business school

00:09:59.500 said, well, what are you talking about? You can't apply biology to study employers and employees and

00:10:04.180 consumers. You know, those folks exist outside of biology. And my entire academic career was really

00:10:11.760 fighting back against that. And it wasn't, it hasn't been easy to oftentimes publish scientific papers in

00:10:18.900 those journals, because the gatekeepers would have none of it. Well, E.O. Wilson was the OG of fighting

00:10:26.520 those battles at Harvard, where his close colleagues were completely rejecting the idea that you could

00:10:35.560 apply evolutionary thinking and sociobiology to explain human affairs. So even in the context of,

00:10:43.120 you know, scientists debating amongst themselves, he was being, you know, harassed and ostracized. And

00:10:51.200 this is, E.O. Wilson is one of the greatest scientists, you know, of the past hundred years. And yet,

00:10:59.140 his Harvard colleagues were causing him all sorts of trouble. There's a famous incident in 1978,

00:11:06.060 where he was about to speak. And some protester came and famously dumped ice water over his head

00:11:16.240 in protest of the fact that this, you know, Nazi was using biology to explain human affairs. 0.65

00:11:24.780 So again, now, of course, these dogmatic, intolerant academics are not restricted to Harvard. But this

00:11:33.640 shows you that even someone with the stellar, unblemished, extraordinary credentials and

00:11:43.520 stature of E.O. Wilson was hounded by fellow intolerant Harvard professors, all of whom, by the way,

00:11:53.620 have proven to be grotesquely wrong. They were parasitized. So the parasitic mind, which many of you

00:12:00.840 know, is a book that I wrote and published in 2020, really, the way that I was first exposed to

00:12:10.140 parasitic thinking was in the context of my academic career, where I would see these professors be

00:12:17.580 completely parasitized by these ideological pathogens that were so detrimental to logic, to reason, to

00:12:27.060 science. And so again, this is where you see it originally, where these natural scientists,

00:12:35.600 Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Lewington, and others at Harvard, were saying, no way, E.O. Wilson,

00:12:41.920 you can't use biology to explain human affairs. Leave these biological explanations for all other

00:12:49.280 species. But when it comes to anything above the neck, when it comes to explaining the human mind,

00:12:55.360 that certainly can't be due to evolution, you Nazi. So there you have it. Harvard continues its

00:13:02.500 wonderful tradition of being intolerant, even when it comes to someone as astoundingly prestigious as a

00:13:11.400 scientist as E.O. Wilson. Now imagine that Harvard has produced folks like E.O. Wilson, and now we have

00:13:21.720 President Claudine Gay, who it turns out not only has been accused now of, I think, something like 40

00:13:28.220 instances of unbelievable plagiarism. I haven't looked at the specific cases, but apparently it's

00:13:35.580 a recurring pattern of very, very grotesque plagiarism. But now it just came out a day or two

00:13:43.740 ago that even the acknowledgments, I think, in her dissertation are plagiarized. So there you have

00:13:51.440 it. You know, people think that a university's reputation is untouchable, right? Harvard is Harvard

00:14:01.240 and it can never be blemished in any way. Well, boy, are they doing a good job at proving that dictum

00:14:11.060 wrong? So there you have it, folks. Go check out, if you're interested in these incredible

00:14:16.920 scientific slash cultural war battles, this is an incredible book, Defenders of the Truth

00:14:23.240 by Seger Strale. Have a good day, everybody. Cheers.

The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - December 21, 2023

Harvard University and the Culture⧸Science Wars of the 1970s (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_632)

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