In this episode, I sit down with evolutionary biologist and author Tucker Barnard to discuss the question of whether or not there is a creator, and how to get to the bottom of the idea that the universe came from a creator.
00:00:21.580Man, if I was an atheist, I'd be very upset that Sam Harris was carrying my atheist water.
00:00:25.900Because I felt like he was a very bad spokesman for his cause.
00:00:30.560The spokespeople for atheism have done such a terrible disservice by demonizing people's religious faith rather than taking it as the important set of questions that it obviously is.
00:00:44.400There are many different ways that AI can radically disrupt civilization.
00:00:51.060The idea that they will become conscious and that we won't know is, to me, highly likely.
00:02:33.080First of all, that doesn't make me right.
00:02:35.640You know, the fact is, yes, I know a lot of factual material, but there are some deeper issues here.
00:02:42.980And I thought it would be useful if you and I just explored them, because I think you're standing in for a lot of people who have begun to have very profound questions about the story that they've been told about evolution and what its relationship is to biology and, most importantly, to people.
00:03:05.420So, I just want to confess a few of my positions so that your audience knows where I'm coming from.
00:03:12.740I do not believe that there is a creator in the literal sense.
00:03:23.660But I've come to the conclusion that there probably isn't such a creator because all of the things that we have been able to figure out about the world, things that we know are true because they carry a great deal of predictive power,
00:03:39.280have come to us through the principle of parsimony and I will clean up the principle of parsimony a little bit because the way it was originally formulated is clumsy.
00:03:50.460But if we had access to all the information, then the simplest explanation for each pattern that we observe would be the correct one.
00:04:02.820Simplicity is our guide to what's true.
00:04:06.240And for me, the problem with the hypothesis that there is a creator is that it answers one very difficult problem, where did the universe come from,
00:04:20.820at an expense that is vastly greater in terms of the assumptions, right?
00:04:29.760And if the universe came from a creator, well, that simplifies one thing.
00:04:34.760But now we have to explain where that creator came from.
00:04:38.780And that's a much harder problem than explaining the universe itself.
00:04:41.720So as much as I agree, explaining the universe and explaining biology is difficult, it does not solve a problem to imagine that a creator is the answer.
00:04:51.160And even if there was one, well, maybe that creator was existing in a universe that was created by another creator.
00:05:02.040But eventually you're going to get to a place where you're going to have to reach for the only explanation we have ever come up with for where radical increases in complexity come from.
00:05:14.480So even if we in this universe are the product of a creator's work, ultimately that creator is going to have to have come from somewhere.
00:05:22.100And the only explanation that could possibly work is going to be Darwinian.
00:05:25.800So, again, I'm not saying that I know whether there is or there isn't, but I am saying that the principle that has allowed us to see all of what we can see,
00:05:36.520that has allowed us to build all that we have built, that principle is parsimony and it suggests that this universe is not the product of an intentional creation.
00:05:48.360But the Hebrews explained it this way, and the Christians too, that the process is inherent in the description.
00:05:57.780So the creator is the force that creates and is not himself created.
00:06:05.000So in other words, there is, God was not created.
00:06:57.180That's why I've invested in it professionally.
00:06:59.000And he gave me an incredible set of evidence for Darwinian evolution.
00:07:10.700And I'm now forced to grapple with the question of why a creator would have given me a capacity to reason, would have given me the principle of parsimony, the power of which I can see, and a set of evidence that forces me to conclude that the biota at least evolved in a Darwinian way.
00:07:36.160Now, it could be, let's put it this way.
00:07:41.720I think the simplest explanation then would be that the creator used evolution to make the biology.
00:07:51.280And that, you know, maybe the creator is especially interested in the products of a Darwinian process.
00:07:59.840You know, maybe the creator is as delighted as I am, or because he's the creator, more delighted than I am at the sight of a hummingbird, that that's a marvelous thing to have happened through this process.
00:08:09.480I could imagine that it still doesn't strike me as the simplest way to explain the universe that I see.
00:08:16.760But, you know, if, you know, if, if a creator wanted a universe in which biological marvels happened, then the universe might look like this.
00:08:27.020And it doesn't change what I do at the point that I know that a Darwinian process is actually the tool that has shaped the creatures.
00:08:38.020Then it, it makes sense to study it in the way that I do.
00:08:42.380So, again, I'm not against the idea that there's a creator.
00:08:48.840If there is a creator, I'm pretty sure he must want me to be skeptical for some reason, because he's given me that which would cause me to be skeptical.
00:09:00.820And I guess the final piece of that argument is that I think that there is a more parsimonious way to understand our, our universe and the role of religious belief in it, which I know will be grating to many people, especially people who, who do have a profound relationship with, with a religious faith.
00:09:27.080But I think the right way to understand all of the evidence is that religious belief systems are themselves profoundly important products of evolution.
00:09:42.320They are keys to the amazing capacity of humans.
00:09:47.740And so, I don't know how clear this is, but part of what I'm saying is that I think the facts tell us, or they strongly imply a story in which there is no literal creator, but they do not tell us that the creator is a fiction, right?
00:10:11.640Our belief in God or gods is a key to human functionality, and it is incumbent on evolutionary biologists to understand in what way that could possibly be true.
00:10:28.360And this is a responsibility on which I think evolutionists have fallen down.
00:10:32.560They have treated religious devotion as, frankly, a pathology, and it couldn't possibly be one.
00:10:56.780I don't think there's any evidence of that at all.
00:10:58.660And I should also say that, by the way, and I'll tell you why I think that, but I should say, what I said on Rogan was, like, characteristically inarticulate and imprecise.
00:11:10.300And I don't have a problem at all with the idea that there's physical evolution, because I think there clearly is.
00:11:18.720My problem is with the question of the creation of all things.
00:11:22.020And I don't think there's a better explanation or a more reasonable explanation that there's just a God that created everything.
00:11:28.900And if you disagree, I'd love to hear it.
00:11:32.000But let me just say of the question of religion being adaptive.
00:11:36.000So, like, one of the main modes of religious expression from the beginning of recorded history is human sacrifice.
00:11:44.220Including, and it goes on today around the world in various forms.
00:11:49.120And the idea that that's, like, necessary because population outstrips resources is not always true.
00:11:56.380Like, there are tons of examples, including in modern day, lots of places, including the United States, where there's, you know, plenty of resources and people do it anyway.
00:12:05.720But it's the same story in every civilization, none of which could have had contact with each other that we know of.
00:12:14.000And there's kind of nothing that evolutionary biology can say about that.
00:12:21.640It's like it's not helping people at all.
00:12:29.100I mean, I see the same or a similar pattern.
00:12:31.980And my sense is, in biology, when we see a complex, costly pattern that either re-evolves, spreads, or otherwise persists over a long period of time, we are forced to grapple with the question of what could its utility be.
00:12:57.780And while I don't think we have a good hypothesis about the utility of human sacrifice, and personally, morally, I'm offended by it, as I'm sure you are.
00:13:10.960Nonetheless, like so many of humanity's worst attributes, we have to look at it and grapple with the evolutionary implications, that it does have some sort of a meaning.
00:13:28.900And I should say, buried within what I'm saying is a critique of where my field has gotten to.
00:13:40.200As I think I mentioned to you in a past discussion, I think my field is stuck.
00:14:06.300But I am a champion of the basic Darwinian paradigm, which I think we have lost sight of.
00:14:15.920In fact, evolutionary biologists in the middle of the 20th century overly narrowed our understanding of Darwinism and have blinded us to what it's really trying to tell us about ourselves.
00:14:29.200And I would love to see us remember how to do the process of discovery and to start unlocking big puzzles.
00:14:40.760But it sounds to me like you believe in a universe in which biological evolution happens.
00:15:35.700And so I don't know if there's room in the framework that you're describing for that fact.
00:15:45.220Well, what I think I did not articulate properly is I'm not arguing that a materialist scientific worldview that excludes the supernatural is a better way to live.
00:16:02.440One of the things I think atheists have done particularly badly, and one of the reasons that I don't call myself an atheist, is that there is no demonstrated case in which an atheist civilization has thrived.
00:16:19.180In fact, we have many examples in which they have spectacularly collapsed.
00:16:23.900And in fact, the things that presently threaten our civilization include a great many, you know, atheist ideas like, you know, you can just up and change your sex if you feel that you're trapped in the wrong body.
00:17:13.900Which is, I have a category that I don't share with anybody as far as I know that I would call the metanatural, right?
00:17:20.540Which is sort of the advantage that comes from believing in the supernatural.
00:17:24.920I believe it all ultimately could be explained through a natural system in the same way you could explain a baseball game by thinking of all of the atoms in the baseball and the bat and the players.
00:17:39.220But that's a terrible way to think about baseball, right?
00:17:41.860It just doesn't – it's not functional.
00:17:43.280But, yes, you could, in principle, do it.
00:17:45.360So I think that the belief in the supernatural is a much more efficient way of encoding hidden truths that you can't readily comprehend.
00:17:58.820So, to give you one example, you might have a system in which you imagine that the misbehavior of your people, whoever they might be, is going to result in the anger of a god who will punish you with famine.
00:18:20.900It's also true that if your people are busy betraying each other, that that may threaten the harvest.
00:18:32.080In other words, your coordination in the planting of crops, the protecting of those crops, and the harvesting of those crops is dependent on whether or not people like and trust each other.
00:18:43.020And to the extent that they're backstabbing each other, it could very well result in starvation without the intervention of an intentional god.
00:18:52.640So, to me, those two stories are the same story.
00:18:57.060How do you explain to people you really shouldn't misbehave because it could interfere with our coordination in a way that may result in us not having enough food to get through the winter?
00:19:05.420The answer is, oh, God sees what you're doing, and he's not happy about it, and when God's not happy, starvation is highly likely.
00:19:16.720So, the metanatural is the category that allows the reconciliation of the efficient narrative description of this process with the difficult-to-spot deeper physical connection.
00:19:33.600I think that's, I mean, I think there's a practical effect of doing the right thing, and it's a good thing, right?
00:20:24.600It shows up at the end of our evolutionary story, not early.
00:20:29.240And, you know, that means that there are a good many mammals that have some degree of consciousness that we can see, but nobody's conscious like we are.
00:20:37.520The conscious mind, I will argue, is actually evolved for an initial purpose.
00:20:47.020The initial purpose is exactly what we are doing right now.
00:20:50.600It is the ability for two minds to pool their understanding, right?
00:20:57.620To actually plug into each other and reach an emergent conclusion that neither of us could reach alone, or that the two of us couldn't reach separately if we couldn't plug our consciousnesses into each other.
00:21:10.700So, when we say, actually, that we know things, but we don't know how we know them, we're sort of talking about our conscious minds, which is just this thin sliver on top of this architecture that has been knowing things for millions of years in ways that weren't conscious at all.
00:21:29.940So, I think we're really, it's that interface.
00:21:32.820Does my conscious mind know why I know this to be true?
00:21:35.600Why do I meet somebody and have a distrust that turns out to be accurate with respect to their trustworthiness, right?
00:22:44.320It's about the sum total of your experiences and what they are capable of putting together about the world.
00:22:56.860And that, to me, you know, it might as well be supernatural from the point of view of how most people live their lives.
00:23:04.520It may indeed just simply be the best way to function.
00:23:10.700But that's different than saying that that's actually what's taking place.
00:23:15.560So, it's not every day that the Catholic Church gets a brand new leader, a new pope.
00:23:19.580Christians around the world are watching really, really carefully.
00:23:23.000This is the largest Christian denomination, the oldest church.
00:23:26.500It is essential that the Catholic Church gets a wise new leader who is installed not simply by the cardinals, but by God.
00:23:36.840And so, it's your job to pray for that.
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00:25:10.880The credit card companies are ripping Americans off, and enough is enough.
00:25:15.440This is Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas.
00:25:17.600Our legislation, the Credit Card Competition Act, would help in the grip Visa and MasterCard have on us.
00:25:25.420Every time you use your credit card, they charge you a hidden fee called a swipe fee, and they've been raising it without even telling you.
00:25:32.960This hurts consumers and every small business owner.
00:25:35.840In fact, American families are paying $1,100 in hidden swipe fees each year.
00:25:42.300The fees Visa and MasterCard charge Americans are the highest in the world, double candidates, and eight times more than Europe's.
00:25:50.260That's why I've taken action, but I need your help to help get this passed.
00:25:54.660I'm asking you to call your senator today and demand they pass the Credit Card Competition Act.
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00:26:17.080In fact, you know, one of the funny things about us is that we have a special adaptation in our eyes that allows us to communicate as a hunting party without alerting the thing that we're hunting.
00:27:14.100She also knows a certain amount about, you know, what's been on my mind and, you know, where I may be heading.
00:27:22.580And therefore, she may be able to deduce because she, you know, if we're talking about intuition, Heather's intuition about me has got to be pretty damn good.
00:27:30.980Because she's had, you know, her entire adult life to build a model that's as accurate as annuities would be.
00:27:37.040So her ability to figure out that there is some pattern there is second to none.
00:27:47.840And it will not surprise me if very frequently she nails the analysis and we can be 500 miles or 1,000 miles apart.
00:27:54.660And it feels like a communication across a very long distance when really it's a kind of a synchrony that allows her to extrapolate when something has departed from normal.
00:28:07.040And I will say one other thing about this.
00:28:09.480We have a very strange pattern as human beings.
00:28:12.560When we meet, we say totally meaningless things.
00:29:01.320And my sense is that it makes sense when we meet somebody to go through a pro forma interaction that allows you to detect things like emotional state.
00:29:21.480And rather than say something special to the degree that it is standardized what those interactions contain, it makes it much easier to detect the part that's important, which is the tone, the cadence, all of those things.
00:30:22.740So, the basics are that in order to reconcile some of the oddities that quantum mechanics has discovered, we imagine that in every instant there is a universe spawned for every conceivable outgrowth.
00:30:40.400And so, you know, if I pick up this pen, there's a universe in which I didn't and a universe in which I did, and those universes go on to do whatever they do, right?
00:30:48.920But this is a spectacularly simple explanation, linguistically.
00:31:12.480That's complex at a level that's beyond extreme.
00:31:17.280And so, my sense, and, you know, again, I'm not arguing that this isn't a better way to live, but my sense is when you say the simplest explanation is a creator who wasn't created, yeah, linguistically, it doesn't get simpler than that.
00:31:31.880It's a one sentence, you know, and you're done.
00:31:34.960At the level of what it means, it's almost inconceivably, what does it mean for something capable of creating a universe not to have come into existence, right?
00:31:47.280I can't even imagine what that means, right?
00:31:59.880But my point would be, the question of did the universe start with the creator is not one that you are likely to derive some practical value from spending your time on.
00:32:16.040In fact, you could waste your entire life, make no progress, and be detained from all of the other things you might have done.
00:32:22.900So, it would be useful for most humans throughout most of history to have had a simple explanation that simply allowed them to move on to questions where there was some profit to be made or peril to be avoided, right?
00:32:37.640You want not to be stuck on questions where there's no potential value in your exploration.
00:32:44.480And so, my sense is that that's a very elegant way of moving on to things that are actually important.
00:32:51.520And that's why it's effectively an enduring answer to a question that every human being is likely to have at some point.
00:35:03.040It fails to explain other things consistently.
00:35:06.540And the closer you get to human beings, the worse a job it does.
00:35:11.300Not because of anything Darwin got wrong.
00:35:13.520He was probably, to his benefit, hobbled by what he didn't know.
00:35:18.740Because he didn't know the molecular part of the story.
00:35:21.680He was unconstrained by it, which forced him to speak in a general sense that turns out to be correct.
00:35:30.560But what you need to understand in order to follow how this story explains human beings is that the underlying story of evolution, the early one, pre-human story, is about genes getting into the future.
00:35:55.060In creatures with meaningful culture, that is, creatures in which there's generational overlap and sociality enough for something to be transmitted outside of the genome, you get a second kind of evolution.
00:38:03.480The fact that, you know, if you go to Italy, you struggle to communicate is the result of two populations having diverged at a cultural level enough that you're functionally incompatible.
00:38:59.600It is a competing branch with Islam and Hinduism.
00:39:06.340You know, these are alternative structures.
00:39:09.380And the implications for the behavior of the populations that subscribe to these different doctrines are as significant as species distinctions.
00:39:21.620In other words, the belief system that you inherit outside the genome is it encodes how to be a human being relative to some niche.
00:42:14.640But totalitarian novels also give us hope, showing us how to defend our society from the horrors of tyranny.
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00:42:46.180So underlying all of this is a question we don't need to get into this, but like, if there's no God, then how is there a moral code at all?
00:42:54.200Like, why can we say that it's better to raise a child than to kill a child?
00:43:11.000So for whatever reason, we all think that.
00:43:16.420There seems to be very little evidence that people are getting better.
00:43:19.860And so the Christian perspective is that people are captive to sin, to the influence of supernatural evil forces on them, which I think is like everyone's experience, by the way.
00:43:33.180You don't have to be a Christian to know that that's true.
00:43:35.600And we're constantly fighting to keep those at bay.
00:44:49.620You might father a child, fathering children, passes on some genes.
00:44:53.940We get why evolution might point you toward that.
00:44:56.140On the other hand, from the point of view of the well-being of your family and your family's well-being has everything to do with how durable a position they hold in your community, how productive their lives are likely to be.
00:45:14.940So, the delayed benefit of not betraying your spouse is substantial, but hard to convey.
00:45:24.180So, the religious doctrine that tells you this is how you should be, and you may see reasons not to be this way, but you can't escape the consequences of them.
00:45:41.020Again, if we go back to the question of, you know, what happens in a community that's full of people betraying each other, while starvation might be one thing that happens.
00:45:51.100You can describe that in terms of a God who's angry and disappointed with people, or you can describe that in game theoretic terms in which, you know, cascades of betrayal result in lack of coordination.
00:47:13.740I'm intending to stay alive as long as possible and to help those I love do the same.
00:47:18.620So it's not that I'm confused about this, but analytically speaking, what is it about life that's superior to not life?
00:47:27.340Well, the answer is nothing, except you would expect a lot of creatures that are the product of a competition between those who were committed to living and those that weren't so committed to it.
00:47:37.460You would expect an accumulation of bias where we would all inherit the same analytical perspective, even though it's not grounded in the physical reality of the universe.
00:47:54.100So that one, the only point there is, I think that one is actually arbitrary, but once you agree that being alive is pretty great and beats the alternative and you're going to get an infinite amount of the alternative anyway, so you might as well preserve the one space of being alive that you're going to get, right?
00:48:17.180Once you're there, well, then the answer is the rest of it follows, right?
00:50:06.740Okay, the story of Jesus, if I understand it, and I'm no biblical scholar, but if I understand that story, the key elements of it, or at least several key elements of it, involve a broadening of the sense of self, right?
00:50:35.240Now, those things are a radical increase in the inclusion of others into an in-group.
00:50:49.140And the benefits of stabilizing a larger in-group are absolutely tremendous.
00:50:59.960Now, imagine for a moment that Jesus had said these things in game-theoretic terms, and he had tried to convince people with whatever the equivalent of a whiteboard would have been of, you know, the reasons to broaden the in-group at this moment in history.
00:51:24.440So that's not how humans become enlightened.
00:51:28.820Humans become enlightened because of the power of a narrative that causes them to modify their behavior so that they do function more effectively in light of all of the game-theoretic hazards that are always jeopardizing us.
00:51:47.300Which then answers your other question, I think.
00:51:54.420You know, if it's simply good to include others in your in-group, why don't we just simply evolve to default to that and never waver?
00:52:03.280And the problem is that there's a competition between short-term gain and long-term gain.
00:52:11.300Effectively, the upgrade in which you in-group more people is much better in the long run.
00:52:21.940But in the short run, individuals who decide to take advantage of that may have some advantage inside of the group, right?
00:52:30.440And so building a structure in which you can't get away with it increases the effectiveness of the moral point, right?
00:52:45.680If you have everybody calculating that it's morally, you know, you should do the morally right thing if you are in a position to be observed.
00:52:52.500And if you're not in a position to be observed, then you should do whatever is most profitable, right?
00:53:29.780And I would say that everything you're saying, which is complex, quite, is an argument for a creator.
00:53:37.220Because the design is so brilliant, as you're describing it, and the end result, of course, is like the perpetuation of the species, of all species, that, like, that's an accident?
00:53:51.100Like, because you're describing a system with intent.
00:54:52.540If we talk about the behavior of a seedling, right?
00:55:00.520A seed is planted, it breaks open, it germinates, and the seedling rises against gravity and breaks the surface, and it puts out its two little solar panels.
00:55:14.300And at that point, it bends towards the sun.
00:55:18.140And you could say, what is the other explanation for that other than a desire to reach the sunlight?
00:55:30.140And the answer is, actually, in this case, we know the mechanism, and it's amazing.
00:57:13.440And, yeah, look, but, but in general, observe living, things that we describe as living that we can observe are all moving in the same direction.
00:57:25.180And the message, being a message guy, I can discern this, life is better than death.
00:57:34.100Okay, let us agree that love is a profoundly, I'm struggling for words even good enough to describe it, is a profoundly transformative property of life that is as close to a North Star as a human being can have.
00:57:58.620And I don't mean just romantic love, familial love, love of country, all of these things.
00:58:05.000Love is this tremendously powerful force.
00:58:11.080Now let us say, there's actually a lot of neurochemistry that we can describe relative to love.
00:58:21.160Which story do I want people living by?
00:58:23.320Oh, definitely the narrative one in which you just simply surrender to the power of this thing and you allow it to be a guide.
00:58:31.620That's definitely, I don't want to live amongst people who view love as just a bunch of chemical reactions, yada, yada, yada, right?
00:59:16.080Well, I'm trying to talk to two camps in a sense.
00:59:20.860And maybe this will be more of a theme of our discussion on other topics here.
00:59:24.400But there's a kind of nuance that has become impossible.
00:59:28.600And I'm trying to make a point to the atheists about what they've failed at and why they're not reaching lots of people and why they're losing ground.
00:59:38.120And I'm also trying to make a point to the theological folks about Darwinism and about the utility of figuring out how to reconcile these things rather than view them as as competing explanations.
00:59:58.780You may have noticed that the companies whose products you buy tend to kind of hate you.
01:00:02.280They're controlled by massive multinational corporations and they have all kinds of weird agendas that you're supporting when you buy their products.
01:00:09.680We didn't realize that nicotine pouches, which we've used for years, were in this category.
01:01:11.000And people can't, you know, the theist and the atheist can have a kind of scripted dance, but it's hard for them to have like a real conversation.
01:01:22.300And I feel like we are, and so I'm grateful for that.
01:01:24.280And I was just thinking, do you know who Sam Harris is?
01:01:29.020And I think he seems smart, and I think he clearly is smart.
01:01:33.460But there's something, I watched a video, I don't know him really, but I saw a video of him once taking up the atheist cause.
01:01:39.820And it's not up to me to like help the atheists sell their program, because I disagree with it.
01:01:44.240But I remember thinking, man, if I was an atheist, I'd be very upset that Sam Harris was carrying my atheist water.
01:01:50.760Because I felt like he was a very bad, very bad spokesman for his cause.
01:01:59.420Yes, and if I haven't said it before, I don't call myself an atheist in large measure because I think the spokespeople for atheism have done such a terrible disservice to the idea of science,
01:02:18.920largely by demonizing people's religious faith, rather than taking it as the important set of questions that it obviously is.
01:02:35.120He became very disturbed during COVID about my stance as a COVID dissident.
01:02:45.880And refused to talk to me about it, frankly.
01:02:50.980I invited him multiple times, and he refused to have the conversation.
01:02:56.480But he, I think, must have earnestly believed that my position was putting people in danger, and he viewed it as a moral failing.
01:03:10.160He had several podcasts on the subject.
01:03:13.260He accused me of being out of my depth, even though I'm an evolutionary biologist, and evolution is highly relevant to all of the topics included in COVID.
01:03:29.860In a technical sense, yes, he is a neurobiologist who, for his dissertation work, which I think is all of his work, studied effectively the same question that he had been an author about, about the dangers of extreme Islamism.
01:03:53.860And he effectively did a dissertation on the supposed neurobiological facts of people in this mindset.
01:04:11.380I can say I have doubts about the methodology that he used.
01:04:18.280He depended on something called fMRI, functional MRI scanning, which, in theory, allows you to see the activity of different regions of the brain when asked to think certain thoughts or do certain tasks.
01:04:34.900But there's a lot of difficulty in calibrating fMRI because you need to know what the baseline activity of the brain is in order to subtract out all of the activity that isn't relevant.
01:04:47.580So, in any case, we can put that aside and just say I'm not certain that what his empirical work involved was robust.
01:04:58.300But even, let's say it is, he is not, broadly speaking, trained as a biologist in any way that I can see.
01:05:06.500And so, he, to his credit, said that he was out of his depth talking about issues of biology related to vaccines, epidemiology, all of the relevant pieces of biological science.
01:05:24.940But then, he argued that I was also out of my depth, which, you know, I'm not a specialist in terms of vaccines, immunology, epidemiology, but evolution is relevant to all of those things.
01:05:37.200And I'm perfectly capable of teaching myself the parts that I didn't know when COVID began.
01:05:43.100And, anyway, he portrayed me as incapable.
01:05:48.800And when I had expert guests, people like Pierre Coury and Robert Malone on my channel to talk about these things, unarguable experts, people with fantastic credentials, he literally dismissed them as possibly schizophrenic, that that would be an explanation for their dissident status.
01:07:06.640He's mad about Islam and he's un-nuanced about it.
01:07:09.520Now, I do think he is correct in one regard about radical Islam and the danger of it.
01:07:19.660But I think it has blinded him to a larger story in which Islam is an ancient tradition that has, in many places, attempted to modernize.
01:07:34.720Some of those attempts have been more successful than others.
01:07:38.360But I don't think, you know, the way he portrays it, it's simply a, you know, a defect written to the Quran that the world needs to wake up to rather than Islam is a population or a set of populations that, like the rest of us, are in an evolutionary process.
01:08:00.160And, you know, there's a lot of nuance to be had about what the way to address radical Islam is and how to encourage any such tradition to join what I would call the cosmopolitan West.
01:08:19.620Sounds like he's making a political point.
01:08:22.140I don't know what kind of a point it is.
01:08:24.080Well, it's all very interesting that a lot of these issues, which would seem to have nothing to do with COVID, do come back to COVID and to the Middle East, by the way.
01:08:37.060And to your earlier point about the dysfunction of our discussion, which I argued is the result of more or less a systematic attack on nuance on any of these charged topics,
01:08:53.060where effectively there's a discussion to be had and often two extreme fringes agree to drive out the nuanced discussion and to force you to pick a team.
01:09:10.460I feel like I'm watching that right now.
01:10:26.420And I'm, of course, like everybody else, I have lots of trepidations about even wading into the discussion.
01:10:33.340Because I know what happens as soon as you do.
01:10:35.840Which is, there's a very low quality thought that people who have already picked a camp have.
01:10:45.740And the thought is, I'm going to listen to what this person says.
01:10:49.820And if it matches what I believe, then I'm going to embrace it.
01:10:54.480And if it doesn't match what I believe, I'm going to assume it's on the other side.
01:10:58.340And so, the reason that you can't have the conversation in the middle is that both sides see you as the enemy.
01:11:03.760Which is, you know, the worst of all possible worlds from the point of view of just living your life.
01:11:08.280However, I do think that this topic is actually a pretty good test case of why it is important, in spite of the difficulty of thinking evolutionarily, to engage the world with that toolkit at least available.
01:11:25.360Because, as an evolutionary biologist who has been fascinated by, often horrified by, the story of human history, I think there's something playing out in the Middle East that is biological.
01:11:42.640And that until we grapple with it, we're in danger of being, for example, dragged into war with Iran, which will be a terrible catastrophe for all of humanity.
01:11:59.940And unfortunately, I will try to use as little jargon and as few terms of art as I can manage, but there is a little bit that's necessary.
01:12:11.300I believe the story that is playing out in the Middle East is one of what I call lineage.
01:12:17.860Here's where things get possibly a bit technical.
01:12:26.020In my field, we do not typically talk about lineages in the context of, let's say, humans.
01:12:37.720Typically, there are two camps in biology.
01:12:42.520There are the kin selectionists who believe in the importance of shared genes in terms of predisposing people to collaborate.
01:12:49.680And then there are the group selectionists who believe that altruism provides such a powerful advantage to people who put those things aside that actually it should dominate our discussion.
01:13:03.160And these two groups both view each other as foolish.
01:13:06.200I think they're both wrong for different reasons.
01:13:08.080And that the correct way to understand humans and their evolution involves two important realizations.
01:13:17.460One, that the kin selectionists are right about the importance of genes in predisposing people to cooperate with each other.
01:13:25.960But they do not understand that you can extrapolate well beyond named kin, right?
01:13:33.000Kin selection doesn't stop just because you lose track of your fifth cousin.
01:13:37.740That a population of people that can detect that they are closely related has reason to collaborate, genetic reason, even if they can't specify their degree of relatedness to each other.
01:13:50.060And that this has a lot to do with the way history has unfolded.
01:13:56.340That up until very recently, most history at the scale that we study it is a process of lineage against lineage, violence, and displacement.
01:14:09.640That populations displace each other from the earth because that's the way to accomplish the evolutionary goal.
01:14:17.400It's the same sort of drive as causes the sapling to reach for the sun.
01:14:46.820And the idea is, in the West, we agree to put our lineage-level origins aside and to collaborate with other people because they have something valuable to bring to the table.
01:15:05.280But I would argue that the founding fathers of the U.S. almost accidentally invented this modern West because they were trying to get the colonists to confederate.
01:15:16.640And they needed to level the playing field sufficiently that the colonists had their fears put to rest enough that they were willing to sign.
01:15:25.380So in leveling the playing field, they came up with what I think is the magic formula for how human beings are to get along.
01:15:33.480And it's not a question of putting competition aside, but it's a willingness to agree that competition should not involve combat.
01:15:42.480That it should involve the innovation and the production of superior ways of being and that those different ways of being can compete with each other in a nonviolent fashion, which is simply better.
01:15:58.920It's fairer, it's fairer, it's safer, it's much more likely to leave the human population here a thousand years from now.
01:16:08.300And so to get back to the Middle East, we are caught in a tension between these two modes of collaboration.
01:16:19.360You've got the ancient mode, which involves lineage against lineage violence, in which, you know, you can find this in the Old Testament.
01:17:15.460And I'm going to show you that I'm opposed to violence because when one of the disciples tries to use a sword against the guy who's arresting him to torture him to death, Jesus scolds the disciple for using violence even then.
01:17:24.640So like those are rat, one is western, one is eastern, I would, I mean, or whatever, however you want to, whatever you want to describe those two hemispheres as being, but they're, those are the two hemispheres and it's like, it's in the same book.
01:17:37.240Right. Now, notice what just happened.
01:17:41.300I just described this to you in what I understand to be rigorous game theoretic biological terms, dry, dull, and boring.
01:17:51.560And you came back with the obvious rejoinder that actually, no, we have a narrative.
01:17:59.240We've actually got a name and a location and a description of this upgrade.
01:18:03.200And whether or not, you know, you think that God inspired the writing of those two stories, they're still two different stories.
01:18:25.760And they, and I know that there's a, like, I'm no theologian, but there's this effort to pretend they're the same story, but they're, they're completely different stories.
01:18:34.560Having read them, I could just say as a close reader of everything I read, those are very different stories.
01:19:08.520So even the way the story is built is it is constructed in a way to be intuitive to people who have observed family dynamics.
01:19:18.420But the powerful thing here, or one of them, is it's not like the state of Israel, about which I am not claiming to be an expert, but I can observe it.
01:19:30.640The state of Israel is caught between these two modes.
01:20:04.260And anti-Semitism is a recurrent fact of history.
01:20:07.240So you can imagine that it structures the mindset of people, even in a long period of peace.
01:20:12.960There's always the question of, well, when is that bad pattern going to return?
01:20:15.840So you can understand that, you can understand a hardline position that is not so interested in hearing about, you know, peace, love, and understanding, because it thinks that the realities of a world in which Jews are constantly being displaced, or which the tendency to displace them reemerges recurrently.
01:21:34.140And maybe that's the story of what's going to happen to humanity.
01:21:37.160But to the extent that it is possible, I think it has to be our focus.
01:21:43.200And if we allow neocons, hardliners, to drag us, and by us, I mean the U.S. into a war with Iran, then we are effectively agreeing to step back into the Old Testament rules, which will be fatal for humanity.
01:22:08.420So this is a conversation that has to take place in a middle ground that is not allowed to exist.
01:22:15.820Like I said before, everybody on both sides of the discussion will hear what I've just said as not in alignment with their perspective and will view it.
01:22:24.680I don't understand, though, why that's – I mean I'm just – you told me something fascinating when we had lunch this fall.
01:22:33.280And you said that the medical freedom movement, the movement that arose in the wake of COVID to assess like what was that and how could we not do that again, totally reasonable, was getting blown up from the inside over Israel.
01:22:46.500And I remember saying to you, what does Israel have to do with it?
01:22:50.880I feel the same way about what's happening right now.
01:22:53.260It's like, okay, people have views on Israel.
01:23:33.840But it doesn't – if you had asked me five years ago what will be like the most passionate debate in the United States at a moment where we're probably in recession and have more homeless people than ever.
01:23:45.540Suicide rates up, life expectancy, all these problems, debt overhang that is going to crush us.
01:23:51.740What's going to be the issue that people are going to be the maddest about in a faraway Middle Eastern country with 10 million people?
01:25:22.760And the degree to which in some sense we are – this is like a neocon hangover that we can't tell is a neocon hangover because the cast of characters has largely changed.
01:25:36.580But the perspective is very similar, right?
01:25:40.040This looks like, you know, as I said very shortly after October 7th, there was a plan.
01:25:49.860It involved a series of wars in the Middle East.
01:32:18.540Like I said, I think there's some element of organized propaganda that pushes us in a direction.
01:32:29.680On the other hand, I think, in part, the reason that this issue seems to derange every conversation, every coalition, is that Jews are infused through all of the activities of civilization.
01:32:47.780And you've got a population that- I'm hesitant to use a term like, you know, intergenerational trauma.
01:32:59.560But you've got a population that hands down the stories of pogroms and persecution and the Holocaust because it's vital information.
01:33:09.320You have to know that that can happen.
01:33:11.780And it can happen anywhere, at any time.
01:33:14.260And so, being of that mindset, being raised to know that things can be very good and people can- you know, there can be no hint of anti-Semitism as there wasn't in my life until quite late.
01:33:27.140Things can be that way, and then something can change, and what you thought were the realities of, you know, who your friends are and what they're capable of would radically shift.
01:33:41.160So, you've got that population involved in governance, business, all of the essential functions of civilization, and then the noises of an anti-Semitic wave start to rise.
01:33:57.640That population recoils into this defensive posture, oh, no, is it happening again, which then causes an attempt to drive out all nuances.
01:34:11.600This is not the time to be asking questions, that sort of thing, which then causes resentment in terms of all of the things you're not allowed to just even ask, right?
01:34:19.900As an American, I'm not allowed to ask questions about our support for a foreign government's war, you know?
01:34:27.960I mean, of course I'm allowed to talk about that, but yet somehow it feels very dangerous to even raise the question.
01:34:34.500So, that pattern results, you know, how big a room can you assemble before you have both sides in that room unable to allow any nuance, right?
01:34:49.340So, what happened to the medical freedom movement was just simply the events of October 7th caused people who didn't even necessarily know each other's positions on, you know, events in the Middle East suddenly to be talking about them and to find each other un-understandable.
01:35:11.540But how did that issue even, I mean, I don't even know all my kids' positions on the Middle East, and they're my children.
01:35:38.480It seems to me that the right thing to do is to recognize we have a whole lot of common ground, and then there's an issue on which we apparently don't.
01:35:47.480And frankly, what a missed opportunity that a bunch of people who'd been through hell together fighting over, you know, their right to speak the truth about all things COVID.
01:35:57.720That group of people seems like they would have the tools to navigate other difficult issues.
01:37:16.640I was, I haven't even followed up asking about this in private, but where were you, were you considered too pro-Israel or too not supportive enough?
01:38:52.000I think Jews are vulnerable and it is important for them to have a homeland.
01:38:55.420And I recognize that there's a conflict with a central value that I hold, which is the consent of the governed, which means that the demographics of the state of Israel adjust how effective a homeland it is for Jews.
01:39:11.680I'm glad it's not my job to figure out how to resolve it.
01:39:13.860But all of that said, my sense is, looking from afar, that the Netanyahu administration's relationship to the population of Israel is a lot like the Biden administration's relationship to the population of the U.S.
01:39:35.600And as an American living under the Biden administration, those people were not on my team.
01:39:41.640Those people didn't give a damn about me or anything I cared about.
01:39:48.440So, my sense is, the idea that you might want to be supportive of Israelis does not mean that you are supportive of the Netanyahu administration.
01:40:01.900What's more, I think it's clear that every rational person should hate Hamas for what it is.
01:40:12.780And it should hate Hamas supporters who know what they're doing.
01:40:16.340And unfortunately, Benjamin Netanyahu is in that category.
01:40:21.820But I see credible evidence that Benjamin Netanyahu cynically propped up Hamas or argued for it to be propped up in order to divide the Palestinians.
01:40:33.620Having done that and then having October 7th happen means that to me, any violence that needs to be engaged in to rescue hostages or to do away with Hamas cannot be under his direction.
01:40:49.180I do not understand why he was left in power being responsible for Hamas in some regard and then responsible for eliminating them.
01:41:00.580I mean, it's so Anthony Fauci-like, it's almost too close a parallel, right?
01:41:07.520And Anthony Fauci is responsible for the gain-of-function research that seems to have produced COVID, and he's also in charge of protecting us from it.
01:41:16.740Anthony Fauci shouldn't have been anywhere near it and Benjamin Netanyahu.
01:41:18.920I agree, and I think in both cases, well, certainly in the case of Bibi, I think the system itself, a parliamentary system, which Israel has, it's very, it's complicated.
01:41:44.940Oh, I think he's very, very smart and very effective, and the question is really, you know, there are two questions.
01:41:54.420One, is he on the side of the Israeli people?
01:41:57.040And two, assuming that he's on the side of the Israeli people, is he making a spectacular error that will actually be a massive setback for them?
01:42:05.060And I would also say, as a corollary of that, it's not just the Israeli people who are jeopardized by his leadership.
01:42:17.460It's, I believe, Jews in the diaspora.
01:42:21.420I feel that the goodwill that existed towards Jews in the aftermath of World War II is being burned up at an incredible rate.
01:42:29.380I don't expect to see it return in my lifetime, and I think that's a tragedy.
01:42:35.000And then, on top of all of it, the fate of humanity more or less rests on our ability to stop playing the game that the Netanyahu side is pushing us towards, the lineage against lineage violence.
01:42:48.560And so, I think it is time for the West to reassert itself and its values, to police our own behavior, frankly.
01:43:02.100I'm not happy when the United States falls down on its commitment to a level playing field.
01:43:06.820But that really is the road forward, and in the end, it's better for everybody.
01:43:13.960In the short run, there are some significant antagonists to moving in that direction.
01:43:20.140I do think what you're seeing here is a variation of what you always see, which is the people who are often in good faith speaking out on behalf of some group are not actually serving that group's interests at all.
01:43:37.680You know, I think there are people who really think they're doing the right thing, but they are not serving the objective they think they're serving.
01:43:45.480Your description, what you just said, you said you might get attacked for it.
01:43:51.200I mean, what you just said seems so humane and, like, measured and thoughtful, not creepy, not hateful.
01:43:59.980How could anyone attack you for saying that?
01:44:02.160Well, one, I think as long as you use the rule that those who are not agreeing with me must be on the other side, it's very easy to end up everybody's enemy.
01:44:21.620Maybe I'm wrong about the reality of the situation, but I'm certainly trying to give decent insight into how Israel can be safer, how the world can be safer, how Islam can be safer.
01:44:44.260The inability to have discussions because some conclusion is understood to follow from them potentially, and we can't risk that conclusion.
01:44:57.860And therefore, the discussion is not allowed.
01:45:23.820It doesn't anticipate the ability to study psychology with scientific tools and, you know, manipulate with industrial strength propaganda.
01:45:32.840But the principle is still exactly right.
01:45:37.200And I will say, I heard your discussion with Matt Walsh last week, maybe.
01:45:43.580And I was fascinated by it because Matt Walsh and I are very different creatures.
01:45:48.660Like, I really am a liberal, and he really is a conservative.
01:45:52.600And I heard him say all kinds of things that were provocative, and I found it absolutely refreshing.
01:46:02.480Just the idea, you know, that you could navigate those questions in public was a breath of fresh air.
01:46:10.240And I'm hoping that all parties who are acting in good faith and really trying to figure out how to get the nation and the world pointed in the right direction
01:46:24.280will recognize that we've lost the one tool that has been useful in this regard,
01:46:29.580which is the ability to hash things out, to not demonize people for holding perspectives.
01:46:37.400If they hold a perspective that isn't right, the answer is to persuade them that it isn't right.
01:46:42.640So I've been thinking a lot about why that has changed.
01:46:47.260And I think it's because there's too much lying.
01:46:52.220And people, or there's a perception, I think there's too much lying.
01:46:55.520And I think that people can't sort of relax and accept that the person telling them a point of view really believes that point of view.
01:47:04.860So there's less sincerity than there used to be.
01:47:09.920And, you know, something like Matt Walsh, or I had my next interview I did was with Ben Cohen of Ben and Jerry's,
01:47:16.800who's like totally liberal on everything.
01:47:19.460But he's liberal on the question of war.
01:51:49.580Unintended consequences, which means, A, the last thing you want to do is go into that complex system with a blueprint.
01:51:59.060Here's what I'm going to do, and here's what it's going to result in, because you don't know.
01:52:03.400The best you can do is prototype and navigate, right?
01:52:08.620You can say, I want to get to that place, and you can take a step in that direction, and you can say, okay, well, what was the consequence of that step?
01:52:15.740And then you can adjust what you did, what you do next, based on what you learned the last time.
01:52:20.720You can get where you're going in the same way that a surfer who can't control a wave is capable of, you know, finding their way down it, right?
01:52:41.900You have to take a measure of the consequence of what you did and look squarely at it.
01:52:48.020And if you say, well, you know, the shots definitely worked because they were always going to work.
01:52:54.640The answer is, well, how many different complex systems did you just intervene in, and you weren't even open to the evidence that it didn't work out the way you expected, that it was counterproductive?
01:53:05.500No, you don't even belong in the discussion if you don't see the need to do that.
01:53:11.080So, why are the shots still on the schedule?
01:54:17.980COVID mRNA shots, which, A, as I think I described to you in one of our previous conversations, all mRNA shots have a built-in vulnerability, or they induce a built-in vulnerability, which is if they are translated in cells of the body that are sensitive,
01:54:38.900then you will get a pathology, because the body will naturally attack the cells that are producing whatever protein you load into the mRNA platform.
01:54:49.040It will attack them as if they are virally infected, because that's what they look like.
01:54:52.960They are cells that are of you, but they are producing a foreign protein.
01:54:57.400That is the signature of an infected cell, and the immune system has one and only one plan for that, which is destruction.
01:55:03.920So, the reason that the COVID shots produce such a wide range of pathologies is that they flow all around the body.
01:55:11.480There's no targeting mechanism in them.
01:55:13.220They invade tissues haphazardly, and then those tissues get targeted by the immune system, as, of course, they would.
02:00:24.700Actually, parents are saying, okay, give my kid a COVID shot?
02:00:27.840I mean, you can imagine what a bewildering situation it is.
02:00:33.460Imagine that you're a first-time parent, and the doctors are telling you that the responsible thing to do is to give your child all of these immunizations because of all of the damage, this, that, and the other.
02:00:45.880It's very hard for a parent to muster the courage to ask the right questions.
02:00:51.660Most people wouldn't even know what the right questions to ask are.
02:00:56.100And what's more, the incentives in the system for doctors to get their patients so-called fully vaccinated are constructed so that doctors are absolutely inflexible on this topic.
02:01:14.300They're going to have something to answer for, in my opinion.
02:01:16.620I agree, and I can't believe that doctors who, at this point, know the truth are not standing up en masse.
02:01:26.840So, I'm sorry, once again, I sidetracked you.
02:01:29.320So, you were about to describe the extent of vaccine injury in the United States.
02:01:34.860I followed this from day one, the VAERS self-reporting system and all the rest, but I don't feel like I have a good sense of it.
02:01:43.180Yeah, I don't think we have a good sense of it.
02:01:46.540What we have is, you know, an official estimate that we know is a tiny fraction of the full number.
02:01:55.340We also know that we can't calculate the pathologies that are very delayed, of which there are many in this case.
02:02:01.900So, we don't have the slightest inkling of how much injury has been done.
02:02:10.460But that's why I want to focus on the other aspect of this.
02:02:14.300The number of people who have been injured is absolutely huge.
02:02:18.420The gaslighting of the vaccine injured is an entirely separate crime.
02:02:24.140At the point that you have told people, there's a shot, it's safe, it's necessary that you get it to protect the vulnerable, and then people have been injured.