The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - January 03, 2026


Questioning Cultural Relativism - ＂The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead＂ (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_951)

Hosted by
Gad Saad
Mentioned
Margaret Mead Derek Freeman Franz Boas Robert Trivers Ruth Benedict
A Deep Dive Into Evolutionary Psychology (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_950) The Prescience of ＂A Few Good Men＂ and Suicidal Empathy (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_952)

Episode Stats


Length

6 minutes

Words per minute

146.72

Word count

943

Sentence count

43

Harmful content

Misogyny

7

sentences flagged

Toxicity

3

sentences flagged

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In the first episode of 2020, Scott Saad discusses the controversial book, The Fatal Hoaxing of Margaret Mead, written by Derek Freeman, about the controversial anthropologist Margaret Mead and her work on sex differences in human sexuality.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Hi everybody, this is Scott Saad. I hope that the new year is treating you well.
00:00:05.880 Today I wanted to talk briefly about a controversy between two anthropologists, Margaret Mead and Derek Freeman.
00:00:16.400 Margaret Mead is one of the, in some sense, legendary anthropologists of the 20th century.
00:00:22.960 She was a doctoral student of Franz Boas, who was a Columbia professor of anthropology.
00:00:33.040 And he was really the guy who started the movement of cultural relativism.
00:00:38.840 Cultural relativism is a parasitic idea that I discuss in The Parasitic Mind because it basically purports that, you know,
00:00:47.000 everything when you're studying culture is driven by idiosyncratic realities, whether they be historical realities or cultural realities.
00:00:56.800 So there is no such thing as a universal human nature.
00:01:02.900 And hence, cultural relativism results in the type of degeneracy of moral arguments, 0.97
00:01:09.000 such as who are you to judge whether we should cut off the clitorises of five-year-old girls. 1.00
00:01:13.200 If that's what they do in their culture, then those are the idiosyncrasies of their culture. 0.97
00:01:17.880 And you have to study it from that relativistic point of view.
00:01:21.660 Now, why am I talking about this today?
00:01:24.120 Of course, it's very relevant to my own work in evolutionary psychology,
00:01:27.740 where you're trying to tease out, you know, how much of nature versus nurture plays into a particular phenomenon.
00:01:34.380 But today what I'd like to talk about is this book,
00:01:37.100 The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead, written by Derek Freeman, who I didn't know.
00:01:44.600 I mean, I thought he had passed away, but I wasn't sure.
00:01:47.140 And so I decided, oh, let me go back and see.
00:01:49.620 Maybe I could invite him on the show.
00:01:51.180 And I quickly realized or perhaps remember that he had died in 2001.
00:01:55.420 Well, the main claim to fame, the thing that put Margaret Mead on the map, 0.55
00:02:02.640 was that she went to Samoa as an anthropologist to demonstrate precisely that which her doctoral supervisor had pioneered,
00:02:12.580 namely this movement of cultural relativism,
00:02:14.960 to show that even when it comes to something as supposedly innate as, you know, the trajectory of adolescence
00:02:23.180 or sexual behavior among the adolescents, there are no universals.
00:02:30.460 Now, of course, we know, for example, from paternity uncertainty theory or from parental investment theory, rather,
00:02:38.580 that, well, actually, both of those things apply in understanding universal patterns of mating.
00:02:43.340 But parental investment theory from Robert Trivers explains that if you want to know in any species
00:02:51.000 which of the two sexes is likely to be more judicious in their mate choice,
00:02:55.260 then look to the sex that has to commit the greater minimal obligatory parental investment.
00:03:02.060 And in most species, it's the females. 0.98
00:03:04.320 Although in some species that are called sex role reversal species,
00:03:07.680 then you will have an exact reversal of all of the sex differences.
00:03:11.640 Now, in the human context, of course, women bear much more of the minimal parental obligatory investment, 0.94
00:03:18.860 and therefore, they are going to be more sexually restrained.
00:03:22.600 Doesn't mean that they're not sexual beings, but certainly they're going to be less so than men. 0.82
00:03:27.320 Well, here comes Margaret Mead on her cultural relativistic horse,
00:03:32.660 and she's going to show that, no, even when it comes to sex differences in human sexuality,
00:03:38.300 I can find an exotic culture where that doesn't hold true.
00:03:42.380 And so in her book, Coming of Age in Samoa,
00:03:45.460 she studied supposedly young girls, Samoan girls, 0.99
00:03:50.080 who exhibited many of the reversals that heretofore were supposedly universal.
00:03:56.540 Yeah, right.
00:03:58.940 Now, we can debate about the methodology that Margaret Mead used,
00:04:03.860 how much she incorporated her own ideological commitments into interpreting the data and so on.
00:04:08.880 But this gentleman, Derek Freeman, wrote this book.
00:04:12.460 And, you know, I highly recommend that you read it because it's part,
00:04:15.900 it's a real story, of course, but that's, in a sense, a detective story.
00:04:19.920 How much was she doing things, she meaning Margaret Mead,
00:04:26.740 that were, say, unethical or perhaps inadvertently was she being biased by her thing
00:04:33.700 versus the reason why he uses the term the fateful hoaxing of Margaret Mead
00:04:38.280 is because he argued that there were several of the participants that she interacted with in Samoa
00:04:45.280 that were just bullshitting her, just having fun with her.
00:04:48.880 But boy, was she ready to accept their narrative as long as it supported her idea.
00:04:54.820 So, in any case, great scientific detective story
00:04:59.400 because it deals with arguably the most important debate within, you know,
00:05:06.220 the human sciences, nature versus nurture.
00:05:09.340 Of course, the truth is that we are an inextricable mix of both.
00:05:12.820 But here comes Franz Boas and his female doctoral students, 0.96
00:05:17.200 Ruth Benedict would have been another one, all of whom were fully committed to this idea of cultural relativism.
00:05:25.420 Margaret Mead goes and tries to find an exotic society where, voila, 0.98
00:05:29.840 all sexual patterns are somehow different from what we're used to,
00:05:35.060 demonstrating that the cultural relativist view is, quote, correct.
00:05:38.960 And then here comes another gentleman who says, uh-oh, not so fast, Margaret Mead.
00:05:44.120 Now, some people have said that, no, he was unfair and that he also cherry-picked his data
00:05:49.960 and he wasn't totally fair to her.
00:05:53.480 You know, it's tough to know without getting into the knee-deep of the exact data
00:06:00.020 what percentage of what she said was false versus how he interpreted it and so on.
00:06:06.280 But we certainly know, I think very few people would disagree with this statement,
00:06:11.620 this very charitable statement,
00:06:13.500 that Margaret Mead had an ideological commitment towards cultural relativism.
00:06:19.160 And therefore, when she went to Samoa,
00:06:21.240 she made sure to find out exactly what she was hoping to find.
00:06:24.800 Cheers, everybody.