My Chat with Dr. Colin Wright - Evolution, Sex Differences, and Personality (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_677)
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Summary
In this episode, Dr. Colin Wright joins me to talk about evolutionary psychology. Dr. Wright is a PhD from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a post-doctoral research fellow at the Manhattan Institute. In this episode we talk about two of the pioneers of evolutionary psychology: John Tubi and Lida Cosmides.
Transcript
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Hi everybody, this is Gad Saad. Today I have a new series of evolutionary-minded folks
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that are coming on my show, although I've had many evolutionary-minded people in the
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past. Today I've got Colin Wright with me, an evolutionary biologist. How are you doing,
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I'm doing great, thank you. So I want to get your brief bio, so please forgive me as I
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put my elderly reading glasses on. PhD in 2018 in evolutionary biology from UCSB. I'll have some
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stuff to talk about UCSB because I have a connection there to them. Then from 2018 to 2020, an Eberly
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research fellow at Penn State. I guess that's some kind of post-PhD position. You have a
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sub-stack titled Reality's Last Stand. I like that title. And then you're also a fellow at
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the Manhattan Institute. Anything that you'd like to add before we proceed?
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Okay, well, I guess the first thing I wanted to say is that, I mean, you were in evolutionary
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biology, but are you aware that two of the pioneers of evolutionary psychology were housed at, well,
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one of them is still housed, but one of them recently passed away. Lida, Cosmides, and John
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Yeah, I'm aware of them. And for some reason, when I was in Santa Barbara, they just weren't
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on my radar for whatever reason. So I started grad school at the University of Pittsburgh,
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and then our lab transferred over to Santa Barbara. So I was at Santa Barbara for the last
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two years of my PhD. And it was just me basically frantically writing all my studies up for my
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dissertation. So I really should have looked into who else was there. They weren't in my
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department. I was in the Department of Evolution, Ecology, and Marine Biology. And where were they?
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I'm not exactly sure what their department was, but it wasn't my department. Otherwise, I would have
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Yeah. So, but just for our viewers and listeners who may not know of them, let me mention them. And
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in doing so, it'll answer your query. So John Tubi and Lida Cosmides are two of the pioneers of
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evolutionary psychology, which is the application of evolutionary biological principles to the study
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of the human mind. And so in the exact same way that you would apply evolutionary thinking to study
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the mating behavior of the salamander, or every other species known to mankind, we'd apply those
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principles to study human behavior, which of course causes all kinds of consternation in social
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scientists, because human beings are the only ones that are not within the purview of biology
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somehow. Now, they are part of what's called the Santa Barbara Church, it's kind of facetiously,
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because they have a particular strain of thinking when it comes to evolutionary psychology. Specifically,
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they promulgated the idea, I mean, they weren't the only ones, but of the domain specificity of the
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human mind, meaning that the human mind is not simply an amalgamation of domain general mechanisms,
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like say, IQ. But they've, the human mind also has evolved specific computational system
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for specific evolutionarily relevant ancestral problems, find mate, retain mate, avoid predators,
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seek nutritious food, avoid poisonous foods, and so on, right? And so they were housed in the psychology
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department, they were both trained in one in biological anthropology, one in cognitive psychology at
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Harvard. But they really are two of the pioneers of evolutionary psychology, which in a sense,
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it's a shame that you never got to meet them. But it demonstrates how academia works in these
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completely isolated silos, such that someone like you studying evolutionary biology would never meet
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two of the pioneers of evolutionary psychology. Yeah. Yeah. And my work, I didn't study humans,
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but I studied animal personalities at both the individual and group levels. So collective
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personalities of social insects and arachnids. And so there's, it's basically like an evolutionary
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psychology, but, you know, applied to animals rather than humans. And strangely enough, they use
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pretty widely different methods when they go about studying animals versus studying humans, mainly
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because you can't, you know, give animals a survey to fill out or anything like that. But yeah,
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it would have been fascinating to talk to them. And I wonder how they're doing now, because I know
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that in the sort of the, you know, spring of 2020, I got the email circling around, you know,
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I was at Penn State at the time, but I got the emails from them, I still would receive a lot of them
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about all the, you know, the BLM chapters on campus, sort of trying to take over the evolution,
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ecology, marine biology program, making them try to reflect Berkeley's hiring program where they needed to
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make DEI part of, you know, not even just, you know, people coming into grad school, but professors
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trying to get, to get raises, to get tenure, all these things. And I talked to some professors who
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were there, and they said the department has not even returned back to normal since then. It's,
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it's, it was sort of this mad takeover since I left. So I wonder how some of them are doing over
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there. Because if you're studying EvoPsych, you know, that's, that's considered pretty taboo. And
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Santa Barbara was pretty on the precipice of being woke when I left and was taken over
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shortly thereafter. Right. No, well, look, so I don't know specifically how, how, how they're
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faring. But as you probably know, as you just said, you know, evolutionary psychology remains
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something that's very contentious in the human context. And by the way, that was my original,
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if you like, foray into understanding parasitized minds, which then led me to, you know, many years
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later, right, the parasitic mind. Because originally, in my academic work, you know, my, my goal has
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always been to introduce evolutionary thinking into human behavior in general, consumer and economic
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behavior in particular, hence, I'm housed in a business school. Actually, I remember I had been
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invited, I was a visiting professor at UC Irvine, I had been invited to UCSB to speak in to their group,
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meaning John Tooby and Lita Cosmides. And as we were walking around, you know, the beach area,
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so I turned to John and I say, who recently passed away, may, may his, may he rest in peace.
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I said to him, John, can you, can you hook me up with a professorship here? I mean, I can, I can get
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used to living here and, you know, hanging around with you guys and doing work. And then his answer
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was, what would a glitzy business school professor that probably makes a lot more money in the business
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school want to do with us? And then he had told me that, you know, the teaching loads weren't good and
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the salaries certainly from a business school professor were not very impressive. But just to
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finish my point, I had always thought it was insane, which of course, now you write a lot about
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the gender ideology stuff, that it was insane that I would get such blowback from my business school
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colleagues, and more generally, the social scientists, that how dare you apply biology to
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study, you know, consumer behavior? Surely, you don't think that consumers are driven by evolutionary
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forces, physiology, hormones, and so on. And that's when I sort of had the little eureka, boy,
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supposedly smart people can be real imbeciles. And then of course, eventually, you know, that
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parasitic framework applied to so many other things. What was your, now you came from the world of
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Exactly. And so maybe there wasn't as much of an obstacle of applying evolutionary theory there.
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But what was your eureka moment or epiphany? Oh boy, we've got a problem here with applying
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You know, I have to say that since my work wasn't dealing with humans, my experience with sort of
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this backlash against people studying humans was more just theoretical, seeing what was going on,
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you know, studying what happened to EO Wilson back in the day, and sort of seeing people that I knew
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who were in evolutionary psychology make basic statements about evolutionary psychology, just,
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you know, the most basic things that our brains have evolved to do these things. Males and females
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have evolved to do slightly different things. And so we might expect differences in behavior,
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just sort of basic sociobiology like that. And they were, they were, you know, just hit over the
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head for saying this stuff. My, when it got personal for me was not so much about the EO psych stuff,
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but it was when my colleagues started posting things about, you know, there being like five
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sexes or sexes of spectrum, all that stuff. And then, you know, as someone who learned a lot about
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what biological sex was, because if you're studying animal behavior, or the behavior of any, you know,
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even humans, one of the first things you learn about in your animal behavior class is anisogamy.
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The differences between, you know, individuals who are producing egg and sperm because of the
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different parental investments that go in there that, that create different entirely reproductive
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strategies. There's so many like downstream consequences for bodies that house these two
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reproductive strategies, that if you don't take that into account, when you're studying the behavior
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of organisms, you're just going to, your data set is going to be a complete mess. You need to
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understand these things. And so when people were talking about, there's, maybe there's five sexes
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in humans, like Anne Fausto-Sterling, or maybe sex was just a social construct and it's arbitrary. And
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you know, there's an infinite number of sexes based on genital morphology or whatever. That's when I
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started being like, what the hell is going on? And if you'll remember the, the nature article called
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Sex Redefined that came out in, I think, 2015 by Claire Ainsworth, that was to me, just a major
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moment of, of, you know, seeing the stuff in magazines like Scientific American before on blogs
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like Tumblr and among activists. And all of a sudden here it was in Nature where they're saying
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that sex has been redefined. And now there was apparently some consensus among biologists that
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I wasn't aware of that sex is much more complicated than just males and females for humans. So that was
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my, oh crap moment. We're in a lot of trouble. Not so much the Evo psych stuff, but I didn't,
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I didn't touch that in, in graduate school. I was comfortably studying my spiders and wasps and
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reading my books from Evo Wilson and that type of stuff. I actually, I just finished reading his
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autobiography, Naturalist, and I highly recommend, have you read it, Colin? I have back, yeah, back in the
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day when I was first getting into sort of these topics and becoming fascinated with social behavior and
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social insects. Naturalist, I think was one of the first ones from him that I read. And, and, and I
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think I read Consilience afterwards, which was just, you know, a book that everyone has to read if they
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want to read. Oh, thank you. I basically say this every week. I'll at least say it twice. Yeah, it's
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mind-blowing. It's like a must read. You have to read Consilience. Oh, I'm getting goosebumps you
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saying it. For those of you who don't know, Consilience is actually something that's been incredibly
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important in my own writing. It refers to, I mean, literally that's, I think the subtitle of his
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book, Consilience, Unity of Knowledge. The idea that you can unify what appear to be disparate areas
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of, you know, human import. So you could take the social sciences, the natural sciences, the humanities,
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and while these seem to be very, very different, they actually can be unified. And in his case,
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and of course I agree, and I do the same thing in my work, it, he, he argues that you can unify
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through the consilient lens of evolutionary theory, right? And so in a lot of my writings in
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this book right here, in Evolutionary Basis of Consumption, the last chapter is all about how
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incorporating evolutionary thinking into the study of consumer behavior would allow the field to be
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consilient. It would, it would have actually a unified tree of knowledge rather than having
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completely disparate, disorganized studies that are otherwise completely unrelated to one another.
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And so I highly recommend, I second what Colin said, consilience should be read by everybody.
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But so going now, of course, E.O. Wilson was himself an entomologist, so he studied social insects and so
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on. Can you tell us about some of the, I'm sure, mind-blowing stuff that you studied in your short
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career as, as someone who studied insects and acrid? And yeah. Go ahead.
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So I studied two different systems. So my advisor, he had a sort of this torturous
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way about him where he wanted us to pursue two PhDs side-by-side and two completely different
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systems. And then whatever one, whatever research program bared more fruit, that's the one that we
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would publish as our actual dissertation. So it resulted in a lot of papers, but it was just frantic.
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So I studied, my dissertation ended up being on the social spider, Stegodyphus damikula. It's
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one of about 35 spiders that actually exist in a social group. So they're highly inbred.
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These are in South Africa, Namibia, Botswana area. And so when it was winter in the U.S., I'd go down to
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South Africa and I would study these colonies. I would basically go around to these areas. We would
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drive along the highways. A lot of the spiders, their webs were located on fences. So we'd,
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we'd go to these colonies on the fences. We'd take them, bring them into the lab. So we'd maybe
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collect say like 30 colonies out in nature. We'd break them apart. We would isolate every single
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spider. There's anywhere between 20 and 400 spiders in any one colony. We would do behavioral
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assays on every single individual in these colonies, testing them for whether their, their score for
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boldness. So if there's a bold and shy sort of axis in animal behavior, it's, it's basically your
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propensity to engage in a type of risky behavior. And some spiders are take more risks. Some are
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take less risks. We call it boldness and shyness. And then what we would do is we would sort of play
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God and we would create artificial colonies of known composition from these bigger colonies.
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We'd create colonies of 20 spiders that are all really bold or all really shy or any sort of
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complex mixture of, of bold and shy. And then we would have them do sort of different tasks,
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like how well do they hunt for prey? How well do they repair their webs? You know, just sort of how
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much their survival, we deepened, put the colonies back in the field over a couple of generations and see
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how they're doing based on their colony compositions. So that's what I did for, um, a lot of my spider
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work. Uh, I specifically looked at their ability to combat invasive, uh, not invasive, sorry, but
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these, these predatory ants, there are these called, uh, uh, uh, pugnacious ants. They were all over
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South, uh, uh, South Africa and the spiders sort of have this adaptation in areas where the spiders were
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really prevalent. Uh, they would sort of build more and more webs around their colonies. So I basically
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looked if there was an interaction between the colony composition and their propensity to with, uh,
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withstand these raids by these ants. Um, and they turned out to be no, because the ants were really
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super aggressive. Uh, but there was a difference between the spider colonies in there. Uh, if they were
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exposed in advance to the sort of the, the sense of these ants, uh, they would all modify their entire colony
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level behavior just with these indirect cues. So I was more looking at sort of, uh, uh, whether if you can
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warn colonies or not, and if their colony composition matters for that. Uh, then I studied social, uh,
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paper wasps. Um, and I was interested in looking at, can I predict the collective behavior of the entire
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colonies based on knowing just the singular behavior of the queen who founds the colony in the beginning of the
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season? And so the, the, the queens basically had a similar sort of bold, shy, uh, personality type to
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them. Some, so it's an experiment I devised where you'd basically antagonize them on the nest. Some of
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the queens would hold their ground and sort of never leave the nest if you're antagonizing them. And then
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some queens would fly away immediately if you just give them a prod with a, a brush or a stick of some
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sort. Uh, and what I was able to find is the, the queens that were quickly to fly away from their
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colonies, uh, abandon their nests when you're antagonizing them, gave rise to colonies that
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were also very quick to leave their nests. But instead of flying away, they would attack you.
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They would attack the intruder. Whereas the colonies that had queens that stood their ground and, and
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fought with you on their nests actually gave rise to colonies that were less aggressive. The, the,
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the, uh, the workers were less likely to leave their nests and attack. So you could vibrate these
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entire colonies and they wouldn't swarm. Uh, so that was an interesting thing. They also linked
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sort of queen behavior and size to, uh, to in the field, to their, their survival and reproduction.
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So those are the things I did. So many, so many places I can go with this. Let me try to go to a
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few places. So one of the things that I've talked about, I actually published a short paper. It was
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on a, it was in the European journal of social psychology, I think, or maybe you're, I can't remember
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the exact title of the journal. I think European journal of social psychology. It was a special issue
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on the, uh, the, the, the evolutionary roots and the evolutionary genetics of personality.
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And, and that's a really interesting, uh, concept because one of the, and I, I, I lecture about this
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often in my course and so on. Why is it that some traits become fixed? That's that, you know, we have
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two eyes, we have, I mean, unless you have a congenital problem, you know, you have, uh, one heart,
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right. Uh, those are fixed. They don't follow a normal distribution, whereas personality types
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are not fixed. And so one of the arguments for why evolution has not fixed a, an optimal personality
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type. So one argument is that there are, and I think it, it fits nicely with some of the stuff
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that you were talking about there is that there isn't a singular social ecosystem where a singular
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personality type is optimal across all ecosystems. And so the analogy that I give is when let's say
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a company. So in the context of say, I'm lecturing this in the business school, I want the students
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to kind of link it to something in their business world. Well, when an organization gives you a
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personality test as part of hiring you, they're actually not, they're at, they're testing whether
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your personality matches optimally with their organizational culture. And so the same person,
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Colin has this, whatever personality type that he has, it is optimal for JP Morgan, but it is
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suboptimal for, uh, Google. And so it's not that there is a singular optimal, you know, Colin
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personality. He's great here. He's bad there. And therefore there are no selection pressures for a
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singular personality profile to, to dominate across all contexts. Is this something that you've kind
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of covered in your own thinking? Yeah. Yeah. Big time. Um, you know, I think we would call this
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sort of a niche partitioning, uh, in, in your environment, because if all organisms are the same
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and they're, you know, within a species and they're trying to go after the exact same resource in the
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exact same way, uh, then, you know, there's, there's going to be others that can out-compete in that
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and then they're screwed. But if they're able to sort of partition their niches and say, okay, well,
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uh, they're really better at that, but I can also maybe get 20% of that, but I can divert more of my
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attention into the secondary food source and I can sort of, you know, take some of those things.
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I can get really good at doing those. So it's just a way that, uh, individuals can still have,
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you know, adapt to their environment and, uh, sort of partition their niche out more and more.
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Finally, when you come to things like social organisms, um, this idea was that there was maybe
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an optimal way to behave within a colony. Like if you're a wasp, you need to be really aggressive
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or something. Um, and the differences in behavior, this had long been viewed as just sort of this,
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this, uh, uh, developmental noise. This was just random variation. It wasn't really adaptive.
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Uh, and then it came to, to discover like, well, I mean, we see these behavioral variations,
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like a lot. We see inter-individual differences in behavior across time and context. That's what
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personality is. Um, wouldn't our default assumption be that maybe this is adaptive. We see it everywhere
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in systems where we wouldn't even expect it maybe. Um, and so we, you can actually test these in many
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systems and in my spiders and bees and pretty much any social system that has ever been looked at.
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You find not only that personality variation exists, but you also find that often these personality
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variations are linked to their proficiency at certain tasks within the colony. There's sort of
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a division of labor that is happening. And we see this in the spiders that I looked at too, where you
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have, uh, aggressive spiders. Uh, you ever heard of the aggression spillover hypothesis? I don't think
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so. So it's when you have an individual that is like so aggressive, like maybe they went through this
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selective environment where it's selected for really, really aggressive individuals. This happens to a lot
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of spiders. Uh, and sometimes females will get so aggressive that they'll actually sterilize
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themselves effectively behaviorally because they'll kill any male that tries to mate with
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them because they're so aggressive. And so you see like this, the selection sort of against
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aggression, but then they, they, they, they still have to be going through the environment of being
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aggressive. So it's almost like a maladaptive adaptive sort of situation they're in. Uh, we see the same
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thing in a lot of the spiders that are in our colonies where we have really aggressive spiders and
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really docile spiders. The aggressive spiders, they have like no chill. They cannot, if you take,
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uh, you know, shy spiders, docile spiders out of the colony, they can't become less aggressive to
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fulfill their niche. They're just always really aggressive. And so when you have a colony that's,
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uh, composed of nothing but really aggressive spiders, well, they're really good at, at combating
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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
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fewer, uh, offspring output than, uh, colonies that have say a bunch of really docile individuals.
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Uh, who are better at caretaking, but if you have nothing but really docile individuals,
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well, then you're going to get destroyed by any sort of intruder or parasites to take over your
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colony. So there is this optimal mixture usually of the aggressive and docile spiders, uh, uh, so
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they can partition their behavior and, you know, uh, and division of labor based on, based on colony
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need. And the shy ones are usually able to up-regulate their aggression and become more aggression.
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If you take aggressive ones out, uh, not, not really great, but more so than the aggressive
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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
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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
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
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
00:27:13.460
social media and so on, is when they say, oh, but come on, you're an evolution psychologist.
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
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
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
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
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
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
00:33:24.220
talk about? And then he gave as an example, then how do you explain spider behavior? And I literally hit
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.
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
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
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
00:37:29.240
posting job listings that Colin Wright is a transphobe, racist, white supremacist, don't hire
00:37:34.680
him. And so it was just this full court press to try to, to destroy my reputation in academia.
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,
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
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
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
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
00:43:45.780
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,
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,
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
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
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,
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
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,
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
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
00:55:18.840
have one side of the political eye or the other one acting like complete imbecilic buffoons. But that
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
00:56:09.340
comes along that raises the exact same points. And you have to slay the exact same dragons. The
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,
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
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,
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.