In this episode, Dr. Nicholas W. Wade joins me to discuss his new position as a visiting scholar at the Declaration of Independence Center for the Study of American Freedom at the University of Mississippi, and his new book, The Origin of Politics: Looking at Politics from an Evolutionary Perspective.
00:13:17.560I mean, you've both been sort of within academics, but outside of academia.
00:13:22.340From your perspective, is there a chance that we can alter this?
00:13:26.580Or it's just an indelible feature of academia?
00:13:29.220Well, I think, at least from the present perspective, it's kind of indelible.
00:13:40.320As long as you have people competing for government grants, there's going to be a sort of strong pressure for conformity.
00:13:48.000Now, if we did away with government grants and academics had to raise their funds from private benefactors, that will give you a diversity of sources and might allow much more independence in academic thinking.
00:14:08.000That's one solution that occurs to me off the top of my head.
00:15:40.400I mean, it is one of the most fascinating social experiments you can think of.
00:15:45.960And its founders were, you could call them crazy, but they were visionaries and they were generally trying to create a new world in which everyone was equal.
00:15:54.580The power of the patriarchy would be eliminated because a woman and children would not be dependent on the father anymore.
00:16:06.480They'd be dependent on the kibbutz and everyone would be paid equal.
00:16:11.960I mean, it's a sort of, it's an egalitarian dream and good for them for trying very, very hard to put it into practice.
00:16:19.980And the kibbutz, because of the enthusiasm and dedication of the founders, they did last for at least a generation.
00:16:29.960But it was only when the second generation came into power who looked at things differently, that human nature sort of reasserted itself.
00:16:41.460And we found that all the ideals of the founders, wonderful as they were in principle, simply didn't work in practice.
00:16:48.980And this was a very clear and decisive experiment.
00:16:54.220It's a pity that its lesson has not been more widely learned, but it's still there for anyone who wants to study it.
00:17:02.680I'm not sure if you covered this in your book, so forgive me if you haven't.
00:17:16.820Well, it's one of the most fascinating side lights that came out of the kibbutz effect.
00:17:25.060And it's settled a big argument between Freud, who thought that incest was, that incest taboo was pretty cultural.
00:17:34.100And was he Swedish or Norwegian anthropologist, Edvard Westermark, who thought it was biological?
00:17:44.620So the early kibbutzniks noticed a very strange phenomenon that people being brought up in the same little group of students, it's called a kibbutz.
00:17:58.400So people educated in the same kibbutz, never married one another.
00:18:04.360Now, no one was telling them they couldn't do this.
00:18:06.860It just sort of turned out that if you've been raised in the same kibbutz with someone, you did not view them in any romantic way.
00:18:15.740And it seems clear, in fact, the kibbutz members were viewing each other as siblings.
00:18:20.520And very probably there's some neural direction that says to us, if you grew up under the same roof with this person, they are not a suitable marriage partner.
00:18:36.120And that is how biologically we avoid incest, which, of course, leads to inbreeding depression.
00:18:43.100So this is a great, another great experimental result that came out of the kibbutz event and told us that, yes, the incest taboo is biological.
00:19:00.680Actually, in this book right here, my first book ever, which was an academic book called The Evolutionary Basis of Consumption, I mentioned the Westermark effect in the context of explaining, you know, the interaction between, you know, nature and nurture and genes and the environment and so on.
00:19:19.600And so the Westermark effect is a manifestation of an if-then rule that is ontogenetic, right?
00:19:26.500So if raised together, then sexual revulsion towards the person with whom you raised.
00:19:33.360Now, in very rare cases, it ends up misfiring, as per the kibbutz, misfiring in quotes, in that the brain assumes that in 99.9% of cases where people are raised together of roughly the same age, they're going to be siblings.
00:19:49.600But in some cases, it ends up being that despite the fact that you've got 15-year-old kids who should be full of libidinal drive and hormonal drive, they look at all these other people who are unrelated to them and say, I don't want to have sex with this person.
00:20:04.020And so that's a perfect demonstration.
00:20:05.960But again, I hate to go back to my earlier pessimism.
00:20:08.860I explained this a million times to a million people, some of whom are my colleagues with all the big titles, and they're completely impervious to anything I say, because they are so committed to the tabula rasa, social constructive perspective.
00:20:24.600And we can come back, of course, to this book.
00:20:26.220One that I think people would want to hear about is just because people are interested in religion, and we recently had the horrible assassination of Charlie Kirk, who was a personal friend of mine, who is someone who certainly has helped in reviving religion.
00:20:40.940Tell us about the faith instinct and how we would tackle religion, the existence of religion, from an evolutionary perspective.
00:20:50.220Well, if you look at religion, it's very strange, it's very sort of strange human behavior.
00:21:00.660And also, it's very costly, because it requires a lot of time, sometimes a lot of money.
00:21:06.920And so you have to ask, why is it that every known society in the world throughout history has had a religion?
00:21:13.760And not only that, but the religion, at least until recent times, has played a very dominant role in society.
00:21:23.120So if something so costly is also universal, it's a very strong candidate for having a genetic, an evolutionary basis.
00:21:33.720And I think it's fairly obvious what that evolutionary basis is, which is simply that religion helps a society survive in many ways, starting with the fact that it gets everyone reading off of the same page.
00:21:48.140So you feel a sense of togetherness, and it's the basis of social cohesion, which, of course, is very important, both for maintaining internal order and morality, and also for galvanizing the society to face its enemies, if necessary, in battle.
00:22:04.740So I think that's why all societies have religion, and it's like language, in that there's a genetic basis, but each society develops it culturally in a different way.
00:22:18.320So all languages are completely very different from each other.
00:22:22.600Religions tend to be very different from each other because of their cultural element, but the genetic element stays the same and is universal.
00:22:33.660So the argument that you just gave would fit within the adaptation explanation of religion, which would be a la David Sloan Wilson with his group selectionism for religion.
00:22:54.720By virtue of their religiosity, and in line with what you said, they have greater coherence, greater delineation between in-group and out-group members and other very earthly reasons, and therefore members of the high religiosity group are likely to out-survive those from the others.
00:23:11.900So that's the group selectionist argument.
00:23:13.480There's another one, which I suspect that you're very familiar with, but I wonder what you think of it.
00:23:21.700The exaptation argument is the one that argues that something exists because it's a byproduct of evolution, not because it is itself adaptive.
00:23:30.220So Pascal Boyer, who is an evolutionary psychologist slash anthropologist, has written a book where he argues that, no, it's not that religion offers an adaptive advantage.
00:23:44.600It's that it is piggybacking on neuronal systems or computational systems that evolve for other purposes.
00:23:52.360So, for example, my coalitional psychology of viewing the world as blue team versus red team is already innate in me.
00:24:00.880Now, here comes religion piggybacking on that penchant by saying, hey, there are Jews and Goy.
00:24:07.580There are the believers and the infidels, the Kuffar.
00:24:11.180Now, do you think there is a bit of both explanations, adaptation and exaptation, or do you think it's largely the adaptive argument that wins the race?
00:24:22.280Well, I certainly like the adaptive argument.
00:24:24.700I think Boyer is saying that as an exaptation, it's not genetic.
00:27:20.480All right, let's talk about, arguably, and you'll tell me if I'm wrong, the book that has brought you the most heartache in terms of critics was the Troublesome Inheritance.
00:27:39.340I mean, one of the things that when you're in the public eye is you receive a lot of blowback.
00:27:44.240If I say the sun is out today, people are going to hate me.
00:27:47.320If I say the sun is not out today, people are going to hate me.
00:27:50.740And so never mind dealing with more difficult subjects like, you know, racial differences, which is completely forbidden knowledge and certainly in the social sciences.
00:28:16.560When I was a reporter on the science section of the Times, my job was to cover the genome.
00:28:25.900So the Beatles started off with the interesting race between Venter and the government to sequence the genome.
00:28:32.680And then a few years later, the results started coming out and they were fascinating, not least because they showed that as the human population spread out from Africa, just like any other species, it sort of differentiated into local adaptations, local populations.
00:28:52.300So I thought, well, this is fascinating because it shows you, you know, written in the genome is a big part of the history of the human race.
00:28:58.820It tells us, you know, what environmental challenges our ancestors were up against, how their genome changed in response.
00:29:06.180You know, all that stuff of prehistory, which is completely lost to us otherwise, is written in the genome.
00:29:12.480So why isn't everyone writing about it?
00:29:17.380And the fact is that academics, as you mentioned, they're dead scared of the subject.
00:29:38.180So anyway, as a journalist, one's always looking for stories and nothing's better than a story you can spin off from articles you've written already, because it's all half of it's in your head.
00:29:50.720So I thought, well, there's a great story here in the biological differentiation of the human race as it's spread out from Africa.
00:30:01.200The human species, I should say, into different subpopulations or what we call races.
00:30:06.300So I wrote the book, maybe in a somewhat naive way, but it was simply, you know, the biology of, you know, why East Asians and Europeans have pale skin and have pale skin through entirely different genetic mechanisms.
00:30:23.400And it laid out, you know, the chapter and verse for why the races differ to the mild extent they do.
00:30:30.540And then I tried to, I felt I should try and give a sort of so what to the readers.
00:31:26.000And then the sort of bandwagon started rolling.
00:31:30.280And eventually some very large number of geneticists, I think a hundred or so, sort of wrote a letter at the Times saying, you know, how dare this journalist misappropriate our findings?
00:31:42.740So they couldn't, I didn't need any Valium tablets.
00:31:47.340I was just very amused by the whole episode because here were scientists who sort of live by the idea of nullity and verba, the Royal Society's motto, that you don't take anyone's word for it.
00:31:59.460It's not authority that counts, it's the facts.
00:32:03.320So here were these guys, they didn't have the facts because there were no mistakes they could find in my book.
00:32:08.680But they were using the weight of their authority, 100 geneticists, to try and prove me wrong.
00:32:15.500There's that nice story about Einstein being told that someone had written a book saying he was completely wrong.
00:32:31.740And a large number of scientists said that were disagreeing with him.
00:32:36.020Einstein said, well, no, one would be enough.
00:32:38.800After all, if you don't have the facts, it just requires one person to, these guys didn't have the facts because my book, as far as I know, was a perfectly accurate description of the biology of race.
00:32:56.520It's, it remains to me, it's now about 10 years old, but it remains to this day, the only book in the field that tells you what the genome says about human differentiation.
00:33:06.080And it does own a completely non-racist way.
00:33:09.040I don't say any race is superior to any other, which is a, which is a thought totally alien to evolutionary biology.
00:33:32.320The Bell Curve, where that got him a lot of flack.
00:33:34.700He's actually been on my show and he made it into my happiness book, which is the one right here that I'm pointing to.
00:33:42.280Because at one point where I was talking about something that, you know, about, I think you mentioned even maybe in this book right here about assortative mating.
00:33:50.880So I, I'm, I'm, I'm in the happiness book.
00:33:53.700I'm saying that, look, one of the ways by which you could either increase your chances of being very happy in life or the opposite is to hopefully find the right partner.
00:34:01.800And so I talk about birds of a feather flock together.
00:34:04.300And in our conversation, he said, well, finding the right partner is very simple.
00:34:08.720Find your best friend with, to whom you're sexually attracted.
00:34:35.540So in about 1996, so this is maybe two years after I finished my PhD, I was giving a lecture at the International Congress of Psychology, which that year happened to be in my hometown of Montreal.
00:34:49.400And so I was, I was in a cognitive psychology session.
00:34:53.160I was going to talk about, you know, the types of cognitive strategies that people come up with when they are facing time pressure and how do they make decisions under time pressure and so on.
00:35:03.240So very non-controversial, very, you know, the sort of psychology decision-making stuff.
00:35:08.000I walk into the session where I'm presenting and it must be packed with maybe 1500 people.
00:35:14.120And I pick up this electricity in the air and I knew that they weren't there to see me.
00:35:23.100So they weren't, they certainly weren't coming to see me.
00:35:25.380And then I quickly realized why they were there because the speaker before me turns out to be Philip Rushton and he's putting up the, you know, here's the cranium size of black men, white men, black women, white women.
00:35:41.060And as I now realize that this is happening, this was maybe the only time ever, I'm not someone who gets very afraid speaking in front of crowds, but I really had this sort of spike in my cortisol levels thinking I'm just going to get lynched by proxy.
00:35:56.520So then he finishes his lecture and then quickly scurries out of there.
00:36:02.780And about 1425 out of the 1500 people follow him to hopefully lynch him.
00:36:09.800And this was the only time in life where I said, where I said, thank God that there's almost nobody here for me.
00:36:15.540I was actually relieved that there were just a few people in this huge auditorium.
00:36:41.900I haven't read his books and I didn't want to get into the kind of differences he was interested in.
00:36:52.260And I just wanted to explore the genome and the genetics.
00:36:58.000You know, I do think these things should be discussed.
00:37:00.940It's unhealthy to sweep them under the rug.
00:37:03.600It's much better to discuss race and IQ differences and whatever else anyone wants to bring up than to behave in this very sort of suppressive way that today's academic world does.
00:40:21.020I know a lot about organic chemistry, about this particular thing.
00:40:25.200And if you ask me to talk about art history, well, surely I can't, right?
00:40:30.700Whereas we don't train academics to be bold, synthetic thinkers who seek consilience, to use a term that E.O. Wilson brought back into the vernacular.
00:40:42.300Do you think that it is possible to break that mold and start teaching academics?
00:40:47.700Again, I know you're from the outside, but maybe you do need an outside perspective.
00:42:52.740I mean, it staggers the mind that this social pathology could erupt in universities of all places, and yet it has.
00:43:01.200Well, it's, I mean, thank you for mentioning that, because you may or may not know I'm Jewish, and I've had to take a leave now for two years from my home university,
00:43:14.320because as universities go, few are even remotely close to the truly debauchery, the orgiastic Jew hatred that you find at my university.
00:43:27.880Although, of course, the senior administrator that spoke to me said, oh, no, there's absolutely no Jew hatred here.
00:43:32.260And then, like, about a week or two later, the president of the university had to go in front of the parliament, the Canadian parliament,
00:43:39.380to actually, you know, with great chagrin, admit that there was huge Jew hatred.
00:43:46.320Do you have any ideas as to what has served, not to use the term of Malcolm Godwell, but I will be using it,
00:43:53.480what has been the tipping point that has unleashed this monster again in the 21st century?
00:43:59.640No, it's very puzzling, and it's very alarming.
00:44:05.100I mean, it's alarming, it's alarming both for Jews, because they remember how even in societies where they were very well accepted and culturated,
00:44:14.320like 19th, 20th century Germany, the beginnings of the Holocaust are in these, are in, you know,
00:44:23.880openly expressed anti-Semitism, so that once that starts, it tends to build.