Making Sense with Sam Harris - #109— Biology and Culture

Episode Date: December 19, 2017

Sam Harris speaks with Bret Weinstein about the moral panic at Evergreen State College, the concept of race, genetic differences between human populations, intersectionality, sex and gender, “metaph...orical truth,” religion and “group selection,” equality, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 Thank you. of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. So today we have my first live podcast officially in Seattle with Brett Weinstein. I introduced Brett on stage, but Brett is the biologist who is at the center of the Evergreen scandal, which you may have heard about. We don't go into as much detail as we might have because Evergreen is just an hour outside of Seattle, and many people in the audience were well aware of what happened there. It did make national news, and it was the most visible, apart from
Starting point is 00:01:18 what happened to Nicholas Christakis at Yale, of these recent moral panics on college campuses. But briefly, what happened there is they traditionally had what they called a day of absence, where people of color would stay away from campus for a day to make their absence felt. And Brett, as an extremely liberal and progressive member of the biology department, was always in support of that. But last year, they decided to flip the logic of this event. And rather than people of color deciding to stay away, they decided to tell white people that they were not welcome on campus on that day. Absence wasn't compulsory, but it was highly recommended. Now, Brett noticed immediately that this was not
Starting point is 00:02:07 quite the same ethical and political message, and said as much in an email to administrators and his colleagues. And then the witch hunt began. So there's much more about that online, and you can see Brett's other interviews on other podcasts, like the Joe Rogan podcast. But suffice it to say, this was an extremely bizarre and unproductive self-immolation of a liberal student body. And Brett and his wife, also a professor there at Evergreen, have since been forced out. There was some settlement. We talk about it a little, but that's the necessary backstory to today's conversation. And now I bring you audio of the Seattle event with Brett Weinstein.
Starting point is 00:03:00 Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Sam Harris. Thank you. Well, thank you all for coming out. I can't see you all, but I can hear you. And it really is an honor, I must say. I will never take this for granted, the fact that I can put a date on the calendar and you all show up. It's just insane to me. So thank you for doing that.
Starting point is 00:03:42 And another thing I won't take for granted is that people like this actually want to talk to me. My guest tonight is an evolutionary biologist. He is not that one. Though I've released some audio from those events with Richard Dawkins, you should know this is actually my first official live podcast. So you guys made it to the start of the tour. Thank you. live podcast. So you guys made it to the start of the tour. But my guest tonight is a biologist who focuses on big questions. He's done narrow research on things like the evolution of cancer and senescence and moral self-sacrifice. But he also focuses on how an understanding of evolution can actually inform
Starting point is 00:04:27 our lives and improve society, and we'll get into all of that. He's also become, in the aftermath of what is now known as the Evergreen scandal, a truly wise and articulate defender of human rationality and free speech. So please welcome Brett Weinstein. Hey, Brett. Good to see you. Good to see you coming. So, Brett, I've been wanting to talk to you for some time. As some people here must know, I'm friends with your brother who did my podcast about a year ago. And, you know, your brother is this polymathic, very articulate, very interesting man. And then I saw a bit of you on YouTube, and you are also this polymathic, very articulate, interesting man.
Starting point is 00:05:21 So your parents did something right. I want to know what happened there. But welcome. Thank you for doing this. Thanks for having me. So I think since we're in Seattle, the Evergreen scandal is probably a noun phrase that people recognize. But I think we should talk about what happened there because it's a point of entry into many of the issues we're going to consider. I have actually seen it described by another name,
Starting point is 00:05:45 the Brett Weinstein debacle. Ah, wow. Yes, so let me give you the very brief version. And I should say it's a story that's very easy to get wrong, and the press, even when they are well-intentioned, often get the story wrong. I'm not going to bore you with the details of what actually happened, but I will say the general narrative is this.
Starting point is 00:06:07 We hired a new president at the college. He set in motion a committee to study the question of equity on our campus and to propose some solutions to problems. solutions to problems. And that committee advanced an elaborate proposal sweeping changes to the college that was, in my opinion, a threat to the ability of the college to continue to function, certainly as an educational institution and maybe at all. It was a threat to our fiscal solvency. And I objected to it, which was more or less part of my job as a faculty member. And I said, we really have to talk about this proposal. And there was steadfast refusal to have that discussion.
Starting point is 00:06:52 And as I continued to insist that we have that discussion, it raised the hackles of some other faculty members who became more and more aggressive in challenging me in faculty meetings, accusing me of being anti-equity itself. And then the next part is hearsay, but I'm led to believe that one faculty member in particular set a bunch of students in motion, students that I had never met, arrived at my classroom and erupted into protest, which disrupted the entire building. They demanded my resignation. And instead of backing down or running away, I tried to reason with them. And when those videos were placed online by the protesters, the reaction was not what the protesters had expected the reaction was. Many people were, I guess, impressed that I had tried to talk to them rationally
Starting point is 00:07:51 about the questions that were at the heart of the equity issue on our campus. And so it backfired, and that set in motion a debate about what the rights of people to protest are in the context of a college campus and what equity means and how we might pursue it. What was the reaction of your fellow faculty? How much support or lack of support did you get? That's a very interesting question. It looks very different on the inside of the college than the outside. On the inside, I got tremendous support from many people, but it was almost silent. And many of the people who were telling me that they were supportive were telling me that they wouldn't speak publicly about their position because they were afraid of what would happen. And in fact,
Starting point is 00:08:41 they watched what happened to me, and I can't say that they were wrong. Yeah, well, the word cowardice does come to mind. It's a word that I refused to use at first, because I don't think their fears were unjustified, and it's hard to judge other people in that way. But I will say... Although their fears were not unjustified if they came out one at a time or only one came out, but there really is safety in numbers here. It's the fact that you were out there all alone that led to this. This is exactly right, and I don't... I mean, maybe I do know.
Starting point is 00:09:18 How do we solve this problem? I'm thinking of something that I've often said of the Salman Rushdie affair. The reason why he had to go into hiding for 10 years, obviously, is a different circumstance. But the whole problem was that there weren't 10,000 Salman Rushdies the next day, and there should have been. How do we get that collective response tuned up? The answer is not an easy one, but people need to level up with respect to game theory. And so the colleagues who were opposed to these false and dangerous equity proposals
Starting point is 00:09:56 were responding to their narrow short-term interests. In other words, they were correctly perceiving that they would be stigmatized and demonized and maybe driven out if they stood up. What they were not realizing was that that will come for them in the end anyway. And so it really isn't a question of whether or not to expose yourself to that danger. It's whether or not to group together
Starting point is 00:10:19 and face that danger and maybe survive it or to expose yourself to being picked off one by one over time. And so there's a problem that I call the activist dilemma, which is really a version of a tragedy of the commons or a free rider problem, in which everybody wants a problem solved, but the best deal is to stand on the sidelines and let somebody else take the risk or the cost of solving it and to get the benefit of that solution anyway.
Starting point is 00:10:49 And in the end, that's the undoing of the coalitions that you're imagining should form to prevent these things. Seems like we could solve this with an app. The right app would just get everyone to go at the same moment. So what were the ideas at the core of this problem? What gave us the Evergreen moral panic? Well, I think it has to do with a couple of different problems. I mean, I've come to view the folks who protested at Evergreen as an insurgency, which to me means that you don't take them literally, that they are actually engaged in a tactical action,
Starting point is 00:11:32 and what they say they are up to is not necessarily what even they believe that they are up to. They are trying to accomplish something, and they're actually quite powerful in doing what they're doing. in doing what they're doing. So it's a little bit hard to know how you deal with a movement that says it is about certain objectives. For example, equity itself.
Starting point is 00:11:56 Equity is something that most people, I'm sure most people in this auditorium, would imagine themselves to be in favor of equity. The problem is if you build a rule into your personality where you say anything that is positive from the perspective of equity is therefore something that I am in favor of, then you can be easily manipulated because all that has to happen is somebody needs to wrap that label around something noxious, and you may not detect until too late that it isn't what you signed up for. What's more, this sets the stage for your cognitive dissonance to be weaponized against you,
Starting point is 00:12:33 because once you've signed up, once you've protested in favor of something called equity, and then it turns out that it isn't what it was advertised as, you have a predicament, which is, do you admit that you were wrong to favor this thing in the first place, or do you double down on protesting even further? And I've seen a lot of people who simply got involved in this movement because it was labeled in a way that sounded good to them
Starting point is 00:13:00 continue to move in the wrong direction because at the point they begin to detect that it isn't what it's supposed to be, it's too late for them to figure out how to back out. And what's the connection to biology here? Is it an accident that you happen to be a biologist, or is there something about biology that presents an especially good target for this kind of confusion? Yeah, that's a great question. It's no accident, I think. I've been teaching and thinking very deeply about questions about how groups compete with each other and what role those game theoretic parameters and predicaments have played in human history. And so really this particular instance was a variation on a theme, and it was quite plain to me what was going on.
Starting point is 00:13:48 And the question is, could I make it plain to enough people who hadn't yet chosen sides to avert a disaster? And the answer with respect to Evergreen is no. On the other hand, with respect to the outside world, it does appear that we have a much healthier conversation on that topic now than we did six months ago. I mean, there's topics here that I think we should touch because they're of such critical importance to our national conversation or our global conversation. And there are topics that it seems like we should be able to talk about rationally and in a truly open-ended and open-minded way without becoming hysterical. But these topics so reliably produce hysteria that it's just like everything's covered with plutonium. Let's talk about first the concept of race, which was at the center of this disruption on campus.
Starting point is 00:14:46 As a biological concept, is it a valid concept? Okay, we're about to get into serious danger. Yes, you're about to get on Twitter. Yes. Well, I have actually, yeah, I have changed my tune on this question. I have not changed my understanding, but the term race is actually close to indefensible. And the reason that it's close to indefensible is not the one that we are told biology has unearthed. We are told that there is more variation within races than between races, and therefore races don't exist. That's nonsense. That actually mathematically essentially has to be true. It says nothing one way or the other about the reality of races.
Starting point is 00:15:32 What does invalidate the concept of race is the way that concept has been used. So, for example, one-drop rules say something about what category you're in that is not in any way mathematical, right? If one drop of black blood makes you black, then this is not a biological concept we're talking about. It's a social concept. So what I would say...
Starting point is 00:15:55 You're not in favor of the Nuremberg laws? Is that what I'm hearing? Well, I would say let's... I mean, I use the term race because it's the term people expect when you're having these conversations. And then when the conversations get technical, it causes a problem. The real term that we should be using is population. Population is a biologically viable term, and we don't get into one-drop rule kind of shenanigans surrounding it.
Starting point is 00:16:20 So I would say if you're having a technical conversation, recognize that race isn't the right concept and move to population, and then we can talk about what the meaning of population is. I would say there's a higher level version of that term, too, which is even is more useful because it is a fractal, meaning that it exists independent of scale, at least over a certain range. And so you and all of your descendants are a lineage. Your mother and all of her descendants, which includes the lineage we just talked about, is also a lineage,
Starting point is 00:17:02 and we can step all the way back up the evolutionary tree of ancestry, and we can generate larger and larger, more inclusive lineages. And so what we call races are typically populations, and those populations are one level in that hierarchy that is important in human history. That said, not every one of these is actually a lineage or a population. So what happened in Rwanda with Hutus and Tutsis was in large measure artificial. Those were not actual lineages in any biologically meaningful sense. They were arbitrary based on phenotypic characteristics that may or may not have tracked lineage. So is a family a similar concept to race or lineage here? There is actually no clear boundary between a family and the rest of the species.
Starting point is 00:17:59 Well, family is not technically a lineage. So you and your wife and all of your descendants are not a lineage because the common ancestor between you and your wife is not included. But that's not... Yeah, I guess biologically related. Yes, essentially the theme of what you're saying is right, that as we step up to larger and larger collections of related individuals, what we have are larger and larger lineages which function like families. They evolve in the same way that families are capable of
Starting point is 00:18:24 because they're related to each other in a genetically precise way, but the borders aren't necessarily easily defined. And there's no easily defined borders of a species either. There was no first human. Well, there is a most recent common ancestor of all humans. Yeah. There logically has to be.
Starting point is 00:18:43 Right. That does not mean that that was the first human in any sense that if you were standing there to observe this person that you could recognize them as such. But the important thing to realize is for some reason we have a bias. We tend to think that evolutionary dynamics ought to function in ways that make them easily tractable,
Starting point is 00:19:04 that make them comprehensible to us. And there's no reason that that has to be true. And you picked the perfect example. We cannot define species in a way that recovers all of the things that we think we mean when we use that term. And it actually becomes particularly broken when we get near human beings. But the fact that we can't define species is of no consequence one way or the other to evolutionary dynamics. They are evolving and lineages are diverging into sub-lineages that ultimately can't interbreed. And there's some point at which we say, well,
Starting point is 00:19:38 they're definitely two different species. But on the road to being definitely two different species, you're kind of two different species and you're kind of two different species, and you're not really two different species. So we shouldn't expect evolution necessarily to make our life easy. What we should understand is that it is a process that does not think, and what it simply does is present us with representatives that did a better job of getting here than competitors that did a worse job. And to the extent that you are a member of many lineages at once,
Starting point is 00:20:11 that's not a problem for this process. The process doesn't need to be able to say you are one of these and you aren't one of those. It just needs to simply continually select that subset of lineages that are playing the game well. So now why is this so inflammatory? Is it that the one fact that seems to keep coming up or its existence or possible existence is the thing that is avoided in all of this is that populations or races or any geographically isolated group of people at any point in history, if you take two groups, they will vary with respect to certain traits. So we can even add
Starting point is 00:20:56 culture here. They'll vary with respect to culture, but they'll also vary with respect to genes. And these genes govern many of the things we care about. Anything you can name about a human mind or a human temperament or human physical characteristics, these vary, and they vary in very predictable ways. The fact that you can look at someone and make an educated guess about where their ancestors came from tells you that there's some pattern here that is conserved, and it doesn't stop at the skin.
Starting point is 00:21:27 And it would be a miracle, correct me if I'm wrong, if everything we cared about that wasn't superficial, like the skin, things like intelligence, things like empathy, things like aggression, all of these things that to some degree are governed by genes, it would be a miracle if the average values in every population were the same. What you've said, I think, is right, but I think it actually leads to a fear that I personally, having thought about it a great deal, having traveled in all different parts of the world, lived in different populations, I don't fear it. And I think... You don't fear that that's true, or you don't think this thing, if true, should be feared? I think the fear is born of the following observation. If we look at
Starting point is 00:22:17 different sports, they select for different populations, right? It happens that marathon running is dominated by Ethiopians and Kenyans. You are unlikely to find Inuits being highly successful in marathon running. And there's a good reason for this, because people from Ethiopia and Kenya are... The fact that that's even funny to picture is worth flagging. It is. Don't get on Twitter with that. Yeah, this just stays between us. So here's the thing. If you think about what it means to be an Inuit, one of the things it means is that you have been selected to conserve heat because the difference between conserving a bit of heat
Starting point is 00:23:02 and failing to conserve it is a life-and-death difference in many circumstances if you live in the Arctic. If you're an Ethiopian, you have exactly the opposite problem. Radiating heat is the key to survival in a habitat that's that hot. So my point would simply be, Inuits are shaped so as to conserve heat. They are rounder, and that round shape does not lend itself to marathon running, and it should not trouble us or surprise us that we see this bias.
Starting point is 00:23:33 I think, though, that people are very concerned that what we see playing out in different sports, the fact that different populations dominate different sports is going to be a mirror for what we find inside the mind. And I don't fear this. I think there's a very good reason to see these things as unfolding very differently in evolutionary terms, which is, in the example I just gave you, you can see a very good reason that two habitats select in very different ways for one's phenotype. habitats select in very different ways for one's phenotype. Every habitat selects for intelligence, which doesn't mean that differences in intelligence didn't accumulate somewhere first. But the real question is, given that human populations are interconnected, to the extent that
Starting point is 00:24:18 there are heritable differences in intelligence, what we should expect them to do is spread, because they provide advantage to anybody who gets a hold of them. And so I realize at the moment there seems to be... Except they might not provide fecundity in anyone who gets a hold of them. What if intelligent people are having fewer kids at this moment in history? Is that... We have to put modernity aside. Right. But the process is still happening, so modernity could just be the last thousand years, right? I would say modernity, you know...
Starting point is 00:24:52 Let me flip that around. There are genetic changes in us that have been selected for very recently, maybe not a thousand years, but like 5,000 years, things like lactose tolerance. And just to ask you, how quickly can that happen, leaving aside deliberate manipulations to the genome? How quickly would you expect a culture
Starting point is 00:25:11 to determine genetically relevant change? Well, I'm going to have to get pretty politically incorrect here. Is that all right by you? So I'm leading you into dangerous territory, and none of this is on this piece of paper. So those changes can happen much more quickly than we think, but human beings are very evolutionarily odd. So everybody is well aware that both nature and nurture
Starting point is 00:25:41 play a role in what human beings are, and at some level the sophisticated consensus around that is that it's a fool's errand to try to separate out the influences of nature from nurture because, of course, they're both playing a role. What we don't say is that human beings are by far the most nurture-based creature that has ever existed on planet Earth, that we have been pushed in the last phase
Starting point is 00:26:05 of our evolution very far in the direction of nurture and very far away from the direction of nature. And that is not an accident. That occurred because it provided a distinct evolutionary advantage. But in practice, what it means is that if you think of a human being as a What it means is that if you think of a human being as a physiological creature, that's the robot. And then it's got a brain, that's the computer. And then it's got a mind, and that's the software. The answer is that human beings are effective at doing what we do because so much of what we are has been offloaded to the software layer. And that is really the key to why human beings are capable of dominating every terrestrial habitat on the planet,
Starting point is 00:26:52 why we can go into space, why you all can exist in this room in a way that your ancestors even 500 years ago probably wouldn't have understood. So the fact that all of these things have been shifted over into a software layer that can be written and rewritten as circumstances change says that the analysis that we might do for some other creature
Starting point is 00:27:15 is less likely to be applicable to us. And the software layer is culture? The software layer is culture, but culture has to be defined a bit carefully. So culture are units of information that are transmitted generally from one member of a species to another. Now, this does provide culture with a special attribute, which is that it can move horizontally. You and I can exchange cultural tidbits, But most culture is likely to be transmitted vertically. So we learn an awful lot in our natal homes
Starting point is 00:27:50 before we go out into the world and pick up more nuanced stuff. So yes, that cultural layer, I would argue, is every bit as biological and every bit as evolutionary as the genetic layer. And in fact, it is a special trick that has been deployed by the genetic layer in order to solve problems that the genetic layer is not capable of solving on its own. Well, I want to get deeper into this and the link between biology and culture and whether understanding evolution helps us produce more normative
Starting point is 00:28:23 culture and society is more worth living in. But before we go there, I want to just ask a question or two about Evergreen. And this is just, this is a moment where we can, we have an opportunity to say how we should rewrite our culture or modify it. What would, so you take these topics that can be raised in the context of a biology classroom, and on their face, they seem dangerous to talk about. that skirts these issues is a symptom of intolerance or some kind of perverse fixation on human difference that has an ulterior motive that we should be suspect of. What should students do, whether or not their understanding of the issues is correct? I mean, in many cases it won't be, but students who are outraged by something that's happening on a campus, in the class or an invited speaker? What is the appropriate means of protest
Starting point is 00:29:31 that doesn't lead to this absolute collapse of an institution? Yeah, what indeed? I would say the first problem is that something about modern protest is absolutely deaf to realities that ought to be important to it. And were this not the case, there would be lots of room to navigate based on concerns, some of which may be legitimate, many of which I can tell you are not legitimate. But the key to dealing with these tensions is to air them and to discuss them. And the hallmark of what I saw at Evergreen and what we have seen elsewhere is that the movement is utterly ineducable on the topics that it's focused on, which is just the oddest thing. And it's very unnatural. So I should say, I lost very few friends in this circumstance. I did lose a few
Starting point is 00:30:37 on the faculty side. But students have overwhelmingly been loyal to my wife and me and very sympathetic and generous and understanding. So the students who actually knew you, knew you. And the students who didn't know you, demonized you. Right. But here's the part that I can't get past. When I talk to these students and I talk to other friends
Starting point is 00:31:01 who watch this whole thing unfold, I hear the same thing over and over again, which is they're not confused about me or Heather or any of what happened, but they cannot reason with their friends who don't know us. So Heather's your wife who is also a professor? Was also a professor at Evergreen for 15 years. In fact, Evergreen's most highly rated professor
Starting point is 00:31:26 based on Rate My Professor online. You can go see her reviews. She's marvelous. But I know that if I was watching somebody, let's say that I thought ill of somebody. I thought they were a horrible person. And then somebody said to me, you know what? I actually know them. You've got them wrong. I would immediately become agnostic about what was going on. I mean, that would just, like, in an instant, I would say, well, either the person I'm talking to doesn't understand what's going on, or I've missed something. But something doesn't add up here, so I'm going to have to go slow and figure out what I've missed. This is not functioning in this circumstance. People who believe that they know what took place are so convinced of it that they cannot be derailed even by somebody saying, hey, you know what, I know that
Starting point is 00:32:14 person personally, and they're not a racist. That doesn't apparently count for anything. So that tells me that this is a kind of religious fervor. It's not a natural, it's not an analytical conclusion that might be amenable to being changed if evidence arose that said something different. It's very unnatural. Yeah, it is. It does have a kind of cultic shape to it, and you would almost have to deprogram someone who's got a ton of invested in viewing you a certain way. You know, when this first thing unfolded, I don't know if you remember it, but you tweeted something about it being cult-like, and I had not thought that thought before I saw your tweet,
Starting point is 00:32:53 but it instantly resonated, and everything I've seen since says that that's the correct analogy. Yeah, and also social media is obviously not helping in this regard. I mean, it's spreading these memes. And once you, again, once you have enough sunk cost seeing it one way and you've been public about it, then the cost, the social cost of changing your mind publicly and apologizing seems insurmountable to people. Which, again, this is an intuition that I don't share. It's like if I've been wrong publicly about something, particularly in this kind of area where I thought someone was Satan and they turned out not to be, I would be so uncomfortable just maintaining that by neglect. I just feel like I'm wired to immediately rectify that problem. But it seems people have different intuitions here. Yeah, I don't quite get it because
Starting point is 00:33:52 intellectual, honest brokers, I think, all reach the conclusion that you just suggested, which is at the point you discover that you've got something really wrong, it's very painful to get on the right side of it. But it's way cheaper painful to get on the right side of it. But it's way cheaper than not getting on the right side of it and continuing to pay the cost of being dead wrong. So there's a way in which, no matter how bad it is to backtrack and get on the right side of something, it's always a bargain relative to waiting.
Starting point is 00:34:19 And somehow that logic does not seem to register with people. I guess there's another topic, two other topics we should mention here that freak people out. Well, there's a name for what I now consider the most vulnerable attitude that would bias someone toward freaking out on these issues, and it is this term that I don't think I've ever uttered on a podcast,
Starting point is 00:34:46 and I'm going to have you define for me. I haven't thought a lot about it, but this notion of intersectionality. What is intersectionality, and when will this go away? Yeah, well, actually, Eric and I have a long-running private discussion on this topic, and the upshot is that intersectionality, like so many of these concepts that we are now being backed against the wall with, actually has a bit of truth at the bottom of it. It's a real thing, but it's been weaponized in a way that just makes it very dangerous. weaponized in a way that just makes it very dangerous. So the basic notion is that people who are from historically oppressed populations are not, you know, they're not identifiable with
Starting point is 00:35:33 one of these things, that if you're trans and you're black, that that's two different kinds of difficult road that you're on simultaneously, and that the interaction of them is unique and emergent. I'm not sure I've actually heard it said that way before, but that there's some unique fact of all of the various things that you face that are obstacles. And the problem is that this gets turned into a very simplistic formula that essentially is like, very simplistic formula that essentially is like, well, maybe I should put it this way. There are two factions in the equity movement, equity being something that is never defined for a particular reason. But the two factions are a faction that earnestly wishes to put an end to systematic oppression. And the other faction wishes to turn an end to systematic oppression.
Starting point is 00:36:29 And the other faction wishes to turn the tables of systematic oppression. And in the context of turning the tables of systematic oppression, one's intersectionality quotient, that is to say the number of kinds of oppression that an individual can claim, basically says where in the new hierarchy you're going to be. Now, this is folly. It's not going to work. And even if it did work, the intersectional movement is unstable,
Starting point is 00:36:53 game theoretically, because it is composed of all of these different entities that are not ultimately the same. And you can see the friendly fire happening in that world where it's almost like a very unhappy game of Dungeons & Dragons where you have various powers that get misapplied against your friends. It's actually tragic. At Evergreen, there were two...
Starting point is 00:37:24 So Evergreen has a very large indigenous population, and the movement used a lot of indigenous imagery to begin with. Most famously, it's something called the canoe meeting, which was an absurd exercise, but, you know, the canoe was there not by accident. It was there as a metaphor for this Indian mode of transport. And you could see that there was tension between these two factions, the indigenous faction and the black faction.
Starting point is 00:37:54 And to my way of thinking, these two populations have the greatest claim on systemic oppression having resulted in a permanent underclass status of any two populations, but they were also in tension with each other. And that ultimately, I believe, is going to tear the movement apart if nothing else does first, which is very sad because the systemic oppression is real. It wasn't real at Evergreen. It was phony at Evergreen.
Starting point is 00:38:23 Evergreen was challenged because it was a soft target, not because it was a bastion of racism. But there are legitimate concerns to be addressed, and unfortunately, by pursuing them in this false way, we leave the impression that maybe the problem isn't real at all. I'm hesitant to go here, to land on yet another dangerous noun, but I'm encouraged by how little trouble we've gotten ourselves in thus far. Cool. How do biologists think about sex and gender, and how will this survive export to the culture at large?
Starting point is 00:39:00 Yeah. Take it away, Fred Weinstein. Yeah. Take it away, Fred Weinstein. Actually, this is funny because to me, sex and gender is a walk in the park compared to race. Sex and gender, there's the embarrassing aspect of discussing it, but the logic of it is much more straightforward and I think actually probably easier for us to deal with. Sexes are real and they're different from each other for evolutionary reasons. And some of those differences we can do nothing about. And some of those differences, though they evolved and they came to the present as a result of the fact that they made evolutionary sense, we are not stuck with them. And we can
Starting point is 00:39:41 reorganize the truth of the way the sexes interact, but we should do so deliberately and intentionally and not haphazardly, because we stand to lose a tremendous amount if we just simply say, men and women are basically the same, and anytime men and women don't behave the same way, that's because the patriarchy is oppressing people. That's just nonsense. And so the message I would have is we should retool sex and gender for modern realities. Just the simple fact of birth control changes everything. And if nothing else did, that would license us to reinvent these concepts. But we should do so in an evolutionarily aware way. Can you say more about that?
Starting point is 00:40:25 So the fact that women have control over their reproduction changes the Darwinian logic of sex difference? Or where are you going with birth control? It changes everything. And, you know, it also results in human beings, modern human beings, being in possession of this marvelous gift that they are now abusing. The fact that human beings being in possession of this marvelous gift that they are now abusing.
Starting point is 00:40:46 The fact that human beings can have sex and not produce babies, not play the baby lottery, that's a gift. And it should be treated with respect. It should not be treated as, you know, well, we're therefore entitled to treat sex as if it were nothing. It's actually a very important, it plays an important role in bonding between people, and to the extent that we are going to reinvent it in some modern way, we should be careful with it. But yeah, men and women are different, and those differences, some of them are absolutely profound.
Starting point is 00:41:22 So the one I find the most interesting is this. Women do not have a reproductive strategy that allows them to produce huge numbers of offspring in a lifetime. There is, the world record is something like 60, which I still don't know how you get to 60. Did you say 60 or 16? No, 60. So every time I say that, I think, well, I've got to have that wrong, and I look it up. But it turns out to be right. Somebody get on Snopes.
Starting point is 00:41:55 Yeah. Well, I think the answer is something like what it would have to be, where the woman was predisposed in some way to give birth to twins, and she was constantly handing them off to wet nurses so that she was immediately becoming fertile again. But anyway, it's an interesting story, but it's very much an outlier, whereas there certainly are males that produce huge numbers of offspring in a lifetime. And the way males produce huge numbers of offspring in a lifetime
Starting point is 00:42:20 is by producing offspring in which they invest nothing, which is impossible for a female. Even a female who hands off offspring immediately to a wet nurse is investing all of the effort of pregnancy, which is very substantial in humans. So what this means is that, A, it produces evolutionarily the phenomenon of menopause eventually, where women adaptively shut down their reproductive capacity and invest in the offspring they've got rather than producing new ones. But what this means is that effectively, women, especially postmenopausal women, but women are much more likely to view their own well-being and the well-being of their brood in a way that is compatible with the well-being
Starting point is 00:43:06 of their lineage at a larger scale. Because women cannot produce huge numbers of offspring at the cost of other individuals, they are likely to be very farsighted in their wisdom about lineage-level phenomena. After they can no longer produce offspring of their own, their interests become almost synonymous with the larger lineage. This isn't the way males see the world, because even an old male potentially could produce more offspring, and his fitness could go up in that
Starting point is 00:43:34 way. Males, on the other hand, precisely because of the way they reproduce, are much more likely to gamble in a particular way and to gamble productively. So a lot of the big wins in human evolutionary history have to do with men taking insane risks and managing those risks to a win. So there's a kind of male wisdom that has to do with risk-taking and a kind of female wisdom that has to do with long-term thinking, and they're both wisdom. And frankly, what should we do with long-term thinking. And they're both wisdom.
Starting point is 00:44:06 And frankly, what should we do with these things? We should democratize them both. We should hand them off. Everybody should begin to see their own well-being tied up in the larger lineage-level questions. We would behave much more reasonably on environmental issues if we did that. And we should also figure out what the message of male wisdom is with respect to risk. And there's no reason going forward that it has to be deployed by males more than females.
Starting point is 00:44:31 Anybody who wants it should have it available to them. But we shouldn't expect it to magically appear equally in both sexes. We should probably have to be deliberate about figuring out how to pass it on. But now what do you do with more inflammatory issues like possible sex differences in both propensities and interests? I mean, I'm thinking of like the Google memo, you know, the James Damore letter. Feel free to weigh in on that anyway. You want to destroy your reputation. feel free to weigh in on that anyway you want to destroy your reputation i understand that that we can step out of the the stream of mere evolutionary logic and rewrite the software of culture but if
Starting point is 00:45:14 it is just a fact that men and women are different not only physically but psychologically in ways that are relevant toward the kinds of careers they seek out, what do we do when the different representation of men and women is always scored as a sign of bias or some sort of systematic injustice? I mean, unless they're exactly the same, there will be a different representation. So what's descriptively true of our current situation, and what do you think should be normatively sought? I think the answer here is pretty clear. It is simply not true that any time you have different numbers of males and females in a profession, for example, that it is
Starting point is 00:46:00 in and of itself evidence that there must be some unequal access. We know that's not true, right? To take an analogy, it happens to be the case that cycling, I'm a cyclist and I follow cycling, cycling is a sport. I'm not talking about competitive cycling, but casual cycling is something that is much less frequently done by black folks than white folks. I can tell you that the culture at the bike store is not uninterested in selling you a bicycle if you're black. In fact, maybe it even
Starting point is 00:46:37 carries some special cachet, but there is something in just the experiences of different populations that has resulted in, at the present moment, a non-representative distribution of people in the hobby of cycling. Couldn't that just be an economic variable? Could be a lot of things. It seems like an expensive sport. Zip codes are more dangerous to cycle in, and so if you grew up in one, you weren't encouraged to ride a bike, or it could be, you know, it could be a lot of mundane things. What we know it isn't is any obstacle to
Starting point is 00:47:11 cycling to any population. Anybody who wants to can get a bike and cycle. Nobody's going to tell you to get off the road. So we know that it is something else. It is not oppression. It is some other thing, which may be the result of the fact that zip codes are differentially desirable from the point of cycling and that zip codes are not distributed in a fair way. That's possible. But it is not oppression at the bike store. And protesting at the bike store would be pointless, right? It makes no sense. That's actually fun to picture. I would support a bike store protest. Just for the irony of it. But in any case, I think the answer is fields, occupations should be open,
Starting point is 00:47:56 assuming that the particular field doesn't depend on physical brawn or something else that would explain why certain people need to be hired more than other people. Anything, engineering, it doesn't matter. It should be equally open to everybody. And frankly, you know, I like seeing women do stuff that is traditionally masculine. I happen to be married to a woman who, though she looks lovely, sort of sees the world in masculine terms. And she's an evolutionary biologist who goes off to the Amazon and is comfortable carrying a machete. And, you know, that's the way she is. And I think it's great.
Starting point is 00:48:34 So I think we should encourage people to follow their passions. And to the extent that their passion is not consistent with historical biases in the way jobs or fields were populated, all the better. But we don't get to just jump to the logic that says if the numbers in the seats aren't even, then something has gone awry here, because it's just, it's logically not true. Which is not to say that that's never true. It's just not necessarily true.
Starting point is 00:49:03 that that's never true. It's just not necessarily true. Exactly. In fact, I think we know if you listen in to what women in tech are saying, even people who are supportive of DeMoore and his memo acknowledge that there's an awful lot of not so nice boys club kind of stuff that goes on in tech circles. So that's not good and it probably does have an effect.
Starting point is 00:49:26 How much of an effect? That's a question that we should study. To the extent it's driving people out of tech, that's bad, and it should be addressed. But that's a far cry from the facile notion that 50-50 is what we have to have in order to demonstrate that there's no oppression. So how do you think about gender and its relationship to biological sex?
Starting point is 00:49:48 That's a good question. I've never done this before. I can't get over the fact that I'm just leading you down a burning hallway filled with broken glass. They haven't rushed the stage. You're doing great. That's good. Yeah. Let's put it this way.
Starting point is 00:50:08 Gender and sex are not identical. I think it would be fair to say that gender is the software of sex, which is not the same thing as saying, so my wife is fond of the description that these things are not binary, but they're bimodal, right? So sexes tend to be two modes, and those two modes tend to line up with two genders. And then there's a lot of stuff that doesn't exactly fit.
Starting point is 00:50:40 Some of that stuff may be the result of chromosomally intersex people being different, and some of it may just simply be at the software level. It would not be surprising at all in light of the fact that we are software-based creatures more than any other creature that has ever been. We are living in circumstances that don't look like our ancestral circumstances. We are therefore getting all kinds of information in our developmental environments that is abnormal and untested.
Starting point is 00:51:08 And what effect it has on your understanding of your own gender, we can't say. It's too early in the study. What I would say is that morally, we are absolutely compelled to be compassionate about the fact that lots of people are telling us, you know what, I have the sense that I was born in the wrong body. We don't know why that is. It's probably a mixture of phenomena.
Starting point is 00:51:35 But come on, these are human beings, and they're telling you something about an excruciating condition, and they're doing the best they can to figure out how to navigate it. So at one level, I think it's a very interesting biological question. As a human being, though, I think it's a very simple question. We have to be compassionate. I don't want to sign up for any fiction. Yeah. And there are so many cases where the unclear biological or scientific picture is married to a very clear political answer like that. I mean, it's just that the politics are so simple, right? And the politics are what would compassion dictate in this circumstance? And once you connect with another person's lived experience, the idea that the politics are difficult to resolve just goes completely out the window. Yeah, I think it's quite analogous to the question of just straightforward male-female differences and how we should address them.
Starting point is 00:52:38 The biological facts are interesting, and they need to be navigated carefully. We can't sign up for fiction to solve the political problem, but at some level, the political dimension is up for us to navigate without all of the information being available to us as to what causes the thing. They really are different questions. And unfortunately, because people have been effectively led to believe that they have a choice, that if they want to sign up for the right political answer, that they have to sign up for a fictional biological answer, we're caught in this conundrum where people like me are in danger
Starting point is 00:53:13 because we want to say, hey, actually the biology doesn't support the idea that gender is made up and assigned by somebody when you're born. Gender is in general a good match for sex, and it is not something that is simply arbitrary. It's real. It's biological. It has a meaning. But we can do the right thing, and that's what we should do. I will also say, though, there is a, just as it was with Evergreen and the issue of the equity protests, the story from the point of view of the outside world is not the real story. Inside the world of trans people, there is a diversity of opinion, which is now beginning to emerge. And it is penalized in order to keep people on narrative.
Starting point is 00:54:02 And that's something we have to address. So, for example, ContraPoints got in big trouble in the last couple of weeks based on her willingness to talk to people who were outside of a particular social bubble. And she was basically penalized online by the very people that had been supporting her. And this is a very unfortunate thing, because what she was really trying to do was bridge a gap that we should all want bridged. So anyway, if we support those people, this will work out much better, and we will get to the conversation that doesn't insult our intelligence about sex and gender. sex and gender. Yeah, yeah. One thing that I've been spending most of my time doing is trying to think about questions of meaning and value in a rational scientific picture. And it's the marriage
Starting point is 00:54:56 of science and moral philosophy, loosely speaking, and important questions that society is grappling with or will have to grapple with. And not everything is at the center of that Venn diagram, but many things are that I focus on. And there are many people who are struggling to speak about it. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense
Starting point is 00:55:30 podcast, along with other subscriber-only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now at SamHarris.org.

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.