TRIGGERnometry - The Biological Reason Socialism Always Fails — Nicholas Wade

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00:00:30.000 Hello, I'm Patricia Gossim, Ontario's Information and Privacy Commissioner, and I host InfoMatters, a podcast about people, privacy and access to information.

00:00:42.040 You can listen in on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or at ipc.on.ca.

00:01:00.000 You basically did something that I've been trying to explain for a very long time, the

00:01:05.500 biological reasons for why communism worked.

00:01:07.900 And you give a fascinating example of voluntary communism, which was the kibbutz system in

00:01:13.660 Israel.

00:01:14.660 That was a wonderful natural experiment.

00:01:17.840 So the founders who decided in Israel they would not just start anew, but they would

00:01:23.500 build a whole new world based on a new kind of person who would be a good, unselfish person.

00:01:30.900 It's a very dangerous system when you don't reward people on the basis of their merit.

00:01:36.820 This is one of the big problems of not taking human nature seriously and not accepting the

00:01:41.340 fact that we have certain behaviors written into our genome by evolution because of our survival

00:01:48.500 values. Our instinct is entirely warlike. I mean, we have genocide written into our genes.

00:01:58.400 Nicholas Wade, welcome to Trigonometry.

00:02:00.480 Thanks for having me.

00:02:01.340 It's so good to have you on. Francis and I picked up your book a few days ago.

00:02:06.700 You know, to be honest, we have to read a lot of books because we interview a lot of people,

00:02:10.820 so it can sometimes feel like a chore. But the moment we opened your book, we were like,

00:02:15.240 Well, give me more of this, because he was so fascinating.

00:02:18.300 You talk, it's called The Origin of Politics, and it's about evolution and how evolutionary history shapes the way we do everything, actually, in a way that we've totally forgotten in our society now.

00:02:31.460 So we're going to talk about all of that.

00:02:33.200 But before we do, tell us a little bit about you.

00:02:35.280 What's your story?

00:02:36.480 What's been your journey through life?

00:02:38.980 Well, I grew up in England, and I worked for Nature, the Scientific Journal.

00:02:45.240 who sent me out to Washington to be their Washington correspondent.

00:02:49.300 And after a year, I was asked by our big rival, science, to join them.

00:02:54.720 So I worked for science for 10 years.

00:02:57.720 And then I joined the New York Times as an editorial writer

00:03:00.740 covering scientific environmental subjects.

00:03:05.000 And I worked for the Times, I guess, for 30, 40 years.

00:03:10.260 Wow.

00:03:11.360 That's it. Very brief biography.

00:03:13.140 Yeah. Well, you've written a number of books. Some of them have caused a bunch of controversies as well. We'll maybe talk about that later. But let's talk about what you are actually talking about in Origin of Politics. You basically did something that I've been trying to explain for a very long time as someone who was born in the Soviet Union, which you basically explained why communism never works, the biological reasons for why communism works.

00:03:37.560 And you give a fascinating example of voluntary communism,

00:03:42.220 which was the kibbutz system in Israel.

00:03:44.100 Talk to us about that. 0.57

00:03:45.720 That was a wonderful natural experiment.

00:03:48.840 So the founders who were fleeing the anti-Semitism in their homelands

00:03:54.960 decided in Israel they would not just start anew,

00:03:58.560 but they would build a whole new world.

00:04:00.900 And based on a new kind of person who would be a good, unselfish person.

00:04:06.760 So it was a really great and noble ideal, but it required doing things that run right against the grain of human nature.

00:04:15.900 So the first astounding thing they did was to abolish the family.

00:04:20.140 So the family has been sort of the basic unit of human society since the dawn of time. 0.94

00:04:25.580 So the kibbutz has arranged that the children would live apart from their families in sort of dormitories. 0.90

00:04:33.100 They were allowed to see their families just at the end of the day for a brief period. 0.68

00:04:37.720 But otherwise, they were raised communally. 1.00

00:04:40.720 And the idea was that the woman would be released from the patriarchy of the father. 0.76

00:04:46.660 So these guys came from sort of patriarchal Jewish families that they really wanted to get rid of entirely.

00:04:51.940 So women didn't depend on their husbands for anything, and they could have whatever jobs they chose. 0.92

00:04:58.900 uh those were the the features of that was that was one big thing that the the kibbutzim did and

00:05:06.280 the other was um to abolish um pay so everyone got the the same pay whether they um worked hard or

00:05:15.200 or slacked off and and the reason was to make sure that uh you had a condition of total equality no

00:05:22.180 was richer or better than anyone else. No one could boss anyone else around. So on paper,

00:05:29.820 it was ideal. Women weren't dependent on men. No one was superior to anyone else. 0.83

00:05:38.140 And it's a great tribute to the idealism of the founders. The system did last,

00:05:43.320 at least while they were alive. But when a second generation grew up who weren't imbued with the

00:05:48.960 founders' ideology. They started to reject all these things. The women wanted to have their

00:05:54.560 children with them during the day. The families were reconstituted. The Kibbutzim had to go through

00:06:00.940 a massive rebuilding program to build apartments instead of these communal living arrangements.

00:06:06.420 And they also had to drop the equal pay system because when they were founded, Israel was quite

00:06:14.520 a poor economy, and it didn't really matter what wages were outside the kibbutzim. They

00:06:19.660 weren't much better. But as Israel grew more prosperous, people started leaving the kibbutzim 0.60

00:06:26.120 for much better paying jobs. So pay differentials were reinstituted, and the kibbutzim, which

00:06:33.360 had been in a very bad way, then started to get more prosperous. So the interest of the

00:06:40.540 whole experiment was that this was a pure test of socialism. Defenders of socialism often say,

00:06:46.960 well, it's never really been tried, meaning that the communist governments that operated it were

00:06:52.060 so corrupt and inefficient, that wasn't a fair test. But the kibbutzim were a fair test. It was 0.97

00:06:57.240 voluntarily entered into, and it was voluntarily rejected when people saw it simply didn't work.

00:07:03.460 And you do a brilliant job in the book explaining where the tension between the desire for equality

00:07:10.520 expressed ultimately in something like the Kibbutzim

00:07:14.400 and a desire for merit-based hierarchy,

00:07:19.700 let's say it like that, right?

00:07:21.120 Where they come from evolutionarily.

00:07:22.860 Can you share that with our viewers and listeners?

00:07:26.460 Yes, the root of that is that

00:07:28.840 men had to compete very hard to survive.

00:07:32.540 So in early societies,

00:07:34.400 it wasn't sort of one man, one woman. 0.82

00:07:36.860 It was the chief guy got most of the wives

00:07:39.780 and many men were left without a wife at all.

00:07:43.460 So unless you competed like hell,

00:07:45.300 you had no chance of having a family

00:07:48.300 and leaving any descendants.

00:07:51.160 So your Darwinian fitness was zero.

00:07:53.860 We are the descendants of the men who survived this system

00:07:58.640 by being highly competitive with each other for women.

00:08:04.180 Then they had to turn around and be very cooperative

00:08:07.320 with the other men in their society

00:08:09.460 for the society's defense. 0.97

00:08:13.420 So that another tribe wouldn't come and kill all of you 0.88

00:08:16.280 and take all of your women? 0.99

00:08:17.820 Right, which is what happened. 0.87

00:08:19.900 If you failed to defend your country, 0.99

00:08:22.380 the men would be killed and the women,

00:08:24.900 and the children as well sometimes,

00:08:26.440 and the women would become the property of the conquerors.

00:08:29.320 So it was a really bad thing to be defeated.

00:08:31.200 So that's why men have these sort of two very strong drives in them

00:08:35.300 to compete with each other and yet to cooperate for reasons of defense.

00:08:42.640 And to answer your question, I think this comes back to why an equal pay system

00:08:47.560 goes so against the grain of human nature.

00:08:50.400 People don't want to just have a system where their efforts aren't rewarded.

00:08:56.800 They are programmed to fight as hard as they can for the means to sustain and protect their family.

00:09:03.720 And Nicholas, the thing that I mean, there's lots of things that are interesting about your book. And I'm going to use colloquial English language to describe this. But I found your theory about this fascinating is the theory of the skiver and how essentially skivers and for our American audience and listeners, that means people who shirk their responsibilities and don't work very hard.

00:09:28.020 That was one of the main problems with the kibbutz system, and actually probably one of the main issues with the Soviet Union as well, wasn't it? 0.84

00:09:37.780 That's right, because the system is set up for freeloading. 0.94

00:09:42.840 You come into a kibbutz, if you get into a kibbutz, then you don't have to work anymore, or you can slack off. 0.97

00:09:50.440 The only thing that stops you, I guess, is public disapproval. 0.97

00:09:55.280 But nonetheless, that can go only so far.

00:09:58.020 So it's a very dangerous system when you don't reward people on the basis of their merit.

00:10:05.940 And that also leads to resentment as well, doesn't it?

00:10:08.740 Which also means that the harmony within the kibbutz is disrupted. 1.00

00:10:12.740 Yeah, it's very destabilizing for society, I think, because people have a strong sense 0.64

00:10:19.160 of whether they're being fairly treated or not. 0.97

00:10:21.100 And if you work your heart out, but get the same pay as the skiver next to you, then you

00:10:27.740 feel wronged, and indeed you have been wronged. So the kibbutz went through this phase of, 0.69

00:10:32.640 you know, basically this is a socialist utopia. Everybody is going to get on great. And what 0.93

00:10:38.940 were the reasons why it started to, let's say, become, how shall I put it, more realistic in

00:10:45.000 its outlook? Was it just because of the skiver? Was it because of resentments within the actual

00:10:51.000 kibbutz ecosystem? Or were there other things going on? I think it was partly the passing of

00:10:57.000 generation. So the guys who'd grown up in the kibbutz didn't have the same sort of zeal as

00:11:02.460 their parents who'd founded the kibbutz. Second thing was that the kibbutzim was somewhat protected

00:11:09.420 from the outside environment as long as the Israeli economy remained poor. They weren't

00:11:15.440 too much affected in a general way by skivers because they recognized the danger and they

00:11:21.680 screen people very carefully before they were let into the kibbutz. But once you have a generation

00:11:27.760 of children, you can't control that anymore. And that's part of the generational impact, right?

00:11:33.560 Right. So the next generation, you insisted that things become more normal, as it were,

00:11:38.300 less idealistic. They wanted to sort of reconstitute themselves as families. They

00:11:43.500 wanted to be paid according to how much they worked. Yeah. And coming back to the discussion

00:11:49.880 we started about competitiveness versus cooperation.

00:11:54.080 You talked about men, and while you and Francis were talking,

00:11:57.080 it sort of became quite obvious to me

00:11:58.680 that there's probably quite a big difference

00:12:00.640 between the way men and women have evolved

00:12:02.460 to think about these things.

00:12:03.540 Is that fair to say?

00:12:04.740 Yes, it's very fair.

00:12:05.720 And there's a current movement on the left

00:12:10.240 to say that men and women are no different,

00:12:14.200 that apart from a few minor physiological differences

00:12:17.760 with reproduction, they are exactly the same thing.

00:12:21.340 But this couldn't be further from the truth.

00:12:23.600 Their minds are as different as their bodies

00:12:25.780 because evolution has shaped them

00:12:27.960 for very different roles.

00:12:30.260 You gain a lot by specialization

00:12:32.180 and evolution hasn't specialized us

00:12:35.200 to the extent it has done, say, with ant societies

00:12:37.980 because we haven't been around as long as they have,

00:12:40.480 but it has taken every chance to specialize men and women. 0.99

00:12:45.080 So women are specialized for raising, for bearing and raising children and for sort of relationships within the family and the neighborhood.

00:12:55.940 And men are specialized for essentially for defense, for fighting and for organizing the larger scale institutions of society. 0.68

00:13:06.540 And would it be fair to say that the female, stereotypically speaking, the female role in addition to raising children is also to manage the conflict orientation of men within the tribe? 0.63

00:13:20.900 Because if all the men are killing each other, when the other tribe comes along, you're in a bad place.

00:13:25.560 So are they a natural regulator of male competitiveness and violence in that way? 0.67

00:13:32.360 The news doesn't just tell you what's happening.

00:13:34.940 It often tells you what to think is happening.

00:13:37.860 And these days, the biggest red flag isn't what's said,

00:13:40.460 it's what gets left out.

00:13:41.740 That's why I use Ground News.

00:13:43.680 It's the only app that compares how the same story

00:13:46.480 is covered across the political spectrum

00:13:48.200 and show you what whole audiences are not being told.

00:13:51.400 The Blindspot feed is one of my favorite features.

00:13:54.120 Every day, it flags upwards of 20 stories

00:13:56.300 that are being ignored either by the left or the right.

00:13:58.960 Follow along at ground.news slash trigonometry.

00:14:01.380 Like this, a new study from UC San Diego

00:14:04.060 found that climate change cost almost twice as much as we thought because earlier estimates

00:14:08.880 left out damage to the oceans. That's a pretty big update and yet no coverage. Literally zero

00:14:13.420 came from right-leaning outlets. All this, a recent Gallup poll found trust in the media has hit a

00:14:18.620 record low with just 28% of Americans saying they trust newspapers, radio and TV to report the news

00:14:24.640 accurately and fairly. That's a staggering result, but if you only read left-leaning news, you likely

00:14:29.740 never saw it at all. Go to ground.news slash trigonometry to get 40% off their unlimited

00:14:35.020 vantage plan, the same one we use, and stop being managed by the media.

00:14:40.760 That's certainly the case among chimpanzees who are uncannily similar to us in their societies.

00:14:47.220 You see female chimps sort of prizing the stones away from male chimps who are about to batter

00:14:52.360 their skulls in because they know that if the males kill each other, the community will be so

00:14:57.100 a week that the chimps next door will come in and invade them and kill all their children. 0.97

00:15:04.340 So I can imagine the same instinct being there in women, but I haven't thought to what extent 1.00

00:15:10.380 it may operate because at least in early societies, women didn't have a lot of political power. 1.00

00:15:16.440 Yeah, I know, but women don't exert political power only through politics, 1.00

00:15:20.120 as we all know, if we're married, right? Like my wife is not remotely political, 1.00

00:15:24.480 but she exerts a lot of power on me.

00:15:28.180 I guess the reason I'm asking this, 1.00

00:15:29.720 we just had this lady on called Helen Andrews

00:15:31.840 who wrote an article about, 0.99

00:15:34.220 her thesis is the feminization of society 1.00

00:15:37.860 has caused the woke explosion 0.98

00:15:40.740 that we've seen for the last 10 years.

00:15:42.180 And we had a back and forth.

00:15:43.360 I don't know that I agree with everything

00:15:44.720 that she puts forward,

00:15:45.960 but it's a perspective that made me think

00:15:48.140 about how some of the recent cultural trends

00:15:51.360 are to do with the fact that men and women evolved

00:15:55.920 and were optimized for different roles.

00:15:58.220 And as the ratios of these two groups change in different institutions,

00:16:02.400 it is quite likely and natural that those institutions

00:16:05.700 will see things differently and operate in different ways.

00:16:08.980 Yes, I think this is a tremendously important issue

00:16:11.800 because the two roles I was describing to you

00:16:16.280 are what evolution has shaped.

00:16:18.860 But of course, culture is enormously strong in our society.

00:16:23.040 So culture can reshape and modulate what evolution has done.

00:16:27.680 And one of the most notable aspects of human societies

00:16:31.540 is that women have been liberated from the home.

00:16:37.720 And in fact, they're now better educated than men. 0.96

00:16:40.580 More of them go to universities, so they have no problem getting jobs

00:16:46.880 and they are no longer dependent on men.

00:16:49.940 And the most serious side effect of that

00:16:53.940 is they no longer bear as many children.

00:16:56.220 So our societies are, in fact, hated for extinction 1.00

00:17:00.640 unless women somehow are persuaded 1.00

00:17:04.080 to go back to bearing more children. 1.00

00:17:07.180 But another aspect of this is the running of institutions.

00:17:10.740 So I think I'm right saying all institutions historically 0.86

00:17:13.860 have been set up and designed by men. 0.98

00:17:17.460 So are women going to do as good a job as they demand to take over even institutions or be represented 50% on corporate boards? 0.98

00:17:29.480 And I think the jury is still out on that, but I don't think really it's a very promising experiment. 0.98

00:17:36.200 If you look, for example, at the way American higher education has been taken over by women presidents, 0.89

00:17:43.100 and they are not all of them terrible but claudine gay for example who harvard chose to be their

00:17:50.120 president has a very small bibliography as a scholar and much of it is written with plagiarism

00:17:57.520 she's not a good poster child for women running institutions so you know i shouldn't generalize 0.98

00:18:04.900 from that it doesn't mean that women cannot run institutions there are you know many fine women 1.00

00:18:11.900 business leaders and politicians. It's just, I suspect, you know, when the dust settles down 1.00

00:18:17.880 and we're sort of mature enough as a society to let everyone be appointed on merit, I suspect we

00:18:24.580 will find that there will be more men running institutions than women. It won't be a 50-50

00:18:31.680 ratio. I'm just going to stress test that argument, because obviously a lot of people are going to be

00:18:36.560 triggered by this. The show is called Trigonometry for a reason. But I guess the stress test of that

00:18:40.820 would be, why do you talk about it as merit? Because the question I posed to you was more

00:18:46.060 about value systems, right? Is it, what I was asking is more, are women likely to bring a 0.88

00:18:53.220 different set of values to an institution? Or do you believe that actually, collectively speaking

00:18:59.680 at the population level, the big institutions, women didn't evolve to operate things like that. 0.98

00:19:07.060 and so they're just not going to be as good? 1.00

00:19:09.000 Or is it a question of they'll just bring a different value set

00:19:11.520 and the institutions will produce a different set of outcomes?

00:19:15.640 It's not about better or worse.

00:19:16.880 It's about imposing their kind of default value set on the world.

00:19:21.120 Do you see what I'm getting at?

00:19:22.440 Yes. I mean, I think it's probably fair to say

00:19:25.120 women do have a slightly different value set

00:19:27.380 and then it's sort of less aggressive than men's,

00:19:31.020 more oriented toward peaceful solutions to softer approaches.

00:19:37.080 But marriage is a separate question.

00:19:40.000 It's of how well do you run an institution?

00:19:42.300 So I think the way evolution has equipped us

00:19:44.800 is that men are more used to sort of long-range relationships

00:19:49.220 or relationships outside the family.

00:19:51.360 And I think it will turn out that they are generally better 1.00

00:19:54.820 at managing them than women are. 1.00

00:19:57.400 But there's no hard data on that. 1.00

00:19:59.860 We're in the middle of this sort of grand experiment

00:20:01.740 and we're going to find out.

00:20:03.480 Nicholas, there's a really illuminating chapter in your book where you talk about chimps,

00:20:09.460 chimpanzees. You talk about the male chimpanzee. You talk about the female chimpanzee.

00:20:12.760 You talk about the difference in behaviors and aggressiveness and all the rest of it.

00:20:17.540 Why is it that we can talk about female and male chimpanzees in this way, yet when it comes to

00:20:23.300 female and male human beings, we pretend as if there's no difference?

00:20:27.840 Well, it's because there's a strong tradition, particularly on the left, to deny that evolution

00:20:34.660 has anything to do with human behavior.

00:20:37.580 They assert that the mind is a blank slate at birth, and that everything that we know

00:20:43.760 is learned from culture, and that nothing comes from genetics. 0.81

00:20:49.440 But it seems to me this is a very foolish view for the reason you alluded to. 0.61

00:20:53.100 If you look at chimp societies, and chimps are our closest living cousins, there is a 1.00

00:21:00.580 genetic basis for what they do. 1.00

00:21:02.240 All chimp societies have the same organization. 1.00

00:21:05.280 All chimps behave in much the same way. 1.00

00:21:08.100 And female chimps behave in a very different way from male chimps. 0.99

00:21:13.560 And chimp societies have a very specific structure, all of which... 1.00

00:21:19.060 Tell us about that. 1.00

00:21:19.800 What are chimp societies like and how do they operate? 1.00

00:21:23.100 Well, they are very hierarchical. 1.00

00:21:26.940 There's a male hierarchy, and beneath that, there's a female hierarchy. 0.99

00:21:31.140 So all females are subordinate to all males. 1.00

00:21:34.140 As it should be. 1.00

00:21:35.040 Absolutely.

00:21:36.640 Someone's going to clip that. 0.69

00:21:39.480 The male hierarchy is established by pure intimidation.

00:21:44.020 As a young male, you sort of work your way up.

00:21:47.020 First, you intimidate all the females, and then you start with the males.

00:21:52.060 Basically, they're sort of trials of strength. 0.60

00:21:55.320 Outright hostilities are avoided by sort of substitute effects.

00:22:00.560 Like you sort of, there's lots of vocalizations. 1.00

00:22:06.140 They're lots of sort of fascinating chimp behaviors. 0.99

00:22:08.760 But basically, when one male chimp meets another, 0.94

00:22:12.000 the degree of dominance has to be established. 0.99

00:22:14.040 So the inferior chimp will sort of kowtow 1.00

00:22:16.920 or make a sort of particular pant-hooting noise 0.98

00:22:19.860 or sort of present his rear to show he's sort of vulnerable to the male.

00:22:25.280 And so the hierarchy, however horrible it sounds to our ears,

00:22:30.600 is good in the sense that it creates a stable society.

00:22:33.840 There aren't permanent fights because everyone knows who is boss.

00:22:37.760 So once you get to the top of the hierarchy,

00:22:40.720 then something very important happens.

00:22:43.340 As alpha male, you get to score most of the matings.

00:22:47.840 Now, you can't do this yourself. You need a coalition. So this is the beginning of politics,

00:22:56.120 that the alpha male distributes mating opportunities to the guys in his coalition.

00:23:01.760 And human societies are just the same, because the autocrat, certainly in an early human society,

00:23:08.660 will sort of distribute land and wealth to his followers, which, of course, are the means to

00:23:13.720 attract females. So it's not sort of direct sexual award. It's an indirect sexual award,

00:23:19.240 but toward the same end. Nicholas, it seems to me, and correct me if I'm wrong, that we're

00:23:25.640 denying our fundamental biology, which means that doesn't that make us more miserable? Doesn't that

00:23:33.060 make us more prone to illnesses, depression, et cetera, if we're trying to be something that

00:23:39.520 we're not? For instance, females, human females, trying to appear more masculine, and also vice 0.99

00:23:46.340 versa as well. Well, I think this is where culture comes in. Our culture is so rich that we live 0.98

00:23:54.180 primarily in a world created by our culture, and the genetic framework is invisible to us.

00:24:02.280 I think where we get into trouble is where we violate some of these genetic structures that nature has put in place. 0.98

00:24:15.060 So I think the kibbutzim are a good example of what happens when you destroy the family. 1.00

00:24:20.640 It simply doesn't work. 1.00

00:24:22.880 And there are lots of ways in which you can successfully modulate human nature, it seems to me.

00:24:26.960 I mean, it's like remodeling a house.

00:24:29.160 So you can change a lot of things around

00:24:31.560 as long as you don't touch the load-bearing walls.

00:24:33.960 So you need to know what the load-bearing walls are.

00:24:37.420 And they're very interesting examples in our history, I think,

00:24:39.620 of where we have successfully modulated our innate instincts.

00:24:43.540 So one good example is monogamy.

00:24:46.940 So most early societies were polygamists. 0.91

00:24:50.240 The top guy got the most girls.

00:24:55.560 But we changed that to monogamy, I think,

00:24:57.880 essentially because it's a very unstable situation to have a lot of young men who have no prospect

00:25:03.840 of getting a wife. They become very disaffected. So what do you do with them? The traditional

00:25:08.420 policies to send them off to fight the neighbor and have them die in battle. But if you start

00:25:15.060 wars, it doesn't always turn out the way you hope. So it's much more stable, in fact, to distribute

00:25:20.720 women equally, which is what monogamy does for you. So Europe became monogamous essentially 0.57

00:25:30.140 under the influence of the church. And then in quite recent times, monogamy sort of spread,

00:25:37.160 presumably by example, to India and China. So now almost all the world is monogamous.

00:25:43.140 And all this represents a sort of great big constraint on the natural male impulse to have as many wives and children as possible.

00:25:54.180 And you also talk in your book about how this monogamy that has been imposed or implemented, however you want to describe it, on societies, it leads to a flourishing of society, both in terms of culture and economically, etc.

00:26:12.300 That's right.

00:26:13.020 And this is one way in which we have transcended our evolution to great advantage.

00:26:17.540 These monogamous societies are much more stable and more productive.

00:26:21.940 And another major example of the same thing is tribalism.

00:26:26.460 So the whole world used to be tribal in between when hunter-gatherers settled down at the

00:26:34.940 beginning of agriculture some 10,000 years ago to one or two millennia ago now, all human societies

00:26:44.640 were tribal. And tribalism is a very successful way and effective way of running a society because

00:26:51.860 it sort of keeps law and order without any police force or courts or laws. And it's very good at

00:26:59.780 And it has many superb advantages such that it's very hard to get rid of. So there's a wonderful book by Francis Fukuyama, the political scientist, where he describes how the major civilizations of the world in different ways got rid of their tribal structure and instituted a single ruler with a sort of state bureaucracy.

00:27:25.120 In Europe, it was done by the church.

00:27:28.480 So the early Europeans were all tribal.

00:27:32.920 And in those days, it was often quite hard to produce a male heir

00:27:37.940 because people died very young.

00:27:40.200 So you very much needed to keep the wealth inside the tribe.

00:27:43.440 So there were stratagems for adoption or marrying your cousin

00:27:48.360 for keeping wealth inside the tribe.

00:27:50.900 So the church came along and said, no, all that is incestuous and absolutely forbidden.

00:27:56.860 And so when people were on their deathbeds, the church would say, well, you should leave

00:28:01.320 all your money to the poor, meaning the church.

00:28:05.100 And the church became fantastically wealthy.

00:28:07.920 At one stage, it owned like half of Germany and a third of France.

00:28:12.640 But the net result of this policy was that the tribes lost all their money and just disappeared.

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00:30:17.320 And that's so interesting because we're talking about tribes now

00:30:21.500 and how the power of the tribe was essentially taken away.

00:30:25.640 But you look at America today, I mean, it feels like we're more tribal than ever,

00:30:30.680 not only in America, but right the way through the Western world.

00:30:34.320 Well, these basic instincts don't go away.

00:30:37.240 They just get sort of modulated.

00:30:38.760 So tribalism no longer exists.

00:30:41.980 If you asked an American what his tribe was, 0.83

00:30:44.400 unless he was an American Indian,

00:30:45.620 he would have no idea what you meant.

00:30:47.820 But you can still see tribalism operate in the form of nepotism.

00:30:52.480 So people will do anything to help their families,

00:30:55.040 give them a leg up.

00:30:56.200 And wherever possible, people will arrange

00:31:02.860 as much of their wealth as possible

00:31:05.200 goes to their surviving relatives

00:31:08.180 so that they maximise the number of children

00:31:10.600 they put in the next generation.

00:31:13.280 Well, it's interesting because there are clearly

00:31:15.180 some pretty healthy adaptations to fill these voids.

00:31:18.060 For example, it's not just Americans, as you well know.

00:31:21.560 British people are very tribal about sport as well.

00:31:24.560 But that seems like one way of channeling those instincts

00:31:27.780 that's quite healthy.

00:31:28.740 What's interesting is, I think, perhaps due to social media,

00:31:33.140 but maybe due to other things,

00:31:34.660 and I'd be curious to hear your opinion,

00:31:36.600 politics has now become very, very tribal

00:31:39.740 in the way that I just don't feel it was 20 years ago.

00:31:44.100 You mean based on race or just based on ideology?

00:31:47.500 Just based on ideology.

00:31:48.700 Like people now treat their political party

00:31:51.160 as their football team.

00:31:52.920 Whereas it felt to me like in the late 90s, early 2000s,

00:31:57.340 yeah, people had some kind of political allegiance.

00:32:00.440 But it's in the same way that like,

00:32:02.980 if you're a fan of the Green Bay Packers,

00:32:04.640 you're not going to hate Patriots fans.

00:32:07.860 It was like, well, look, I'm a Democrat,

00:32:10.200 he's a Republican,

00:32:11.060 but we sort of are going to be able to get on.

00:32:12.940 Now it's become tribal in the sense of like,

00:32:15.240 this is warfare almost,

00:32:16.840 is what it feels like to me.

00:32:19.100 Yeah, I think tribalism can sort of break out

00:32:21.320 in almost any context

00:32:22.540 because it's so inbuilt in our systems.

00:32:25.260 You embrace your friends

00:32:27.160 and you hate or despise or kill your enemies.

00:32:31.380 And tribalism itself hasn't really gone away

00:32:38.480 It's just been transformed into the nation state

00:32:42.200 So the nation state, I think, has emerged as the most effective way for humans to organize themselves

00:32:48.700 And yet it really is just an extended tribe

00:32:52.700 It's got everything except kinship

00:32:54.280 And kinship is the glue of tribes

00:32:57.980 A nation state has various surrogates, like people usually have a common language, a common religion, a common ethnicity, a common sort of founding narrative of how their nation came to be.

00:33:13.340 And these things are very effective because nations are so effective.

00:33:17.520 Their problem often is not that they're too weak, but they're too strong.

00:33:21.040 So they will make war against their neighbors.

00:33:24.000 I definitely think, though, that nations are the best way we have yet evolved of organizing

00:33:35.260 ourselves. And it seems to me a great shame that the sinews of nationhood are often ignored or

00:33:42.600 rejected or repudiated, particularly by the left. So this is a particularly serious problem,

00:33:49.600 I would think, for the U.S., because many countries are sort of natural nations, and

00:33:56.440 they have a little Scandinavian democracies.

00:33:59.840 They all speak the same language, they have the same religion, they have contiguous borders.

00:34:04.260 So the U.S. used to be like that when it was primarily settled by English Protestants

00:34:12.820 very early on.

00:34:14.360 Because of its wonderfully flexible constitution, it was then able to embrace lots of other nations, mostly Christian nations, mostly Europeans, while retaining its cohesiveness.

00:34:33.540 But if you look at it now, many of the sinews of nationhood are fading.

00:34:39.300 Americans used to be very religious.

00:34:41.080 They're not so religious now. 0.93

00:34:42.520 They're following Europe in that. 0.65

00:34:44.360 pattern. The ethnicity is quite mixed and changing. It's so stable at the moment. You

00:34:53.880 never know how long that's going to last for. There used to be a common language, but now

00:34:59.400 there's sort of Spanish-speaking enclaves that resist adopting English. You have to ask,

00:35:08.420 well, what is it that holds Americans together?

00:35:12.100 It seems to be money right now.

00:35:14.560 It seems to be prosperity.

00:35:15.640 Prosperity holds everyone together.

00:35:17.260 No need to rock the boat if everyone is reasonably prosperous,

00:35:21.180 at least in relative terms they are.

00:35:23.180 But if that should fade for any reason, what would happen?

00:35:28.140 I don't know.

00:35:29.020 I don't see the natural bonds of a nation state being so cohesive

00:35:35.460 that one needn't worry about them.

00:35:37.080 I think we should start to worry about them.

00:35:39.920 Yeah, well, it makes a lot of sense.

00:35:41.100 Although, interestingly, I would have thought in many ways

00:35:44.140 Europe is in a worse place in relation to all of this

00:35:47.080 because at least in America you have a history of immigration.

00:35:52.460 It's kind of understood that this is a nation of people

00:35:56.880 who've come from different parts of the world,

00:35:58.540 different cultures, who've come here and bought into the American dream,

00:36:01.980 which, as you say, is kind of prosperous.

00:36:03.300 I mean, the American dream is we all get to come here and be prosperous.

00:36:07.080 effectively, right, if you boil it down to its basics. Whereas in Europe, and I said this as

00:36:13.520 someone who myself immigrated to Europe from outside, you had a society which was very

00:36:19.800 monocultural, very cohesive in terms of all the things that you talk about, language, ethnicity,

00:36:24.860 etc., that now doesn't even have any structure to explain what a nation state is, because it used

00:36:34.300 to be based on common heritage and common culture and common religion. So now you have lots and lots

00:36:40.560 of people come from other parts of the world who do not buy into that, but they also don't have

00:36:45.400 any story that they tell, that they are being told or their children are being told at school.

00:36:51.280 They don't stand for the national anthem. They don't salute the flag, whatever it is that Americans

00:36:55.220 are taught to do. And that seems to me like an even bigger challenge, I would argue.

00:37:00.620 Yeah, I think Europe has definitely mishandled immigration. As you say, the American rule was to integrate everyone. And it worked. I think it still works. Whereas in Europe, I think there's been a general failure of integration. You have large Muslim communities. And there's nothing wrong with Islam. But here you have a community that doesn't buy into the current ethos.

00:37:27.700 And religion is extremely important in sort of shaping a nation and interpersonal relations. 0.94

00:37:36.560 And these large Muslim enclaves, I think, are not well integrated, are not well happy. 1.00

00:37:44.460 They're too large for the country to handle easily. 1.00

00:37:49.680 I think the thing about immigration is it needs to be done on a sort of more on a trickle basis than a sort of great big flow, because otherwise you don't give people time to adjust. Immigrants become sort of threatening if people think they're taking their jobs or all the usual sort of anti-immigrant feelings that are sort of always latent will get stirred up the larger the immigrant population is. 0.99

00:38:16.700 And what is the biological and evolutionary source of those concerns?

00:38:24.540 Well, it's simply sort of the inside-outside dichotomy.

00:38:29.380 I mean, anyone who's not like you is an outsider.

00:38:33.180 So the best kind of person is someone sort of related to you,

00:38:37.500 because you know you can trust them.

00:38:39.840 But the more people become...

00:38:40.840 You haven't met my family.

00:38:41.720 the more people become sort of different of different religion different language it doesn't

00:38:48.340 different ethnicity the harder it is to establish the bond of trust which is the essential glue of

00:38:55.000 human societies but you talked about culture being a very powerful force are there not cultural

00:38:59.480 adaptations that can help us overcome these things or is it just something that you feel

00:39:03.600 that's one of the load-bearing walls of of of human society no i think there are cultural adaptations

00:39:09.820 and there are multiracial societies that work very well.

00:39:17.700 Now, Singapore leaps to mind,

00:39:19.160 but I think you have to recognize that you have one ethnicity, 1.00

00:39:24.720 the Chinese, that essentially are in control. 1.00

00:39:27.880 I have to be careful in phrasing this, 1.00

00:39:30.860 but it's definitely... 1.00

00:39:32.460 One doesn't want a situation in which any one ethnicity

00:39:36.180 claims to be superior to others,

00:39:39.020 But it's also the case that if you have one ethnicity able to govern, then that ethnicity can make things safe for everyone else. And you don't have vicious intercommunal warfare as you do, for example, in multi-ethnic states like Afghanistan or Lebanon.

00:39:58.660 So states work best when you have a dominant ethnicity that treats everyone justly, which is the case in the US and in many European countries.

00:40:13.320 Nicholas, it seems to me that our elites are the people in charge, the politicians.

00:40:19.060 They have become more and more alienated from the very things that make us human.

00:40:25.040 are, you know, the fact that we have tribalism

00:40:28.400 clearly imprinted into us.

00:40:31.640 We are tribal creatures.

00:40:33.480 Yet they don't seem to understand

00:40:35.160 that if you import millions of people

00:40:38.140 into a particular country,

00:40:39.720 that's going to have a profound destabilizing effect, 1.00

00:40:43.080 even if every single person who comes in

00:40:46.400 is a net positive to society.

00:40:49.300 Which they're not.

00:40:50.460 Yeah.

00:40:51.680 Yeah, I mean, this is one of the big problems

00:40:53.480 of not taking human nature seriously

00:40:55.820 and not accepting the fact

00:40:57.080 that we have certain behaviors

00:40:59.240 written into our genome by evolution

00:41:02.020 because of our survival value.

00:41:04.640 So acting like a member of a tribe

00:41:07.780 is one of them.

00:41:08.940 So if you ignore that as a politician,

00:41:11.660 then you're going to run into trouble.

00:41:13.720 If you say, well, all people are alike,

00:41:16.940 all people are equal or should be equal,

00:41:18.800 and what we want is a global society

00:41:22.020 with no national borders,

00:41:23.480 and everyone loving each other, that's fine.

00:41:27.020 But our nation won't let us operate a society like that.

00:41:33.080 We need to live in sort of smaller, definable systems

00:41:37.960 such as a nation.

00:41:41.700 We're not ready for one global society

00:41:45.160 because there's no way of organising it

00:41:47.960 that is sort of written into our genome.

00:41:50.000 And it also shows a fundamental ignorance of history

00:41:52.920 Because if you look at history, it doesn't matter what period of history, it's mainly defined by wars.

00:41:59.300 Yes, that's right, pursuant to the fact that our instinct is entirely warlike.

00:42:07.520 I mean, we have genocide written into our genes, and we and chimpanzees are the only species smart enough to figure out that the way to sort of finally solve the problem of the enemy is to eliminate him.

00:42:18.780 So we are basically genocidal, but this is another example, I think, where culture has successfully curbed and restrained our influence, and it does so on quite a wide level.

00:42:35.740 And if you think of the Westphalian peace that ended the religious wars in Europe, and there were schemes that have succeeded it.

00:42:46.060 The Congress of Vienna, again, reestablished peace after Napoleon's wars.

00:42:52.440 You had the Pax Britannica that sort of kept European countries from war.

00:42:59.800 And after the Second World War, we've essentially had the Pax Americana.

00:43:03.640 So America doesn't really like playing this role

00:43:08.020 But it really helps to have someone who polices a sort of world order

00:43:15.340 In which states accept they do not fight each other or invade each other's countries

00:43:21.400 So this is a great example of a sort of cultural curb on natural human instincts

00:43:27.780 And again, it's vastly for the better

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00:44:55.980 But it also strikes me that we've become arrogant about human nature because

00:45:00.080 it really does appear that we've kind of been lulled into this false sense of suspicion that,

00:45:07.160 well, the last couple of years have certainly disproved this, but, you know, we found a way

00:45:12.300 to transcend war. There's going to be no war if we trade with each other. We're more enlightened

00:45:18.560 now. We have diplomacy. And you go, yeah, but deep down, we're just primates. We're glorified

00:45:28.660 chimpanzees. All right, we can express ourselves a little bit more articulately. And we're not

00:45:34.280 going to start flinging excrement at each other. But we're not that far away, are we?

00:45:39.200 No, we're not. You're right. We are basically primates.

00:45:42.240 But I think there's a reason for a little more optimism than you suggest.

00:45:46.780 Sorry, I've come from South London.

00:45:51.180 Over the big sweep of history, we've become less violent.

00:45:55.380 I mean, within societies, we don't treat each other so horribly cruelly as we used to.

00:46:02.020 We didn't have public hangings or debtors' prisons or child labour.

00:46:06.640 So the level of violence within societies has gone down.

00:46:11.540 I don't think anyone really knows why,

00:46:13.660 but there could be a genetic explanation,

00:46:16.260 which is simply that people who are very violent

00:46:18.420 are sort of ostracized.

00:46:19.680 People don't want morale.

00:46:21.100 And maybe people who are very violent

00:46:23.060 have less children than people who are peacefully inclined.

00:46:28.080 Looking outside societies,

00:46:29.960 we have far fewer wars than we used to have,

00:46:34.460 Or rather, we have far fewer men as a proportion of the population killed in wars.

00:46:40.760 I mean, in primitive societies, people used to go to war every day.

00:46:46.280 I mean, they didn't have mass casualties.

00:46:49.140 But if you lost one guy a week, then pretty soon, men over the course of their lives,

00:46:54.980 it was like a 30% chance of dying in battle in hunter-gatherer societies.

00:47:00.940 So our chances of dying in battle, thankfully, are very small.

00:47:04.820 And it appears that we kind of need this balance, don't we,

00:47:10.320 when we're talking about the human being and our societies.

00:47:13.460 On the one hand, we need to be pragmatic and accept that we're tribal

00:47:17.540 and we still have these instincts and impulses to go to war, for example,

00:47:22.280 for resources, we're still hierarchical in nature,

00:47:24.940 but we still need perhaps that progressive element, which is,

00:47:28.160 look, we're not as violent as we used to be.

00:47:31.780 We're not, maybe not as tribal as we used to be.

00:47:35.240 So we can work on the human being whilst also accepting

00:47:39.080 that there's going to be some fundamental aspects

00:47:42.380 of our biology that can never be changed.

00:47:45.360 Yeah, I think that's exactly right.

00:47:46.620 We should understand and acknowledge what is there

00:47:50.060 and sort of work with it rather than against it.

00:47:53.260 And what does that look like in our society today?

00:47:55.720 What would that look like in terms of changes to how we think about things?

00:48:01.820 I think there are two big ways in which we are running into trouble.

00:48:07.480 One is the fertility crisis.

00:48:11.400 We have undermined the human family and the way evolution organized it

00:48:16.080 to produce, nurture, and raise children.

00:48:19.940 And it's been a good reason. 1.00

00:48:21.900 It was sort of to free women from all the duties of the home 1.00

00:48:27.280 and looking after children. 0.99

00:48:29.820 And it's true, looking after children is a great chore.

00:48:33.640 Whatever joy they may be, it requires a lot of effort to bring them up.

00:48:37.800 And many women are deciding not to do it. 1.00

00:48:40.460 Fine, but that road does lead to extinction. 1.00

00:48:44.480 And it's very hard to reverse.

00:48:46.520 I mean, you might think it's easy to make more babies

00:48:48.820 if more babies were needed.

00:48:50.280 But in fact, many governments have had strong pro-natalist policies.

00:48:55.480 The Soviet Union, for most of its existence, had strong pro-natalist policies

00:48:59.180 of banned abortion and contraceptives.

00:49:02.960 And nothing that any government has found has reversed this trend,

00:49:09.200 with one exception, which is the former Soviet Republic of Georgia

00:49:14.200 that has an archbishop.

00:49:18.400 It's called Elia II, and he announced that for any couple married in the Orthodox Church

00:49:27.720 and had two children, had a third child, he personally would baptize it and be its godfather.

00:49:35.480 He said this in 2005, and the next year the birth rate took off like a rocket.

00:49:41.500 Everyone started having children.

00:49:42.800 And this is the only known example of a government policy

00:49:48.720 that has reversed a declining birth rate.

00:49:51.580 That's really interesting.

00:49:53.000 I've been to Georgia a number of times.

00:49:54.640 People in Georgia are very, they're not aggressively religious,

00:49:58.460 but they're very faithful, and it's a big part of their lives.

00:50:02.180 I imagine in America that would be like, I don't know,

00:50:04.920 LeBron James sending you a sign, something for every third child.

00:50:09.340 That might work.

00:50:09.840 You know, something like that.

00:50:11.860 This is a question that we've dealt with a lot on the show.

00:50:14.480 We've interviewed all sorts of people about the fertility crisis.

00:50:17.880 And there are different perspectives on it.

00:50:21.120 Young people like us, well, what?

00:50:23.700 No, no, young. We're young. We're young.

00:50:25.240 We used to be young.

00:50:26.260 There was a time when we could say young people like us.

00:50:28.260 But people of our generation and below will say housing is so expensive.

00:50:33.460 We're sitting here in New York.

00:50:35.220 You look around at the property prices here. 0.95

00:50:37.420 as a young person, you know, someone under 30, like, you are so screwed unless you've got 0.96

00:50:41.880 millionaire parents. So how are you going to pair up and have kids if you are living four to a tiny 0.89

00:50:48.060 apartment and you're spending 50% of your income on rent? There are other people who will say,

00:50:55.280 well, as society declines in religiosity, people have fewer children. There are other people who

00:51:00.460 will say, Louise Perry, for example, who we've had on the show a couple of times, she wrote a

00:51:05.320 book called The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, in which he basically said, look, once you invent

00:51:10.260 the abortion pill and washing machines and all of this other stuff, women are free and they go into

00:51:16.420 the workplace, which is might be great, but then they don't have kids and your book's just falling 0.97

00:51:19.960 over. Then this is inevitable product of this. There are other people who say it's actually the

00:51:25.080 education of women. Like all of these things are going on. And that's maybe why it's so hard to

00:51:30.540 turn around. But is it your thesis of fundamentally, sounds like a weird question to ask, but I think

00:51:37.480 it's worth asking if it's true. If women participate in the labor force more, this is the inevitable 1.00

00:51:44.500 consequence, rightly or wrongly? Well, all those things you mentioned are definitely important 1.00

00:51:48.660 factors. I think that the most important way of looking at this problem is that the one thing

00:51:56.100 that in one country after another correlates 0.98

00:51:59.540 with the fertility rate is what women want, 0.72

00:52:04.000 is the number of children women in each country say they want. 0.97

00:52:07.900 So that is a perfect correlation. 1.00

00:52:10.120 So that, it seems to me, is the sort of place

00:52:12.900 to start looking for answers.

00:52:16.660 And that is something that's very hard to change. 1.00

00:52:22.180 I mean, women are not taking this decision lightly. 1.00

00:52:25.260 I assume. But for all the reasons in any society, this is what they decide. And I don't know how, 1.00

00:52:33.100 no one knows how you make them change their minds on this.

00:52:36.160 Well, I'm not sure you can. I've tried to change many women's minds. It's never happened. 1.00

00:52:40.180 But the reason I think it's maybe some optimism, like a lot of people I talk to now

00:52:45.120 are sort of going, oh, right, we're like, we should do this. We should have kids,

00:52:49.120 men and women. And so there will be, you know, every action has an equal and opposite reaction,

00:52:53.500 maybe on the one hand. On the other hand, I worry about, you know, there was this myth of like

00:52:59.340 runaway climate change for a long time. It's like runaway infertility or lack of fertility,

00:53:04.860 because if you're not constantly surrounded by young children, you get further and further

00:53:10.640 distance from that experience. And then you only, you just look on Instagram and you see a yet

00:53:16.440 another parent complaining about how hard it is. And what you don't know is, well, actually being

00:53:21.840 your parents great, but also very, very hard. So yeah, you go on Instagram to complain about it,

00:53:26.200 but you've got all these moments and days and weeks of joy that stays in the background.

00:53:31.680 So I just wonder how all of this is ultimately going to get resolved. But I guess we'll find out.

00:53:37.820 Yeah, if people will start to recognize it as a true crisis, which I think is the problem is it's

00:53:42.900 a slow moving crisis and we're not going to go extinct tomorrow. It's just that things will get

00:53:47.860 steadily worse. We'll have an ever-dwindling workforce supporting an ever-larger group of

00:53:56.320 old people, and we won't be able to have the soldiers to defend our borders. It's a very 1.00

00:54:04.080 slippery slope and very insidious to recover from. Yeah, the thing is, I don't think people

00:54:10.260 are ever going to have kids to save the country. No. I think what people might discover, and we've

00:54:17.380 had lots of conversations on this trip around the US with people, women in particular, our

00:54:23.260 generation, sort of late 30s, early 40s, who just, they feel like they've missed out on something

00:54:29.040 important. And I think as we move forward in society, people increasingly lack meaning and

00:54:35.380 purpose in their lives. That might be actually the reason that people do think about this differently

00:54:40.900 over time. Right. That's very interesting. Might be. Or we could be completely screwed.

00:54:45.760 Well, this, of course, is the purpose that evolution has created for us, to breed and have children. I mean, we don't like to admit it. We look in our culture for all other kinds of purposes, but this is the root purpose.

00:54:58.420 But the thing is, it's hardwired into us.

00:55:01.460 So when you, like I have a three-year-old,

00:55:02.980 when you have kids,

00:55:04.700 like all these little things

00:55:05.940 that have been built into us for millennia,

00:55:07.540 activate that.

00:55:09.020 And this is really the core of your book.

00:55:11.000 That's what you're really saying is all of this,

00:55:13.340 all of our politics,

00:55:14.520 all of it goes back to the basic fundamental instinct,

00:55:18.360 which is to have children

00:55:20.200 and to have them live into adulthood and to reproduce.

00:55:22.960 And the way we think about everything

00:55:24.420 ultimately boils down to that original source.

00:55:27.100 Isn't that right?

00:55:27.660 That's exactly right. That's a very good thing, I would think, for politicians to focus on. They should try and make each stage of life easier for people who are having children. As you mentioned, reducing the cost of education would be a very good thing to do, and housing and so forth.

00:55:44.940 There are lots of sort of tweaks you can make.

00:55:47.620 None of them have worked in the past,

00:55:49.640 maybe because they haven't been applied in a wholesale and systematic way.

00:55:53.720 But if this were recognised as an important function of government,

00:55:58.740 then we might be able to turn it around.

00:56:01.520 And we talk about genetics, the origin of politics.

00:56:06.460 There's been a discussion that's been happening online,

00:56:09.140 which I'd love to get your opinion on,

00:56:10.580 which is ever since women have got the vote, 0.73

00:56:13.340 we tend to vote for as a nation or as a society for more left-leaning politicians, more left-leaning 1.00

00:56:20.480 parties. Is that something that you would agree with broadly, or do you think it's far more

00:56:25.500 complex than Reddit would like to appear? I don't have any empirical data. I don't know

00:56:31.020 if women do, in fact, vote more often to the left. It's not women. That was much cruder than I think. 1.00

00:56:38.600 I think married women and unmarried young women vote very, very differently.

00:56:44.660 And men, too.

00:56:46.400 I think it's much more about that.

00:56:48.080 I think people become more conservative as they have something to protect,

00:56:52.480 which comes back to the conversation we were having.

00:56:55.040 I was wondering, we always are extra interested in people who seem sensible

00:57:00.740 but have been embroiled in some sort of controversy or been cancelled or whatever,

00:57:04.740 because that was an area that really I found very interesting

00:57:07.960 but also confusing for a long time.

00:57:09.760 And you had that with the previous book, did you not?

00:57:13.480 My book on the evolution of race was attacked

00:57:18.520 by a bunch of geneticists.

00:57:23.100 They didn't find any error in the book.

00:57:26.720 So I didn't pay any particularly serious attention to them.

00:57:32.500 It did me no harm

00:57:33.860 because the book had already been out

00:57:35.140 for a year and a half by that stage.

00:57:38.180 It may have increased sales a little.

00:57:41.300 And I retired from the Times,

00:57:43.920 so there were no repercussions at work

00:57:48.040 since I didn't have any work.

00:57:50.260 And what was your central argument of that book

00:57:53.780 and why did people disagree with it as strongly as they did?

00:57:57.460 Look, we spend a lot of time on trigonometry

00:57:59.760 talking about things that matter,

00:58:01.320 and I'd argue this matters more than most of them.

00:58:03.860 because you are wearing underwear right now and there is a reasonable chance, sorry,

00:58:08.580 and there's a reasonable chance it's not doing its job. I'm talking about Sheath. S-H-E-A-T-H.

00:58:15.460 Sheath.com. It's underwear built around the dual pouch system. What that means in plain English,

00:58:21.460 everything stays where it should be. No sticking, no chafing, no shifting around mid-sentence while

00:58:26.340 trying to maintain an air of gravitas. The fabric breathes, the design separates. There is apparently

00:58:31.780 a technical term for what this creates and that term is zen-like separation which sounds ridiculous

00:58:38.520 and is also completely accurate it was developed by a veteran on his second tour which means it

00:58:44.100 was designed under conditions where comfort was not a luxury over 10 000 five-star reviews from

00:58:49.380 people who are not messing about and i'll be honest the difference to my day-to-day comfort

00:58:53.320 is bigger than i'm comfortable telling you about on a politics podcast if you know you know go to

00:58:59.200 Sheath.com. That's S-H-E-A-T-H.com. Use code trigonometry at checkout for 20% off. First

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00:59:19.400 Well, the central argument was simply that if you're interested in human evolution,

00:59:23.200 nothing is more fascinating than seeing how the population adapts to different localities as it

00:59:30.320 spreads out from Africa, as any species will. So the book gave you a biological explanation of

00:59:38.460 race, sometimes in very great detail, which was then becoming possible. Like, for example,

00:59:44.780 we know that both Chinese and Europeans have pale skin, but they do so for entirely different

00:59:51.780 genetic reasons. There's one set of genes that produces pale skin in Europeans and a mostly

00:59:57.960 different set that produces pale skin in Chinese. So if you look at all these genes, often you can

01:00:04.720 tell their history when they develop. So you can put a date on when we acquired pale skin and blue

01:00:12.900 eyes. Just from the point of view of natural history, which was really all my book was

01:00:18.580 concerned about. I had no interest in the politics of race and didn't touch it.

01:00:24.120 And all this was, you know, my job at the time was to cover the human genome. So this was one 0.91

01:00:29.740 of the first results that came flowing out of the human genome, how, you know, the different

01:00:34.360 variations on the genome that have occurred throughout history. So that's when I started

01:00:46.460 writing it up. Also, because I found that academics were petrified of discussing these

01:00:50.660 fascinating results. There's a great taboo in talking about race. Well, here we were generating

01:00:56.060 all this information. You shouldn't someone report to the public what it says. So that was the only

01:01:02.260 motivation of my book. It was just a sort of straight, as I viewed it, it was just a straightforward

01:01:08.320 science book saying, this is what we know. However, it's remained unique in the field

01:01:14.020 because no one has since dared write about it.

01:01:16.780 There's a complete taboo on saying anything about race.

01:01:21.600 And the reason it annoyed people

01:01:23.800 was that it went to the heart of the left's position,

01:01:29.420 which is that there is no biological basis to race,

01:01:34.480 or indeed to sex.

01:01:35.980 Both race and sex are cultural concepts,

01:01:40.100 not biological in the view of the left.

01:01:42.600 So this is a profoundly evolutionary, utterly nutty position.

01:01:47.720 But my book was a direct challenge to it because it said, well, here is the biological basis of race. 0.71

01:01:52.140 And down to the nearest nucleotide, this is why Chinese are different from Europeans. 0.95

01:01:57.700 Do you think that it's not, I wonder if it's just that, because I understand your argument. 0.96

01:02:02.760 You know, if the political worldview that you advocate for relies on pretending there are no differences between population groups,

01:02:10.320 then it's very advantageous to you to shut down any evidence to the contrary.

01:02:14.580 But do you think there's also quite a reasonable concern, based on history, that quite on the

01:02:20.020 number of occasions in the last 150 years, but probably prior to that as well, people have come

01:02:26.780 along and said, well, the science says that this group of people is superior to that group of

01:02:31.460 people. Therefore, here's a bunch of discriminatory policies that often lead to very, very negative

01:02:37.940 and unpleasant outcomes.

01:02:39.420 And then we later learn, actually,

01:02:40.800 that wasn't scientifically accurate at all.

01:02:42.980 We have a new theory that explains certain things

01:02:45.020 that people were claiming at the time.

01:02:47.040 That's certainly a real danger.

01:02:48.860 But what do you do about it?

01:02:50.280 Do you just suppress the scientific knowledge you're gaining?

01:02:54.160 Surely what you should try and do

01:02:55.500 is let everyone know what the science says

01:02:58.840 so that people can then make informed views

01:03:01.760 as to what implications they should draw from it.

01:03:04.520 And I mean, just because we have races that sort of differ in various aspects, that gives

01:03:14.040 you no basis of saying one race is superior to another.

01:03:19.040 Is that really true, though? 1.00

01:03:20.720 Because like if you say black people are better at basketball, I mean, they are superior at 1.00

01:03:24.500 basketball. 1.00

01:03:25.380 So if you make claims about other metrics that determine people's success in various

01:03:29.840 aspects of life, you can very easily see how when you get to things like intelligence or other

01:03:35.800 things, it becomes very easy to use that as a discriminatory piece of information. And there

01:03:42.380 are lots of people who would. Well, it's true. And Tibetans are adapted to living at high

01:03:48.900 altitudes. So you can say Tibetans are genetically better than lowlanders are living at high altitudes. 0.98

01:03:54.160 But it's a pretty useless observation.

01:04:00.040 The thing is, you can't prevent people going around making claims like this.

01:04:06.320 But should that mean you don't discuss these things at all,

01:04:09.960 I think you can get into difficulties if you don't discuss racial differences

01:04:19.520 that may be relevant in some aspects of social policy.

01:04:23.360 What do you mean by that, Nicholas?

01:04:25.440 Well, I don't want to get too far into this

01:04:27.140 because I'm really not an expert in the politics of race

01:04:30.200 and have no real interest in it.

01:04:31.840 But I assume, for example, if you look at education,

01:04:37.160 it's very important to give everyone

01:04:39.200 the best educational experience you can

01:04:42.900 so that everyone has a sort of fair chance

01:04:45.820 of living digital life.

01:04:48.680 Now, if some people are less educable than others,

01:04:52.680 You surely need to recognize that and give them a different and appropriate treatment to the ones who are more easily educable.

01:05:00.580 Now, this lack of educability can come from a lot of causes, many of them environmental.

01:05:05.620 You have parents who don't make the kids do the homework, who neglect the kids, kids live in poverty, and so on and so forth.

01:05:15.180 And that can be a genetic element. It doesn't really matter.

01:05:17.740 you've still got two groups, say, that require different treatment

01:05:23.800 if you are going to make the best use of your educational facilities.

01:05:31.380 Yeah, I can see why this is controversial.

01:05:33.700 I think the thing that will worry people,

01:05:36.060 and will worry particularly black people in the US and in the UK,

01:05:39.880 but more so in the US, is, look, you know,

01:05:42.520 if we start pointing out racial differences,

01:05:45.400 We've fought long and hard to get equality, 0.80

01:05:48.940 and this is just going to be used as a cudgel to beat us with.

01:05:52.700 That's a legitimate fear,

01:05:54.300 but surely if you look at the history of civil rights in the US,

01:05:59.280 the trend has gone the other way.

01:06:02.180 The Voting Rights Act enfranchised everyone,

01:06:07.740 and discrimination, it may not be a thing of the past,

01:06:12.240 but it's certain you can't discriminate in public.

01:06:14.600 in any way. So in fact, Americans have done everything a government reasonably can to lift

01:06:23.180 up its black population and give them an equal chance and equal opportunities. It hasn't done

01:06:28.580 so perfectly, but at least you can point to all the efforts it has made. I'm starting with the

01:06:32.900 civil war to end slavery. So it doesn't necessarily mean that people are going to make the most

01:06:39.360 divisive possible use of this information. Yeah, I guess all I'm saying is I think I can see why

01:06:45.320 people are very touchy about the subject. Absolutely. Yeah. Well, listen, it's been

01:06:49.720 great having you on the show. We're going to ask you some questions from our supporters in a second,

01:06:53.060 but before we do, the last question we always ask is what's the one thing we're not talking

01:06:57.340 about that you think we really should be as a society? I think the thing we should have

01:07:03.180 talked about if you had time, was the very deep problem of inequality. So inequality is a very

01:07:09.940 destabilizing society. But if you have an open society, merit-based, particularly in this era

01:07:17.860 of very fast technological advance, very enormous fortunes get made overnight, you are going to have

01:07:23.800 a lot of inequality. And you have to find some way of making that acceptable to a population.

01:07:31.160 Well, we have time, actually. So if you want to delve further into that, we definitely can. Are you talking about, for example, we've just come from San Francisco, talking to people there who work in the AI field, it is very clear to me that even though there's very high levels of inequality in Western countries already, we ain't seen nothing yet.

01:07:54.480 I mean, over time, the majority of new wealth will be created

01:07:59.180 in one small area of one small city, effectively.

01:08:04.840 That has got to be a recipe, A, for disaster, but B, then also,

01:08:09.340 you know, I was sort of saying to one of these guys,

01:08:11.280 I'm only half joking, like, you know, I wrote a whole book

01:08:14.280 about how communism is evil, but, like, we might need it

01:08:16.840 if this carries on.

01:08:18.800 Well, we might need a universal basic income if this carries on,

01:08:22.140 if people get put out of jobs, which is not yet clear.

01:08:25.920 I think one aspect of inequality that is important to keep in mind

01:08:29.380 is that you shouldn't really mind if Bill Gates is a lot richer than you or I are.

01:08:36.860 The question is, do we have enough to eat?

01:08:39.760 And, you know, almost everyone in this country has enough to eat.

01:08:43.040 They have a roof over their heads.

01:08:44.560 Most of them have iPhones.

01:08:46.080 So why does inequality matter?

01:08:48.160 Well, hold on a second.

01:08:49.100 You are someone who's an expert in evolution.

01:08:51.360 You know why that matters, because human beings don't operate on an absolute basis.

01:08:57.000 They operate on a comparative basis.

01:08:58.660 Yeah, that's absolutely right.

01:08:59.940 So why do we want status?

01:09:02.780 Status is important to people because it gives you a bigger claim on societal resources,

01:09:08.940 especially in early days when people were living on the edge of starvation.

01:09:13.060 So if you were a big cheese in a small society, you were more likely to survive than if you had very low status.

01:09:21.080 So this, I think, is the reason why inequality is so jarring to us.

01:09:27.200 There isn't really a good logical reason in a country that has a decent welfare system

01:09:33.580 why we should be bothered about inequality.

01:09:36.260 It's our inherent yearning for status and feeling that we're diminishing our chances

01:09:43.580 of survival if we don't have it.

01:09:44.900 Another aspect of inequality, I think, which I have a chapter on in the book, is that it's much harder to get rid of than you might think for purely genetic reasons.

01:09:59.280 And that is that human societies, I think, are much more mobile, have been much more mobile in the past than we imagine.

01:10:06.300 So even in aristocratic societies, the aristocrats, half of them would die in battle every generation.

01:10:14.640 So their rank, how did they fulfill their ranks?

01:10:19.540 Well, it was sort of rich commoners could buy a title or marry a duke's daughter.

01:10:25.100 And so there was new blood constantly infusing into the aristocracy.

01:10:30.540 So there's a fascinating series of papers by an economist called Gregory Clark, in which

01:10:35.660 he measures mobility in English societies over the centuries.

01:10:41.020 And it's very slow.

01:10:43.760 The people at the top do gradually descend in the social scale, presumably because whatever merit got them to the top is diluted genetically. But the societies are pretty much stable.

01:10:59.180 His basis for this is he follows people who attended Oxford and Cambridge,

01:11:04.300 which were the only places you could educate it then.

01:11:06.420 And he looks at people with very rare surnames who,

01:11:11.140 because the surnames are so rare, they're very likely to be related to each other.

01:11:15.900 So he'll look at the sort of shuffle doors in the 13th century attending Oxford.

01:11:21.820 And lo and behold, at the 17th century, the shuffle doors are still there.

01:11:26.520 So this is a family that sort of kept itself at the top.

01:11:33.860 So if that is the case, if our societies are in fact stratified by some kind of genetic merit to a much greater extent than we recognise,

01:11:43.500 then it's going to be very hard to sort of shuffle them up short of war or revolution.

01:11:49.500 Do you think also part of the problem that America is facing is in a society that is as consumerist as this one? And with social media, you judge essentially your status on the acquirement of material possessions. So if you are constantly comparing yourself to other people, that's going to put you in a place of resentment and anger, which will then lead to destructive impulses and behaviours.

01:12:13.420 Right. Well, and your point about social media is so important as well, because 100 years ago,

01:12:18.160 you couldn't go inside the Rockefeller mansion and have a good look around. Now you just open

01:12:22.220 your phone and you're right there. Right. And if you're rich, I guess you're so pleased

01:12:27.660 that you don't hide your wealth and you constantly see the rich competing with each other in terms

01:12:33.140 of the size of their yacht or whatever it is. So their wealth is not hidden from the lower orders.

01:12:40.380 Well, if you're a billionaire watching this,

01:12:42.180 put your yacht in the hangar or whatever.

01:12:44.000 There's probably a different word for a boat hangar.

01:12:46.780 I don't know.

01:12:47.660 Fantastic.

01:12:48.200 Thank you so much for coming on.

01:12:49.640 Head on over to triggerpod.co.uk

01:12:51.720 where we're going to ask Nicholas your question.

01:12:54.940 Is there any evidence that our ways of thinking about politics

01:12:58.180 and other social issues

01:12:59.720 is linked to how much genetically we have

01:13:02.320 of other hominid species,

01:13:04.200 such as Neanderthals within us? 0.99

01:13:09.920 We'll be right back. 0.99

TRIGGERnometry - May 06, 2026

The Biological Reason Socialism Always Fails — Nicholas Wade

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