The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss - Charles Murray: On Human Diversity

Episode Date: July 1, 2022

After writing the book, The Bell Curve, Charles Murray became a controversial figure in the US Social Science scene, and was much maligned in the public arena. His work has been misinterpreted as being racist and sexist, and at Middlebury College students forcibly stopped his guest lecture and rioted. As often the case with stereotypes, Murray is instead a thoughtful scholar who has tried to base his social science research on data from empirical science, something that should be standard, but isn’t. I wanted to discuss his most recent book, Human Diversity, with him. It is far from controversial, and instead is a clear effort to explain often complex genetic concepts in a popular format. He makes it clear that he focuses on only well understood and well accepted concepts, and the discussion we had was instructive and enjoyable. He is a delightful and thoughtful individual and I believe that comes out in our dialogue. I know from experience, as I indicated at the beginning of our discussion, that many people will condemn the discussion without listening to it, just as they condemn his writing without reading it. But if you take the time, I think you will be pleasantly surprised, as well as learning some new things about the world. One of the purposes of The Origins Podcast is to connect science and culture, and Murray connects hard science with social science issues in a refreshingly honest and detailed way. Indeed, if all social scientists and policy makers took his approach, the overall tenor of popular discussion would improve, I believe. And while Murray and I do not share political views on a number of issues, thoughtful discussion is far preferred to blanket cancellation and denunciation or a refusal to even engage. Again, that, I hope, is a hallmark of the podcast. I hope you enjoy the discussion as much as I did. Get full access to Critical Mass at lawrencekrauss.substack.com/subscribe

Hi, Lawrence Krause here. Before we begin our podcast, I wanted to let you know that the Origins Project Foundation has four or five seats left associated with our special trip to Iceland, September 21st to 25th, four nights, five days. We'll tour the iconic vistas of the land of fire and ice, one of the most remarkable geographical locations on Earth. And we'll also do several things that the public cannot normally go to, including a visit to a special carbon capture facility. there. In addition, there'll be a public event with Barry and I and several local experts from Reckjavik. All told, we hope it'll be a remarkable experience that'll change your view of the world and allow you to see one of, as I say, one of those remarkable places on Earth. I hope you'll consider joining us. Go to www.orgensproject.org and go to the travel page, and in the next two weeks, we still have those seats open before we close things up. Thanks. Charles Murray is a controversial figure and has been ever since he published the bell curve. He's been castigated, hated, reviled, censured, censored, and more.

I wanted to have a discussion with Charles for a variety of reasons. First, because I always worry that stereotypes of people are inaccurate. And I like to hear people have a chance to discuss their own ideas themselves. But more interestingly, I was taken by a new book by Charles Murray called Human Diversity, which sounds like it's going to be an emotional book again. But as he points out in the very beginning, if you're looking for bombshells, you won't find them. It's instead a social scientist's take on the biological and scientific issues associated with human diversity in all its forms.

And it's based on reading the technical literature and discussing things with experts. His point, the whole purpose behind it, is something I find very important. He argues that social scientists often base their discussions on ideology or preferences and don't refer to the scientific literature. And he thinks it's really important for public policy and social science to base their discussions on science. He says that social sciences have been in the grip of an orthodoxy that is scared, stiff of biology. And so I think it's really great to see that combination of using science as the basis of decision making, which is really one of the things we push in this podcast a lot.

Once we began the discussion, I discovered what a delightful, thoughtful individual Charles was, and the discussion is not heavily wrought and emotional questions, but really tries to explore the, as I say, the science behind human diversity and not focus on those hot-button issues necessarily. I hope you'll not only enjoy it by be enlightened by it and perhaps change your views of the man and at the very least learn something about the biological basis of diversity. You can watch this podcast, add-free, on our Critical Mass Substack site, as always,

or you can watch it on our YouTube channel, the Origins Project YouTube channel. You can listen to it either on, our Critical Mass site or on any site that hosts podcasts. However you watch it or listen to it, I hope you'll enjoy it. And I hope you'll also consider supporting the foundation, primarily by subscribing to our substack site. The funds from that go to supporting the foundation which produces the podcast and makes this possible.

In any case, I hope you enjoy the podcast, enjoy Charles Murray, and that this provokes your thinking in one way or another. Thanks. Well, Charles Murray, thank you so much for agreeing to be on the podcast. I'm really looking forward to our discussion. So thanks for coming on. So am I looking forward to it.

Well, you know, I want to, in full disclosure, which I think is important, and you've given a lot of full disclosure in the book I want to talk about mostly, which is diversity. I want to say that I've been wanting to have you on for a while, but, of course, I first learned of you with the bell curve and all the controversy around the bell curve. And I kind of had a kind of a smug reaction to that. I was kind of happy in a way about the negative responses.

I was, at the same time, you know, I was, you know, being a natural liberal, I was, you know, concerned about that. But I also had a suspicion about social science being a physicist and therefore a natural skepticism of social science. But at the same time, I have to say, I remember, I mean, at least I think I remember. And a lot of these things are just maybe manufactured memories. Some concern, I knew that the blanket condemnation had to be inappropriate. Because that was even before, that was well before I'd learned from my own experience in the public domain. That most people don't read anything you write before they condemn it. And so I was a little concerned about that.

And then I also was, you know, I was interested. I was at Harvard and around that, actually, and had moved after Larry Summers had his experience, but I was impacted by that. I remember I met him and he, I happened to get rid of the president of my university, and he knew of me because of that. And I was concerned about the reaction to his comments. I didn't, once again, it was only later that I realized how innocuous a number of his comments were. And I began to rethink some of this. But as I say, we come at this, I'm traditionally, and I mean traditionally, and you make a point in your book, it's hard to have labels nowadays, but I'm traditionally much more liberal. I'm probably left. Coming from Canada, by definition, I'm on the left in the states, I think. And in the sense that I don't view, intrinsically, I don't view government as the enemy. And I think that's a property of parliamentary systems. In any case, so, and I, you know, I really, and I knew that you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, as we'll talk about for good reason, are concerned about to what extent various,

the implementation of various social programs can really have an effect. But nevertheless, I grew up in Canada with free medical care and lots of social programs. So I had that bias. But things began to change for me. Also, I should say the fact that you were at AEI also had a bias later on. I actually spoke at AEI, and I can't remember if we even met there. But I spoke and actually did a dinner at the American Enterprise Institute for those people don't know what it is, which is kind of viewed as a conservative think tank.

And I spoke about science, nonsense, and non-science and religion, and had a dinner afterwards. And it was an interesting experience, but I was told that they never wanted me to come back. So it was, I thought it was an interesting dialogue. But all of that buys me. And then, and then things began to change. I taught at Yale and I, during the height of kind of deconstructionism and post-modernism, in at least the literature departments where everything was viewed as a social construct. And I began to, of course, recognizing that was nonsense began to rebel about that. And then over the years as the nonsense of sort of diversity and equity programs at universities, which I've been intimately involved with for 40 years at universities,

seeing how they denied reality and clearly things became impossible to talk about, or generally accepted that were nonsense, that there were no sex differences between men and women, that all disparities in the number of people in programs was due to white privilege or supremacy, which having clearly been a part of the situation and observed this, I realized with nonsense. And realizing this conflating of misconflating

of equality of outcome with equality of opportunity, which are two vastly different things, but are for many people and nowadays, for almost all institutions, at least in America and in other places, are viewed as the same thing. I began to become more interested in trying to learn about what you were talking about. And then finally, you know, having seen cancel culture

in many and written about it now a lot, I also became more sympathetic with the, with your quote unquote cancellation because of the bell curve. So I want to put all that out there because it's going to influence where I'm coming from and our discussion. So I, but I don't want to focus. We'll talk about Belker a little bit. I want to focus, and we talked about this beforehand, with your book, Human Diversity, which is, I will say right off, my work is cut out for me because it's a remarkably comprehensive book.

It's a remarkable book in many ways. And I'm sure I won't do justice. our discussion won't do justice to it's because it's quite detailed. I love books that have data, and that's just the way I am. And this is a book full of data. And to substantiate points which, as you point out and we'll get to, are not should not be subject to debate. And they're generally accepted.

In legal parlance, you would say at the beginning of a, you know, these points are not subject to, you know, know, debate. But I think that the ultimate theme of that book is that social scientists should be, should actually base social science on biology first. And secondly, that biology is having a heyday. That biology is in a golden era. And therefore, it's a prime time for social science to be able to exploit the results of biology. Have all of that said in the context of what is clearly recognizing we live in times where, where the denial of the the results of biology have become a standard part of at least social, a lot of social science

and a lot of social media. And so the book is talks about the three kind of things you don't want to talk at dinner parties about, probably, gender, race, and class. And we'll talk about, and really what I want to go through is 10 items that you more or less say are well confirmed and not controversial, but they are in modern society. So before we get there, I've been talking nonstop and people who often complain I do that. But have I misrepresented at least the general context of the book? No, not at all. The only thing I'd add to that is it's really written because I think the social sciences are,

well, two things. One, the social sciences will undergo a revolution. And I'm guilty sometimes of being too optimistic about how long a revolution will take. But I will still go ahead and say what I say in the book, which is, I think the next 10 years are going to see a lot of the major battles fought because the progress in biology is so rapid at this point. And I'm also saying that, look, the social sciences should be embracing that. You talked about a golden age in biology. Social scientists should be relieved that finally, we have a chance of being full participants in the scientific project

because we've always been second-class citizens. The economists sort of have pretensions to hire things. Okay, but we're not close to what the physicists do. And so we should be really excited and we aren't. Instead, you have what I think is going to be great, turmoil, but I also think at the end of it, and whether it's 10 years or 20 years, doesn't make much difference in the greater scheme of things. You will have a social science, which is radically different and be attracting radically different people into the field than we have right now.

And what I'm saying, the way I describe it in the book is this is a progress report. This is where things stand now, and I know that when you hear these propositions, you're going to say, but that's not true. Everybody knows that. It's not true. That's pseudoscience. And I'm saying, actually, know that the people who are familiar with the literature are going to be yawning and saying, tell me something I don't know. Well, you know, okay, great. In fact, I remember that specific part, that warning and encouragement from the introduction of your book. I have to say, before we even there that I'm surprised by your optimism in terms of a time frame reminds me in my you know physics experiments I was involved in proposing things in the 1980s that still

haven't been completed at the time I thought it'll be solved at 10 years I I I guess my well we can talk about this the end but I'm my natural inclination right now and my what I tell all my friends is that I think it's going to get worse before it's going to get better but we'll see well and actually I have some thoughts since the book was written that we can get to. Good. Oh, that'd be great. Well, let's try and get to it. But before we get to it, this is an origins podcast. And I think it's important to preface some of this.

And it was interesting to me as I tried to learn about your life. So I want to ask some questions about your life. You grew up in Iowa. And you used to hang around. I've read Juvalial delinquents and and such. And, but your father was an executive for Maytag. I don't know what your mother did. I didn't learn.

I was going to ask. She was a housewife. Okay. And you were obviously ended up being interested in, well, being interested in ideas and, you know, ultimately, you know, going to Harvard. But who, who did either of them provide an influence? speaking of, I know that you've talked about in the book, in fact, that sort of the parental influences are not as great as one thinks. But nevertheless, did either of them sort of provide an inspiration for what eventually was going to study political science? So I'm wondering,

I wondered to know where that came about, that interest. Well, the short answer is, my father was a great rule model for a boy, you know, modest. And he was sort of the way that men were supposed to be he was a very gentle man in the true sense to that word that's nice you know ironclad integrity he didn't go to college because his he had to support his uh sisters and his parents uh and uh he still worked his way up to be the middle manager at maytag my mother was a force of nature uh she was a child of a broken marriage which was not usual in the 1910s when that happened. She worked her way through a little college called Culver Stockton and got a college

education all on her own. She was a feminist before there were feminists. And she was also like my father, rock-like integrity and sort of no exceptions demand of right behavior. And when I disappointed her in that, I remember once she jumped on me for reasons I won't go into when I was 17 years old and I came out of that experience saying, actually, even when you're 17 years old, your mother can still cow you. My mother's 100 and it still happens. I don't want to go. I've never talked about them before publicly. and I have but but it wasn't that they had to do inspire me to be interested I was I wasn't a child prodigy but you know all the standardized tests I was in the top 10th the top percentile that sort of

thing and and and I was just interested in everything and read everything and voluminously did they read I'm did it's interesting me that of the two parents your mother had gone to college and your father hadn't but in terms of encouraging reading uh did your mother or did it just a natural interest or do you remember? Well, I remember that she read to me, you know, and which I enjoyed thoroughly, but she stopped doing that when I think we were on Huckleberry Finn and she found out that I'd already read two chapters ahead,

but I enjoyed listening to her. She said, okay, you can read it yourself now. But, yeah, so they encouraged that. It was a very good environment for a kid who, was smart in an IQ sense to flourish because they let me live with the local

Carnegie Library. Yeah, sure. And it was great to have a great library nearby. You were small, Newton, Iowa. I don't know if I've been to Newton, Iowa. I've been in a lot of places in Iowa. But it's a small town? Small town. 15,000. You've got to have a library and such. Did

Now, you eventually, we'll get to getting to Harvard in a second, but you, you, you, you, did you study political science as an undergraduate as well as a graduate student? No, Russian history. Oh, history, that's right. Russian history. So you would decide early, I always wonder why people don't do science. So I wanted to ask you. It's interesting.

Because by visual spatial, deals charitably can be called pedestrian. And so when I was in physics in high school, just high school physics, I didn't do particularly well in it. The mathematics was not a language that came naturally to me and still doesn't. And so it wasn't that I wasn't interested in science for any subsidy. reasons, but I didn't gravitate to it because it did not come easily to me, whereas things involving history and literature and the rest of that, that was all easy. And I think it's natural

for somebody to go with their strengths. Well, yeah, and you talk about that as a, you legitimize that. It was one of the points in the latter part of the book, is it, or actually in the early part of the book, when one talks about vocations that people tend to do what they like. And it's not Which is surprising. I mean, it's, you know, it shouldn't be contentious to suggest that, although it is in a context, which we'll get to. But it's certainly impact on you. So you were, you enjoyed reading and history and obviously history and you studied history. And you said the, and I guess I'm interested in your take back and forth on the SATs,

which comes up in this book a little bit, but also it's well known that you said the SATs helped you get out of Newton and get to Harvard. because the standardized tests. But later on, you sort of argued that they were not, the university shouldn't use them because of a variety of social changes. So you want to talk about that for a second? And I don't know if you've changed that view back again or not. No, no. What I said in the article, Lawrence was, this was an article in the AEI magazine.

By the way, I'm sorry you didn't have a better experience in AEI usually. Well, I loved it. I thought it went really well. It was only afterwards. Anyway. Anyway, the argument was this. And I had to be persuaded by data because I didn't want to believe the data. This was a big Californian study that was done in the early 2000s.

And they concluded that achievement tests do just as good a job, even in schools for disadvantaged kids as the SAT. And I was saying, that's really hard to believe. you know, because the SAT insofar as even though it's been bastardized in the last 20 to five years, still is a better measure of, gee, general intelligence than achievement tests. But this California study was very rigorous. And also, I'm unhappy with the SAT because it has taken on all this cultural baggage. And so instead of being this way for a kid from a poor home to be able to raise his hand,

and get some attention and say, hey, I should be paid attention to. It's become this thing that the kids who get high scores in upper middle class homes flaunt as, you know, as evidence of their wonderfulness. And if the achievement tests do just as well, achievement tests don't carry a lot of that cultural baggage. So I wanted to replace the SAT with achievement tests. I didn't want to get rid of standardized tests. Yeah, no, that's important because it's, I mean, that's what this is, as you know, there's a huge movement to get rid of standardized testing as somehow racist. And yeah, I couldn't have imagined.

Right. I was sorry, Lawrence. It doesn't matter. Anyway, yeah, it's racist in the following sense. it is taking away, well, not so much racist as kids from disadvantaged backgrounds. It's taking away from them the best tool for identifying them. And that is, that's a crime. Yeah, yeah, okay.

Okay, absolutely. And I think, you know, I go back and forth. Since I went up, grew up in Canada, I didn't take SITs. I think I must have taken some other tests, but universities didn't use them in Canada. was much less competitive to go to university there than it is in the states, certainly now. But having, it's funny because in physics, I've taught a lot of different schools, elite, I believe schools and other research universities. And it's funny, at least at the graduate level, beyond a certain threshold, at least,

of competence. I've always found that the, that it's very, that, um, the score. really didn't correlate with how well people would do, at least in the, say, the graduate entrance exams. And I've always kind of felt been more taken with the idea of random acceptance. Because even when I left Yale and moved to Case Western, and then even in Arizona, I didn't find,

we're going to talk about means of distributions, but I didn't find the mean very that different. At the extremes, there were, you know, there were huge differences. huge differences. But most of the students, I haven't found that many differences, and maybe because they're all self-selected middle-class students, I don't know. Well, the numbers on this, there are a lot of numbers. And what you're dealing with is truncation of range. Yeah. Yeah. In your experience, so if you say, is there any evidence that there is a threshold beyond which increments in measured cognitive ability don't make a difference in performance, the answer is no. That includes the very

high end. I used to argue with Dick Ernstine about this because I said, look, when I was an undergradter at Harvard, I know some kids that had stratospheric IQs, and I wouldn't trust them to make any kind of a common sense decision. And they were really pretty

weird. And Dick said, I could take you to the admissions office and pull the folders of another dozen kids that were every bit as smart in terms of cognitive ability, but they were also at good social skills and so you didn't notice him.

It's not the, and he had some, he did, he had the data on his side, which was usually true with Dickerenstein. I see well, okay, I don't want to get in it. It's interesting just me to see it. You went, you went to the Peace Corps after, you, in between undergraduate and graduate school. And, and I don't know if that effect, well, if that affected your decision to go into political science, that transition, maybe we can talk about that for a little bit. I do want to get to the book, but I'm intrigued by that. Well, yeah, it's, I can go on a narrative for 20 minutes and not, but I won't. Here's the, here's the Cliff Notes version.

I went into Peace Corps because I, from the very beginning, I didn't want to go to Reckney graduate school. I don't know why I didn't. I just didn't like the idea. I didn't say. I also wanted to go see the world. Sure. And the score is a good way to do that.

And when I was in Peace Corps, and then after, I got out of peace car, I stayed in Thailand because at that time I was married to a Thai woman who had been a full bright scholar in the States and she had an obligation to work off at a local university. So I stayed and I did research projects. And contrary to what the Southern Poverty Law Center says, these were not covert operated. They were research into how to win the hearts and minds of the villagers and so forth. Anyway, Cliff Notes version, after a couple of years, of doing that, I was convinced that my insights into how Thai villages worked were way better than those of the anthropologists I was reading. But I couldn't prove it. You know, they had their

narrative and their anecdotes and I had my narrative, my anecdotes, and I wanted to be able to prove. I was right and they were wrong. And so I got interested in quantitative methods. And I found I'm not good at learning math, you know, motivating theorems. I'm not good in all sorts of the more abstract things. It turns out I'm pretty good at applying statistical findings. It certainly seems that way when one reads one. No, this is what I'm good at. And so I've pursued that on my own and then I decided to apply to MIT because they had one of the best programs of quantitative social science. And that's what I wanted to I wanted to take every quantitative statistical course known to MIT.

And that's pretty much what I tried to do when I got there. That's the advantage of MIT. I always felt, and I know people in the humanities and social sciences in MIT. And I've always admired that quantitative aspect. I remember it was a big jump when I went from across down the river from MIT to Harvard to see that change a little bit. Now, yeah, but you did, you know, actually I was I was amused reading that your wife. wife your next one your wife who's a quaker by the way from newton iowa did that mean women i saw that i thought did you know each other as as as children or was that just a fluke two and a half

blocks away from each other our parents were good friends i was six years older than she so i had no interest in her whatsoever yeah at that age 18 and 12 you just aren't interested and we reconnected when we were both in our 30s That's lovely. That's a lovely story. That's great. And I think, you know, she was, this is one of the things, because I've heard from people who I know what a nice man you are. Let me put it that way. And, and I was amused, but her reaction was, I think, the same as a lot of other people wants to be about you, which is she said, you know, she looked at your conservative reading list and was, you know, and was sort of turned off by it. But ultimately, had a hard time reconciling that with the, deep decency you had as a human being and i thought that was a beautiful a beautiful combination and um and i just and and everything you know that that i can see you i i i can see both and i think that's really kind of a nice combination so i'm happy that has worked out but i will just say that she uh we were courting when i was working on losing the ground and so she began her role as

editor she has edited everything i published oh wow She's a brilliant editor. But as she was doing, she was still a standard academic liberal when she was doing this. And sometimes she caught herself saying, I'm helping this guy write better positions that I'm supposed to find horrific. That is the best thing. I mean, that's why I love that. That's why I want these conversations. That's what should be so wonderful about academia in general and is completely missing now.

And that's what depresses me. And it's important for me to have conversations across, very personally as an individual, but also to try and promote these discussions because you don't have to agree with someone to have an interesting discussion. And that's wonderful. That's wonderful that your relationship survived that

and has continued to survive that. I understand a Quaker that may make some relevance there. And the last thing I want to say because I want to come back to this at the end of the discussion, five hours from now. No, anyway, at the end of the discussion, you described yourself as an agnostic, sort of a Christian wannabe,

but you really can't jump. Is that still true? Oh, no, well, yeah, in a way. I mean, I've evolved over the last 15 years, a lot under my wife's influence and also the people I met through her and also through other people. I'm afraid you would find me disturbingly shaky in my unbelief if we talked about it longer.

I'm still filled with uncertainties about all sorts of things. But yeah, I've been I've been tending toward being religious and specifically Christian. Well, you know, as Fox Muldar said in the X-Files, we all want to believe. And so I think it's understandable. And I was going to say, I'll help you and get over your shakiness. But I'm not a proselytizing atheist, in fact. But I think one thing I will point out is I edited a book. I didn't edit it.

I actually wrote the preface for an old book that was re-coming out about atheism. And it made a point which I'd never thought of before, which is agnosticism is atheism. If you take atheism generally saying, well, you're not willing to. to not doubt in a sense. You don't find the arguments convincing enough to say, yeah, I quote unquote believe, which is what agnosticate is that. That's just one form of atheism. But anyway, it doesn't really matter.

I think that it's important that we have questions, but I can understand the attraction of at least the social, the, certainly the Quaker aspect of Christianity. Anyway, we'll come back to that because I think it's, you end your book in discussing that. Maybe you don't remember you ended in the book, but not really, but I picked up on it on the need to, well, when we get to, when we get to the goals of how to have a good society. But let's get to the book. But I think that all of that was fascinating for me anyway.

And I was very happy that you revealed some, at least one thing that you'd never said before. So that was good. Let's talk about, okay, so human diversity is a book about, literally the nature of human diversity as it relates primarily to those three conceptual areas of gender, race, and class. And you begin by talking about the fact that on university campuses you can't really incorporate biology into social science without being inconspicuous. And I'm intrigued being said the price can be protest by students. students, denial of tenure, tenure track employment for postdoc, sorry, denial of tenure track employment

for postdocs, denial of tenure for assistant professors, or reprimands from the university administrators. You're being very tame. It actually includes even more than that. You can now have your tenure revoked. Tenure is no longer what it used to be. And I know a number of examples that I've written about in the Wall Street Journal elsewhere, where people basically who disagree, are they're removed from tenure. So it's gotten more extreme, I think, then. It's awful. Now, here are, let me read,

maybe it's probably best to read the 10 items that are not in dispute. If I was going to be a judge, I would say that, or that you would have argued are not in dispute. Could not be in dispute. Yeah. One, sex differences in personality are consistent worldwide and tend to widen in more gender egalitarian cultures. 2. On average, females worldwide have advantages in verbal ability and social cognition,

while males have advantages in visuospatial abilities and the extremes of mathematical ability. Three, on average, women worldwide are more attracted to vocations centered on people and men to vocation centered on things. Already, I can hear listeners screaming, but anyway. Four, many sex differences in the brain are coordinated with sexual differences in personality, abilities and social behavior. 5. Human populations are genetically distinctive in ways that correspond to self-identified race and ethnicity. 6. Evolutionary selection pressures since humans left Africa have been extensive and mostly local. 7. Continental population differences in variance associated with personality, abilities, and social behavior are common.

8. The shared environment usually plays a minor role in explaining personality, ability, and social behavior. Nine, class structure is importantly based on differences in abilities that have substantial genetic component, that have a substantial genetic component. And 10, outside interventions are inherently constrained in the effects they can have on personality, abilities, and social behavior. So I want to go through those one by one. I've highlighted for myself some quotes, but I want to give you a chance to, well, an opportunity

to elaborate. Obviously, as I say, we can't do justice because most of this is trying to argue that there's substantial data supporting these things. And now we can assert that on this program, but we can't, we're maybe examples, but it'd be hard to adequately reproduce the data that you have there. But you do, recognizing that these 10 things, as you point out, will either people will have ordered a stop reading the book or they'll just say, you know, if they're experts, we knew these things. You do feel the need right away to say, let me state explicitly that I reject claims that groups of people, be they sexes or races or classes,

can be ranked from superior to inferior. I reject claims that differences among groups have any relevance to human worth or dignity. And so I think, you know, that's a disclaimer. I think given the bad rap you have the had to do. But let's begin with the sex differences. with gender, sex differences in personality, consistent worldwide, gender-wide, more gender-gender-wide,

and more gender-evalitarian cultures. Your basis for this first is with evolution, which I resonated with the fact that evolution leads to sex differences in tribes. First of all, physiologically, men are larger, faster, greater upper body strength. Females are capable of gestation and lactation, and given such differences, certain divisions of labor were natural. So that was an initiation of biology being having an impact on on on on personality.

Can I correct something here? Sure. Yeah. If you're asking, do I think that evolutionary psychology it should play a huge role in all of this? The answer is yes. But as I was doing the work on the book, I was dismayed to find that every time you. invoke an evolutionary psychological explanation of that the retort, oh, this is a just so story that these reactionaries have made up to justify the patriarchy and so forth. They were dismayingly

effective. And so I explicitly say in the introduction, I'm not going to talk about evolutionary biology. I'm going to talk about, because of that very reason, I'm going to focus on what we know about what is, whatever the sources of the causes of that may be. So I agree with what you just said about the role of evolution, but that's not. Yeah, I know. In fact, I'm glad you jumped in, because you do say that explicitly that, that, and what you also say in the end of the book is that you think that's a field that's going to blossom because of the ability to, to, because of improvements in genetics, primarily that evolutionist psychology will be able to be correlated with genetic factors in a way that in your in your hope will bloom greatly in the next 10 to 20 years.

Okay. So, so you give a framework for thinking about sex, sex differences and, and of course, talk about difference between gender and sex. Sorry, go on. Let me just give a, maybe the way to do this is let's go through each of the 10. but for some of them I will try to be real brief because, A, I can't go through all of the evidence for. I can summarize quickly why I think we can dispose of it in the case of the first proposition that these differences in personality and so forth are found worldwide. And they tend to widen in the most socially and gender egalitarian countries.

that's a case if we have replication after replication. Point number one, I think I had three or four at the time I was writing the book. There have been more that have come out since then. Point number two is there are no countervailing studies out there of similar quality, remotely similar quality, that find the opposite, a narrowing of these differences. And point number three is that in the current environment, this is an unwelcome finding. So you know very well that an awful lot of the scholars who went into this went into it expecting to find that the difference is narrow in more gender egalitarian societies probably were not happy to find that they didn't. Bless their hearts, they went ahead and published the data anyway.

So we're talking about a finding that's extremely consistent and has lots of replications and a sort of hostile testimony. But let me give a real quick example of why it works that way. Why it can be that differences in, let's say, vocational preferences are more gender typical in Sweden than they are in Pakistan. And this may be intuitively understandable. If you are a woman who is capable of being an engineer in Pakistan, you are capable of taking up a profession that pays pretty well. And there are not that many, you don't have an abundance of opportunities if you're a woman in Pakistan to get a job that has good pay. So you may not want particularly to be an engineer, but the incentive to do so are compelling. If you were that same woman with exactly that same skill set in Sweden, you do have abundant choices.

And so you don't have to go with the one or two that will make a decent income. for you, you can go with a wide variety of choices. And you can afford to do what you want to do. And so the implication is that the reason that the difference is widened in some respects is because in the more gender egalitarian countries, people have greater freedom, have more latitude to do what comes naturally. I will just interject a little caveat to that, that though, just to let people know how interesting this is. A great deal of what accounts for the widening differences is men, not women, that in some ways men show more tendency to have gender typical choices in more gender egalitarian countries, which I find very interesting, and I don't

have a quick snap of the explanation for that. It's always nice to find something that surprised this one. That's why I like doing physics. but but uh okay let's let's parse this a little bit um that's a summary and and i think it's important i think it's important if you don't we won't do it but but to stress when one is talking about these studies one's talking about statistics and to try and and when one looks at the analyses and the studies that have been done one refers to things like effect size and i you know you know I think for people wondering how one can make those statements quantitatively, it might be useful for you to spend a few minutes talking about distributions and effect size.

I think it's probably worthwhile. And because it also gets to a central source of arguments about the argument about the magnitude of gender differences. Effect sizes are usually fairly small. One of the things, effect size means, let's say that you have the effect of nutrition on height. Yes, it does have an effect, but it's not huge. It's relatively small in any one generation. And that's true of most social phenomena. Let me interrupt you for one second, only maybe because I like to think mathematically.

But it's important since, and maybe it's too bell-curvy. but but to measure it basically one is looking at two just everything is a distribution people are distributed and normally by some normal curve which has a peak somewhere and and generally what the studies are doing are looking at the distributions and they're always outliers in both directions for men women and everything else is looking at the difference of the between the two peaks divided by the width of the distribution. Clearly, if they're, you're going to, you're going to draw it. I can't.

Could you see this? No, no. I'm seeing the top of your. Okay, never mind. It's all right, but let me, I can just say it. So if two different are really narrow and they're just and they're far and the peaks are far apart, it's clearly the case. If the peaks are the same distance apart, but the distributions are very wide, then you might

argue you can't really distinguish them. So effect size is really the distance, between those peaks divided by the width of the distribution. So one can heuristically, so I just want, I think it's important because that's a central factor in a lot of the analyses that you talk about. And it's a reasonable way of trying to understand

if statistically what you're seeing is visible. I used to, a friend of mine, a physicist used to say that if you nearly needed complex statistics to see differences, and they probably weren't there, but with effect size, if you can, It's basically, if you can see it, it's there. Yeah, the thing that I've spent 25 years trying to get people to understand overlapping distributions.

Sure. And the other aspect of it is not only is the distance between the two peaks, oftentimes small, what that means is that there's a great deal of overlap. So you do not have people separated into binary camps. One other quick point, though, and this is where I have taken aside in a very, contentious topic. If you take each personality, characteristic, and cognitive ability, and social behavior separately, and say, what are the effect sizes between men and women? The answer is most of them are small. And those who say that it's wrong to think that these differences are a big deal,

like to deal with them one at a time. And another set of scholars say, I can't do that, that if you have 15 personality characteristics, what you're interested in is a profile. And so each of the individual effect sizes can be small, but there are ways of aggregating those, and you aggregate them. And you've got an important difference. I am persuaded that you cannot look at these things separately if they are conceptually related, as they are conceptually related. Yeah, of course, one has to. And one sees this in fields like physics where one can do, of course, statistics much easier, more easily. You have to worry about the correlations between them.

Clearly, if two things are completely correlated, you can't just add them because they're basically telling you the same thing. So one has to look for independence and correlations. And all these things are carefully accounted for if you do the statistics properly. But it's really important to, if you're aggregating, to say, are these 15 factors independent or are they all really? the same thing. But there are techniques for doing that. Yeah, sure, exactly. And you talk about it in the book,

and that's one of the many things we won't get to. One of the things you said, before we get on to, you know, there's personality differences, and you've sort of said that. And I'd really like to get to the verbal and mathematical and vocational differences, because that's kind of really a hot topic and one that.

Let's do that. I've written about, but I will, I can't help. but giving one quote about a fact about sex difference of personality that I didn't know that so i want to say it that i read in your book because for other people the most dramatic example of a finding from infancy which led to considerable publicity was a 2002 study presenting evidence that newborn girls no more than two days old after birth showed stronger interest in a human face while the newborn boy showed stronger interest in mechanical mobile it's a it's a single unreplicated

study with a sample of 102 it not proof to take the bank but its finding was in line with many other studies i think it's fascinating to see more and more studies that are looking at these things and and finding um you know as you say with 102 kids it's not it's not anything to visit it but it's intriguing to me and i and i was yeah i agree with you and the reason i don't said don't take that to the bank but you i have but that's dramatic because it's only you know there just a day or too old. But you also have a lot of studies that are with children a month or too old. And so the chance for the environment to be accounting for things is still quite limited.

So once again, we're looking at a pattern of results that are consistent. Okay, let's talk to the, about the neural functioning, neurocognitive functioning, visospatial and math. I mean, this is the hot topic area. This is the area that got Larry Summers fired a long time ago, or at least just removed. I don't, maybe fired as the right way to say it. So, and it's an area of interest to me because lately,

when seeing the, these requirements in STEM fields that, that are suggesting forced requirements that that seem, that seem to me and I've written to be not only ridiculous but harmful. And so let's go right to math, but first. before we go to visual spatial. And you say it's one of the cases in which data are plentiful and the story doesn't vary, at least within the United States. Sex differences in mathematics become progressively larger

as a sample becomes more selective and the type of math skill becomes more advanced. And your examples here were fascinating to me, so maybe you want to talk a little bit about that. Yeah. Partly you have a difference in male and female variance so that even if the mean is relatively close in terms of math tests, that you have more males at the, you know, at the low end,

but you also have more males at the high end, and the further out you get the greater the disproportion becomes. So what becomes a minor difference at the means is important because you have radically different proportions of males and females who are out at the far end. How do we know that's true, particularly given that in order to do confident work at the foreign distributions need really big sample sizes. But this is a case where we do have that in the form of this, you know, U.S. math competition,

the name of which I'm forgetting, but it's a very difficult. So it's sort of like the SAT math on steroids. and the male-female differences in that are very large. And say, well... The MC-12, I think you call it... Yeah, yeah. And so the sample, we have a number of samples with reasonably large samples. Sizes, you still have to worry about some self-selection problems.

You know, might it be that women are less interested in taking that test because of social pressures not to, you know, be in math? So I'm not saying those are dispositive. I'm saying they're consistent across measures. But I'll tell you what I find if we're segueing into vocational choices. Yeah. And the really fascinating data there is the data set for the study of mathematically proknotice youth. I found that data remarkable.

So I was going to get there, but we can jump there now. Okay, let's go back. If we're going to get through all 10, I think we've got to move briskly. Oh, yeah, but I wanted to go through. Yeah, I plan to more intensively do the beginning and more generally towards the end. But it's okay. I want to brisk you go, but I do want to, before, I was actually going to go right there, but I did want to, one thing that I think is important that you point out is that there are other areas where they're the same effect-sized.

differences that work in the other direction, that women have better social cognition and and I think verbal abilities. But so, so there are similar tests that you can perform for that. Yeah. Well, there's the neurocognity tests in the University of Pennsylvania cohort where they have a battery of tests where you have very interesting different profiles for men and women, but there is no way in which you can look at those profiles and say, oh, guys are smarter than gals or vice versa, because of you've got these different strengths. And when we get to advances in neuroscience, the nice conjunction is that

they're making progress and understanding why these things exist. Some of the data that I find most interesting again are our studies that can be criticized and I'm not using as the basis for my conclusions but there's a kind of thing you know this test called reading the mind and the eyes and it consists of a set of photographs of just a rectangle of the eyes uh and this is about all you see and you're supposed to identify from multiple choice what that person's emotions are and so forth. And I took the test. And I took the test.

And I took it very seriously. And I spent time on it. I stared at them. Okay, I've been saying before my IQ is above average, my score on reading them on the eyes was precisely average for males. Okay. And it's lower than the one for females. So, you know, you have the stereotype of women who, and this is the kind of thing, oh, women are intuitive and so forth,

or intuitive which the feminists are very unhappy about because, you know, the men are rational and have intellectual power. But women have this kind of cute intuition. No, it's not that. Women observe what's going on in the world around them and they can decode information and some things better than men can decode it. And there's a lot of consistent data to that. Oh, sure. And anecdotal. By the way, there's lots of uses, very unsentimental ones, too.

It means, for example, women may very well be better interrogators in criminal, the situations that men are, because they're picking up on things that men don't pick up on. There are a wide variety of applications of these social cognition skills. Yeah, no, it's, by the way, did your wife take the test? Did she, you know, I never got her to take it. Okay. I might, well, I might as well fess up. She scores higher on all kinds of standardized tests.

Yeah, sure. Okay. Good, then good, excellent. Okay, but now let's get to the vocational part of this, because it really resonates with something that is a very important social issue for me anyway in academia, which is this issue of diversity. And you started by saying people generally enjoy things they're good at, like you talked about why you went to history. They also like the experience of being good of what they do, a fundamental truth about the nature of human enjoyment that goes back to Aristotle.

And when it comes, we're living in times where there are differences between the proportion, not just in gender, but in race, of individuals in university departments and background demographics. And what we're told without any evidence, without any studies, without any supporting empirical data, is that that's due to racism or systemic racism. And I think you make the point very clearly at the beginning that more than a century after legal restrictions on women's vocations were lifted,

and a half century since gender discrimination and hiring promotion of firing were outlawed, large disparities continue to exist in university educations that young men and women attain, the jobs and the jobs they take. And we'll see that the disparity is going in two different directions, in different directions in different areas. But you can see it.

Again, I've said this in other podcasts. I was a chairman of a department in the 1990s. And I saw how even then if we're working hard to get women into physics departments. And every time we made a hire that wasn't a woman, I always had to write a letter explaining why. And that was 30 years ago. And so it's not as if this stuff is new. now but we're still seeing disparities and i think the the study that you let's talk about these

studies which i just think are fascinating at the extremely high levels this guy named julian stanley had the idea back in the 1970s or 60s to give the SAT to 13-year-olds and the idea was uh that it's just this regular SAT and so a lot of the stuff in the sate and so a lot of the stuff in the is on subjects that kids haven't even been taught at age 13, but it will identify extreme levels of talent. And it was a brilliant idea, and it worked. And he had a program which identified these kids, and they also had summer camps for them and a variety of things.

But in addition to that, they have longitudinal follow-ups. And so you have good-sized large samples that go back to children that were born in the 1960s. and had been followed ever since. And remember what I said earlier about the difficulty of studying the high end is you need big sample sizes of people who are out of that. They've got that. Here are the two best things of all. The first is that you now have a set of males and females going into college and choosing careers for whom any differences in skill sets are in a sense irrelevant because all of these kids.

kids just about are capable of pursuing any occupation that they want to pursue. You notice it's the study of mathematically precocious youth. So you have very high math skills among the women too. That's one good thing. Yeah, yeah. These are these are different cohorts which are truly exceptional math skills. And they're and they're and they're and they're and they're females and both being studied.

Again, just to emphasize being studied from time they're young to they're in their 50s, which is really wonderful. I did not know. It just seems to me a dream study for social scientists. Well, the second big advantage of the sample, and this may come as a surprise to people who still think that feminism is a new phenomenon. There was probably more intense socialization in the upper middle class of gender neutrality in the 1970s than there is now. That was the decade when women can have it all.

that was a decade when women need men like a fish needs a bicycle to a common phrase when when when gender neutral toys were already a big thing and the kids who ended up taking these tests in the Simpe program were drawn from Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Baltimore area and overwhelmingly from these upper metal classes that were already fanatically trying to social their daughters into being interested in this stuff. So you have a really terrific example, and here's what you found out. Here's a little tiny bit of all the fascinating things they found out. One is that people, even at that very high end,

tend to go with what they do well. And that includes males who had higher verbal skills than math skills. they tended to go toward verbally oriented occupations. And women who had, they followed the same pattern, except that women who clearly could, well, first place, there are more women than men who had the very high verbal skills in these sets. And they, in a way, males have fewer choices than females do at the high end.

because with an awful lot of the females in this program, their math and their verbal were both in the top percent of time. Whereas you had a fair number of the guys who were absolutely brilliant at math and hopeless at verbal, or at least not nearly as strong. I don't suppose you ever met anybody like that in the physics department. But in a lot of ways, most of the extremely mathematically talented guys were going to go into STEM because that's what they were good at. they would go to it whereas you had a lot of women who could have gone either way in terms of their skills

and they tended to go toward the uh toward the verbally or people-oriented courses and what i what i found more interesting even more well that reinforced that more was that there were two cohorts there were there merely exceptional cohort two which is sort of in the top one percent and then there was a cohort that was just off scale in the point one percent level uh and beyond to you know i cues whether you like it or not at you know at 180s or something and and and the effect was almost stronger in in the cohort that was even more exceptional yeah i know and that that was very intriguing to me i should say by the way just again for full disclosure i grew up and i'm the child of the 60s i was born in the 50s and so what you're talking about it is that that sensibility

in in urban environments of of of uh of of that age of feminism is something that I grew up with and it was exactly that that everyone that you know everyone was capable of everything and women were you know should be the sky should be the limit and it's really interesting for me to see having had that sensibility to see the um the the vic the victimhood card that's being played a lot but let let me let me and I know I'm pushing people's buttons I'm expecting lots of hate responses for some of this but but let me you know I What? There's lots of data on this.

Yeah, there's lots of data. That's what's amazing. And I encourage people to look at the book and other things for data because data matters. But I just read the book and you wrote it a long time ago. So I want to quote some things here that may not be in the top of your head here. But cohort too was remind you the listener or viewer that that that's just the merely exceptional, the top 1% in this math test. Educationally, males and females in cohort two were in a dead heat,

with nearly the same high proportion of getting bachelor's, masters, and doctoral degrees. Yet the traditional gender gap in STEM majors persisted. These women were about twice as likely to take STEM majors as the general population of female undergraduates. But this was also true of the men, and the male-female ratio in STEM degrees was about 1.6, even in that sample. So once again, they were more, because they were incredibly skilled, they were more likely to go into scam, but men were still more likely in that group. Even though everyone in court or two was gifted in mass skills, those with those whose verbal skills were even higher than their mass skills, namely who were even more talented verbally, ended up in the social sciences, humanities, business, and law, while those whose mass skills were greater than their verbal skills tended to end up in scam fields. reinforcing the notion that you do what you like to do.

And if you're stronger in one area than the other, you do it. And then you talk about the top, this final group, which is one in 10,000 individual level. And even gifted women who are attracted to stem gravitate towards the life science, as you point out, not math and the physical sciences. It's a subtle tendency, proportionally males outnumbered females by almost two to one on the things oriented sciences. That means physics, mathematics, engineering.

And females outnumbered males by almost two to one in the people oriented sciences, like life sciences, biology, and et cetera. The implication you say are women who are so gifted that they can deal with any intellectually demanding field are not scared off by science per se. They instead tend to prefer those fields that deal with living things rather than long living things.

And I thought that was an interesting point. Anything you want, did I, anything you want to add to that? The only thing I would add is that did the feminist revolution in the 1970s have any effect? The answer is yes, it did. You did have a lot of vocational changes in vocational patterns in the 1970s, including an increase of women going into STEM fields. The interesting thing is that these increases, which I think were directly the result, of opening up of opportunities had stabilized very quickly. They stabilized by the late 1980s or early 1990s in most cases.

And they've now been pretty stable for 30 years. That's important. And so here is circumstantial evidence, but it seems to me that because you did observe the initial change, which is environmental, that the fact that it stabilized in the last, 30 years indicates that a burden of proof has shifted somewhat.

So that if you're going to say it's still because of racism, that women aren't doing this stuff, okay, you can try to make that case, but you've got to make the case. You can't assert it. You can't assert it. And that's what's really important. And that's what resonates and why I think I become involved in this a little bit,

is that I've been a part of it. And I've watched how it's, you know, this diversity push is not new. In the 90s, as I say, we were 30 years ago and even the 80s, but 90s by the time I was chair of a department, early 90s, we were working very, very hard. And there was a huge effort to try and recruit women and minorities. And it's not new.

And the notion that somehow that it has to be legislated now 30 years later, that somehow universities were systematically barring women from fields 30 years ago. Well, that was true 50 years ago, as you're pointing out, but it wasn't true 30 years ago. And the fact that the numbers, as you quote them, haven't changed much, is very interesting, a very interesting point. And I think it's quite telling. And you make the point also that you can also see this difference and go in the other direction, that the removal of barriers for women, has not only increased the number of women in STEM, but it's increased the number of women education

to the point that right now, women at higher educations, outnumber men by huge factor. Most universities, it's 60% women, 40% men. And I think that you quote this number, 1960, 20 men got a professional degree for every woman who did. Because it was legislated, the women were excluded. By 1970, the ratio was less, 10 to 1. By 1980s, it was less than 3 to 1. In 2005, it became equal. Women caught up with

men. Since then, more women have gotten more professional degrees than men every year. As of 2016, 93,000 and changed, women got professional degrees compared to 84,000 for men. And that continues. And so that in fact, more PhDs, women are are getting more PhDs than men in universities. And so the notion that universities are systemically infringing on the education of women generally certainly can't be made. Yeah, and the notion that the fathers of these daughters have been, or the mothers have been telling them to, oh, get married and have babies and don't get that.

That's not true either. The encouragement of women to go into all sorts of fields has been coming from home as well as from the universities. And I think the other important point that really is worth stating is the global nature of this. The fact one can argue it's a societal thing and one can argue that they're social factors, as people do. But it is fascinating that there's a global consistency in the numbers. are almost they're they're they're very stable um from all countries um the relative strength effect size of math for for boys versus girls young young kids is is is is pretty stable in in in in most countries and on average women worldwide are more attracted to vocation centered on people

and men to vocation centered on things and in fact i think the point you make is that though that difference is larger in societies that are more egalitarian, where you would think there are fewer barriers for women going into STEM, for example. I just add to why do we think this is a problem that more women, if they go into, the sciences go into biology or they go into, if they're going into medicine, that more women go into direct patient care as opposed to surgery. come on, this is not something we need to lose sleep over. On the contrary, you know what, the idea that you have lots of very mathematically

talented women who are going into, let's say, the people-oriented social sciences, that's not a bad thing, that's a good thing. In all cases, why don't we relax and say, let's declare victory? Let's say we have made enormous progress in allowing men and women, women alike to fulfill their potential in the way that they see fit. Obviously, I couldn't agree more. And I'd add to that by saying it not only should we not relax, but what is incredibly sad is you take environments like university.

There are no more enlightened environments, or they used to be, no more enlightened environments in the world, and certainly in America and the West, than universities where and and and and that level of enlightenment and that level of open open encouragement has been around for a long time but instead what we're seeing is the is the claim of the exact opposite that that they are are are systemically biased that that that they're that they're unsafe that and and and those are the reasons that that they're these disparities and it's sort of it's it's tragic for me as someone who's been academia to see an environment where not only is that claim made but if you disagree with that claim now you are you are ostracized yeah agreed yeah okay well

let's go to the next claim which is what was that we've only got eight more to do yeah i know but Well, we're going to go faster. Don't worry. Don't worry. Because a lot of this, the arguments, the basic setting up the arguments is somewhat similar. And so I was thinking, as I was reading, I was thinking, well, okay, when we get to race, you're right, it'll be a different kind of, it's a historical argument. But I do want to get to the sex differences in the brain briefly, which is, I guess, many sex differences in the brain are coordinated with sex difference, sex differences personality.

The fact that, again, what seems to be a heretical statement, but should simply be viewed as a fact on the basis of neuroscience, is that men's and women's brains are different. And there are measurable biological causal factors having to do with hormonal effects that produce that. So why don't you just quickly? There are a wide variety of differences that have been identified. Everything from different volumes, relative volumes of the brain and men and women. to different actual total volumes. You have a variety of specific things that have done with, been done with different regions of the brain.

I'm not going to go into those. They're fascinating. But I will go with the one thing that I certainly wasn't familiar with. And I imagine a lot of people watching aren't either. When I thought about the rule of testosterone, that famous hormone, I thought about it in terms of the circulating as a drug and, you know, and it has effects like alcohol, or whatever. And it does have those effects, and they are important.

They have all sorts of behavioral effects, and because men have higher levels of testosterone, they affect sex differences. What I did not know was that you have prenatally these surges of testosterone that affects, they bind with certain parts of the brain and certain receptors in the brain. among males and not among females who develop normally.

And they change fundamentally the structure of the brain, the functioning of the brain. And in particular, the lengths to the lateralization of the brain are very strong, whereby lateralization means basically, insofar as a brain is lateralized, that means that one of the hemispheres of the brain is doing a whole lot of work separately. from the other one. And insofar as it's not lateralized, both sections of the brain are operating

in greater coordination. And there is not really an argument among neuroscientists that male brains are lateralized much more than female brains and that it is a direct result of the testosterone surges prenatally that bind with receptors in the brain. I have now having to simplify all of this very greatly. this also can explain the visual spatial skill difference between males and females for reasons I won't go into except in terms of suppose you have one part of the brain that is optimized for efficiency in visual spatial skills and in males more than in women and the other thing is I suppose you have a brain in which the two hemispheres communicate and are not. not lateralized. The former can explain why you have elevated visual spatial skills in males. The latter can explain such things as, for example, if you have an injury to the left hemisphere, I hope I'm not mixing up left and right at this point. I always have problems with left and right. We'll just say we're interviewing you in a mirror. It's okay.

Yeah. But if males suffer a damage to the left hemisphere, their language function is. screwed and they are very unlikely to get it back again. Whereas women, it's much easier for women with exactly the same kind of injury to just simply shift the load to the other hemisphere and recover, which is better. You know, it depends on what your criterion measure is. And that's true with just about everything involving differences in the male-female brain. It is not good versus bad, it is, it depends on what you want to optimize. Absolutely. And, you know, and, and, and you remind me with lateralization. My wife always reminds me that I'm not good at multitasking because I have such a small corpus callosum that,

that, you know, which connects, which connects the two halves of the brain. And so we have a teeny one. So she says, I'll forgive you because you have a tiny corpus callosum. And, but it is true that I don't understand it was. Oh, yeah, well, she certainly knows those things and can try and understand every now and then. But it is true, in fact, and I was happy to see the data in your book that that connector, if you wish between the two emissaries is measurably larger

on average. On average, again, the distributions in women than men. And even in infants, just the last bit before we move on to the next subject, one quote I took from here, which I thought was fascinating. We found that at toddlers at 12 and 24 months of age, who we had identified as having lower fetal testosterone, now at higher levels of eye contact and larger vocabulary, or putting the other way around, the higher level of prenatal testosterone, the less eye contact you now make in the smaller your vocabulary. I mean, so these,

when you're seeing it in kids, it's just really quite amazing. And I think, you know, that's the kind of thing that is that that is fascinating and in some way should be celebrated as part of human diversity and the wonder of being of being male or female but um unfortunately as you say there's to put a value judgment on whether being better at mechanical things or you know better at being able to communicate or or or relate socially it's just it's just ridiculous and again as you stress in the book and I want to stress over and Oregon, these are statistical statements. Every individual,

and I think it's really important. And one of the things that I know recently, I wrote about a faculty member didn't get a scholarship, didn't get a grant in Canada, a physicist, because more or less, he said I treat everyone as an individual. It was his diversity statement.

And I, you know, and I look at their skills, and that was obviously not good. But that's exactly what all of this suggests is that sure there are statistical means and averages and changes, but every individual has skills and talents that are different and have to be treated as individuals and very important difference. Okay, let's go from gender now that we push that button and then many people have probably pushed who don't agree have already pushed their own buttons and may have left, but let's go to the next, which is not controversial at all, which is race.

And, and, um, and um, and um, um, Race as a social construct. And so the statement you make, which again, which is not contendious, you would argue, is human populations are genetically distinctive in ways that correspond to self-identified race and ethnicity. That's the easy one. Yeah, okay, exactly. Because a whole lot of people who are looking at this have gotten their 23-and-me results. Yeah.

How do you suppose it is, the 23-me is able to tell you that you are, 82% German and 14% French and so forth. And the answer is it's not just that you can tell the differences in the continental races, but you can by using genetic markers go down to very, very fine, granular understandings of your origins, of your ancestors. But the thing is, at the continental scale, it's even more obvious. By the way, these distinctions, which come out of what's called cluster analyses, have nothing to do with the phenotypic behaviors, all right? For these analyses, they deliberately try to use what are called genetic markers

that have no known effect on any trait. And there are a bunch of them. And by phenotype, one means somehow the expression of genetics. He observed, he observed. So one's using markers that don't produce any observed effects. And I've got to introduce one bit of jargon because I don't know how you talk about this without that snip. Yeah.

And SNIP is single nucleotide polymorphism. And what that means is that you have a base pair in DNA. You have two different or could be more. Variate variance on it. It can take on different alleles. the jargon is so hard. Well, I know. The idea is that there's a small segment of DNA,

a bunch of letters that can vary in the population. And when they vary, they're expressed in two different ways. Red hair, blonde hair, blue eyes, brown eyes, that kind of thing. And some of them do have an expression in terms of that. Some of them don't. You have the different markers, you have the different alleles, but it has no known function. and those are the ones they use.

So what I'm about to say does not directly imply any genetically cause differences, nonality or cognitive ability or anything. But the statement is this, that with these markers, you have, well,

and when you conduct analyses where you aren't telling the computer anything about the people they're analyzing. You're just saying, statistically find the clusters that if I tell you to make three clusters, do the best you can statistically to define three distinct ones. And what happens as you increase the number of clusters that you ask the algorithm to produce is that it keeps discriminating people first by their continental sorts of origin. So if you ask for two clusters, you have those whose origins are in sub-sherential.

in Africa versus everywhere else. If you have three clusters, you then have sub-Saharan Africa and Europe and Asia. And if you go on to five clusters, you basically have the continental groups. And they are separated statistically in terms of these genetic markers. And I say we can do this one quickly at first because there's really no controversy about this anymore. And when I say you've gotten your 23 and me results, that's an indication of how far we've come since the first time that these findings emerged in the early 2000s. Yeah. And yeah, so I think, and I think you, but you do try to, but that, so that's the fact that there are, that there tend to, that, that there are genetic differences between different groups, as you say, if anyone who's 23 me recognizes that. What becomes more contendious is the claim, but you say, my goal is to get past the first hurdle in thinking about race differences.

And by the way, you make a point of saying, I'm not going to race, I'm going to talk about populations because I want to do this in an evolutionary perspective, because I want to understand the genetic evolution that's taken place in hominid species. Anyway, to lay out the evidence that it is evolutionarily reasonable to expect that phenotype differences among races in cognitive, of repertoires could at least be partially genetic and then expanding knowledge about a genetic variance supports that expectation. So may, do you want to explain, I mean, it's a reasonable presumption. Do you want to explain how differences in genetics that have no phenotype production might lead you to the suspicion that that genetic difference? also relate to at some level impact on behavioral areas.

Okay. So now we go to the next proposition that that recent evolution, that evolution has been recent and mostly local. And this is, I think, a very important couple of points to get across to people. In the 1970s and 1980s, you could have Richard Luantan, a famous geneticist died recently at Harvard who said that the very small proportion of the variance among human groups is accounted for by genetics. And he was correct. It was about 15 percent, I think. And also, you would have Stephen Jay Gould saying, and for completely

understandable reasons, that if humans dispersed out of Africa 60 to 80, thousand years ago. Evolutionarily, that's a blink of an eye. And he's had a famous passage where he says, you know, it's an exigent fact of history. It could have worked out differently, but the fact is that there cannot be important substantive differences between the races because there has been enough time. And as recently as the turn of the 20th century, that was still the ruling paradigm for understanding evolution. Evolution by mutation. And mutation is an extremely slow process. And furthermore, when you do get mutations, they're almost always deleterious. Either they don't have any effect at all on your evolutionary fitness or they're, they make things worse.

Yeah. So the idea that you can have evolution that's producing new, valuable characteristics in humans over an 80,000 year period is just wrong. The big thing that was found out after the genome was sequenced, and that was in the early 2000s, is that evolution can take place much more rapidly through what's called standing variation. So I'm going to use an analogy to try to get this across. It's completely made up, but I hope it gets the point across. suppose you think of a set of genetic variants that promote the trait called thriftiness. Okay?

You've got a hunter-gatherer tribe. There's variation in those snips back in the Pleistocene probably. It's standing variation, but it's not doing anything, particularly because there's no reason for, I have dogs too. There's no reason. And it doesn't make you more likely to pass on your genes if you have the characteristic of thriftiness, because everything rots within a few days anyway, and everything is very in common. As soon as you invent agriculture and it can accumulate surpluses and through surpluses accumulate wealth, those same variants begin to have and augment your evolutionary fitness. they do it both because thrifty people are likely to accumulate resources and have better health and you're in greater, they live longer and so forth.

But also for males, there's a sexual selection thing whereby if you're thrifty and you get rich, you're more attractive to women and you're more likely to pass on your genes. So if you think of it that way, the variation is already there. You don't need mutations. All you need is an environmental impulse. which gives value to those, it becomes comprehensible to how evolution can take place fairly quickly.

Now, I've used that, and now what I cannot do in the context of this is explain to you how these geneticists identify that evolution has been taking place and the timing of it, it is for an outsider miraculous. I've read all the techniques, I could sort of under sort of like understanding quantum physics. One night you think you understand it.

The next morning you don't anymore. Well, it's it's it's the same in understanding these incredibly ingenious techniques that the geneticists have developed for timing the evolution. But here's what they found. Multiple studies, not a subject of argument within the profession, which is a lot of evolution has gone on within historical times. Sure, with lots of different, you know, the discovery. of different hominid species, Denisovins, hobbits,

you know, a tremendous amount of hominid evolution since out of Africa. Yeah, well, you've also had intergression. Yeah. Which is that the humans who left Africa interbred with Neanderthals, and they also interbred with these other hominids that have been discovered. And that's in addition to the changes in the standing variation that have gone on. And the second thing that has been found is that different continental populations, which basically correspond to race, as the term is used to locally, it's very local.

So that the changes in standing variation in Asia, Asian populations are very seldom shared by European or sub-Saharan African populations. And you put all that together. and you have an explanation for why it could be that you have within historical times, and certainly since humans dispersed out of Africa, can have had substantial evolutionary differences developed, which is the subject of the subsequent chapter in the book. Okay. And I suppose we can go to that subsequent chapter.

I will say, I just want to say you ran something by, that may get people thinking, when you talked about your thriftiness example, you talked about Hunter Gather Society, suddenly, it's basically a selection effect that appears that didn't appear before, that wasn't there before, can obviously enhance the speed of that of that variant being adopted. And you said that thrifty people, you know, become wealthy and that's attracted to women. And what you really meant is in a Hunter Gather society, where there's great scarcity. It's evolutionarily women who have to, who therefore have to lactate and take of her child need resources at that in those tribal societies and therefore

it's reasonable to suspect that the people who amass a lot of resources are therefore attractive potential mates except that you don't have mass resources in it you know you just you'll use them well yeah you use them right away yeah okay but let's let's go to the next chapter because I and I think it's important again maybe so one can establish that there's been a tremendous amount of evolution since the time when Stephen Jay Gould thought there hadn't been. Okay, that's important point. But that there are, that there are continental population differences in variants are associated with personality, ability, and social behavior are common, that these things

result not just in, do result in behavioral changes. And I want to go into that, but I think it's really important that I got the sensory book and let me ask you to verify this, that while the claim is made that there are differences, continental differences due to population changes, and those population, those continental differences generally correspond to what people might say are race right now, that there are differences, that they may not be great, and it doesn't discredit the fact that within groups, the variations are much greater than the variations between groups, which is a really important fact. Now, I think I got the sense in your book.

You kept saying that people stress this fact for political reasons, obviously, but I didn't get the sense that there was any evidence that disagrees with that. No. But the problem, if you try to phrase this in terms, oh, it's a small percentage of the genome. And for a long time, well, in the technical literature, it's called Lowantin's fallacy. Yeah. And the people were writing about it as early as the 1980s, that the idea that just because humans are mostly the same on the vast majority of these variants doesn't mean that the remaining differences can't be important.

Okay. For that matter, I mean, the genomes of chimpanzees and humans are, what, 98% the same? Yeah, but there's significant differences. Yeah, and so it's the case of having to hold two thoughts in your mind at the same time, which is that humans are mostly the same. And there can also nonetheless be significant differences. It's really hard for it. Yeah, no, it is. It is, and it's hard to talk about now.

But there can be significant differences, which once again don't have necessarily value associated with them. The differences can be, if they exist, can be beneficial in certain circumstances and not beneficial in other circumstances. Yeah. But go on. The point is that if you go look at, let's say that you have any given snip and you have, let's say, one of the, Alleles promotes schizophrenia. I think that's an example I use in the book. By promotes it, I'm talking about it gives a tiny little bump

to the likelihood of schizophrenia. And I'll say parenthetically, another of the discoveries that's quite recent since the sequence of the genome is it used to be thought that you had genes for things, a gene for schizophrenia, and maybe you would have more than one gene, but even at the turn of the century, the best geneticist still thought of 10 or 12 SNPs as being involved was kind of surprising. Well, the answer is that even for something as simple as height, which we know is 70, 80% heritable, you have thousands

of SNPs that are associated with height. You have thousands of SNPs associated with IQ or with schizophrenia or anything else. So it's a look so but you go back to the example, you have an allele which promotes schizophrenia. Okay, that allele is said to have an allele frequency in a population. For convenience, let's refer to the percentage of people. It's actually the percentage of gene animals, but let's let's think of it in the percentage of people in a population who carry that allele. Let's say it's 80% among Europeans. You can also calculate the allele frequency for that same SNF in sub-Saharan African populations, East Asian populations. Question, is the frequency, is the allele frequency similar in all three groups, or is it different?

If you're talking within sub-Saharan African populations, and how different are Kenyans from Nigerians, the answer is the correlation between the allele frequencies is about 0.98 to 0.99. And guess what? That's true for East Asian populations, within East Asian populations, and it's true within European populations. populations, the degree to which you can look at thousands of different snips and ask about the correlation of allele frequencies, they're all about 0.9798. Now, physicists don't get excited about that size of a correlation.

A social scientist, it's unheard of to have correlations that. But if you look at the differences between the populations in sub-Zeran Africa and Europe, the correlation average is more like 0.7. And similarly, if you look at the Europeans and East Asians, correlations are about 0.7, that's still pretty high. But as anyone who's worked with correlations knows, if you do a scatter plot of something, two variables that have a correlation of 0.7, there's a whole lot of scatter than that. And that's what you see with not just a few of these snips, you see these population differences across continents. Now, here's the problem with writing the book two years ago.

Is it about 30% I think? It's a very, very large percentage. Whether you're talking about blood pressure or you're talking about schizophrenia or blood proteins or social behavior or cognitive ability, doesn't make any difference. these differences are ubiquitous. Now, the conclusion of that, and large differences are ubiquitous. The conclusion from that is not about any specific trait.

We aren't there yet. We're getting there. The geneticists are getting there. And they're making incredibly rapid progress. That's why I say 10 years, an awful lot of these. this stuff is going to be understood, but we aren't there yet. I am saying precisely the same thing that David Reich, a very highly respected geneticist at Harvard,

I almost hate to bring him into it because voted by Charles Murray is certainly not David Reich's idea of a good time. But he said it in the New York Times op-ed piece. Okay. And he said it very eloquently. People have got to stop saying, that what we know is races don't have any important genetic differences. They're going to just be run down by the tsunami,

I think he used the word, the tsunami of data. And he went on to say this is not a catastrophe. He went on to say that these differences won't necessarily be great. But this idea of labeling someone a racist, if they suggest that human groups can be significantly different genetically, has got to stop because it's an indefensible position. Well, even though, I mean, there are, you know, in certain diseases, we already know that there are group selection effects that,

the way you call it race or populations, that certain populations are more susceptible to certain diseases. We've known that for decades, actually. That's one thing we've done. But for some reason, people have said, even though we've known for a long time, the sickle cell anemia has to be genetically different in and that the Taysax syndrome has to be genetically different between Ashkenazi Jews and other populations.

We've known that for a long time. Sure. But only for a few traits. And for some reason, we said, oh, well, it can't be anything else. And no, everything is going to be somewhat different. Okay. Let's move from there in the last 20 minutes or so to class. We've, which has got to be less controversial

than racist. Is anybody still watching this at this point? Yeah, no, believe me. You know, if you're thinking, oh, yes, you know, don't worry. We've, this will be nowhere near the longest podcast. But, you know, I think to look, one of the goals I want to have is, is there are very places where people can get, if they really want to understand something,

they can get an in-depth discussion between people, respectful, hopefully, in-depth discussion, of ideas and and you know people can always take a break but I'm always my experience so far and we'll see what we happen happens here is that people often say I could you know I would have liked even heard more so so I hope that's the case I certainly if I didn't think it was if I didn't think it was interesting I would have cut you off now so I'm having good time so I'm willing to go on as long as you're my as long as you're having a good time then I'm having a good time. And I think, but I think it's, it's fascinating to discuss these ideas and

being able to discuss them. And so, and stated certain ways, as you point out, it's just, they're not content. It's only when you phrase them in other ways that they appear to be contentious, but it's so obvious that, that, that some things are true. Without any, without ascribing any ideological or value significance to those statements, they become clear. It's only when you, when you ascribe, and we'll talk about in the next few minutes, near the end of this, the ideological aspect of this, which is so worrisome. But anyway, let's talk about class.

And I think we can go through this a little more swiftly. It's one of the areas where you've gotten clearly a lot of pushback as well. But the basic statement you're making is that, well, let me, let me, you say it. My proposition is that racism and sexism are not. longer decisively important in determining who rises the top. To support that proposition, I'm about to demonstrate that ethnic differences in two major components of class, economic attainment and income, nearly disappear for people at similar

IQs. And then you also say racism and sexism still play a role in determining who rises to the top, but that role is not decisive. We can have a range of opinions about whether the roles of racism and sexism merit the adjective large or small and advocate different public policy. depending upon our different perspectives without affecting the relevance of the role of genes, environment, and the interaction that continue, that constitute the topic of class. So the, and I think the, again, I'm going to, I'm going, so one of the things you've gotten

a lot of pushback for is basically saying that at some level what you might call intelligence, which is just an accident of nature, plays a large role in what is a large role in what is emerging to be distinct class differences, which are independent race, more than, more than dependent upon, on relative, as you would call it, IQ. But also, the other thing that I think was really important that I got out of reading this, which I think is, well, for me, even more fascinating, because I always like not knowing rather than knowing in the sense, because it means there's a lot we have to learn is that the dominant factor that appears to be and and by and when you say this you also tie in i guess i'm going to kind of put the last three or three things together you tie in

your experience that given this fact that intelligence is is is is crucially related to some success factor in our modern society that many efforts to by governments and local industry local groups to intervene and programs that do that are guaranteed to not be successful at some level, which has caused you a lot of grief. I'm sure that statement. But it's worth pointing out that you've been involved in this for a long time, from the, from actively being involved in at the, and in the Peace Corps to studying this later on. But so not just that, but the really remarkable thing is that the chief determining facts,

that determines sort of behavior that's going to lead to success or happiness or many other things is completely unknown. It's not parental guidance. It's not genetic, but it's due to unsupervised environment in a way that no one understands. So I've thrown a lot of things together, but I want to just sort of merge them together. Okay, so here is a concept, another jargoning concept that's really important. the distinction between the shared environment and the non-shared environment. The shared environment are the things that most people think of when they think of environmental causes of economic success, socioeconomic status and so forth. That would include the income of the family, the educational attainment of the parents, the parenting styles, the quality of the neighborhood, the quality of the schools. That's shared to some degree by all siblings, but it's shared most cleanly by twins.

Yeah, and you study between studies. Twins are born at the same moment in a marriage. They're born at the same moment in the socioeconomic trajectory of the family over time, et cetera, et cetera. And so you've had a very powerful research tool in taking large samples of fraternal twins and examining their similarities and large samples of identical twins and looking at their similarities. This is a completely separate thing from the famous studies of identical twins raised apart. Those are interesting. They're fun. They're informative. But the really large sample studies are not twins raised apart.

They're twins raised together because that gives you algebraically a way of partitioning what's going on. To illustrate why, and I won't go through the algebra, fraternal twins share 50% of their genes. Yeah. Of their parents' genes. Excuse me. Each other's genes. Identical twins, one egg, I mean, they share 100% of their genes.

Yeah. Effectively. Two to one. Yeah. And algebraically, that enables you to compute what proportion of the, variation you observe is accounted for by heritability, her genes, but it's heritable. It allows you to compute what proportion is accounted for by the shared environment.

And whatever is left over is called the non-shared environment. That's actually inaccurate insofar as it includes two things. It includes the non-shared environment and it also includes measurement error and measurement error. and measurement error in the social sciences is a big deal. Yeah, well, it's a big deal in all of science. Only differences in physics, we know our measurement error is generally better than you do in social sciences, but it's an inherent part of science.

And it frustrates me that people don't realize that that's the great thing about science is we can try and quantify our uncertainties instead of just ignoring them. Anyway, the finding that came out starting in the 1980s, because this text, technique has been known for a long time and a lot of work has been done. The startling thing that was first identified in the 1980s was the heritability of almost all

traits is substantial. It varies depending on what the trait may be, but it's substantial. The surprising part was how little was explained by the shared environment. And by the way, this is depressing news for all parents, including me. We like to think that as parents, we account for a lot more. how our kids turned out. And I continue to believe that's true. And in fact, I can appeal to some empirical evidence for that. As my wife likes to put it, we can teach our kids to be nice, even if we can't teach them to be smart and teach them to be good. We can socialize them to some degree, and that's an important thing to do. But the proportion of things that people have always thought

historically were hugely affected by environment. The factors in the shared environment aren't. This has huge implications for what you can expect from attempts to change things. And this is where I'm not saying, okay, I am identified with one branch. of the interpretation of this which says this really constrains what you can expect out of environmental interventions and there is a book by katherine page hardin that's come out recently the title of which i don't recall off hand which uses a lot of the same science and and describes it accurately and comes to much more optimistic conclusions

about how we can still use interventions to make a difference. So I will phrase the argument that I think is a plausible one and a reasonable one, which is it's highly constrained. Because if you're starting out with an environmental influence, since people are always talking about how you raise test scores, that's one of the main goals of pre-g and the rest of it. I don't know why, but it's supposed to be an American fixation. Okay. If it's the case that the shared environment only accounts for 20%, let's say, of that,

and I'm probably being generous, okay, so you've got 20% that can be twiddled with through really effective programs, presumably. But the problem is that any intervention you have is going to comprise a small fraction of the total environmental environment. that the child is in. And so simply as a matter of math, you're looking at a potential change, even given a really good program that is severely constrained. And I will be happy if people will simply accept that

and stop believing every time the New York Times gives you the latest story of miraculous increases in IQ produced by some program because you have short-term effects on the exit test sometimes. A lot of times you don't. It was to tenuate over time. And the overall story is genes are a big portion of all kinds of personality factors, all kinds of cognitive abilities, and an awful lot of social behavior.

It's not, this is not genetic determinism. Yeah. We were talking about explaining modest proportions of the variance. We live with a great deal of uncertainty, whether genetic or environmental. No, it's not genetic determinism. It's just saying it's an important aspect. And we have in the past way overestimated the direct effects of the way that we raise kids. Yeah, no, I think that those two things are very important. I tend to take more, I don't know whether solace is the word, from the fact that the largest component is still not understood, which I'll get to in a second. I guess the thing that doesn't surprise me so much, I mean, as a parent, you realize this immediately,

but I think in general, I once described it recently to someone saying was really a property of entropy in physics. But effectively, it's just a lot easier to do bad than it is to do good. It's a lot easier to damage your children than to improve them, I think. And it's just, I think, a property of nature. And so I think you said, I mean, it's, you know, clearly you can abuse a child and really have severe impacts. But incrementally, it's much harder.

And it's hard to society. It's a lot easier to have the effects of, say, someone who's not a self-made billionaire or becomes president and have those bad effects than it is to try and improve problems. It's just a lot easier to do one than the other. But at the same time, the worry or I might disagree, and people will probably say I've been too kind, but I accept it's all science, and therefore I can't help but agree with the data in a sense. and find it compellingly interesting, is that while it's true, while I think the data is clearly definitive

that parenting perhaps doesn't have as much impact as you think would, and as you point out that, well, rich parents can solve problems that kids have that poor parents can't do in certain cases, especially if the kids run into problems, the fact that so much, that the unshared environment has such a big impact, suggest to me as someone who's much more amenable

to new social policies, let's say, that if as we learn more about what aspects of the unshared environment really do help or change, help or hurt, we might be able to exploit that. Once we learn about how biologically that unmanipulated environment has an impact, we might be able to think of new ways to manipulate things in a way to have

programs that are more effective. What do you think about that? Well, let me try to dash all of your hopes. Good. As best I can. Okay. First place, some very smart people have been working on precisely that issue. Robert Coleman has been one of the leading people who have been trying to, to figure out this non-shared environment. And he's been working on it for decades now, and they've made quite little progress, as he will say. But let me just offer instead two other observations. One is any parent who has had more than one child knows that those two kids had characteristics

that were quite different from the get-go, that you recognized in the first two weeks of life in some case. And furthermore, I think parents of more than one child recognize there is no way that they are able to change the second kid to be more like the first kid or vice versa. It's just the impossibility of that becomes a parent pretty quickly. So I'm saying basically our experience is parents with these traits and their interactability generalizes to a larger population. A second thing that I would offer in terms of caution about what we're going to learn about the non-shared environment goes to the phenomena known as I'm getting old and I'm becoming more and more like my mother for girls and I'm coming more and more like my dad like for boys more like my parents. And that is reflected in the data on heritability over time. So let's take, go back to the case of standard. test stores and IQ, the heritability of IQ normally for five-year-olds is pretty low.

It's maybe 0.3.4. And it goes up. And so by adolescence, it's up around 0.5.6. And by full, maturity, it can rise up near 0.8. And so you say to yourself, why should that be? because intuitively you would say you start out with your genes, but your environment accumulates over time and presumably the effect of the environment should accumulate over the time, over time. The alternative is to say this, and I'm offering this as an analogy, we're way off the, this is things we don't have to argue about anymore. We can argue about this one, but I'll just present it as my own view I've come to.

And that is that a lot of us, as we grow up, particularly in adolescence, we are consciously rebelling against our genetic tendencies because we're rebel against our parents, we're rebelling against whatever. We do a lot of things when we're 18, 19, 20, and through our 20s, which are experimental. We're trying stuff. And as time goes on, we've got a form of regression to the mean, which is that those are in way aberrations from natural tendencies, and those aberrations diminish. And you generalize that statement, and that can help account for the increasing heritability of IQ,

of personality traits, or the rest of it. This is not dispositive proof at all. It is an attempt to say we have a very, well-established phenomena of increasing heritability with age. And this is one way of thinking about it that might be fruitful. Okay, it's good. Okay, I do want to get to, now I want to move to sort of your thoughts about your more value judgments about how this impacts on society. But I will, I do want to read this because you say it shouldn't, the goal, which is to try and understand class structure and where it comes from,

should not obscure a larger truth. The bulk of the variance in success in life is unexplained by either nature or nurture. Researchers are lucky if they can explain half of the variance in educational attainment with measures of abilities and socioeconomic background. They're lucky if they can explain even a quarter of the variance in earned income by such measures. The takeaway for thinking about our future as individuals is that we do not live in a deterministic world ruled by either genes or a social background, let alone race or gender. But Proposition 9, which is about social classes, is about classes, not individuals.

The takeaway for thinking about the future of modern Western societies is that the role of genes is important for shaping class structure. So instead of the, so it basically says we don't live in a deterministic world. It's not saying genetic determinism, but genes are significant. And in the and in your last few chapters where you start to talk about, you begin to talk about about value and i want to give a few quotes and and and and and and and and and and and and and and you know we'll go on for about another five or ten minutes um you say say i submit that the evidence is conclusive enough to warrant treating them as facts the implication is that advanced societies have replaced one form of unfairness with another the old form of unfairness was

that talented people were prevented from realizing their potential because of artificial barriers rooted in powerlessness and lack of opportunity. The new form of unfairness is that talent is largely a matter of luck and that the few who are so unusually talented that they rise to the top are the beneficiaries of luck in the genetic lottery. The future, and then I jump ahead here, and that's the end of one chapter, and you begin the next by saying, the future of the liberal arts, we need to call up the future, therefore, lies therefore in addressing the fundamental questions of human existence head on without embarrassment or fear, taking them to the top down and easily understood language

and progressively rearranging them into domains of inquiry, they unite the best of science and humanities in each level of organization. And so the first statement is that basically it is a genetic lottery, and when people talk about lucky genes, sometimes they mean, the ones I've heard of talk about usually, it means, mean, their parents are rich. But your argument is that really, and when you get to your value judgments, that there's a real problem with society in the fact of what we do about the fact that

that lucky genes or talent produces a socioeconomic class structure and what we're going to do about it. So I want to, I want you to elaborate on that concern about that constraint and what we might do as a society. Yeah, and I would also suggest to people who are watching this that they read a book by Michael Sendell, who's a philosopher of Harvard, called The Tyranny of Meritocracy that came out about a year ago, I think, and is a very thoughtful discussion of this problem. And Dick Hernstein and I were also aware of this, we wrote the bell curve. And if you go to the last chapter, the bell curve, you will see a lot of what about to say now.

The one perfectly reasonable response to the importance of luck in the genetic lottery is to say, well, what we need to do is to redistribute the world's goods. more effectively in a Rawlsian kind of fashion, John Rawls, because the inequality is not justified by merit. That's perfectly natural response. I think that a better response is not to say that that's going to solve anything, but rather to frame the question as being one of, how do you have a society which provides an abundance of valued places

for people of a very broad range of abilities and characteristics to fit. And by a valued place, I mean, if you were gone, people would miss you. And that can be because of a family and spouse and children. It can be because of a community that would miss you. I suppose it can be because your place of employment would miss you. It could also be because your faith community will miss you. I have to introduce that. It was next on my list.

But this is much more important. So in other words, I'm saying, suppose we take someone who's gotten the short end of the stick on a variety of ways. They're below average in IQ. They're below average in beauty. They're below average in charm. They're below average in their personal skills.

They're below average in industriousness. And all of these are, if you get, down to it, not their fault because they were unlucky in the draw. They need a society where they are not going to get rich, but they will have enough. And I will say parenthetic, I'm in favor of universal basic income. Yeah, I was going to talk. If we had more time, I was going to talk about that, but that's important. But much more than that, much more important than the income is that they have a value place.

How can you do that? you can have a society where it is widely recognized and celebrated that marriage is a wonderful source of the most intimate human contact and family is, a society in which communities are so constructed that communities are engaged in important activities that have lots of work need to be done with them for everybody so that you can contribute to that. You need a lot of missions for a lot of people. And now we're really getting to my own read elections. My own view is that a decentralized, not a pure libertarian society, but a very decentralized society where the action, the stuff of life is conducted at a local level to the maximum extent,

is the one that produces the richest assortment of value. places. That is very much my own view. I am not going to dis- anybody who disagrees with it. But I would say that's the right way of framing the problems that we have to come to grips with. We are not going to fix the unfairnesses of the genetic lottery through income redistribution. Well, okay. That is that is sort of of that's sort of one thing that might have effects at the margin. It is not give people meaningful, satisfying lives.

Well, okay, and I wanted, it's perfect. I'm glad, well, I gave you that forum because I wanted to move to this personal view, which you express eloquently here. It's a part of what I agree with so much of what you said. Part of it I just agree with. I think one, not, I agree with everything you said. Personally, I would say it's not so much a decentralized society that's done at the local level. I think I would like a society where all of the basic needs are met by government.

And those basic needs are health, education, and safety. And those are needs which are not being met, I would argue, in many countries, in particularly United States. But let me, but I don't, but my views, well, this is a dialogue and not an interview. I want to focus on what you said. And I want to read what you said because you wrote so eloquently and I find it so wonderful. So let me just say my argument begins with two apparently unrelated propositions. First, the ultimate goal of public policy is not to do things like raise

incomes or increase college graduation rates, but to enable people to flourish and to achieve deep satisfactions in life, to pursue happiness in the Aristotelian sense of the word. Second, recent decades have seen the development of a new upper class that I described in coming apart, another one of your books, not just influential and affluent, but smart, highly educated with its own distinctive culture, significantly cut off from the mainstream of American society. It's the same group, no longer emergent but having come to cap power that Richard Hernstein and I called the cognitive elite in the bell curve. The new upper class includes, though it was not limited to, people who have the leading roles in shaping the nation's economy culture and politics.

For me, what matters most is not material equality, but access to the well springs of human flourishing, which in turn requires that society be structured so that people across a wide range of personal qualities and abilities are able to find valued places, as you just said. And then, and related to what you just said to me, you then say, what the new upper class can do is honor the well springs. That means, for example, celebrating marriage, not just as one of many options,

but as an institution that gives the most people the best chance of creating a deep and fulfilling intimate relationship with another adult. It means celebrating the Tokvillian community, whether it is found in a small town or a neighborhood in a metropolis or megalopolis, and it means celebrating productive works of all kinds.

It means celebrating the fulfillment that people of faith derive from their faith. Celebrating does not mean passing laws. It means that people who sit at the apex of the nation's politics, economics, and culture need to be advocates for marriage, community, productive work, and at the least, to treat religion with respect. So I think the notion that we as a society should value everyone is one that is incredibly laudable and the notion that wherever the elites come from,

whether as you argue and I think for good reason give compelling arguments behind that elites now are being are being caused by by genetic talents more than other more than other areas in human history where elites were caused by other other constraints other social constraints but that we should celebrate everyone you know whether we determine that marriage is always the best way to do it is not something I disagree is but I was also intrigued by the fact that you you say we need to treat religion with respect and and and and that people that we we recognize people of faith derive something for their faith but i wanted to go back to what what i said to you at the beginning you i surprised you're not really a person of faith you're a person who'd like to have faith and so i'm intrigued that you put that up there among the among the things that you value that you think society should value because i think we should respect people but i don't see any reason to respect religion

Okay, you've just opened up another three-hour conversation. Well, let's do it in two minutes. I want to end. I'm going to read a final quote for me to end. But I wondered why you put that in there. Obviously, your wife has influenced you, and you can see the satisfaction for the Quaker community that you've been growing. We talked to, that's why I wanted to talk about at the beginning.

But are there other arguments? Okay, there's the social science argument. Okay. I mean, people get something for religion, but my question is, My question is, it's not so much, I won't, don't deny that people get something useful from religion. If they didn't, it wouldn't be so ubiquitous in human society. Clearly, it serves whether you say an evolutionary purpose or a cognitive purpose. The question I wonder is, can you get the same thing without having religion?

Why do you need religion to give that? Can't we have quantum mechanics classes every Sunday instead of, instead of? Let's put it this way. I also have respect for people without faith. And I'm only asking that they quit talking as if only that smart people don't believe that stuff anymore. I agree with you completely there. Because one of the things that I have discovered over the last 15, 20 years, and again affected by my wife and the experiences there is.

I have met a whole lot of people of faith who I have been increasingly convinced have access to ways of knowing that I do not. And here is the analogy that I finally came up with. I think it's similar to tone deference. for genetic reasons, some people are tone deaf. That does not mean that the music of Beethoven is not beautiful. It means they, for reasons not their fault, can't hear it.

Same as colorblindness, literal color blindness. I think that in matters of faith, there is a genetic element there. And if you want to, you can say, yes, some people, have more of gene for diluting themselves than others and that is one that is one parsimonious explanation I am inclined to think that it's more analogous to tone deafness I think it is I think some people have it's harder for them to access faith for genetic reasons and the genetic reason the genetic reasons constitute a disability in some sense well that's where I mean I agree with you I agree with you I

everything you said there except for the disability i wouldn't put the value judgment i would say and it's this notion that people say loss of faith as if loss of faith is a bad thing i would argue in fact um maybe it's like um well mountain climbers some people aren't afraid of heights and and to me it's i'd rather have the gene that makes me or the thousand genes that make me afraid of heights than then then take some of the chances of martin conner's but but i don't view i don't view it i guess i don't view it as a loss or a disability. There's no doubt that I recognize my lack of my perfect comfort and happiness with the lack of faith may have a genetic basis. I also think it has an intellectual one. But we're at an impasse here and would be in an impasse no longer how long we talked.

No, I know, I know, but I felt it's important to, I've been, you know, I think it's important that there are two sides of this. And and and what, but what I, what I will, what I will agree with you completely about is the fact that, that, that, that it is ridiculous for people to claim that if people have faith that they're somehow stupid or that only people who don't think, faith. I, I think the scriptures are nonsense, but, but people having a deep sense of faith is a different, is a different thing. But I don't, but let me give you the last word here. I thought it was worthwhile having that brief conversation, but I just want to read the last paragraph of your book, which I find beautiful. When we are able to once again, once again to talk

easily about human differences, a difficult and elusive next step remains. The wellsprings of human flourishing have been going dry for many Americans, and the damage done by the new upper class, however inadvertently, has been importantly to blame. Replenishing and revitalizing, and revitalized those wellsprings should be our first priority. But developing policies that replenish and revitalize them must begin with a drastic shift in thinking of most of the people who run the nation's economy, culture, and politics. It's time for America's elites to try living with inequality of talents,

understanding that each human being has strengths and weaknesses, qualities we admire and qualities we do not admire, and that our good opinions seldom turns on people's talents, but rather on a person's character. We need a new species of public policy that accepts differences and works with people as they are, not as we want to shape them. I hope this book contributes to that process. Let me say two things about that.

Beautiful paragraph. First of all, it's clearly not the statement of a racist or a sexist or a genetic determinist. And secondly, I hope that your book does help. continue to the process, even if we may differ about policy issues, but the goal of what you just said there is something that I don't see how anyone could disagree with. And I do want to thank you for your patience in spending time with me going over some of this. So I do thank you. Thank you for a chance to say the things I've said and to tell you how much I've enjoyed the conversation.

Oh, great. Well, that's, thank you. And I'm sure the people listen and listen carefully will benefit greatly. So thanks again. I hope you enjoyed today's conversation. This podcast is produced by the Origins Project Foundation, a non-profit organization whose goal is to enrich your perspective of your place in the cosmos by providing access to the people who are driving the future of society in the 21st century and to the ideas that are changing our understanding of ourselves and our world. To learn more, please visit OriginsprojectFoundation.

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