The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - My Chat with Dr. Colin Wright - Evolution, Sex Differences, and Personality (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_677)

00:00:01.000 Hi everybody, this is Gad Saad. Today I have a new series of evolutionary-minded folks

00:00:09.020 that are coming on my show, although I've had many evolutionary-minded people in the

00:00:13.280 past. Today I've got Colin Wright with me, an evolutionary biologist. How are you doing,

00:00:17.960 Colin?

00:00:19.020 Hey, I'm doing fantastic. How are you?

00:00:21.180 I'm doing great, thank you. So I want to get your brief bio, so please forgive me as I

00:00:26.660 put my elderly reading glasses on. PhD in 2018 in evolutionary biology from UCSB. I'll have some

00:00:35.380 stuff to talk about UCSB because I have a connection there to them. Then from 2018 to 2020, an Eberly

00:00:43.840 research fellow at Penn State. I guess that's some kind of post-PhD position. You have a

00:00:50.820 sub-stack titled Reality's Last Stand. I like that title. And then you're also a fellow at

00:00:57.480 the Manhattan Institute. Anything that you'd like to add before we proceed?

00:01:02.680 That's about it. That covers everything.

00:01:05.500 Okay, well, I guess the first thing I wanted to say is that, I mean, you were in evolutionary

00:01:10.820 biology, but are you aware that two of the pioneers of evolutionary psychology were housed at, well,

00:01:18.320 one of them is still housed, but one of them recently passed away. Lida, Cosmides, and John

00:01:22.920 Tubi, do you know those guys?

00:01:25.520 Yeah, I'm aware of them. And for some reason, when I was in Santa Barbara, they just weren't

00:01:32.500 on my radar for whatever reason. So I started grad school at the University of Pittsburgh,

00:01:36.620 and then our lab transferred over to Santa Barbara. So I was at Santa Barbara for the last

00:01:41.720 two years of my PhD. And it was just me basically frantically writing all my studies up for my

00:01:47.800 dissertation. So I really should have looked into who else was there. They weren't in my

00:01:53.080 department. I was in the Department of Evolution, Ecology, and Marine Biology. And where were they?

00:01:59.320 I'm not exactly sure what their department was, but it wasn't my department. Otherwise, I would have

00:02:02.760 known.

00:02:03.380 Yeah. So, but just for our viewers and listeners who may not know of them, let me mention them. And

00:02:08.940 in doing so, it'll answer your query. So John Tubi and Lida Cosmides are two of the pioneers of

00:02:17.120 evolutionary psychology, which is the application of evolutionary biological principles to the study

00:02:23.180 of the human mind. And so in the exact same way that you would apply evolutionary thinking to study

00:02:28.460 the mating behavior of the salamander, or every other species known to mankind, we'd apply those

00:02:34.720 principles to study human behavior, which of course causes all kinds of consternation in social

00:02:39.940 scientists, because human beings are the only ones that are not within the purview of biology

00:02:45.440 somehow. Now, they are part of what's called the Santa Barbara Church, it's kind of facetiously,

00:02:52.740 because they have a particular strain of thinking when it comes to evolutionary psychology. Specifically,

00:03:01.320 they promulgated the idea, I mean, they weren't the only ones, but of the domain specificity of the

00:03:06.960 human mind, meaning that the human mind is not simply an amalgamation of domain general mechanisms,

00:03:12.940 like say, IQ. But they've, the human mind also has evolved specific computational system

00:03:20.060 for specific evolutionarily relevant ancestral problems, find mate, retain mate, avoid predators,

00:03:28.280 seek nutritious food, avoid poisonous foods, and so on, right? And so they were housed in the psychology

00:03:35.160 department, they were both trained in one in biological anthropology, one in cognitive psychology at

00:03:42.160 Harvard. But they really are two of the pioneers of evolutionary psychology, which in a sense,

00:03:47.620 it's a shame that you never got to meet them. But it demonstrates how academia works in these

00:03:52.300 completely isolated silos, such that someone like you studying evolutionary biology would never meet

00:03:58.500 two of the pioneers of evolutionary psychology. Yeah. Yeah. And my work, I didn't study humans,

00:04:03.640 but I studied animal personalities at both the individual and group levels. So collective

00:04:08.960 personalities of social insects and arachnids. And so there's, it's basically like an evolutionary

00:04:15.360 psychology, but, you know, applied to animals rather than humans. And strangely enough, they use

00:04:20.460 pretty widely different methods when they go about studying animals versus studying humans, mainly

00:04:26.160 because you can't, you know, give animals a survey to fill out or anything like that. But yeah,

00:04:31.380 it would have been fascinating to talk to them. And I wonder how they're doing now, because I know

00:04:35.740 that in the sort of the, you know, spring of 2020, I got the email circling around, you know,

00:04:42.580 I was at Penn State at the time, but I got the emails from them, I still would receive a lot of them

00:04:47.200 about all the, you know, the BLM chapters on campus, sort of trying to take over the evolution,

00:04:53.720 ecology, marine biology program, making them try to reflect Berkeley's hiring program where they needed to

00:04:59.140 make DEI part of, you know, not even just, you know, people coming into grad school, but professors

00:05:04.520 trying to get, to get raises, to get tenure, all these things. And I talked to some professors who

00:05:09.880 were there, and they said the department has not even returned back to normal since then. It's,

00:05:14.960 it's, it was sort of this mad takeover since I left. So I wonder how some of them are doing over

00:05:20.900 there. Because if you're studying EvoPsych, you know, that's, that's considered pretty taboo. And

00:05:24.840 Santa Barbara was pretty on the precipice of being woke when I left and was taken over

00:05:30.160 shortly thereafter. Right. No, well, look, so I don't know specifically how, how, how they're

00:05:36.800 faring. But as you probably know, as you just said, you know, evolutionary psychology remains

00:05:42.140 something that's very contentious in the human context. And by the way, that was my original,

00:05:47.580 if you like, foray into understanding parasitized minds, which then led me to, you know, many years

00:05:54.820 later, right, the parasitic mind. Because originally, in my academic work, you know, my, my goal has

00:06:00.620 always been to introduce evolutionary thinking into human behavior in general, consumer and economic

00:06:08.700 behavior in particular, hence, I'm housed in a business school. Actually, I remember I had been

00:06:12.620 invited, I was a visiting professor at UC Irvine, I had been invited to UCSB to speak in to their group,

00:06:19.480 meaning John Tooby and Lita Cosmides. And as we were walking around, you know, the beach area,

00:06:24.820 so I turned to John and I say, who recently passed away, may, may his, may he rest in peace.

00:06:31.880 I said to him, John, can you, can you hook me up with a professorship here? I mean, I can, I can get

00:06:38.340 used to living here and, you know, hanging around with you guys and doing work. And then his answer

00:06:42.720 was, what would a glitzy business school professor that probably makes a lot more money in the business 1.00

00:06:48.620 school want to do with us? And then he had told me that, you know, the teaching loads weren't good and

00:06:52.660 the salaries certainly from a business school professor were not very impressive. But just to

00:06:58.580 finish my point, I had always thought it was insane, which of course, now you write a lot about

00:07:04.540 the gender ideology stuff, that it was insane that I would get such blowback from my business school

00:07:09.840 colleagues, and more generally, the social scientists, that how dare you apply biology to

00:07:15.380 study, you know, consumer behavior? Surely, you don't think that consumers are driven by evolutionary

00:07:20.560 forces, physiology, hormones, and so on. And that's when I sort of had the little eureka, boy,

00:07:26.700 supposedly smart people can be real imbeciles. And then of course, eventually, you know, that 0.99

00:07:32.400 parasitic framework applied to so many other things. What was your, now you came from the world of

00:07:38.580 studying, you said insects, was it?

00:07:42.620 Yes, social insects and arachnids.

00:07:44.720 Exactly. And so maybe there wasn't as much of an obstacle of applying evolutionary theory there.

00:07:52.220 But what was your eureka moment or epiphany? Oh boy, we've got a problem here with applying

00:07:57.220 biology to humans.

00:07:59.860 You know, I have to say that since my work wasn't dealing with humans, my experience with sort of

00:08:06.600 this backlash against people studying humans was more just theoretical, seeing what was going on,

00:08:11.820 you know, studying what happened to EO Wilson back in the day, and sort of seeing people that I knew

00:08:16.820 who were in evolutionary psychology make basic statements about evolutionary psychology, just,

00:08:22.360 you know, the most basic things that our brains have evolved to do these things. Males and females 0.97

00:08:26.240 have evolved to do slightly different things. And so we might expect differences in behavior,

00:08:30.060 just sort of basic sociobiology like that. And they were, they were, you know, just hit over the

00:08:36.580 head for saying this stuff. My, when it got personal for me was not so much about the EO psych stuff,

00:08:45.400 but it was when my colleagues started posting things about, you know, there being like five

00:08:50.620 sexes or sexes of spectrum, all that stuff. And then, you know, as someone who learned a lot about

00:08:56.120 what biological sex was, because if you're studying animal behavior, or the behavior of any, you know,

00:09:01.020 even humans, one of the first things you learn about in your animal behavior class is anisogamy.

00:09:06.700 The differences between, you know, individuals who are producing egg and sperm because of the

00:09:11.920 different parental investments that go in there that, that create different entirely reproductive 0.64

00:09:15.960 strategies. There's so many like downstream consequences for bodies that house these two

00:09:20.700 reproductive strategies, that if you don't take that into account, when you're studying the behavior

00:09:25.100 of organisms, you're just going to, your data set is going to be a complete mess. You need to

00:09:28.940 understand these things. And so when people were talking about, there's, maybe there's five sexes

00:09:33.900 in humans, like Anne Fausto-Sterling, or maybe sex was just a social construct and it's arbitrary. And

00:09:39.020 you know, there's an infinite number of sexes based on genital morphology or whatever. That's when I

00:09:45.500 started being like, what the hell is going on? And if you'll remember the, the nature article called

00:09:50.180 Sex Redefined that came out in, I think, 2015 by Claire Ainsworth, that was to me, just a major

00:09:56.660 moment of, of, you know, seeing the stuff in magazines like Scientific American before on blogs

00:10:03.800 like Tumblr and among activists. And all of a sudden here it was in Nature where they're saying

00:10:08.520 that sex has been redefined. And now there was apparently some consensus among biologists that

00:10:12.980 I wasn't aware of that sex is much more complicated than just males and females for humans. So that was

00:10:20.080 my, oh crap moment. We're in a lot of trouble. Not so much the Evo psych stuff, but I didn't, 0.97

00:10:26.340 I didn't touch that in, in graduate school. I was comfortably studying my spiders and wasps and

00:10:31.700 reading my books from Evo Wilson and that type of stuff. I actually, I just finished reading his

00:10:37.160 autobiography, Naturalist, and I highly recommend, have you read it, Colin? I have back, yeah, back in the

00:10:43.720 day when I was first getting into sort of these topics and becoming fascinated with social behavior and

00:10:48.680 social insects. Naturalist, I think was one of the first ones from him that I read. And, and, and I

00:10:55.340 think I read Consilience afterwards, which was just, you know, a book that everyone has to read if they

00:10:59.320 want to read. Oh, thank you. I basically say this every week. I'll at least say it twice. Yeah, it's

00:11:05.460 mind-blowing. It's like a must read. You have to read Consilience. Oh, I'm getting goosebumps you

00:11:10.400 saying it. For those of you who don't know, Consilience is actually something that's been incredibly

00:11:15.320 important in my own writing. It refers to, I mean, literally that's, I think the subtitle of his

00:11:19.920 book, Consilience, Unity of Knowledge. The idea that you can unify what appear to be disparate areas

00:11:27.520 of, you know, human import. So you could take the social sciences, the natural sciences, the humanities,

00:11:32.660 and while these seem to be very, very different, they actually can be unified. And in his case,

00:11:37.920 and of course I agree, and I do the same thing in my work, it, he, he argues that you can unify

00:11:42.860 through the consilient lens of evolutionary theory, right? And so in a lot of my writings in

00:11:48.720 this book right here, in Evolutionary Basis of Consumption, the last chapter is all about how

00:11:54.220 incorporating evolutionary thinking into the study of consumer behavior would allow the field to be

00:12:02.340 consilient. It would, it would have actually a unified tree of knowledge rather than having

00:12:08.300 completely disparate, disorganized studies that are otherwise completely unrelated to one another.

00:12:14.360 And so I highly recommend, I second what Colin said, consilience should be read by everybody.

00:12:20.100 But so going now, of course, E.O. Wilson was himself an entomologist, so he studied social insects and so

00:12:25.800 on. Can you tell us about some of the, I'm sure, mind-blowing stuff that you studied in your short

00:12:32.320 career as, as someone who studied insects and acrid? And yeah. Go ahead.

00:12:38.820 So I studied two different systems. So my advisor, he had a sort of this torturous

00:12:44.800 way about him where he wanted us to pursue two PhDs side-by-side and two completely different

00:12:50.280 systems. And then whatever one, whatever research program bared more fruit, that's the one that we

00:12:56.380 would publish as our actual dissertation. So it resulted in a lot of papers, but it was just frantic.

00:13:01.160 So I studied, my dissertation ended up being on the social spider, Stegodyphus damikula. It's

00:13:06.820 one of about 35 spiders that actually exist in a social group. So they're highly inbred.

00:13:13.140 These are in South Africa, Namibia, Botswana area. And so when it was winter in the U.S., I'd go down to

00:13:19.440 South Africa and I would study these colonies. I would basically go around to these areas. We would

00:13:27.040 drive along the highways. A lot of the spiders, their webs were located on fences. So we'd,

00:13:32.060 we'd go to these colonies on the fences. We'd take them, bring them into the lab. So we'd maybe 0.96

00:13:37.400 collect say like 30 colonies out in nature. We'd break them apart. We would isolate every single

00:13:42.200 spider. There's anywhere between 20 and 400 spiders in any one colony. We would do behavioral

00:13:48.700 assays on every single individual in these colonies, testing them for whether their, their score for

00:13:55.860 boldness. So if there's a bold and shy sort of axis in animal behavior, it's, it's basically your

00:14:01.040 propensity to engage in a type of risky behavior. And some spiders are take more risks. Some are

00:14:06.720 take less risks. We call it boldness and shyness. And then what we would do is we would sort of play

00:14:12.200 God and we would create artificial colonies of known composition from these bigger colonies.

00:14:18.320 We'd create colonies of 20 spiders that are all really bold or all really shy or any sort of

00:14:23.560 complex mixture of, of bold and shy. And then we would have them do sort of different tasks,

00:14:30.400 like how well do they hunt for prey? How well do they repair their webs? You know, just sort of how

00:14:37.160 much their survival, we deepened, put the colonies back in the field over a couple of generations and see

00:14:41.660 how they're doing based on their colony compositions. So that's what I did for, um, a lot of my spider

00:14:47.900 work. Uh, I specifically looked at their ability to combat invasive, uh, not invasive, sorry, but

00:14:54.340 these, these predatory ants, there are these called, uh, uh, uh, pugnacious ants. They were all over

00:14:59.780 South, uh, uh, South Africa and the spiders sort of have this adaptation in areas where the spiders were

00:15:05.640 really prevalent. Uh, they would sort of build more and more webs around their colonies. So I basically

00:15:10.660 looked if there was an interaction between the colony composition and their propensity to with, uh,

00:15:15.580 withstand these raids by these ants. Um, and they turned out to be no, because the ants were really

00:15:21.400 super aggressive. Uh, but there was a difference between the spider colonies in there. Uh, if they were

00:15:28.120 exposed in advance to the sort of the, the sense of these ants, uh, they would all modify their entire colony

00:15:34.560 level behavior just with these indirect cues. So I was more looking at sort of, uh, uh, whether if you can

00:15:40.720 warn colonies or not, and if their colony composition matters for that. Uh, then I studied social, uh,

00:15:46.760 paper wasps. Um, and I was interested in looking at, can I predict the collective behavior of the entire

00:15:54.280 colonies based on knowing just the singular behavior of the queen who founds the colony in the beginning of the

00:16:00.180 season? And so the, the, the queens basically had a similar sort of bold, shy, uh, personality type to 0.92

00:16:06.620 them. Some, so it's an experiment I devised where you'd basically antagonize them on the nest. Some of

00:16:12.060 the queens would hold their ground and sort of never leave the nest if you're antagonizing them. And then 1.00

00:16:17.180 some queens would fly away immediately if you just give them a prod with a, a brush or a stick of some 1.00

00:16:22.360 sort. Uh, and what I was able to find is the, the queens that were quickly to fly away from their

00:16:28.000 colonies, uh, abandon their nests when you're antagonizing them, gave rise to colonies that

00:16:32.960 were also very quick to leave their nests. But instead of flying away, they would attack you.

00:16:38.000 They would attack the intruder. Whereas the colonies that had queens that stood their ground and, and

00:16:43.140 fought with you on their nests actually gave rise to colonies that were less aggressive. The, the,

00:16:47.840 the, uh, the workers were less likely to leave their nests and attack. So you could vibrate these

00:16:53.720 entire colonies and they wouldn't swarm. Uh, so that was an interesting thing. They also linked

00:16:58.280 sort of queen behavior and size to, uh, to in the field, to their, their survival and reproduction. 0.99

00:17:03.780 So those are the things I did. So many, so many places I can go with this. Let me try to go to a

00:17:09.160 few places. So one of the things that I've talked about, I actually published a short paper. It was

00:17:15.440 on a, it was in the European journal of social psychology, I think, or maybe you're, I can't remember

00:17:20.600 the exact title of the journal. I think European journal of social psychology. It was a special issue

00:17:24.640 on the, uh, the, the, the evolutionary roots and the evolutionary genetics of personality.

00:17:31.520 And, and that's a really interesting, uh, concept because one of the, and I, I, I lecture about this

00:17:38.320 often in my course and so on. Why is it that some traits become fixed? That's that, you know, we have

00:17:43.840 two eyes, we have, I mean, unless you have a congenital problem, you know, you have, uh, one heart,

00:17:49.660 right. Uh, those are fixed. They don't follow a normal distribution, whereas personality types

00:17:54.460 are not fixed. And so one of the arguments for why evolution has not fixed a, an optimal personality

00:18:03.440 type. So one argument is that there are, and I think it, it fits nicely with some of the stuff

00:18:07.980 that you were talking about there is that there isn't a singular social ecosystem where a singular

00:18:15.120 personality type is optimal across all ecosystems. And so the analogy that I give is when let's say

00:18:22.060 a company. So in the context of say, I'm lecturing this in the business school, I want the students

00:18:26.840 to kind of link it to something in their business world. Well, when an organization gives you a

00:18:32.060 personality test as part of hiring you, they're actually not, they're at, they're testing whether

00:18:38.920 your personality matches optimally with their organizational culture. And so the same person,

00:18:47.360 Colin has this, whatever personality type that he has, it is optimal for JP Morgan, but it is

00:18:54.020 suboptimal for, uh, Google. And so it's not that there is a singular optimal, you know, Colin

00:19:00.540 personality. He's great here. He's bad there. And therefore there are no selection pressures for a

00:19:07.180 singular personality profile to, to dominate across all contexts. Is this something that you've kind

00:19:12.800 of covered in your own thinking? Yeah. Yeah. Big time. Um, you know, I think we would call this

00:19:17.880 sort of a niche partitioning, uh, in, in your environment, because if all organisms are the same

00:19:23.260 and they're, you know, within a species and they're trying to go after the exact same resource in the

00:19:27.600 exact same way, uh, then, you know, there's, there's going to be others that can out-compete in that

00:19:31.880 and then they're screwed. But if they're able to sort of partition their niches and say, okay, well,

00:19:35.760 uh, they're really better at that, but I can also maybe get 20% of that, but I can divert more of my

00:19:41.000 attention into the secondary food source and I can sort of, you know, take some of those things.

00:19:45.400 I can get really good at doing those. So it's just a way that, uh, individuals can still have,

00:19:51.080 you know, adapt to their environment and, uh, sort of partition their niche out more and more.

00:19:55.240 Finally, when you come to things like social organisms, um, this idea was that there was maybe

00:20:01.640 an optimal way to behave within a colony. Like if you're a wasp, you need to be really aggressive

00:20:05.640 or something. Um, and the differences in behavior, this had long been viewed as just sort of this,

00:20:13.320 this, uh, uh, developmental noise. This was just random variation. It wasn't really adaptive.

00:20:18.920 Uh, and then it came to, to discover like, well, I mean, we see these behavioral variations,

00:20:24.980 like a lot. We see inter-individual differences in behavior across time and context. That's what

00:20:30.060 personality is. Um, wouldn't our default assumption be that maybe this is adaptive. We see it everywhere

00:20:35.680 in systems where we wouldn't even expect it maybe. Um, and so we, you can actually test these in many

00:20:41.200 systems and in my spiders and bees and pretty much any social system that has ever been looked at.

00:20:46.960 You find not only that personality variation exists, but you also find that often these personality

00:20:52.120 variations are linked to their proficiency at certain tasks within the colony. There's sort of

00:20:56.260 a division of labor that is happening. And we see this in the spiders that I looked at too, where you

00:21:00.740 have, uh, aggressive spiders. Uh, you ever heard of the aggression spillover hypothesis? I don't think

00:21:06.760 so. So it's when you have an individual that is like so aggressive, like maybe they went through this

00:21:11.960 selective environment where it's selected for really, really aggressive individuals. This happens to a lot

00:21:16.260 of spiders. Uh, and sometimes females will get so aggressive that they'll actually sterilize 1.00

00:21:21.580 themselves effectively behaviorally because they'll kill any male that tries to mate with

00:21:25.260 them because they're so aggressive. And so you see like this, the selection sort of against

00:21:29.300 aggression, but then they, they, they, they still have to be going through the environment of being

00:21:33.980 aggressive. So it's almost like a maladaptive adaptive sort of situation they're in. Uh, we see the same

00:21:38.820 thing in a lot of the spiders that are in our colonies where we have really aggressive spiders and

00:21:43.120 really docile spiders. The aggressive spiders, they have like no chill. They cannot, if you take,

00:21:48.660 uh, you know, shy spiders, docile spiders out of the colony, they can't become less aggressive to

00:21:54.860 fulfill their niche. They're just always really aggressive. And so when you have a colony that's,

00:21:59.260 uh, composed of nothing but really aggressive spiders, well, they're really good at, at combating

00:22:04.380 enemies and making sure their colonies are free of parasites and things like that because they

00:22:08.700 attack anything in sight, but they ended up attacking their young as well. So they have much

00:22:12.280 fewer, uh, offspring output than, uh, colonies that have say a bunch of really docile individuals.

00:22:18.660 Uh, who are better at caretaking, but if you have nothing but really docile individuals,

00:22:23.000 well, then you're going to get destroyed by any sort of intruder or parasites to take over your

00:22:27.440 colony. So there is this optimal mixture usually of the aggressive and docile spiders, uh, uh, so

00:22:33.280 they can partition their behavior and, you know, uh, and division of labor based on, based on colony 0.66

00:22:37.660 need. And the shy ones are usually able to up-regulate their aggression and become more aggression.

00:22:42.340 If you take aggressive ones out, uh, not, not really great, but more so than the aggressive

00:22:46.420 ones. So yeah, there's the aggression spillover of the aggressive spiders, uh, that can become

00:22:51.460 maladaptive. But if you have a colony, if you have a group, you can be multiple types of behaviors at

00:22:57.040 once. You don't need, there is no single behavior, uh, cause the entire colony can be, uh, finely tuned,

00:23:02.800 uh, as, as, as it will. Uh, a couple of more, uh, geeky, nerdy, evolutionary biology.

00:23:10.720 I love it. I never get to talk about this stuff. I love it. I know. I, I, me too. I mean, I could sit

00:23:15.240 and just geek out on all that stuff. So number one, are you familiar with Sam Gosling? Does that

00:23:22.660 ring a bell? It rings a major bell. So Sam Gosling is a psychologist at university of Texas, Austin,

00:23:30.000 who has studied, uh, personality differences. I, I don't know if it was strictly with dogs or he,

00:23:40.040 but I mean, I know for sure he did it with dogs, but I, but I think maybe with others as well. So

00:23:44.720 I know that you're no longer in academia, but I think it might be someone that you might be,

00:23:48.940 I mean, it's in a completely different, you know, animal taxa. It's, it's not the insects. It's not

00:23:52.900 spiders. Uh, it's, you know, it's, it's, it's mammals. It's, it's, it's our closest, uh, you know,

00:23:58.020 uh, uh, uh, buddies, dogs, but that actually speaks to another point. Cause you were talking

00:24:02.820 about social species in the paper that I mentioned earlier that I had written in whatever European

00:24:08.600 journal of social psychology, it was a response article to a target article. And I think it was

00:24:14.540 in that target article where I had read a finding, which maybe you, you might remember the reference

00:24:20.580 because I think it's, it's a mind blowing finding. If you look across species within a particular,

00:24:27.420 say felines, right? So if you are a social species within felines, which lions would be an example of

00:24:38.280 many of the other felines are solitary other than for mating purposes. Then what you find is that the

00:24:45.120 more social the species is, the greater, the personality heterogeneity within that species.

00:24:53.440 So lions will have greater personality variants and, you know, inter-individuals than would cheetahs,

00:25:00.920 which again speaks to our earlier point that personality heterogeneity is a means by which

00:25:07.000 you might be optimal in one social ecosystem, but not another. Are you, are you familiar with that

00:25:12.520 general finding? Yeah, I am. Yeah. And that's, that's basically what a lot of our research is,

00:25:16.880 is, I guess, based on because, you know, when you look at social species, you do see this division

00:25:23.460 of labor and because social species are the only types of species that can divide labor. And so there

00:25:28.520 is good selection pressures to have these two different maxima, I guess, of, of selection within

00:25:33.880 a colony that you don't get in solitary species, quite so, so, so well-defined.

00:25:39.860 Very cool. Last question, because you mentioned earlier, parental investment, which to us, because

00:25:48.040 we're in the evolutionary, you know, ecosystem, okay, we get what that is. But I actually think that

00:25:52.800 that's one of the most unbelievable insights within evolutionary thinking. And it demonstrates

00:25:59.260 the consilience, the explanatory power, the parsimony of an insight that could then be applied across

00:26:07.200 all sexually reproducing species. It's Robert Trivers, who, who proposed parental investment

00:26:12.980 theory. And he said, look, if you want to understand the pattern of sex differences in any species,

00:26:19.520 simply look at the minimal obligatory parental investment of the two sexes within that species.

00:26:25.580 For most species, it ends up being that females provide the greater minimal obligatory parental 1.00

00:26:33.120 investment. So that has downstream effect on their morphology, on their sexual behaviors,

00:26:38.480 on all sorts of things. But in a few, in many fewer species, you have what's called sex role reversal

00:26:45.640 species, where it is the males who provide the greater minimal obligatory parental investment.

00:26:52.460 So what do you think happens to all the sex differences? They're perfectly reversed. It's 0.97

00:26:57.920 the males that are smaller. It's the males that have less testosterone. It's the males that are less

00:27:02.400 aggressive. It's the males that are more sexually choosy. I mean, you couldn't make up the data if you

00:27:07.240 wanted to, to be so accurate. So one of the things that pisses me off so much about all the idiots on 1.00

00:27:13.460 social media and so on, is when they say, oh, but come on, you're an evolution psychologist. 1.00

00:27:18.240 It's just so theorizing. You sit with a cognac, you smoke a cigar, and you just pontificate post hoc

00:27:27.000 bullshit. Whereas in reality, it's the exact opposite. For you to be able to establish that 0.99

00:27:34.240 a phenomenon is truly veridical, the evidentiary threshold that you go through before you tick it

00:27:41.180 off, as I think we've got convincing data, is astoundingly higher than the rest of the sciences.

00:27:46.360 What are your thoughts on that, Colin? Oh, I couldn't agree more. This is the whole

00:27:50.860 consilient aspect of biological sex of male and female is what I try to drive home in all my talks

00:27:58.840 that I give on this topic. Because what you see is a lot of activists who are basically trying to

00:28:04.280 move away from a consilient aspect of view of sex and just sort of reduce it to these individualized,

00:28:12.160 uh, to the, to the level of the individual without any links to across species, uh, across time or

00:28:18.660 anything. So I, I, I use the analogy of, um, you know, back before we knew the, the, the sun was the

00:28:25.140 center of our solar system. You had these models and they had what are called, uh, I think they're

00:28:29.260 called epicycles that they needed to introduce into the models because the planets were moving in

00:28:34.080 weird ways. And so like, oh, we'll just, we can add these little loop-de-loops in our model of the

00:28:38.360 solar system. And then, you know, you add a loop-de-loop and it actually kind of explains,

00:28:42.300 you know, it fixes this error, but two other small errors pop up over here and don't worry,

00:28:46.300 we'll just keep adding epicycles. And they just keep adding those. And then you see these models,

00:28:50.560 you know, after many years of this process of just adding epicycles and, you know, patching it up with

00:28:55.840 more and more that there's the, there's these cumbersome, like Rube Goldberg, like models of the

00:29:02.440 solar system they had. And then you just get the bright idea. It's like, well, what if we,

00:29:06.340 instead of just adding infinite numbers of these epicycles, what if we just like move the sun

00:29:11.380 from here to there? And then you see all the orbits there, you know, they're, they're just

00:29:16.620 forming these perfect ellipses and it's just, everything makes sense all of a sudden. So what

00:29:20.700 we're seeing, and I've, I've shown papers on this, of what the activists are trying to do to the biology

00:29:25.160 of sex is they're trying to like look at sex in these, these different levels of, you know, look,

00:29:31.020 you have your, your chromosomal sex, your gametic sex, your hormonal sex, your, your morphological

00:29:38.120 sex. And they think none of these takes precedence over any other, you know, even though we would

00:29:43.320 say that your gametic sex is your sex and all these other things are just either upstream causes of

00:29:48.760 your sex or downstream consequences. But they try to break it down into these graphs that are just

00:29:54.220 all over the place. And I look at this and it's just like, they're, they're adding epicycles.

00:29:58.040 They're, they're moving away from the perfect ellipses of a solar system. What we have of

00:30:03.160 males and females. And the reason that we know that, you know, a male seahorse is the one that

00:30:07.340 gives birth is because of their, they're the ones that are producing gametes. The reason we can

00:30:11.380 identify sex reversible and birds or any other species, uh, is because their gametes don't match

00:30:16.940 the behavior we would typically expect of their sex. And the activists are just trying to just get 0.99

00:30:21.640 rid of all of that completely, uh, in favor of this system that is just completely, you know,

00:30:27.560 looks sciencey. They make sciencey looking graphs. Um, but it's just, uh, it's sophistry. It's,

00:30:33.940 it makes absolutely no sense. And then it has other layer of being, uh, incredibly socially harmful

00:30:39.440 in, in, in many different, uh, contexts. Well, I love your analogy and you may or may not know this,

00:30:45.380 but Kepler himself was, uh, famous for using analogical reasoning in arriving. So it's,

00:30:53.220 it's interesting that you're using a, a, a cosmological analogy to talk about sex when

00:30:59.220 Kepler himself, uh, I talk about this in, in this book and the, the happiness book, when I'm

00:31:03.720 discussing, uh, the importance of analogical reasoning in science, that it's such an important

00:31:08.920 tool, which actually allows for greater interdisciplinarity and consilience because by,

00:31:13.160 by once you're generating analogies, you're, you're saying this is linked to that in a,

00:31:19.420 in a meaningful way in the exact way that you just said, uh, one last point about parental

00:31:24.000 investment. Then I want to get into how you decided, I think to, to the regret of your field

00:31:30.880 to leave academia and so on, but, uh, parental investment theory actually applies to spiders

00:31:38.120 in the following sense. I mean, I know, you know this, but I want to say it for, so spiders

00:31:44.040 or some spiders engage in what's called sexual cannibalism, where to your earlier point about

00:31:50.220 the females being super aggressive, in this case, what happens is the, in order for the male to mate 1.00

00:31:56.460 with the female, he has to give himself up as a packet of calories so that she eats him while he's 0.99

00:32:05.160 mating with her. Now, what would parental investment theory exactly predict? Well, what, what is a greater

00:32:12.700 minimal parental obligatory investment than to kill yourself in the service of mating? So what do you 0.85

00:32:20.320 end up getting in those species? Gigantic females and as minuscule males. I mean, we're not talking

00:32:27.600 about a sexual dimorphism of, you know, in the human context, it's, I think about 15%, although I've

00:32:32.840 always thought that that seems to underestimate how much males are bigger than females in the human

00:32:38.720 context. But it's, I think it's 15% is the official number or something, something around

00:32:42.720 that, right? Yeah. It fails, it fails to account for the multivariate sort of combinatory effect of

00:32:48.860 the differences. Any, any one metric is like no greater than 15%. But if you were to combine them

00:32:54.180 all and, you know, multiply them, it's, it's vastly higher. It's vastly higher. Exactly. Well, in the context

00:33:00.140 of spiders who engage in sexual cannibalism, I mean, you tell me what the number one number is,

00:33:07.500 but it's, it's, you know, it's in the order of they're a hundredfold bigger, right? Or something,

00:33:11.740 right? Or more, yeah. Or more, exactly. So, and I remember at one point I was giving a talk at USC

00:33:18.200 where some smarmy, you know, marketing professor was like, what is this bullshit biology stuff you 0.97

00:33:24.220 talk about? And then he gave as an example, then how do you explain spider behavior? And I literally hit 0.97

00:33:29.960 him with the sexual cannibalism example as a demonstration of parental investment theory in a

00:33:36.240 sexual reversal species. And he just shut his mouth like the idiot that he was. All right. 1.00

00:33:41.220 We're done with, with geeking out on insects. And by, although we could spend another five hours

00:33:46.120 talking about it, why did you leave academia? What happened?

00:33:52.300 That's yeah, that's a, that's a big question. I suppose I'll try it. I'll be as succinct as possible.

00:33:55.800 Um, so I got into academia to be a scientist because, uh, well, I was involved in sort of the,

00:34:04.180 the new atheist community back in the day. And I really got into evolution when I was

00:34:07.780 arguing with a lot of creationists and intelligent design people. And I, I used to run a blog where I

00:34:12.540 sort of was debunking a lot of, uh, pseudoscience, whether it was, um, uh, you know, like Qigong type,

00:34:21.160 artificial medicine, you know, uh, folk medicine type stuff. Uh, or it was, you know, mainly debunking

00:34:27.260 creationism and intelligent design claims. Um, I stopped doing a lot of that when I was in grad

00:34:32.540 school because I just didn't have time. I was focused on doing my work, but I was in, I idolized

00:34:37.280 people like Richard Dawkins and, um, you know, a lot of the other four horsemen, Sam Harris, uh,

00:34:42.960 Daniel Dennett. Are you still idolizing Sam Harris? Uh, I'm, I'm a fan, but, uh, I would definitely

00:34:49.560 disagree with him on, uh, some of his tech censorship views, but, uh, I, I think he's

00:34:54.840 got such a large backlog of, of work. That's great. I, I can't, I can't abandon, uh, all

00:35:01.120 of that, but yeah, I would like to love to have a chat with him about sort of where we

00:35:05.120 disagree on some, uh, some big issues now. So, um, I was doing a lot of this, uh, work

00:35:13.200 as sort of in the new atheism space, um, really cared about what's true. That's something that

00:35:17.660 Dawkins always instilled in me is that, you know, we are scientists, you care about what's

00:35:21.960 true. Um, and then people like Hitchens, you know, they, they were just these, these bulldogs

00:35:27.020 who just, they don't care what you, what you think. They're going to say what they, what's

00:35:30.640 on their mind and they're not going to, they're going to deal with the consequences. So as I

00:35:34.440 was going through graduate school, I just sort of noticed this percolating ideas of five

00:35:40.780 sexes, sex is a spectrum, whatever. And when I started pushing back just as a scientist,

00:35:45.740 does a very making a very scientific, you know, Oh, I think people are just wrong about

00:35:49.560 biology. Here's, here's why I think you're being mis, uh, misunderstanding of what it means

00:35:54.060 to be male or female. Uh, I was expecting this scientific arguments back, you know, I would

00:35:59.100 giving them reasons and all your young child, my sweet summer child. Yeah. And, uh, and I

00:36:06.340 realized, you know, they're just immediately went full, you know, all the way to 11. You're

00:36:10.440 a bigot, racist, sexist, homophobe bigot. Um, and this was, it was shocking. And my initial 1.00

00:36:18.080 response was to completely, uh, uh, pull back and expunge my social media and things like

00:36:24.160 that. Cause I was applying for professor jobs. I was writing DEI statements at the time and

00:36:29.200 trying to make it. So I wasn't saying stuff I disagreed with. And it was just nightmare.

00:36:33.060 Um, and then I, I couldn't look away from what was happening because I realized that there

00:36:40.540 was something there and it was really important. Not only was people, people are, they weren't

00:36:44.560 just wrong about biology, but there were many ways in which it was harming society in a big

00:36:49.280 way. You could talk about males and female sports, what people are doing to the whole

00:36:53.200 gender affirming care thing, trying to say that sex is a mutable property and we can align 0.98

00:36:58.680 kids' physical sex with their brain sex. There's a million problems with that whole thing. Um,

00:37:03.960 but this was having just tremendous real world effects. And so I ended up writing an article

00:37:07.880 that got published in the wall street journal, um, in 2020, uh, it was called the dangerous

00:37:14.400 denial of sex. And that went like incredibly viral. And I had a lot of my colleagues just

00:37:20.240 denounced me. People started posting on social, uh, on job boards. Uh, there's one called eco

00:37:24.960 evil jobs is probably the biggest one for ecologists and evolutionary biologists, people 0.97

00:37:29.240 posting job listings that Colin Wright is a transphobe, racist, white supremacist, don't hire 0.98

00:37:34.680 him. And so it was just this full court press to try to, to destroy my reputation in academia. 0.95

00:37:40.780 Um, and I decided I wasn't going to back down. I was still going to be talking about this in a

00:37:45.040 reasonable way. Um, and so I ended up leaving just because I think they probably did a pretty

00:37:49.680 good job of destroying my reputation. Uh, I didn't get fired from Penn state. So kudos to them for not

00:37:54.740 firing me or anything like that. Um, and then I just started talking about this stuff full time

00:38:00.700 and giving talks and writing about it on my, uh, website realities last stand. Um, and I work for

00:38:06.840 the Manhattan Institute now where we're involved in, I basically do the biology side of things. I do a lot

00:38:12.300 of expert testimony for court cases around the U S and internationally, uh, for, you know, when a,

00:38:18.380 when a state or a country tries to implement a law that sex is real, I both help write these laws about

00:38:24.020 the reality of sex and what it means to be male or female. And then I often come and defend them

00:38:28.100 in court and get cross-examined by ACLU lawyers who have no idea what they're talking about. It's,

00:38:33.100 it's really, uh, quite fun. So that's what I'm doing nowadays. Uh, well, first, I mean, take your

00:38:40.540 case, which it, it just because of my personality, it infuriates me. That's why I am in the public eye

00:38:47.860 because I can't shy away from fighting for these things. It pisses me off that your destiny,

00:38:55.060 if I can put it in fatalistic terms was determined by all of these parasitic ideas, right? I mean, 0.94

00:39:00.780 academia is supposed to nurture, you know, intellectual pursuits, truth seeking. Here's

00:39:06.160 a guy who comes along who, you know, you're hardly someone who's very bombastic and who tries to be,

00:39:11.020 you know, of the little that I've seen of your work. And I'm, I'm going to follow it more closely.

00:39:15.320 Now you certainly strike me as someone who's very calm in your demeanor. You're not trying to hurt

00:39:19.860 anybody. And yet the very real consequence was that you said, I've got two choices. I could try

00:39:25.420 to continue in academia or congratulations. You won. I'm out. Well, that decision that you made

00:39:32.220 because I've been a professor now for 30 plus years and I've been, I guess the guy who's most

00:39:38.340 fighting against this stuff. I get your story a thousand times a year from people who say, look,

00:39:45.320 I'm just finishing my PhD in clinical psychology. I'm out. I just, I'm finishing my PhD in biological

00:39:50.700 anthropology. I'm out. So imagine the amount of brain power that you are. So it's not just these

00:39:58.040 esoteric, you know, philosophical conversations. There are real consequences. And of course there

00:40:02.860 are many real consequences. One of which you're losing people that we spent many years training who

00:40:08.600 say, this is not for me. I'd rather go do something else. And maybe now you don't regret your

00:40:13.560 decision. Maybe you're very fulfilled, but it should be you who makes that decision rather

00:40:18.940 than the chilling effect of people saying, you better stop doing this or else you'll never get

00:40:23.960 a job. It's horrible. Well, I often say that they really shouldn't have done what they did,

00:40:28.800 not just because, you know, principles and things like that, but, you know, it would have been in

00:40:33.060 their best interest to just let me poke my spiders and wasps in my laboratory tubes rather than me

00:40:39.560 just dedicating like almost every waking hour to writing expert testimony and court cases and

00:40:45.020 writing explainers and doing videos on this. So like they've kind of created a monster in that

00:40:49.100 sense. So I'm very happy doing what I'm doing now because I think it's very important to get these

00:40:56.400 ideas out there. And I get to, you know, I miss having students, that type of thing and being able

00:41:00.860 to interact with them and teach courses. But I do have a much bigger audience for my writing and

00:41:07.760 the things I talk about. So if today, let's suppose some university, Smith College calls up,

00:41:14.980 hey, Dr. Wright, we've got the ecosystem for you. I'm a big fan of your spider and other insect

00:41:22.960 research. Please come set up a lab, assistant professorship. Would this be something that

00:41:28.360 stops you in your track for a minute and you're thinking about whether you want to go back to that

00:41:32.420 or have you put academia in the rearview mirror never to return to it?

00:41:38.860 I don't think I'll return to being sort of having my own lab type of thing, but I am still writing

00:41:46.260 articles. So I've published a peer reviewed book chapter with Dr. Emma Hilton, who also talks about

00:41:51.820 this called The Two Sexes, just because there wasn't any peer reviewed articles that make the banal 0.99

00:41:57.460 statement that there's only two sexes and here's why, you know, it was just sort of this, everyone

00:42:03.700 knew that that's the way it was. And, you know, you don't have papers, you can sign physics that say,

00:42:08.460 like, objects fall down, like this is our gravity is real. It's just, you know, we have here's the

00:42:14.360 equations, it's been mapped out, we've measured these things. And so I've kind of in a good spot where

00:42:20.360 I can write articles for scientific journals without having to be directly in academia and

00:42:28.580 have to apply for grants and all the bad stuff and the stuff I didn't like about academia. So

00:42:34.180 I get to sort of launch my rockets over there and do sort of my academic thing while at the same time

00:42:42.260 not being just completely immersed in it. Now, if they were to have, since I just moved to Nashville

00:42:47.300 recently and bought a house here, so I don't plan to move anywhere for a long time, maybe forever.

00:42:52.940 So if maybe Vanderbilt were to want me to start a lab of some sort dealing with this topic of sex

00:43:00.260 differences and pushing back against the literature that's out there that's spreading rapidly, that's

00:43:05.780 something we can talk about too, is all the papers that are coming out in big journals that are just 0.60

00:43:10.280 crap in the bed about what it means to be male or female. Because we need an army of people that 0.97

00:43:17.220 are responding, doing letters to the editors, writing rebuttals to these things, publishing our

00:43:22.440 own articles, saying basically that sex is real and know this because there's intersex conditions

00:43:27.600 doesn't mean sex is a spectrum. And the only reason that we know clownfish change sex is because

00:43:33.600 their gametes change from producing one type of gamete to another. And this is strangely and

00:43:39.880 bizarrely the type of thing that we need to be publishing in scientific journals that I would love

00:43:43.680 to be contributing to.

00:43:45.780 What do you, I mean, I'm going to ask this with some incredulity, despite the fact that I'm the

00:43:54.540 author of the parasitic mind, so nothing should surprise me about these parasitized minds. But then I see,

00:44:01.620 here comes Sean Carroll, you know, Mr. Physics, I'm very smart, who then explains to the rest of us

00:44:08.600 simpletons that know sex is not binary. Here comes scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson, who's never

00:44:16.460 published a scientific paper, who explains to us, I don't know if you saw it, I did a satirical take

00:44:21.260 on it, you know, depending on how much makeup you wear or whether, and I actually did a clip where I

00:44:26.420 started putting on a wig, I started putting on half of lipstick, and depending on how much

00:44:31.600 female accoutrement I put on, it changed how female I became, because that's what Neil deGrasse Tyson

00:44:38.420 had explained on a show with this incredible intellectual pomposity, right? I'm a physicist,

00:44:45.240 and I'm explaining to you that it is absolutely not true that there is male and female. So do you

00:44:50.360 think, I'm asking you here to speculate, so I know you don't know what's inside their hearts or in the

00:44:55.300 deep recess of their mind. Do you think that Sean Carroll, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and other

00:45:00.460 parasitized, lobotomized guys, do they in the deep recess of their minds know that they are lying,

00:45:08.100 but that it is pragmatic to posture in this way? Or have they found a way to actually believe in the

00:45:15.860 lie? I think it's a weird combination of ignorance and this desire to cling on to what were our previous,

00:45:27.540 what I would call liberal in the classic sense, values, and the direction that we used to be going

00:45:33.340 as a society where it was, you know, we have males and females, some males are feminine and like to

00:45:39.820 wear makeup, and some females are more masculine and, you know, have a more butch presentation, 1.00

00:45:45.420 don't like to wear dresses. And just to be comfortable with sex nonconformity, and let that

00:45:51.400 be the norm and don't bully people for their personality, preferences and behaviors that they

00:45:57.760 like to express, like, you know, so insofar it's not criminal. That's where we were going. And I think

00:46:02.560 people like Sean Carroll and Neil deGrasse Tyson, they think that this new ideology is just this,

00:46:10.640 is that. They think that's what it is. And then this is coupled with an ignorance about what sex is

00:46:16.980 fundamentally, you know, rooted in gametes. And so you get them saying... Forgive me for interrupting

00:46:21.360 you. Sorry to interrupt you. How could you have existed in the world for 50, 60 years? I don't know

00:46:28.380 how old they are. Presumably they've had children. Presumably, so you don't, like, you're a Darwinian

00:46:36.080 being, like, you don't have to be an evolutionary psychologist or an evolutionary biologist studying

00:46:41.180 sex differences in spiders to be able to put your imprimatur on what gametes do and so on. So

00:46:48.900 I can't believe that they just don't know any better.

00:46:53.140 Yeah, it's true. I've been shocked at how seemingly difficult the gametic foundation of sex is hard to

00:47:00.920 instill in people's minds. And I think a lot of it is because, you know, you don't see people's gametes

00:47:05.520 during the day. When you meet people in public, we're seeing secondary sex characteristics under

00:47:12.900 clothing. We're seeing, you know, where we can make a pretty convincing, educated guess, and you'd be

00:47:19.200 accurate almost every single time of what sex somebody is. But when we're, the signals that we're using,

00:47:26.120 the cues we're picking up when we're putting, you know, male and female boxes on people in our minds

00:47:30.100 isn't gametes. And so people get this impression that, oh, I guess sex is kind of this bimodal thing

00:47:36.200 that has, that's related to secondary sex characteristics. And, oh, gametes are a component

00:47:40.720 of sex, but they view sex as really just like all these different traits. They don't distinguish

00:47:46.240 between sort of the upstream causes of sex, like chromosomes for humans and mammals, and the

00:47:52.560 downstream consequences of sex, like, you know, differences in morphology and facial shape and

00:47:57.680 body size and strength and that stuff. They just sort of put it all in one big blender and they

00:48:03.000 think that's what sex is. I cannot really forgive people like Neil deGrasse Tyson and Sean Carroll

00:48:09.940 because they're supposed to be science educators. They should know better. It's unclear if they

00:48:13.600 do know better or if they're just trying to maintain that liberal, the left side of the audience by

00:48:19.760 pretending to kind of do this liberal, like, accept everyone without sort of understanding how

00:48:25.800 actually against all of these values the gender ideology is. Because what gender ideology says is, 0.98

00:48:31.960 well, no, if you were a little boy who is behaving more typical of a girl, then you actually have

00:48:37.680 a gender incongruence. You have a, you know, you were born in the wrong body. You have a female brain 1.00

00:48:43.000 and a male and a boy's body. And that can be fixed by changing your body to match your brain. Because,

00:48:49.440 oh, if we do the opposite, if we try to, you know, convince you to change your behavior to match your

00:48:53.740 body, that's conversion therapy. But, you know, injecting drugs and doing surgeries somehow isn't

00:48:58.480 conversion therapy for these kids. That's gender affirming care.

00:49:02.320 It's gender affirming. Yeah, of course. So it's, it's a, there's, there's a lot of social reasons

00:49:07.820 that they're doing this. I, I can't even like look Neil deGrasse Tyson in the eye after he had that,

00:49:16.600 those videos, because he's so influential. And I just knew that like, he's just creating so much

00:49:21.580 more work for me. And maybe that's a good thing. Could be. Yeah. I mean, yeah, I guess I'll be in

00:49:28.740 business for a while, I suppose. So let's suppose, so on that point, suppose that your services are no

00:49:35.620 longer required, Dr. Wright. Is there a next idea pathogen that you might turn your cognitive acuity

00:49:43.420 toward? Or, I mean, or are you, you know, I'm the evolutionary biology guy who can really weigh in on

00:49:49.300 sex differences and I'm riding that train into the sunset or, you know, so for example, before you 0.79

00:49:55.680 answer my question, let me tell you for me, right? I call myself, I'm a parasitologist of the human

00:50:01.820 mind, right? So any bullshit that is spewed by a human mind is fair game to me, right? So I go after, 1.00

00:50:09.520 so yes, of course, the biophobia and the rejection of biology in studying human affairs is one idea

00:50:15.640 pathogen, as is social constructivism, as is cultural relativism. So in other words, I target

00:50:22.140 my web, I mean, I point my weaponry to any purveyor of bullshit. Do you view yourself ultimately as that 0.98

00:50:31.080 or are you very much, you're focused on that specific issue? So I'm focused on this at the moment

00:50:39.880 because I think it's the most critical. There are other aspects I can see it jumping to. So we had

00:50:45.700 a big review out of the UK. It's called the Cass Review. I don't know if you've heard about that,

00:50:49.340 but it's basically it is based on seven systematic reviews of the evidence to show there wasn't good

00:50:53.840 evidence for any of these procedures in minors and young people who have, you know, issues with

00:51:01.280 their so-called gender identity. So that's what I'm mainly focused on and trying to get people to

00:51:07.400 understand that a lot of these policies are rooted in this idea that sex is this multi-level spectrum

00:51:12.380 that can all be changed just by, you know, adding hormones and surgeries. You can change the secondary

00:51:17.940 sex characteristics and therefore that changes your sex. But then there's another fundamental,

00:51:22.600 more fundamental aspect to this whole literature about brain sex and about how, you know, your sex,

00:51:31.540 your brain can have a different sex than your body. There's this whole pseudoscientific literature

00:51:35.840 out there about this. And this is also being used as a justification for these surgeries because,

00:51:41.580 you know, if you have a brain sex and you have a body sex and those can be different, then that's

00:51:45.900 the sort of justification for modifying kids' bodies to match their brain sex. But then there's, 0.75

00:51:52.820 you know, so there's those things. But then just recently on Twitter or X, you're probably aware

00:52:00.800 when Tucker Carlson was recently on Joe Rogan and he made these claims about, you know, no one believes

00:52:06.480 in Darwinian evolution anymore. Of course, yes, yes. And so I was just shocked because I looked around

00:52:12.560 and there was this no one actually taking up the mantle and being like, this is complete BS. Like,

00:52:17.940 what are we talking about? So I was just going hard online about this and seeing these same arguments

00:52:25.440 instead, it was almost nostalgic because I was like, oh my God, I got my start talking about

00:52:30.020 creationism, intelligent design. And like all of the same arguments are there. They're slightly

00:52:34.740 modified and I guess they've evolved slightly over time and mutated. And I can just see that as the

00:52:42.000 right sort of gains more social cachet, more power in the institutions, it's just going to be

00:52:47.140 emboldening these people that have, I guess, have been there for a long time. They're going to crawl

00:52:53.280 out from underneath the floorboards and start trying to, you know, get evolution out of schools

00:52:58.180 again or something. So I can imagine that I'll be, I'll be useful there in the future. And those,

00:53:03.460 when we go back to, you know, moving forward and going back in time to the 2010s when this was a big

00:53:08.640 issue. Yeah. I mean, I'll just keep commenting on whatever I think is the most insane mania at the

00:53:15.260 time. Hopefully I can lend my expertise to it. Fortunately, with the whole biology of sex thing,

00:53:19.780 I can with evolution denialism, I can do that as well. And I'm sure I'll be able to modify to

00:53:26.220 something else. And I have a sub stack I can write about whatever I want on there. And, you know,

00:53:31.680 maybe I'll have to get some other, maybe I'll get a real job, but, you know, I would actually be

00:53:35.620 totally fine having this issue, winning this issue and just, you know, I'll always have a social media

00:53:41.980 account. So they'll always be there to some degree in the public eye, but I can see myself

00:53:46.740 ratcheting things down. I didn't get into this to be a celebrity biologist or anything like that.

00:53:52.380 I really got into this because I think that this issue would not only was just completely insane,

00:53:58.020 but amazingly, extremely harmful. And so if I could just, if I was satisfied that that was taken care

00:54:04.920 of and that that's on the, on the, on the downs and going away. Yeah, I would, I would be actually

00:54:10.960 very comfortable no longer being quite as much of a public figure as I am now. So

00:54:16.600 gotcha. We'll see. Just speaking about evolution denialism, I've made the point, I think I made it

00:54:22.860 most famously on an appearance on Joe Rogan, where I explained that, you know, parasitic thinking and,

00:54:33.480 you know, imbecilic thinking is what, while I focus a lot more on the left, only because the idea

00:54:38.860 pathogens that I discuss all emanate from the university ecosystem and most professors are 0.97

00:54:44.760 leftists. I make, I specifically make the point in, in very early in the parasitic mind that it's not

00:54:50.920 as though it is only people on the left that have the capacity to be parasitized. And as specifically

00:54:56.460 relating to evolution, when it comes to the denial of evolution, it's much more likely to be right

00:55:01.700 leaning folks. When it comes to the denial of evolutionary psychology, it's much more likely to be

00:55:07.260 left leaning folks. So that actually is a beautiful way to demonstrate that even within the same sphere

00:55:13.320 of a discipline, evolution in general versus evolutionary psychology in particular, you could 0.99

00:55:18.840 have one side of the political eye or the other one acting like complete imbecilic buffoons. But that 0.99

00:55:25.000 leads me to the next point, to your point about, you know, being able to be someone who's useful in this

00:55:29.980 area for many years to come. I actually think that the human mind is built regrettably to not accept

00:55:38.200 evolution and evolutionary psychology. In other words, there are elements of the architecture of

00:55:43.700 the human mind that makes it a default value for most people to say, la, la, la, I don't want to hear

00:55:50.360 it. So it's not as though here comes Gadsad with his, you know, persuasive techniques and charm,

00:55:57.220 and he is once and for all going to slay that dragon. And we're done. We're not having that

00:56:03.240 conversation because I've seen it in my now 30 plus year career, just a new generation of imbeciles 0.99

00:56:09.340 comes along that raises the exact same points. And you have to slay the exact same dragons. The 1.00

00:56:14.580 phoenix keeps rising from the ashes. Yeah, yeah. No, that's exactly right. Now, something I'm,

00:56:19.800 you know, learning as I am going through at least one more iteration of this one, I've seen this

00:56:25.400 shift sort of go from, you know, oh, you know, Richard Dawkins owns creationist person videos to

00:56:32.540 Ben Shapiro owns woke activist on campus. And I know I see a lot of the same arguments too,

00:56:38.680 about the people who are denying the reality of sex, as I saw when I was sort of battling the

00:56:44.240 creationist and ID people. One of these examples is sort of this argument from

00:56:49.720 complexity, this sort of irreducible complexity argument, where, you know, you talk about,

00:56:54.580 you know, though this, this thing couldn't have possibly evolved, because it couldn't have

00:56:58.080 gone through these, you know, these series of intermediate forms, it's irreducibly complex.

00:57:03.960 And then, you know, it's, it's slightly different, but it's still an argument from complexity.

00:57:07.600 But on the sex denialism side, where they try to just make these graphs and be like,

00:57:12.400 sex is so complex. It's, you know, your hormones, you know, if you're an alligator temperatures, 0.90

00:57:17.360 it's your, you know, hormonal milieu, it's your secondary sex characteristics, it's your body

00:57:23.540 hair, it's your voice pitch, it's all these different levels. You know, it's, it's so complex

00:57:28.660 that we can't even like, begin to say what the sex of an individual is. Because, you know,

00:57:33.920 who are we to tell them they're not a male or a female, because no body is the same. It's all just 0.98

00:57:39.380 so complex, we just need to throw our hands up and let them, let them tell us, you know, what they

00:57:43.560 identify as. This is, it's a very similar ways of thinking. And every once in a while, a new one

00:57:48.480 will come up with, I'll just be like, that fits the exact, just snaps into the same mode of thinking.

00:57:54.700 And you can sort of see, I guess, there's maybe these like, fallacious, archetypal ways of thinking,

00:58:01.780 I guess, that people fall into, that is just, it's just the, you know, it's sort of like a

00:58:06.880 madlib, you just plug in your, your system, and it's, but it's the same structure of terrible

00:58:12.780 argument. And so I think a lot of the ways that me battling creationists and ID people, 1.00

00:58:17.300 that was like, the, the first battle that prepared me for what I'm doing now, because I can just

00:58:24.440 identify all the same fallacies, everything, it's just like, I've been here before. It's fascinating.

00:58:29.800 Right. All right. Are there any projects, last question that you're currently working on that

00:58:36.020 you'd like to use this opportunity to discuss or promote, take it away?

00:58:40.520 Well, nothing that you can purchase immediately, but I am working on a book. It's right now,

00:58:47.120 tentatively called Reality's Last Stand, The Modern Denial of Biological Sex. There have been a lot

00:58:52.980 of books that have sort of touched on sort of sex pseudoscience very passingly. So what I'm going to be

00:59:02.040 doing, because, you know, we didn't get a chance to go into the many different, there's just so many

00:59:07.460 different arguments that they have for denying the sex pioneer. There's probably 20 that we could go

00:59:14.360 into that are all being used by the same people, even though many of these arguments are mutually

00:59:19.600 exclusive, and they shouldn't be able to exist in the same mind. And so the book I'm working on is

00:59:25.740 basically just a one-stop shop to understand what sex is, wide-evolved, debunking every single

00:59:35.440 activist argument for sex not being a binary, and giving people the sort of the tools, the mental

00:59:42.640 toolkit they have to combat it, and basically why this is coming about, and the harms that it produces

00:59:48.180 in society, and how to push back. So I'm hoping that's going to come out probably early next year.

00:59:52.580 That's my goal. But yeah, that's something to look forward to. And then my substack is called

00:59:58.860 Reality's Last Stand. I publish a lot of stuff on sex and gender-affirming care over there,

01:00:05.460 and any other topic. I'm trying to expand it to other topics of sort of just pseudoscience in

01:00:11.140 general, any area where people are denying basic facts about the world around us.

01:00:16.540 Very interesting. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Colin. It was a pleasure to finally meet you.

01:00:20.740 Thank you. Look forward to your book coming out, at which point I'd love to have you back to discuss

01:00:25.980 it. Stay on the line so we could say goodbye offline. Thanks so much for coming on.

01:00:30.020 Hey, thanks, Gad. Appreciate it.

01:00:31.340 Take care.

The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - May 30, 2024

My Chat with Dr. Colin Wright - Evolution, Sex Differences, and Personality (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_677)

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript