Modern Wisdom - #251 - Colin Wright - The Battle Between Gender & Biology

Episode Date: November 28, 2020

Colin Wright is an Evolutionary Biologist and the Managing Editor at Quillette. The debate around gender and sex differences has taken longer to work out than Jordan Peterson's rehab. We're nearly at the end of 2020 and what constitutes a man and a woman are still being discussed. Hopefully Colin can shed some light on this. Sponsor: Get 50% discount on your FitBook Membership at https://fitbook.co.uk/showcase-your-work/ (use code MODERNWISDOM) Extra Stuff: Follow Colin on Twitter - https://twitter.com/SwipeWright  Read Colin's article - https://quillette.com/2018/11/30/the-new-evolution-deniers/  Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Well, hello my friends. Welcome back. I am finally returning to the UK after three and a half weeks in Dubai. I'm kind of weirdly glad to be coming back. If I'm honest, I think it's been very nice to have a break, but I'm ready to get back and knuckle down, make some huge growth on the channel. Also, getting ready for that big 100k subscriber celebration party with a video guide, upon which we are going to announce a bunch of new series and some very exciting stuff. On to today's guest, Colin Wright is an evolutionary biologist and the managing editor, Quilette. The debate around gender and sex differences has taken longer to work out than Jordan

Peterson's rehab. We're nearly at the end of 2020 and what constitutes a man and a woman are still being discussed. So hopefully Colin can shed some light on this. We also get an insight into the internal politics of the evolutionary biology world and his problem with Bret and Eric Weinstein's reticence around why they're not publishing papers on seemingly amazing theories that they've got. But for now, it's time for the Wies and Wonderful. Colin Wright. Colin flipping right in the building. How are you doing, man?

I'm doing well. It's a good intro. Yeah, I like the best intro I've had so far. What can you say? When I'm away, I'm on holiday. I'm just in a jovial mood. You know, just ready to discuss some evolutionary biology. I'm down, let's do it. I love it. So what's the most undiscussed topic in evolutionary biology, which you think should be talked about more?

So I'm right out of the gates there. Yeah, this very limited for play in this show, Colin, it's kind of straight in. Yeah, so there's these bigger overarching questions about just like human evolution, how we evolve certain complex traits behaviorally and otherwise. But I'd say it's really an append to who you ask on some of these issues. Some people think that we can explain all the diversity of life and all the behavior with current models of evolutionary thinking, just gradualism, mutation selection, and then you have some people, like I've heard people like Brett Weinstein, for instance, he thinks there's a missing component

that we need to have some sort of paradigm shift and we need something to explain things like peacocks tales and why there's so much diversity in the tropics and things like that. And I'm sort of in the camp that we've figured out like the main big trends and like how at least in principle how these things could have arisen. I haven't been totally convinced that there's any massive discoveries to be made in terms of, you know, that it's going to, like, completely change the way we think about evolutionary biology. I think from this point forward, it's going to be more, like, tweaking bits. And I'm sure, I mean, there can be some substantial insight we might gain from areas, but, um, yeah, I think it's going to be largely applying the same principles of, you know, Darwinian

natural selection to sort of things that we already kind of know about. Then you can also go the other route and say, well, the important things to learn about are things that we kind of already know, but we're not really allowed to say maybe or to some degree because they're sort of a social taboo against things. And I think that's probably more threatening to evolutionary biology in the short term, and maybe even long term, depending on how long these cultural norms last that won't let people speak freely about certain controversial topics

or something, or even worth the only allow one side that is sort of aligns more with our morality or something, that they only allow that side really to get published because it's just they, they, they'll go through review a lot faster because they, they kind of are leaning towards all the preconceptions and views that reviewers might already have or something. So then you get like a biased literature that's not really reflective of reality, but sort of reflective of what we'd kind of like to be true in a sense. So yeah, that's sort of my overarching take on sort of evolution at the moment. Got you. What's the bifurcating that you're talking about between Brett's approach and your

conception of how evolutions worked. You know, it's not entirely clear because he hasn't fully fleshed out the things he's proposing. Is it commonly helped? Not in my experience. No, not in my time in academia, I hadn't heard sort of the types of critiques that he's been proposing. But it's also not exactly sure what the type of critiques he is proposing because, and I do get a little frustrated from some times, he'll post things that are sort of these. He'll say something that, you know, evolution is, I don't want to misquote them, but this is sort of paraphrasing. You know, in a crisis, we haven't really made any big discoveries lately. And he kind of, in a way, if you're there's a way to read them where he seems to be like tipping his hat

towards like the intelligent design people or something, even though that's not what he's really doing. But whenever I've sort of pressed him to go into more detail, he doesn't really go into crazy detail about what exactly he's proposing. He's proposed certain things like these different behavioral types. They're called like explorer modes that explains maybe how how individuals can find new habitat, even though them exploring new habitat wouldn't be selected at an individual level, he might have a similar thing that applies to it as morphological traits and sort of bounded mutations and things like that. These are all ideas that I'm totally open to. I haven't heard them fleshed out in a way that makes me think like there's something there that's really missing that I need to find

out what this is. I like to have a podcast with him at some point and just have him lay it all out. And him and Heather are writing a book and maybe he'll go and more on this. And he's also suggested because he got pushed back from people like Michael Schurmer too that was saying like, you know, what are you saying? And also Jerry Co, who's one of the most, I guess prominent evolutionary biologists, sort of called him out in a big blog post. It was just like, what the hell's going on? Like, what are you talking about? And the response wasn't substantial.

It was just saying, like, maybe I'll write a book on this and then we can move from there. And so I'm just like, that's fine. He doesn't tend to want to go the publishing and academic journals route because he thinks there's sort of a gated institutional narrative and they're going to suppress them even though you can still submit these things online to open what it's like the these open journals that you can it's like a pre-print service where you can upload things online. So they can't suppress your ideas before they're published. Like you get your ideas published

on one of these open source areas before they get accepted. And it's, I just really, I really wish both Brett and his brother would sort of go that route. And actually, right up the paper, whether or not you're going to submit it to a journal but just have something that we can look at where I can actually assess what's being talked about here because it's just a big black box and maybe they're geniuses who are going to just turn the paradigm of evolution or maybe not. I just have nothing to go off of, so I guess we'll see. It definitely feels like. I'm a fan of this isn't like there's not a kind of kind of kind of butt heads at them. I'm just I want to see more because he's he's a smart guy. He's the kind of person that I could see maybe coming up with some

brilliant idea. I just as a biologist myself, I, I just want to know more. I'm super interested in what he what he's proposing. It definitely feels to me like him and Eric have had such burnt finger syndrome from the traditional avenues of academia that it kind of doesn't surprise me. I didn't know that about their aversion to publishing in traditional journals and putting together the papers in the normal way, but it totally doesn't surprise me given what I know about their background together the papers in the normal way, but it totally doesn't surprise me given what I know about their background. Yeah, I mean, it's not even that they want publishing journals, like I'm fine if they just publish it on a blog or something,

you know, it's just write the paper so I can see where it is and we can assess it on its own merits. Yes, Brett. Brett, if you are listening, my friend, there's a lot of people out here that want to know what's going on. So next thing that I was really interested in,

we'll get we'll loop back to this kind of recent narrative restricting what people can and can't talk about within your field. But what area do you disagree with colleagues that you think are mostly rational and reasonable in your evolutionary biology field on? What is it that you guys don't agree on? Is there anything kind of juicy that's not the obvious stuff? Yeah, well, depends how obvious I guess. There's not the obvious things that, yeah, that's

sort of the obvious area that people outside realize is that, you know, sex differences is of course sort of like this whole controversial thing both outside and within. But there's also, I mean, I studied collective behavior, animal personality, social behavior, and you social insects and also in spiders. And when you start getting into the social evolution literature, you start budding heads with these two factions that a lot of times when you go to your undergrad and in some cases grad school, you learn about

these two different modes of evolution for social behavior. There's sort of this individual selectionist model that's basically founded on kin selection, which is this notion that you might behave altruistic or seemingly altruistic towards individuals because you share like a higher proportion of your genes with them. And so it's actually not, you're not doing anything actually to benefit them, but you're benefiting yourself or at least copies of your genes sort of indirectly by helping other individuals. This is kind of like an altruistic trait that can evolve and sort of explains why we're actually nice to other individuals when you might predict that we'd just be selfish all the time. There's also

other models within that like reciprocal altruism, like I'll scratch your back, you scratch mine, things like that. And then there's a whole other kind of way of thinking that a lot of times you use this sort of like this whipping boy in classes, it's sort of this notion of group selection that like groups themselves can evolve traits at the group level that benefit the individuals within it. So it's not just driven by individual selection at sort of like this lower rate, but you can actually have

Selection between entire groups of individuals and it's gonna select for sort of like a collective type of behavior. That's way more controversial There's the tends to be this so that the history of it kind of is the reason why it's so controversial is because some of the early days when they discuss these ideas this guy name win Edwards. He sort of had this idea of of group selection as you'd have maybe individual sacrificing their body for the good of the group for the good of the species. And it turns out this is sort of like a just a cartoon version of group selection like Like you're never gonna get sort of like this sacrificial trait that can evolve in a population because any individual that has this trait for committing suicide for the group,

if it's beneficial, well, they die and they take that gene with them, they're out of the gene pool, so it's not gonna spread through the gene pool. But there's sort of this more, I guess, nuanced version of group selection that sort of looks at selection at multiple levels. They call it multi-level selection.

I think it's much less controversial, at least it makes more of theoretic sense, even though there's still a lot of people who will just think people are crazy within the field. And there's heated debates between multi-vel selection and the kin selectionists, people walking out of conference talks because they're having this certain opinion and getting papers is rejected and things like that. It's super brutal and you would never guess this. I love the idea of this stuff.

I'm clearly half academic debate is just like, I've heard stories people at conference and they're just like at the urinal next to each other. And they see the other person who's a group selection conference and they're just like at the urinal next to each other and they see the other person who's a group selection is then they're just you know they can't even they can't even like he next one and it's so it's it's the ultimate like petting is I think and I think a lot of it too is people are talking past each other in these you know there's a volume of these these 5,000 word papers back to each other in reviews where I think you know something just like this like a, like I just want to get to these sides.

I could get them on Joe Rogan or something and just let them hash it out where they can just talk because I think they both make really good points and I can't really put myself in any one camp. So, but that's a, might be a controversy people aren't really aware of. Yeah. And the outside. Did you look at how collective intelligence works for insects, stuff like ants in a big colony and stuff like that?

That's always been something that's fascinated me. Yeah, not intelligence, per se. I looked at really their collective behavior and how we can predict the behavior of the entire group based on knowing the behavior of, in spiders, knowing the behavior of sort of the composition of every individual. So, and then when I study this in wasps, I would look at how we can predict the behavior

of the entire quality, and it's also future survival and fitness, based on just knowing the personality traits of the entire colony, and it's also a future survival and fitness based on just knowing the personality traits of the queen and the beginning of the season before any colony even exists, which is just a solitary foundress. Wasp queens have personalities? Oh, almost everything has personalities in nature. So what are the different personalities that a wasp queen can have? So there's there's so many different axes of behavior the main ones people test are things like

aggressiveness and boldness There's sort of these Test of how well they're startled by like novel objects There's like gregariousness. All of these words. All these words sound like exactly what wasps do. But I'm not a massive fan of wasps, and this is exactly.

You can also look at like their foraging behavior exploration, sort of how well they learn, nest construction, things like this. Those are kind of, some of them might not be seen as a traditionally personality traits, but a personality really is just any consistent behavior that exists that an individual has that's consistent throughout its life, or more specifically like consistent individual differences in behavior that exists in a population. So certain individuals behave one way in this one context and they behave a similar way in multiple contexts. It's really just sort of like a

common sense, I guess, idea of what personality is. If you're an aggressive person, you're going to be aggressive from when you're young to when you're old and probably across different contexts. It's just sort of a scientific version of what we sort of normally think about when we talk about personalities. And just as, you know, no two individuals have the same personality. What my research did was sort of apply that same principle

but to entire groups and looking at the emergent behavior of an entire colony. And how does this one colony differ in its behavior from other colonies? And how are they you know dividing labor up among individuals how do they respond to you know being attacked or something or being disturbed basically any sort of context that would be relevant for their survival of a group. What you have been focused on for the last few years I know that you've taken a

little bit of a left turn with regards to your career recently. So what have you been focused on? Yeah. While I was in academia, or not in academia, after academia. My last few years. So after it hasn't been so much academic research in sort of the type I would be doing, if I'm in a lab or something like that,

since I don't have the same funding I do now that I'm not in academia. So it's more sort of a literature-based approach to doing research. I've been very interested in sex differences in humans and also animals generally. How sex differences arise. A lot of more behavioral psychology I'm sort of trying to get into that literature, and also the human personality literature, because human personalities actually tested quite differently than animal personality has done. There's different traits that are looked at.

I mean, there's some overlap, but basically you can't ask an animal to fill out a survey, and so you can't get at some of the nuances that you can get into people but then at the same time like animals aren't gonna try to deceive you the way a human might try to do or try to make themselves appear better on paper so there's there's benefits and disadvantages to to each and I think it's be really interesting to see if they make how many bridges can be dropped between sort of the human personality literature animal personality literature, and also going into some of Jonathan Heights research with the moral foundations and stuff, and how do those relate to human personality differences, too?

Can we look at how these map on to political parties and individual types of behavior? Can we find keystone individuals, which are just sort of individuals that have a disproportionate influence on the behavior of groups in any other individual, which could be important for things like rioting or, you know, all kinds of interesting questions. So I've just been kind of exploring all kinds of stuff, which has been super nice because back when I was in academia, I was studying ants and spiders and wasps a lot. And so everything I'm reading is just like, ants, spiders and wasps. But now I've just sort of just blown it open.

Like I can research anything I want to now. And it's been really refreshing actually. As much as I love ants, spiders and wasps, it would be, I'd probably have to switch systems at some point just to remain sane because And you can only read so many of those. There's an upper bound on how much you can research in sex man like being in the trenches talking about gender and sex differences for the last few years must have been You must have been like the vanguard and the Lord of the Rings two towers battle the Lord of the Rings, two towers, battle. Yeah, I mean, I never expected that that's kind of where I'd end up, you know,

sticking my ground in the culture war, I guess, but I, yeah, I didn't, I didn't choose it really. As just I've always been sort of somebody who tries to like debunk things, I used to have a blog back in the day where I would just debunk weird pseudoscience, like sort of ancient Chinese medicine or something, you know, just things like that. So I was always very sort of combative in that sense of trying to like debunk pseudoscience. And I guess I just had just, in my opinion, I saw what I would appear to be pseudoscience coming from inside the academy rather than from the outside. So yeah, there's a lot more, there's a lot more consequences when you decide to speak up from within the institution

against other people that are in the institution rather than speaking out against ancient Chinese medicine or against creation science where they don't really have a foothold in academia in the first place. So yeah, it's been interesting couple of years for sure. Are you surprised that the argument about the gender and sex differences and how we define that is still going? I mean, Jordan Peterson has been in and out of rehab in the time that this debate is being going. How is this. How is it still going? Is there still more for us to discuss?

I mean, I don't think there's a lot to discuss. Really, I mean, it seems pretty cut and dry that we can just distinguish between what biological sex is and what gender identity is and know that these things are completely different things. And just move on from there, like this shouldn't be a difficult division to be making. Yet somehow this is just, you know, we're getting things sometimes in the New York times or even in nature, magazine, the most prestigious journal in the world that's making claims that sex is a spectrum or that you can't determine individual sex based

on anatomy or genetics. That's a claim that they've made in Nature Magazine before in an editorial that they did. And it's the most extreme claims I can imagine coming out of a biologist's mouth. In extreme claims, I can imagine coming out of a biologist mouth. So yeah, it's truly bizarre. What's the definition that you use of gender and of sex? So for sex, so there's sort of like two levels to look at it, and this is where a lot of confusion sort of arises, is that there's sex as sort of a concept levels to look at it. And this is where a lot of confusion sort of arises. Is it there's sex as sort of a concept if we're talking about, you know, males and females.

And when you're looking at a population of organisms, if you're asking, like, does this population, does it sexually reproduce? Okay, if the answer is yes, then you say, like, what kind of system does it have? Or are they isogemic, which means they have individuals that aren't really males or females, but they might have two different mating types, where they have the same size,

gamut basically, which is, you know, when there's males or females at sperm or OVA, but some species don't have these two dichotomous things. They're just sort of the similar size gamutes that'll come together and create offspring. What's an example of that animal? What animals would fall into that category? There's like mainly there's a lot of plants that have that like some fungus. You know, I don't know. There's some sea organisms that have sort of this type of. Yeah, I'm sure there's many I'm missing.

I don't focus too much on the isogumic species because they're not that particularly interesting to me, but when you get to the the existence of a male and female and what those are as sort of a concept when you're looking at a population is the the individuals that are creating the small gametes whatever it is you know sperm if you're treats you know you're making pollen or something. Those are considered the males and the females are the ones that are producing the large gametes that are basically stationary. But then there gets to the point where when you want to actually assign or record the

sex of individual organisms that we come up up against something where it says, a male's before they reach puberty, they are not actually creating sperm, they don't produce any, so are they sexless because they don't produce small gametes? And so when you're actually a sexing individual bodies, you sort of look at what their primary sex organs, they're going as, what's the developmental trajectory they've taken? Have they developed to organize around producing sperm or organized around producing Ova? Are these basically are they testes or is it a variant issue? Is what kind of ad base comes down to? But you get a lot of people that try to use things like secondary sex characteristics,

like the characteristics that we get after puberty, so females will get breasts in their body fat distributed differently over their body, males get more upper body strength, and our jaws become more chiseled all that stuff. They conflate that with biological sex. So they're sort of looking at the appearance of bodies and how a body looks generally. And they're saying that because that's sort of on a spectrum and you can have masculine-looking females and feminine-looking males, that's sort of how they're trying to quantify sex, even though that's not what sex is at all.

And then you asked about gender. I don't really have a definition of gender. There's like five out there. And I just, I find it almost, it really depends on what they mean when they say it. So whenever someone asks me about gender, I always say like, well, what definition do you have? Like, I'm a biologist, so I'm, when I talk about males and females, I know exactly what we're talking about in that context because it's a very,'s a very scientific definition, it's very precise. But there's some people that have definitions of gender that, you know, you have like the radical feminist definition, which is sort of the societal roles and expectations that are

placed on individuals based on their perceived sex. So we might associate women with being more submissive or more caring for offspring, that type of thing, and male is more aggressive and dominant in that type of stuff. There's the idea of gender identity and it's sort of like an internal feeling of masculinity or femininity, however those are defined, which usually sort of reduced to sort of gendered sex stereotypes. And then there's sort of psychological definitions, there's more activist-oriented definitions. There's like the Tumblr definition,

where it's just like everyone's got this gender identity and here's a list of a hundred of them and you can just pick one off of it, you're a new trough or whatever, by gender, pan-gender, gender-fluid, like there's all those two, which is just sort of like the the Pokemon approach to gender is that usually like kind of describe it. There's huge list. So yeah, I don't know what gender is. If someone gives me a definition, I can just at

least know we're talking about and see if they're differing at it from biological sex. That's kind of what I care about. Like people can talk about gender as much as they want to as long as they don't tread on sort of the scientific definition of biological sex and try to blur that boundary in some sort of way. So genders more the expression of the particular sexual characteristics that or not or the counter to the particular sexual characteristics that an individual has. Yeah. I think that's mostly the most common sort of way people think about it, I suppose. There's a political divide to conservatives who basically don't distinguish between sex and gender. Also, like radical feminists too. So their definition of what a man and a woman is is just like an adult human male or female So they don't really add that social component sometimes they do sometimes they don't

It just depends what's into sex. That's it. Is that another sex? So it's it's not another sex. It's just sort of defined as either being sexually ambiguous or they're being sort of a mismatch between sexually ambiguous, or they're being sort of a mismatch between your internal sex organs and external appearance. So you can have certain individuals say that have like complete androgen and sensitivity syndrome, where their cells don't respond to testosterone at all. They don't receive signals to develop based on the presence of testosterone. Also, in utero 2, so they might be born and look 100% female. Then they grow up too, and they still look 100% female. They might be on average a little bit taller. But when puberty

comes around, they don't start menstruatingating and then they usually go to the doctor, like why are time menstruating? And that turns out they have internal testes and their body doesn't respond to the testosterone that they're making, so they just never develop to look like a male, even though inside their biologically male in a very real sense. But it's not a third sex,

because if you look at the definition of sex, it's basically the organization around producing sperm or producing OVA. Since there's not a third intermediate gamut between sperm or OVA, there's not really a third sex. There's variations of body types, but there isn't a third gamut that is out there to be a third sex, even like a hermaphrodite, even like a simultaneous hermaphrodite if you have an individual that can produce birth, both Burm or Ova, which hasn't really been shown in humans. That would be an example of someone being sort of both male and female. There wouldn't be like a new- Still not a third thing, yeah.

Yeah, they're not like, I tend to use like colors. You can have like if you have like red golf balls and green golf balls, you know, you have another golf ball that's like half of it is red and half of it is green. Like well, like red green isn't its own unique color. It's just like a combination of red and green. You know, it's you can you can mix them, but that's not what like a hermaphrodite is. They're like both at the same time. So yeah, there's there's some nuances there, but a lot of the

Some people in both sides do they just sort of throw the nuance out the window and they don't want to Sort of get in the details of what they're actually talking about. Yeah, what do people mean when they say that gender is a social construct then? Yeah, so when they say that, if they say gender is a social construct, it's usually that the radical feminist view that sort of there are these societal expectations and norms that we build up socially that we come to expect of people that look male or female. For example, if you're like an effeminate male growing up, they probably get really bullied by their friends to some degree or other, maybe not close friends, but I might get bullied

for being like a sissy or something like that. Or if you're a super tomboy, you know, you might get bullied because, you know, you're not particularly feminine. And so that's sort of the social aspect of making individuals trying to conform to these stereotypes of masculinity or femininity. And so in a way, gender is constructed kind of that way by society that's sort of having people try to conform to these norms of masculinity and femininity. There's also a biological component where males are on average more

likely to behave in a certain way that conforms to masculinity or femininity. But the social construct is sort of like the other societal roles that we ascribe to these different sexes. It's this social component that we sort of to these different sexes. It's this social component that we sort of put into our culture, I guess, might be the best way to describe it. There's certain renditions of that that I think are interesting that can need to be talked about. But then you get some people who are saying sex and gender are all social constructs and

they sort of mean what they mean by that is they don't actually exist. There's no such thing as sex differences at all because there's overlap between males and females. You can't say that they actually differ and they're all involved in just trying to blur boundaries between anything so we can't make any statements about average group differences and things like that. So there's more nuanced and more messy ways to approach These questions feels like they're all messy ways. Feels like every single one of them is a messy way

Yeah, I think the main difference is some people are being maybe intentionally Trying to obfuscate things and not offer clarity. They're only trying to blur things and then people like me and others are trying to just, you know, say like yeah There's a lot of complexity. Sometimes boundaries are a little blurry, but that doesn't mean we can't make sort of general true statements about average differences between groups according to some sort of You know their sex or whatever it might be. How much of this is a semantic game, do you think? Oh, it's almost entirely a semantic game.

Like, when I, if I'm talking to people who are, or activists, they'll use the words that are, you know, those say gender or something, like I'll make a statement like biological sex is into spectrum and then they'll, they'll counter with, you know, like no gender is a spectrum. I was like, well, I didn't say gender. I said biological sex isn't a spectrum and then they'll counter with, you know, like no gender is a spectrum. I said, well, I didn't say gender, I said biological sex and a lot of times the rebuttals to my articles will be, you know, all my articles are all about biological sex and they'll sort of refer to biological sex,

then they'll have a sentence where they sort of pivot to gender identity and then the rest of the article will be about gender identity and those do their whole gender thing after that and it's like that's not responding to anything I'm saying. And that's just yeah there's they'll use gender in a context or sex in a context depending on like what is the kind of the most expedient way to to like win an argument to some degree it seems. Maybe I'm being a little harsh on them, but this is what it seems like. At least from my perspective. Yeah, it reminds me a little bit

I was talking to Douglas Murray earlier this year and he brought up Black Lives Matter and the fact that you have semantic overload within that terminology. And even this year, you saw certain people when referring to the group calling it BLM, and then so that you could kind of semantically distance yourself from the term Black Lives Matter. And it seems a little bit like there's a common thread, perhaps, between that and what's going on here. Yeah. I mean, one good example is whenever I talk about intersex individuals of people ask what

that is, some people will say, you know, like a developmental error or something has taken place or, you know, there's a condition or something like that, which I think you need to use some word because it's not the norm of sexual development. And then if you were to say that developmental errors take place, they'll then switch it around and say, are you calling me an error? I'm an error. They'll take that word and they'll describe it to them as a person. And it's just no one's calling you as a person and you know it's just no one's calling like you as a person an error like they're just saying that

at some point of development, you know if someone developed and they were born with you know with only one arm like you can say that there's an error and development has taken place that led to a limb missing you're not calling them an error you know there's still a 100% human a limb missing, you're not calling them an error, and they're still 100% human. But this is like this semantic and we're always trying to kind of bait you into saying something that they can then construe as you being a terrible person or something to to then go on and make you try to smear your reputation or something. Yeah, and I suppose that gender dysphoria, in its most extreme manifestations, could be described as an error,

and quite rightly so, like the people who are living within that particular body feel like that body isn't for them. If that's not a glossary definition of what an error is, then I'm not sure, but as you get further and further down the boundary, obviously you have no way to know my level of gender dysphoria is at 10, yours is only at the five, yours is only at a two,

yours is at a minus two, you feel perfectly happy being in a man's body or a woman's body. I suppose that again, that degree of the degrees of freedom for interpretation, just further muddy the water. Yeah, it becomes an error when you move beyond just saying that like I sort of feel like I've been born of the wrong body to people saying that like that's literally the case. Like I've I was assigned the wrong sex at birth and you know that's that's just what it is. I'm actually this other sex.

It's like, that's just not literally true. And I just think we have a responsibility to be precise about what is actually true in these situations. Because if you're just going to bend over backwards and let them redefine their own bodies, like alchemy or something, then just based on what they feel, then there's just nothing they can't just believe and have be true. I mean, we need to have some sort of grounding

principle that tethers us to reality to some degree. So yeah, that's kind of what I'm concerned about. You know, if we can reject something is clear cut in most cases is biological sex is if that can be just dismissed and mass by a whole bunch of people, there's just nothing else that, what other things are we're going to start just saying aren't real, like age? Like what, I mean you already get people saying some of that stuff too and it's, you know, I see this is just a hill that I'm willing to die on because there's, there's no, there's no stopping if we get past this point. Like this is one of the most obvious truths, I think that we can, I can at least state as a biologist. So I'll just keep saying it, I suppose. It's not working out okay for me. It's that classic

Ben Shapiro video, right? Why aren't you 60? Why aren't you 60? Yeah, basically, it's like that. Yeah, I mean, I don't know man, like what has happened over the last 15 years to cause this to rise to prominence? Because I went to school 15 years ago and this wasn't, I wasn't hearing this sort of rhetoric pushed that all.

Yeah, I mean, it's good to go to people like Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay who can trace sort of like the ideological underpinnings of the movement and the ideologies. It comes down to at least for, you know, the whole sect and realism stuff. That's just the humanities in specifically queer theory that's just basically involved in trying to destroy any sort of binary and make everything as blurry as possible and then problematize things where if you disagree you're a horrible person, I've set that sort of postmodern way of looking at things where it's all about discourses and power dynamics. that sort of postmodern way of looking at things where it's all about discourses and power dynamics. And it was present, it wasn't like it didn't exist back when I was an undergrad. It was just kind of starting there. And I went to undergrad when I was 2008 to 2012, I think.

And it was there, but it wasn't like a dominant view at the time. There were some activists that would talk about that. and I would just be like, okay, that sounds crazy. And I just never thought about it again because I didn't have to. And then, of course, when I went to graduate and then I went to grad school and got my doctor, then at the time I was sort of looking for jobs. Now, that's the dominant view. And there are so many people in just my field right now,

other biologists who are making these same claims. It's just like it's super seeding the science in many ways. And I know a lot of the people that I've even co-authored papers with, I think I'm just like this horrible, horrible person now, just for writing some essays in Kuala, it's, it's amazing. Yeah.

Did you say that someone or a number of people had reached out to you basically for warning you that they were going to have to do a, so public announcement about the fact that they are not associated with you. They do not believe what you believe. And they have to kind of do it behind the scenes to you just so that in front of the scenes they can make this show of force. I mean, it was it was someone who'd co-authored papers with me and you know,

I'm always fine with people who want to disagree with me even publicly. Like I don't get there, I don't like take offense to that. It doesn't make me feel like I'm being attacked because I just think ideas need to be attacked as long as it's not saying bad things about me directly, I'm fine with it. This was a close friend and Edith said, yeah, I'm going to need to write something because and the scariest part is that, you know, I think he actually disagreed with me, which is fine, but it wasn't just the fact that he disagreed. And people saw, like

his colleague saw that we had been, you know, we were friends before, we had co-authored papers, saw my name on a paper next to his. And it was this mutual policing, like they went to him and there, they're making him sort of justify him ever associating with me. And he was worried that just because of sort of the fire that's going on with me and the controversy that sort of sprung up, that there was gonna be splash damage on his career and that he needed to distance himself from me.

And so I think that's just such an exemplary of the mutual policing going on, that he felt that he had this pressure to condemn my views. Before he was a silent on the issue, he didn't even care. But it was the social coercion of his colleagues, where he felt he needed to do a public denunciation, which that's the scariest part because it's so true. These are my experience, the cultural aspect of academia

and the way that you need to be, you need to have allies to do good science, especially in my field of evolution and ecology. You need collaborators, you need to have people going on grants with you. And they can essentially make your career impossible to move forward just by not wanting to speak with you, not wanting to associate with you.

And that's sort of what he's not coming his way if he didn't make a public denunciation. So that's the scariest part. What do you wish people were spending their time talking about or thinking about rather than debating gender? Because there's this famous Douglas Murray line where he says, when theians are at the gate we'll be debating about what gender they are whilst we all get Kalashnikov'd in the head and I've been reading a lot of existential risk recently I'm absolutely terrified about the advent of misaligned artificial general intelligence and nanotechnology turning us all into

Grey Goo or bioweapons or engineered pandemics or natural pandemics. Like if there was ever going to be a year that should have re-aligned our values, was 2020 not the one. And why hasn't it brought us, why hasn't it brought our values back in line? Yeah, I think the things we need to talk about, it's not necessarily things we're not talking about. I just think we're talking about things in the complete opposite way we should be talking about them. I think it's important to talk about things like racism in society, it's important to talk

about whether or not there are environmental components to behavioral differences between sexes or whatever species you're talking about. But we just need to have a more sober conversation where we don't leave some explanations or just off the table before the conversation even begins. You can't talk about like things like any sort of cultural inertia that any sort of population might have, regardless of where it's coming from in the world. Like we can't talk about any of those sort of factors. Like any cultural factors whatsoever that could be predictive of differential group outcomes.

Like that's just off the table. You can't talk about those at all. You know, if you're looking at police violence or whatever, like if there were papers that were published in prestigious journals like PNAS that you know looked at police shootings and didn't find any correlation between this you know, I think it was actual people who were like armed to or shot by police. They didn't find a racial component to that. And Heather McDonald, who comments a lot about race issues, she had some articles in the Wall Street Journal about this highlighting this research.

It was one of the biggest data sets. And the wake of George Floyd, the authors of that paper, nothing wrong with the paper, they just said that they wanted to retract it because they were getting hammered by people saying that this research is racist. But again, the data, there is nothing wrong. You usually only retract papers if there's a flaw, if the interpretations off. And usually it's just not even a retract. Unless it was like data fabrication was found.

If it's just a bad interpreter, you can amend them. You can say, like, oh, we need to issue an addendum onto this thing, but no, they just fully retracted it. That's calling the ejecto seat. Oh, yeah, they just memory hold this paper. It doesn't even exist anymore. You can't cite it. Now, if you try to cite it, people are going to be like,

oh, you're a crap-potsiting this paper that's been retracted. It's like, well, no, there's nothing wrong with the data. And Heather McDonald even said they've retracted it because I accurately portrayed their research in the Wall Street Journal. And that's basically what happens. So we're going to get this situation now where the only research people are willing to publish is that that aligns with a certain political narrative and it's just, you can't trust the experts anymore, it's horrible.

The environment is so salted and scorched earth that it's not a friendly environment to actually go into and try to ask a question and be okay with any outcome even if it's sort of doesn't align with what we'd like to be true. Is this still on an upward trajectory in academia? Because it keeps on seeming to me as someone who consumes a lot of content and has been a fly in the wall watching this for the last few years. First off, it was the sort of thing that was students on campus. Well, you don't really have to worry because they're just students on campus and when they grow

up, they'll hit the real world and the real world will sort them out. And then it started to sort of move into policy of private companies and you saw Netflix and other companies have some kind of like weird policies about eye contact and then it starts to move into press and you see some increasingly bizarre headlines that if you were to give to your mum or dad, kind of sort of the earth people probably wouldn't make a massive amount of sense. And now we're seeing politicians and we're seeing public policy. Like, is it still a growing concern? Because to me, it's still not something I've ever encountered, IRL personally, and up until that sure that it's going to come and arrive at our door, this denial of facts. No matter what your particular beliefs are around the topics that we've gone through

today, there is a lot of fact denial. Both sides can't be right. So there is fact denial going on. Like what's going on? Yeah, it definitely arrived at my door, which was shocking to me because I was going to facts and I'll go on. Like, yeah. What's going on? Yeah, it definitely arrived at my door, which was shocking to me, because the reason I decided to, I wanted to be an academic, you know, 12 years ago, when I decided to major in a biologist, was because I wanted to work, you know, at the frontier of biological

research. And I thought what better environment to what could be more intellectually stimulating than talking about certain issues and being only driven by facts with a bunch of other experts in the field and things like that. And that just turned out not to be the case. You know, I had said that same mantra that you referred to is sort of, referred to as when you get into the real world, you're not going to have these. I used to say the real world doesn't have trigger warnings. It turns out it does now. They've modified their environment to accommodate them. The same way the humans have sort of,

you know, we need shelter. And so we've now reached a position where we've created houses. And now we don't have to brave the elements. They've sort of just created the same equivalent. They've just made safe spaces and places where we said that they didn't exist. And it's definitely getting way worse. Like it's, yeah, we're nowhere near the peak of this.

I don't think, I guess it's just exploded in over the last six months. Like it's just gotten everywhere. I mean, we see the diversity equity and inclusion statements that are taking over all the, I can't, it's hard to apply to university now, right? I don't have to fill out this diversity equity and inclusion statement,

which is basically a political litmus test that I pledge allegiance to this sort of way of thinking about racial issues that I just really don't agree with. It's not because I'm like a bigot or anything, it's just I think a more liberal approach is more warranted and some of the words are used in ways that, you know that non-standard definitions.

Yeah, it's creating this feedback loop in academia too, where you have a bunch of people on hiring committees who have these ideologies and the only higher other people that have these ideologies and social media makes it so you can find out someone's political beliefs and might not think these are influencing your hiring decision, but they almost certainly are. Like what's the chance that someone has a public Facebook and they have a MAGA hat on or something. They could be the best, you know, microbiologist in the world. They're not going to get hired bi- Berkeley. Like they're just not going to get a job there. Period. Especially if they don't fill out the diversity statement the way that they want

it to be done. And Berkeley has a rubric of how exactly to respond to these and what types of answers are wrong. So they're like, they're leading you to tell you like, here's what you need to say, like, say the words, say them. And it's just, it's a nightmare. And it's just going to get worse. Once you get this feedback loop where you get more and more skewed towards one political orientation, it's just going to go to fixation. It's going to be 100% and then where do you go from there? How do you reverse it? If everyone shares the same blind spot, there's no one there to point it out to them anymore.

It's like some sort of brutal brutal mouth-usian trap. Oh, yeah. I'm, do you think post-modernism is slowing human progress? Oh, yeah. It just has to because it's just not tethered to reality. I mean, there might be like sort of a nugget of truth that is at the center of their concerns. But when you go about to try to actually try to base a policy or some action in your basis is postmodernism, it's just assumes that powers, the thing that permeates everything and that truth is created through narratives and there's not like an objective reality or at least

we can't come to objective knowledge about that reality. There's just nothing we can't go anywhere, there's no traction to go direction. Are the effects sufficiently widespread now that they're actually making a genuine impact on our ability to move forward as a civilization as well? Oh, I think so. I mean, I'm just on almost every issue that we care most about. The main, almost every issue that we care most about. The main, I guess the ideology de jour is rooted in postmodernism, like almost entirely. You look at just sort of the critical race theory approach to how they want to solve racism and it's just measured by, let's look at outcomes, let's look at any disparity of outcomes and that's just going to be, if there are these disparities, that is the definition of institutional structural racism and end of story, and we need to

fix the outcomes rather than try to solve something at the beginning of the pipeline, because they've convinced themselves it's not a pipeline issue, it's just sort of a systemic issue, and that, you know, the only way we can do it to fix things is by just having some sort of racial quotas is what it usually boils down to in the end. Are there any areas that are still holding fast? Is there any area of academia or research which is yet to be slowed by this? Yeah, some of the more, I mean, I guess, stereotypically, hard sciences, like particle physics and, you know, I'm certain, I'm sure that like a lot of engineers, I mean, I've seen postmodern papers that are about sort of trying to deconstruct like engineering and physics and cosmology and stuff. I don't think they have any influence whatsoever right now,

but they're definitely trying to get a foothold and somehow they've managed to get some of these insane papers published in these in decent journals, just because no one wants to reject the paper because they'll be, you know, almost certainly accused of some, some range of bigotry if they were to reject it. So yeah, it's sort of has a wedge everywhere, but some place is going to be a lot harder to drive it through because at some point with engineering, the bridge needs to stand. The fields where there's gonna be a real world, like bridge collapsing somewhere, something that's just like that obviously

is not a stable bridge. Something that like reality will just break down everything and make it really apparent that this is incorrect. Those are gonna be hard of not impossible to really completely take over. I may not maybe. I say that now, but who knows? It seems like you keep on using the word hard science, and that's kind of the one that appears to be the last stand at the moment for rationality. Has the last five to ten years been a stress test

Yeah, the last five to 10 years being a stress test for all academic disciplines in that way. Yeah, some more than others for sure. The stress, it's harder for some to survive the stress test because some of the ideas that they're dealing with, if they're actually, if they're wrong about something like, like in my field ecology, for instance, we're dealing with super they're wrong about something like that. Like in my field ecology, for instance, we're dealing with super complex variables. We're looking at the way populations are interacting with their environment and the environments change and the populations are changing genetically

over time and complex behaviors. You can make some broad measurements about how things are happening between groups or something, but it's not a very precise science. It's, it requires long term studies to get like anything that's going to be super robust. And so if you're wrong about something in ecology or in psychology or some of these other sciences that are just so complex to, to measure, you don't get that moment of watching a bridge collapse, you know, that you would get as an engineer who...

The rocket doesn't explode. The rocket doesn't explode, like, you know, exploding rocket and a collapsing bridge. Those are just immediate ways to know, like, we really messed up here. But some other fields, you're not going to know you've messed up until, you know, a while or never, depending on how you get, you know, if you have certain narratives that are getting published more and you're not accepting other things to get published that could potentially debunk these things, there might be, you know, there's these cryptic, you know, crumbling bridges that are in there waiting to be discovered, but they just might not be discovered. And so yeah, so that's the stress

test is like, do you have an objective test of failure that's going to be so readily apparent to everybody? And a lot of fields just don't have that. It's much more nuanced and requires a lot more rigor. I guess as well, in fields that are based on interpretation, when you think about what a lot of literature is, what a lot of philosophy is, it's abstract thought, it's thinking about thinking, it's interpreting pasts, passages and ideas. And by its very nature, that level of abstraction adds slippage into the system where people can slide nefarious ideas. Yeah, I mean, any of those fields we know where they're just thinking about thinking.

I mean, once you go down a pathway, like, there's no corrective mechanism to get back on the trail, you're just going to be walking out in the woods forever and ever. So yeah, you need to have some tether to reality. There needs to be some sort of external check. You need to have some, what is it? The theory of knowledge where it's it's it's it's based on feedback from nature. Basically, you have to have some way of being falsified, some way of some outcome where you could say, oh, yeah, we're clearly wrong on that because we didn't expect that outcome or we predicted this outcome and that's not what we got. Yeah, you need to be able to, in some way, to test alternative hypotheses and you just

don't get that in some fields of philosophy, especially those that are based on, you know, those, the post-moderate thing where you're just narratives is like the foundation of it all. As an evolutionary biologist, do you find it hilarious or interesting that this, to me, seems like a massive status game that everybody is just status signaling left, right, and center. Status signaling that they're not status signaling tearing down other people who are that must be fascinating to you. It really is. Yeah, I mean, there was a paper, I might butcher the interpretation of it, but it was like, it was an evolutionary psychology paper that was talking about how, it was like an evolutionary psychological explanation

for the reason why certain ideas are being suppressed. Like it just, it fitted the entire, like, suppression of ideas within a framework of evolutionary psychology and how it's just sort of like these tribal mentalities that are going going at one another. And just basically predicted, like this is what we would expect if evolutionary psychology was true. We'd have these certain groups that are trying to suppress these ideas and signal in

these certain ways. You get to the smallest little things too, like pronoun usage or something, and just in your bio or in your signature of your email. And these are like, you don't need to be aware of what those are doing, like at an ultimate level, for it to be actually influenced by some evolutionary force. So like people who have the premise, they might tell themselves that these, I have these apprentices because it's a nice thing. It's creating an inclusive environment or something like that for certain minorities or something. But what these turn into and what the real function I think of these things are is, it

will turn into a sort of like this in-group signaling where you see other people sort of like someone who wears a cross or something on their shirt. Like you can identify these individuals who share a wide range of your beliefs in the in-group. But then once this becomes more expansive and more and more people are using this and almost every email I get from a university professor has them and their bios and on their Twitter profile,

it's less of identifying the in-group with given that everyone now knows that pronouns and bios and email signatures is a thing, it says more now when you don't have it in your bio, so it becomes more of like a way to identify this out-group. And there's just so so many evolutionary dynamics that are going on here with forming tribal identities and how easy it is to form these identities and how, you know, if these identities are ever challenged, how easy they are just defended super hard, like if they're challenged and you agree, so that you have this imbalance of how easy it is to form identities and then how

how much people double down on those easily formed identities when they're challenged. And it just breeds this tribalism that you were getting in almost every area of with political discourse nowadays. Have you read Scott Alexander's blog post? I can tolerate anything except the outgroup. I don't think I've read the I've read some of his stuff. I really need to go and do like a deep dive on his because every time I've read his stuff, they're just incredibly thoughtful. He's phenomenal, man. So I implore everyone that's listening to go and check that out. I'll send it to you once we're done, man.

It's awesome. And it just identifies how much fear everybody has around not being part of that in-group, and it's so unbelievably compelling. And upon deep diving down the evolutionary psychology, Red Pill Rabbit Hole earlier this year, it's shown me just how easily swayed we can be as seemingly sovereign beings. We presume that we have our own agency and I'm in control and I define my own destiny and you realize that the vast majority of what you do, you don't even understand how your genes are manipulating your emotions. Let alone when you then start to scale that across a 50 person workplace and a 10 person

family and the interactions between all of them and social media with a couple of billion people on it consuming the world's news in real time 24 hours a day. Like, it doesn't surprise me that we're in a mess in 2020. It really doesn't. And my fear, which I wish, usually I'm able to kind of assuage things because I believe I get myself set on a particular idea and then I realize I've talked myself into it rather than needing to be talked out of it. But that was my question about, is this on an upper trajectory and my fears about

the control problem for AGI and existential crisis and risk and stuff like that? Is that, like this, this could be the great filter as the crisis and risk and stuff like that, is that this could be the great filter as Robin Hansen puts it. This could be the thing that stops us from actualizing our potential as a civilization, and de-allaud, if the thing that kept us together below Dumbar's number when we were living valley to valley

and trying not to get the pathogen from the tribe next to us Is the thing that stops us from colonizing the galaxy? We didn't deserve to do it Yeah, I know I've been surprised that during this recent election cycle we didn't see more Deepfakes, which I think are just gonna be It's gonna discompletely erode our ability to tell What's real, you know like you can have a perfect deep fake of any political candidate you want to, just like clearly sitting down there talking to someone who's not really there, you can just make a perfect fake. Like how much would that just destroy?

I mean, like the access Hollywood thing that people thought was going to take Trump down, you know, the whole, the, uh, and the, uh, was it a, uh, motor home or something or bus? In the future, they could, we could, they could make those videos just from scratch, you know, just with actors and just deepfake it all the way. I mean, I'm, I'm shocked we didn't see them now because I've seen some deepfakes that are scary good now. And they're a lot better than they were even just a year ago. So I think yeah, everything is kind of pointing to the trajectory of we're not going to have the ability to know what's true anymore for any high degree of confidence. And actually, that kind of relates to the control problem for AGI, right?

That what you want to do is you want to have the particular goals aligned before you give the system the power to enact them. You need to ensure that you have the foundational source code of the direction that that's moving in correct before it has the ability to move at a speed that that occurs to happen. And in a weird way, we have gone backward with a lot of the values and the virtues that had taken a couple of thousand years to develop and had arrived at a society

that kind of understood how things were supposed to work. And that now being undone, whilst at the same time, the speed at which you can undo it and promulgate these new messages, whether that be through technology communication, stuff like that. But it's like going backwards, it's like going backwards at twice the speed somehow, like going backwards, and up in the air at the same time and just getting dropped out of an aeroplane. Like the deep faith thing is absolutely crazy and you're totally right, it doesn't surprise me, that's the case.

Another thing that I learned a while ago was the difference in suggestiveness that people have from VR. Have you seen this? So there's basically an upper bound on the level of change that can occur to your belief system when you're consuming content through a particular type of medium. Let's say it's too dimensional on your phone with audio and video. But then when you strap a VR headset onto yourself, they were able to show people, I think the study was done on,

it was to do with paper, to do with the trees that were cut down for paper, and it had some unbelievable multiplier, larger impact on how people related to their paper usage and the way that they felt about the environment, mostly because it was such a more immersive absorption mechanism, I suppose. And fuck, I don't know what we need to do because it's like technologies usually what we would claim would be the solution to all of our problems in situations like this.

Let's get back to what truth is, let's use technology to help enable us, but it actually seems like technology is the delivery mechanism. It's the needle through which the virus is coming. Yeah, I mean, it's just the tool that ultimately needs to have, as you mentioned, like the good inputs to actually have it result in good outcomes. So, yeah, you can use it for any end that you want to want to want to enact, you know, there's a lot of people that are probably wishing to bring the whole thing down. So, yeah So how apocalyptic, what an apocalyptic way to finish a podcast. But dude, I really do think that it's important that we understand this. People can only arm themselves with correct knowledge of exactly how these messages are being promulgated.

And no matter what particular stance you have, I think that being able to talk, it's a try to say it. Now, like, everybody shouting and no one's listening, but it's try because it's so obvious. Yeah. But yeah, man, what's coming up for Quillette? Let's leave the listeners on a bright and no. What have you guys got coming up at Quillette soon?

That's going to be cool. You know, there's certain things I can't talk about too much. commercial, confidential, commercial confidentiality doing this again. I will say that there is a book that's going to be announced very, very soon. So I'm going to say, I want you to get angry at Cliff hanging sod calling. All right. So if people want to check you out at swipe right on Twitter,

where else can they go? I have an Instagram that's swipe right fitness and that's right. Is in my last name W R a G H T. Yeah. So I do have a whole fitness thing I do as well. I'm going to try to do a little bit more to that. I didn't know that was you. So I was going to tag you earlier on today. I was like, there's no way that Collins got swipe right fitness when he's got swipe right

on his normal Twitter. I was like, that can't be him. I won't bother tagging him. So it is. Yeah, I was trying to get swipe right, but someone took it, but they haven't used that account in years, and they won't respond to my messages to try to take it from them. Worst kind of human. The worst kind of human.

Look dude, thank you so much. Everything that we spoke about will be linked below. I'll also put the main collette article that you sent me earlier on in case people want to check that out. I'll go and have a read below. Calling thank you man. I appreciate you. Been awesome thank you so much.