The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad


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

Hosted by
Gad Saad
Mentioned
E.O. Wilson Stephen Jay Gould Bill Hamilton Richard Lewington Claudine Gay Robert Trivers Charlie Kirk Seger Strale Segestrales Nature Oracle Darwin

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Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Harvard University has a long history of tolerance and respect for opposing views. In fact, it is the home of one of the most important evolutionary biologists, E.O. Wilson, who is credited with discovering the mechanism of kin selection, and developing the theories that led to the development of the theory of evolution by kin selection.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
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.