This podcast is brought to you by the Albany public library main branch and the generosity of listeners like you. God daddy, these people talk as much as you do! Razib Khan’s Unsupervised Learning.
Hey, everybody, this is Razib Khan with the Unsupervised Learning podcast. And I am here with Diana Fleischman of Aporia magazine. She's also an evolutionary psychologist who has a research appointment at the University of New Mexico. And she has been involved in the field for many decades now. So I want to start off with asking you, I guess, what is evolutionary psychology? How would you define it? What are the presuppositions or premises of the field, so we can just kind of understand as we're going forward, what we're talking about
Cool. Evolutionary Psychology is the idea that the human mind is - has adaptations for solving certain problems that were recurrent throughout deep history. So problems like finding a mate, finding food, avoiding aggression, avoiding disease. These are the kinds of problems that evolutionary psychology deals with. And there's a couple of different main schools of evolutionary psychology. But the main one, which is the Santa Barbara school, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, they have this idea that the mind is actually sort of a set of modules or like programs, and instead of the mind being some kind of general purpose mechanism. In fact, we have programs that solve specific kinds of adaptive problems. And that's generally what most evolutionary psychologists think. There's also some other suppositions that have been challenged or unchallenged over time. One of them is that there's a psychic Unity of Mankind, that all human beings everywhere have a similar psychology or psychological architecture, which is something that is a little bit controversial, and also that there are significant sex differences between men and women and in terms of their psychology, considering that they had to solve very different adaptive problems throughout evolutionary history.
Yeah, so I mean, the sex differences thing, I think, was traditionally the least controversial aspect. But I feel like in the last couple of years, last five years, it's gotten like quite muddled. How has evolutionary psychology dealt with the changing tenor, tenor of the culture.
One interesting thing that's happened is I think that there is going to be a woke and anti woke evolutionary sciences. There seems to be a schism happening right now. And on a recent conversation with with Mike Bailey, who's a sexologist, and whose son is an evolutionary psychologist, we had this conversation about, you know, whether it's not best actually, for different societies like now with sex research, there's two societies, there's a woke, and anti woke kind of sex Research Society, but the European human behavior and evolution association is really into anthropology, human behavior ecology, they tend to actually collect data out in the field. And they have very few evolutionary psychologists, and very few evolutionary psychology sessions in their in their conference, and one of the main people there is called Rebecca Sear. And she's a demographer, and she's very against, you know, what she thinks are some of the excesses of evolutionary psychology, including overestimating sex differences, you'll get a sense with the European Human Behavior and Evolution Association, which met back in April, their keynote was Adam Rutherford, which I don't think that Adam Rutherford would be a keynote at the Human Behavior and Evolution Society in the United States. Whereas HBES in the United States, is really much more focused on evolutionary psychology, sex differences, there's some really fun kind of talks and ideas that are that are being thrown around. I think they had a whole session like on incels, and that's quite different than - So those two societies seem to have a rift and, and I think the European Human Behavior and Evolution Association, they are also like, probably much less in favor of talking about sex differences. If you look at some people involved in that, you know, I think like David Geary, David Schmitt, David Buss, all two other David's, they're all much more into sex differences. And, you know, while they're welcome in both conferences, I just don't think that there would be like a whole session on sex differences at EB which is what it's called, as opposed to HBES. So, you know, maybe that's a good thing. I don't know, if that's something that's also happening in behavior genetics, or in other -
Well yeah, it's interesting because I think in behavioral genetics is the opposite. In terms of the woke the stuff is stronger in the United States than it is in Europe. And, and some of the some, I will tell you, I mean, you know, this happened years ago, so not that many years ago, but I think I can tell you, but - There were some things related to sex differences and sexual harassment and microaggressions and other sorts of things in from what I've heard in the behavioral genetics community and their conferences, and basically the Americans won because they had more people, but the Americans were pushing the more progressive social justice positions. And the Europeans, a lot of these Europeans, like, they're not conservative, they're socialists and stuff. But, you know, they, they were resisting. So it seems like in the behavioral genetics community, it is the opposite. I do have to say, in the genetics, community as a whole, definitely people in the United States are more woke. So evolutionary psychology, or like, you know, this this field is seems to be, you know, I know, I know Rebecca's here, a little bit. She used she was on the Insight back before she had her awokening. Because, yeah, I mean, I know she's a big activist right now. She wasn't like that five years ago. I don't know what happened. But
Yeah, she's, she's changed quite a lot. I used to. I mean, I was at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. I've been out with her in groups several times, so that we had no problems before fairly recently. But, you know, just, I don't want to get too far afield here. But yeah, it in the HBES. There was also like a reckoning about whatever sexual harassment. And we actually ended up collecting data. I think there were 300 respondents, and three people said that they had been asked out, and one person said that it was persistent in a way that they didn't enjoy. And so certainly, there are some people who say that was one too many. But I don't think like one out of 300 people is a particularly pervasive problem.
I mean, yeah, I mean, okay, so evolutionary psychology, of course, like you would do a survey. And you know, you would be interested in sexual harassment, like, not in sexually harassing, but in the topic, because evolutionary psychology, you know, stylized facts, like you guys are obsessed with sex. Right?
Yeah. So we are obsessed with sex. No, you know, there's two, there's two filters in terms of what your whether your genes get into the next generation. One of those filters is if you survive, which is much less sexier than the other filter, which is whether you have sex, and whether somebody wants to have sex with you. And so reproductive success is very important. But there's also this other factor of sex, which is that in our species, sex is used for a variety of reasons other than just reproduction. It's also used to make alliances, to show affiliation. You know, I've written about this, I wrote about bisexuality a lot when I was in graduate school. And what I said essentially, is that there's a there's a continuum of affection to sex, and that we use sex as a reward to facilitate behavior that's in our adaptive interests. So we're not like bonobos, where we're having sex all the time. But we're also not like chimps, who, who never who are very rarely have kind of same sex, sexual relationships. And if you ask bonobo researchers, there's this bonobo Research Station, where I was talking to one of the researchers. And she was saying, you could take all the bonobos open up all the gates and let all the different groups mingle together. And while there'd be a bit of frenzied humping, it wouldn't end up with bloodshed. Whereas if you had a group of chimps together, and you let them all interact with each other, there would be almost certainly a serious injury or death. So that's the difference in species that can have sex for affiliation and those that can't.
Actually you just dropped in the bonobo there. And, you know, I feel like, I know, I know what that is, you know, I've read my Frans de Waal or whatever you're talking about bonobo and common chimpanzees, because I feel like a lot of our discussions are based on primatology and bonobos, and common chimpanzee fieldwork. But the two species are quite different. And I feel that what researchers generalize about primates, quote unquote, “apes”, you know, our lineage varies based on what they study. And that's a little weird to me.
It’s a little weird to you what? The primates that people study how they influenced their perception of human behavior.
Okay, so I don't know. Wrangham. He studies common chimpanzees. Right. Richard Wrangham. Right. So, you know, we talked about, like, you know, I mean, I think, you know, he's written about violence and stuff like that. And then, you know, some researcher, I think, de Waals that studies Bonobos you know, bonobos, I don't know, how you how people say, I've heard different things.
Diana: There's two different ways to say it.
Yeah. And then, you know, they're like, oh, like, they're the sexy ape. And, you know, so we're talking about sex all the time. And like, Look, we're not common chimpanzees or bonobos. So, you know, like, how are we going to? Snd like, you know, phylogenetically we are equally distant to both of them because they're in a clade by themselves, you know, and so -
Diana: They interbreed though.
Ugh, yeah. Yeah.
There's, there's some idea that there's hybrids of them out there. I just think it's very interesting, you know, because you do population genetics and stuff like that, to think that two species that have such completely dissimilar social behavior actually can still interbreed. In principle, chimps and bonobos don't interbreed in the wild. Because bonobos and chimps have very different attitudes to water. chimps don't like water, they won't swim anywhere. And so that they don't -
So I think, you know, evolutionary biology, we call this probably allopatric speciation, where the bonobos are south of the Congo River. And chimpanzees are north and east and west of the Congo River. And so they can't cross the Congo River. And that's how the speciation happened. But like you said, they're socially very, very different. You know, chimpanzees tend to be, you know, I'll say, Patrilocal patrilineal. And, you know, kind of much more aggression. Bonobos are the opposite of their matrilineal less aggression, more sex. And I guess what you're implying here is it's not learned behavior. It's hardwired and yet they can still hybridize, right?
Yeah, they can still hybridize So my first ever job when I was 19, was working at a place called the Language Research Center, in Decatur, Georgia. And they had a bonobo breeding program. And they also had four chimps there, and the chimps could use symbols to communicate with language. And there's actually a bunch of behaviors ran that particular center. And so that was one of the formative experiences for me was working with with great apes. At that time. They also had rhesus macaques at that same center. Anyway, they ended up moving the bonobos out. But the bonobo was were actually quite aggressive to humans, there were two of the bonobo researchers were missing fingers from the bonobo working with bonobos. So
Yeah, so and that is actually something that I wonder about, in terms of we have these stylized ideas of the peaceful, sexy ape, and then chimpanzees are crazy. And, you know, they'll rip your face off common chimpanzees. And, you know, these are stylized facts, and, you know, they do reflect something in reality, but there's a distribution of behaviors, right? Just like human beings, you know, we can be quite peaceful and Zen, or we can be like crazy. And so, you know, if, if there were if there were anthropologists study studying humans, like, you know, depending on which, you know, Japanese, very warlike people, in the 1940s, you know, and now today, you know, they're, like, not very warlike, you know, so, I mean, how do we generalize that sort of thing? And, you know, I think our prior as human beings, as we have cultural, we're special. But I mean, what are we like, how are you sure? Because like, I don't know, this field as well. How are you sure that common chimpanzees and bonobos differ? Because they're hardwired to be different.
I mean, the experience that I have is when they were raised in captivity, and they were raised in captivity and Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, who is this woman who founded the Center that I worked at, she actually raised at a baby chimp and a baby bonobo together and taught them symbol language together. And they still had different calls, and they still had quite different behavior. So I think that's one indication. But you know, I can't necessarily be sure I was reminded of, you know, Robert Sapolsky, in this conversation, who has, I don't know if it's a whole book, or most of a book about how he studied a baboon troop, where the culture was fundamentally changed by the death of a couple of individuals. So that's, that's quite interesting. But I think, given that when they're raised in captivity, they show they show quite similar behavior. You do see bonobos raised in captivity, GG rubbing, and you don't see chimpanzees doing that, even if they're raised with the bonobos.
Okay, so that's, that's a pretty big difference. And so what you're saying here is, there's hardwired behaviors, which are, which are not shocking. As people, we have children, you see mannerisms in your children at a very early age, and even if like the father is out of the house a lot because he’s working, you see certain mannerisms. And obviously, it's somehow hard coded into the brain. There's probably some hard coding combined with some sort of priming, you know, some, some, like inputs obviously come in, and they behave in a particular way. And so it's not like shocking to me. I am looking at just like the literature real quick, you're talking about hybridization. It looks like certain certain chimpanzee groups have hybridize in the Congo in the last -
Diana: They’re also a subspecies of chimps, yeah .
Yeah. In the past, like 500,000 years, what, you know, that's kind of like, you know, you know, I mean, the Neanderthals and modern humans, our Stem lineage, or African lineage separated like 750-800,000, maybe on the high end years ago. So this is not trivial, because they have a shorter lifespan, and they've been hybridizing. So we have these two apes that are kind of quite different in a very biological way, bio behavioral way, and they can still hybridize which indicates the probably the best explain And as we're talking would be a hybrid population like someone, I don't know, like maybe some billionaire like maybe Elon Musk could fund this, like, let's create like a troupe of like F1s, you know, filial ones, of hybrid common chimpanzees and bonobos. And the hypothesis, the behavioral differences, is it hardwired is that they should behave intermediates. You know,
It's just you talking about things, people that are like hardwired and genetics. I know somebody who was really red pilled about genetics, because he found out that he was the product of sperm donation when he was in his 20s. And so he thought his parents had really done everything for him. And that, you know, they had tried really strived to to give him all available opportunities to make him smart. And then when he found out that his dad, the dad that raised him wasn't his real dad he’s like, oh okay, it's all genes. So yeah, that's a definitely a great way to get red pilled.
Well I mean, okay, I think, let's do - Let's do the segue here. So you are an editor, or you're a contributor at Aporia, which, you know, that’s a weird word. I'm not gonna lie. You know, but you wrote about eugenics. You've been writing about eugenics, like you guys have been here. Yeah. Is this as
Since Ithe game just since I left academia. Yeah. Yeah, you've been right along. Yeah, you might as well go for it, you know.
Yeah. So talk about your eugenics piece and how people, you know, okay, here's the thing with eugenics. This is a term that's been used so much, that people have different definitions. So the original term about eugenics in the late 19th, really early 20th century, it wasn't even it was actually pre genetic insofar as the original eugenicists, were actually not Mendelian, they were against the Medelites, if you want to say. Although they eventually you know, became converts, and they had this idea that they wanted to improve the germ plasm of the species, you know, it was like, out of the Galtonian tradition. And, you know, it was about these heritable characteristics. Today, eugenics is kind of a slur, just like, I don't know, racist or something like that. And so for example, you know, people pointed this out, there is a termination, you know, there's prenatal screening for Down syndrome, etc, etc, people abort Down Syndrome fetuses quite frequently, in certain countries, they're almost gone, like in Iceland and Denmark. Is that eugenics? So technically, that is not eugenics because those individuals have very low fertility anyway. So it's not really having a long term change in the species, you know, germ plasm, or whatever. But, but I think most people colloquially will say, That's eugenics. And so I don't really I don't really know how to handle this, because I've done like, the nerdy response. Well, actually, that's not really … you know, and that people are like, look at you like, you're a dork. And you kind of are being a dork. So I've given in, and then I've encountered people who do the same thing to me. They're like, well, actually, that's not really eugenics. And I was like, Okay, I know, it's not, but colloquially everyone assumes it is. And so, I mean, how do you do first of all, how do you do what do… define eugenics for me? Like, tell me how you deal with the definition of words?
Okay let me just do a brief preamble about how tricky it is to define eugenics. Eugenics has become difficult to define for a variety of reasons. Like you said, before people knew what genetics were like. So for example, when a mother transmitted syphilis to her baby and her baby ended up blind or deaf, right? They thought that that was genetic. And so treating syphilis became a eugenic endeavor, because they thought that was genetic at the time. So there's a lot of stuff that, you know, was considered eugenic. But now we know doesn't have anything to do with genetics. Also, there's a problem with if you malign eugenics, then you end up defining eugenics in a very weird way, because you want to exclude all the stuff that you agree with, and include all the stuff that you disagree with. So like, Katherine Paige Hardin in the genetic lottery, she says eugenics is all stuff that contributes to inequality. Adam Rutherford and some other people who you define eugenics, they basically say, individual choices cannot be eugenics, it's only top down control. And then when you get into stuff, like, you know, is mandatory prenatal screening that's subsidized by the government, eugenics, nobody wants to touch that because that's something that all progressives agree with. So to me, eugenics is anything that is meant to improve the genetic or desirable, you know, increase the rate of desirable genetic qualities and decrease the rate of undesirable genetic qualities in the future. And, you know, again, also with COVID, people were saying that, you know, people not wearing masks was eugenic because in some sense, it was going to kill off everybody who had a bad immune system. So everything from You know, giving out free birth control to literal murder could be considered eugenics. And it's become very muddied. Just this week actually, Colin Wright and some other people were looking at this paper that said that trans men who are natal females should be allowed to take testosterone when they're pregnant. Because the concern about how testosterone would influence a fetus is eugenic in or it's redolent of eugenics or whatever. So it's become incredibly muddied, but my, my version of it actually includes a lot of stuff that people find desirable things like prenatal screening, but also includes things that people find undesirable, like paying people to get sterilized.
Yeah, so definitionally, what you're pointing to there is positive versus negative eugenics or positive eugenics is okay, you want the characteristics that you favor to increase negative eugenics is the opposite, didfavored characteristic should decrease and negative eugenics, you know, traditionally has been done through also like top down coercion, and that's why, you know, it's called negative eugenics and it has like a negative odor. You know, a lot of people, you know, I have traditionally, I don't use the word anymore, just because it's like, too toxic, but, you know, personalized genomic choice, you know, like, genomic libertarianism. I don't know people make individual choices. Yeah. Yeah. What were you saying?
I was gonna say, you know, one thing that I should go back to is that the person who came up with the term eugenics was Francis Galton. And when Francis Galton was talking about eugenics, he was not talking about top down control, he was interested in developing a culture in which people considered genetic concerns when they got together with other people when they made it and when they got married, he wanted to have a eugenic culture as opposed to any top down kind of control. And yeah, what you're talking about is sometimes called liberal eugenics, or reprogenics, which is, you know, things like polygenic screening, giving people a choice about what children to bring into the world.
So an interesting point here, though, is also you know, we're talking about technology, polygenic, screening, abortion, all of this stuff, right is very, you know, post 19 century tech, but who you select as your sperm or egg donor, who you marry, that is also eugenical. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, you are doing you are doing polygenic screening, like so women. Women want a man who's six inches taller than them. That is polygenic screening. For height.
Yeah and in some sense that as polygenic screening, yeah. You know, that's it's interesting when you look at the culture war about this, because I actually really admire progressives who are willing to bite the bullet and say, No, you shouldn't be able to predict, you know, you shouldn't be able to choose a sperm donor on the basis of their height, or we should have five foot four sperm donors in our banks, of course, you would see in terms of selection that they would probably be unlikely to get selected. But certainly men under six feet tall do get selected as a sperm donors. So yes, if you say personal choice cannot be eugenics it's actually a lot of progressive lefty, you know, people like @dialecticbio on Twitter who hates me, who actually brought to mind that personal choice can be eugenics. Because, you know, people like Rebecca Sear, were saying, Oh, no, you know, she she criticizes me and whatever papers and says, Diana Fleischman says, you know, that personal choice or, or prenatal screening can be eugenics. But it's not because people are not thinking about the good of the species, even if it might have eugenic outcomes. And you know, what these progressive historians of eugenics have said is actually what Galton mentioned was not top down control. And so it doesn't make any sense to make this bright line. Although it is easier to make a bright line and say, eugenics is just racist stuff, or just just increasing the prevalence of white people. That's a common definition, or only top down control that's coercive, another, another common definition. So in my piece, which is called your probably eugenicist, I just lay out, you know, why eugenics shouldn't be used as a slur? Because I was very annoyed by the discourse around modern technology, where people were saying, you know, something like? So this is a guy called George Church, he came up with an app idea called digidate, where it's a it's like a tinder app, but you would upload your genome into there and it wouldn't match you with somebody who has a genome where you would make babies that would have potentially a serious disorders, something like you know, Tay Sachs, and people were calling this eugenics. And the point that I was making is, yes, it is eugenics and that's fine. So you actually can't learn anything morally by using the word eugenics. And certainly I've been criticized people have said, Oh, we should, we shouldn't try to reclaim the word at all. But, you know, you could say this is annoying, an annoying semantic battle. But certainly when it comes to something like euthanasia, you know, 10 years ago, people were saying, or 15 years ago, they were saying you shouldn't use the word euthanasia to talk about helping somebody die who's in pain, because it was a word that the Nazis used. And now people use it very easily. And I think reclaiming the word has helped increase the popularity of, you know, what they would call death with dignity, which is another nice way of saying, you know, killing people who want to die. Yeah.
So one thing I will say is, you know, these lexical treadmills that are going on, I mean, in terms of eugenics, you know, we do know that prenatal screening, you know, you, you are, I mean, I think I can say this, you're pregnant again, like you have been pregnant before, a lot of people who are childless, childfree, or are too young to be at that stage of life don't know that. Now, like, women routinely get a blood draw, and they are told, like, you know, about a dozen, I think now, genetic conditions, including Down syndrome, of the fetus, you know, they may do verification. But the point here is, we are engaged in the last 10 years, in this massive, massive biomedical experiment. And the only people that discuss this are, you know, social conservatives and pro life people. And if I point this out, like, you know, I think you've probably done it too. If you point out this fact that this is probably the biggest eugenic, quote unquote, “change” in society in the last decade. It's silence. Why is it silence? I, my hypothesis is this is just self interest. People in academia are actually doing this, because they have children later, it's them. So when they make the choices, it can't be bad. You know.
If you're somebody who maligns eugenics, you're generally somebody who is unwilling to bite any bullet. This is my experience with people who are like progressive, you know, Anti-eugenisist. And so if you say, I'm against women having prenatal testing, to choose whether or not they're going to bring a baby to term that has a severe disability, then you don't want to bite that bullet. Because saying that a woman shouldn't be able to terminate a pregnancy is something that social conservatives say, and they don't want to be on the wrong side of that divide. Right? So you know, an individual woman is probably not making a choice on the basis of how she wants to change the the genetics of the population. But certainly, if a government subsidizes prenatal testing, they are having a eugenic effect on the population.
Yeah, and the government does in various ways, you know, tax credit, I mean, with Obamacare, in the United States, socialized medicine in Europe and the NHS. So these are, these are really, really live questions, and you've jumped into it. In a way, it's interesting, because the technology is kind of incrementally, you know, bringing us to all these sorts of screening, you know, people doing in vitro, they're screening their, you know, embryos, they're doing all these sorts of things, it's happening, but we're not really talking about it, and it becomes normalized, then eugenics is the next. You know, it's like, the next thing that hasn't been done yet. You know, you were talking you bring up like, the racial issues. Again, the media doesn't platform this, nobody amplifies this. But if you go to pro life websites, they talk about genocide against black people, because in the United States, abortion is really, really skewed towards black Americans and to a lesser extent, you know, Latinx Americans, you know, so they talk about it. And like, yeah, you're laughing because but you know, what, it's ironic.
Diana: I didn't I didn't know if you - it was ironic okay,
it's ironic, you know, only only right, only right wing people say Latinx now, that's just a thing. Like, we, we've, we've reclaimed it, you know, because, you know, and like to my Latinx brothers and sisters out there, I'm being ironic, do not, yeah, I got, you know, what, like, I'm gonna, like, talk about this real quick. I was at like, a social event. And I was - I said, someone was Latinx. They took offense because they were Latinx. Next thing I know, like, three swarthy males have surrounded me, and are daring me to call them Latinx, and I did and it was like, it was a tense moment. There is some Latinx rage, I guess, about the fact that apparently like 10 years ago, some white women in a conference boardroom decided to rename a whole ethnicity. You know, they're not happy about it. Like they're Latinx and they're not going to take it anymore. So anyway, be careful out there. You know, like this sort of like this sort of like ironic usage. The term you know, I've had some experiences, so you gotta be careful. But yeah, I mean, in terms of abortion, it does have disparate impact. That's what literally disparate impact is. And so the pro life faction, you know, the pro life group in the United States was like, you know, like, 40% of the population. They've been talking about it for decades, and against no traction, because, you know, Jonathan Haidt would say, you know, abortion is a sacred value on the left, you know,
Yeah. And, you know, there is some interesting evidence about abortion being eugenic, which is obviously, unfortunately tied up with this race. So there's this guy, Donahue and Levitt the guys who came up with Freakonomics. And there's this data now that shows that one of the main drivers of the reduction in crime in the 90s was the legalization of abortion, and deleading, you know, probably had something to do with it, too. But they were, you know, there are a synchronicity between those two things. It's not one or the other. And they assiduously you know, Donahue and Levitt, avoid talking about any kind of genetic effects. Like maybe somebody who is careless enough to get pregnant is also somehow predisposed to have a child who's careless enough to or not conscientious enough to avoid breaking the law. There's also this idea that homicides were decreased by the legalization of abortion, which is another thing that the right really hates, even though they're, they're tough on crime. They hate this idea. But anyway, in Donahue and Levitt, there are two papers, which cover more than 20 years of data on abortion and crime rates. They say that the important factor in why children who would have been aborted if abortion was legal go on to commit crimes is because they're unwanted. They talk about unwantedness as opposed to any kind of genetic factor. But these papers convince me absolutely that, that legal abortion has a eugenic component to it. Even you know, there are certainly edgelords online, who say that it's not because - but I think it definitely does.
Well, I mean, so I mean, you know, I love this about you, but like, you're like Ishmael, like your hand is against every other man, you know. So I was just like, we have these social justice warriors on the left that are coming at you. And you're like, throwing out like casual comments about how abortion is eugenic. And I'm sure that my, my pro life listeners are just like, you know, gouging their eyes out right now. You know, what, what impels you to like it, like, are you hardwired to be just like very disagreeable and casual about ... I mean, I know you used to be vegan, you obviously have an interest in extremism of various sorts.
An interest in extremism. You're making me sound like I used to belong to ISIS. I'm disagreeable. And I think I think that the topics that people offer just more interesting, I guess, maybe it's like a combination of being disagreeable and, and easily bored, I don't know. And there's this idea called high decoupling, which is where you can think about things in the abstract. So that's one aspect of it. But another aspect of, I don't know being unusual, if I'm going to talk about myself for a moment, is that I'm also very disgust insensitive, remarkably disgust insensitive for a woman. So things that are, you know, other people find repugnant like moral questions. I enjoy them. I enjoy them because they're spicy. I enjoy them because they piss people off. And I enjoy them because they, you know, make me have intense feelings that I enjoy ignoring to try and get a heart of the matter.
Well, it was so I mean, I'm disagreeable, but I don't have your issues. I don't have your insensitivity to disgust as anyone who's met me, I mean, Diana, like makes fun of me about this. I have, I have I have a particular face that, that I do. And everyone knows that I do this face if I'm disgusted by things. So it's interesting, because I feel like we're similar in some ways, but then in other ways, not so much. You know, and it just shows that there's a, there's like, there's a diverse way to get to the position where we are, I do think that I do enjoy... We're not predictable, partly because like, I feel like you're not like checking the temperature all the time, and you're not reading the room and seeing so a lot of what we're talking about here, you're when you're talking about eugenics, it's very confusing to me, because if you didn't immerse yourself in a particular subculture, you wouldn't know how - you wouldn't know why they're ignoring this or that. Okay. So for example, you know, social justice oriented progressive thinkers are not going to write about, you know, how in vitro fertilization, and you know, prenatal screening is eugenic or problem. I mean, some of them do, but that's very rare. And I do believe that they don't do that. not from an outside perspective, people would wonder what why aren't they talking about this? Well, they're not talking about this because their tribe has decided that these are good things. You know, even if - Yeah, go on, go on Diana.
So the the other big article that I wrote, so I wrote, ‘You're probably eugenicist’ I don't know if you do show notes Razib, but you should for me, ‘You’re probably a eugenicist’ is one. And either one is ‘Polygenic screening: healthy babies versus bad arguments’ In that second one, I really take aim at a progressive darling, called Adam Rutherford, who's a BBC presenter. And in his book, you know, it's really interesting, actually, in terms of a culture war, how assiduously, he avoids biting a bullet. So he talks about polygenic screening, just for IQ and height, which are problematic, but not for health, which would be considered unproblematic, right? And so Simone and Malcolm Collins, who have been in the, their prenatal lists, that people who think that everybody should have more kids, they're actually not people who think that only some people should have more kids. They're not really a eugenicist, actually. And they say, essentially, you know that polygenic screening is good, because they're having the healthiest children, they can. And they chose their children, their most recent child on the basis of a health score provided by genomic prediction. And specifically, they wanted to avoid having a daughter who would die of the same cancer that her grandmother died of. And if you look at the cultural response to this, I think that, you know I’m a psychologists, it's just very interesting to look at how people would respond to let's say, somebody's trying to have a child who has the lowest rate of mental illness, versus someone trying to have a child who has the highest IQ, versus someone trying to have a child who's less likely to die of cancer. And it's this avoidance of people using polygenic scoring for this particular issue, which is the healthiness of their of their children, you know, and this is a to get back to you Razib. I think this is one reason why you are willing to be spicy, and bite bullets in some respects, because you're really pronatalist you love your children, and you love children generally, and you love family. And I think that this drives you to think about how to have, you know, a better next generation, as opposed to just wanting to be edgy.
Yeah, I mean, it's not abstract, it's concrete, is what you're saying, you know, I have some skin in the game literally. And, you know, like, so I think one of the issues that people don't want to acknowledge is that humans vary, and human variation matters. Okay. So for example, I mean, I did a twitter poll recently. And it was like, it was a combination. And this was a very evolutionary psychology thing to do. You know,
Oh I saw, your polls are so good.
Yeah, I see why you guys do it. The engagement was off the charts, you know, but it was like, you know, it was basically like, I was asking men and women, I was like, Okay, I keep someone who's a 10, out of 10 IQ of 70, someone who has an eight out of 10, an IQ of I think 85, and then someone who's a six out of 10, an IQ of 100. And then someone who is a four out of 10, and an IQ of 130. Okay, so those of you who just don't know, really quickly, someone who's a 70 is retarded, literally, I'm not like, using a pejorative, they're retarded, like 70 is retardation, mental disabled - whatever, I don't know, whatever the cool kids, whatever the term that's in the bottom, you know, one or 2%. And then 85 was the 15th percentile. 100, obviously, at the 50th percentile. And 130 is about like two percentile. So that's a very smart person.
I was going to say do you think is the average IQ of the people who are listening right now Razib?
125? Probably, 120
I think that’s probably about right.
Yeah, I think that's about right. So you guys, you know, high midwit you know? Should I not have said that? No, Sri, don't edit that out. I'm gonna I'm gonna get some anger right now. But whatever. You know, so - Diana is losing it. You guys aren't seeing this Diana's losing it. What, should I not have said that ?
You called your audience midwits. You’re like, I really avoid controversy, but also-
Well, I don't know well I mean they listen to my podcast. I don't listen to their podcast.
No so, I think yeah, so when you when you did that poll, you know, you have to think about the sample that's answering that poll. So, you know, how much would a man be able to tolerate a woman with an IQ of 130? You know, actually, some of the responses were kind of interesting, because men were saying how annoying high IQ women are, which I hadn't really thought of before.
I mean, you should you should meet yourself. No, yeah. I mean, there was a sex difference. Women were… women were less likely to take the were like much less inclined to take the trade off of dumb hot. And men were, you know… Well, I mean, it wasn't it wasn't like super skewed. But like, you know, a lot of basically six out of 10. And 100 was actually the sweet spot for men, a lot more women pick the four out of 10 130 option, although a fair number of my, like followers on Twitter did did pick that that are male as well. I mean, that was the option that I would have picked? Probably. I mean, no, it is what the option I picked literally well, not in real life, but I'm like digging myself into a hole here. But what I'm saying is like so, yeah, it's interesting, because, you know, these are like, these are conversations that happen on YouTube. Just in real life, and their eugenics conversations, but we don't label them as such. You know,
Yeah. I think it'd be great to do a book. You know, I think Jeffrey's talked about doing this. But I don't know if the zeitgeist is different now than it used to be. But How amazing would it be to be for there to be a book about like, how to pick somebody to have kids with that, you know, you'd be genetically compatible with there's a lot of trade offs. And as we all know, all of us who have kids and, and so yeah, for me, you know, I waited a long time to have kids. But with somebody who has a, I don't know, I don't want to brag. But we're really far into this podcast, if you're still here with somebody with a 150 IQ. That was like, amazing to me, right. And I'm definitely more interested in having more kids with somebody with a 150 IQ than I would with somebody within 130 IQ. But I'm explicitly eugenic in my personal life, too, although I have not used polygenic screening for the record.
Okay, okay. Well, I mean, you have, ironically,
I have I have chosen a mate for polygenic characteristics, but Al because -
- because IQ, the IQ is a polygenic characteristic. And that's what I'm getting at. We don't label it that way, though.
Yeah. And my husband's weaknesses are things that I have, you know, like, my, I'm, I'm almost pathologically cheerful. And so it's fine for me to get together with somebody who's sad sometimes, as opposed to, I wouldn’t want to get together with somebody else manic I'd have children that were crazy. So yeah.
And we know that, you know, we know that he does not overeat. For sure. It's very, we know that he has, he has self control about that. You know,
And I’m a hobbit, I'm only five feet tall. He's six feet tall. So these are all good things. Yeah.
Yeah. So I mean, you know, the height, for example. You know, there are women and men who have like, really extreme preferences. There are - I mean, there are guys that I know, that are six feet, they only date short women, like women that are below five, four.
Diana: Yeah…
that's all. And like, that's the thing, and we don't need to talk about why it's a thing, but it's a thing. You know, and then -
As a woman who’s five feet tall. I definitely know why. The people like it, you know, and like, I've never dated a dude, I think the tallest dude I ever dated was like six six, but like, I've never I mean, as far as I know, no one's ever rejected me because I'm short. Which is crazy, right? Because I am fucking short. So,
Yeah, I mean, I, um, you know what, I'm not gonna like, This podcast is not about my preferences. So I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna go there. Like you're, you're like, you're
You’re talking liking a woman, and I absolutely think you know because if somebody was saying like, Oh, you know, my family. We always get together with smart tall women. And certainly, if tall women are like less in demand, you can get a great deal on IQ if you're willing to date somebody tall. I love a tall woman. I'm I date women and men and I love a tall woman. So yeah, fine.
Okay, okay, this we just, we just went into tmi territory, although I guess you can. You can see that on your Twitter feed. So I guess it's not TMI, right. We're just, we just we just broke the podcast wall here and the social media is bleeding in. So what is so you're you're you're doing this stuff for Aporia. You guys are doing edgy stuff. Tell me about Aporia actually. I mean, I know. I know, people involved in it. I was on it w arlier, there was an earlier incarnation. I was on the podcast, like a year ago, before you took over and I mean, you know, I have to say, I've told you this privately, you are a good. You are a good podcast host and it's not because your high Midwich that's also like, you know, I mean, we all know that, you know?
Yeah, we're cornering the market on like, you know, jewy whatever they are, the Aporia audience is probably like, I don't know, 90% male if I'm being generous. 95% male. So yeah, you know, when when I started talking to Aporia, I was like, Hey, why don't I do a podcast for you? And they were like, okay, Cool, let's negotiate. And I was like, I know I'm in a good bargaining position because there's like, One Race realist woman who's like not doesn't have autism that you might know. I mean, I'm being really cheeky. But so yeah Aporia does edgy shit. It's about immigration. It's about polygenic screening, it's about eugenics, it's about whether there are race differences and sex differences. There's a really cool interview with somebody who's an expert on Galton. Galton was like a fascinating character, and but we’ll publish anything from from anybody, you know, my editor, Matt, he published a deeply religiously conservative rebuttal to my polygenic screening essay, saying, you know, I'm commodifying people, and that that's not a Catholic thing to do. So, you know, we're happy to take stuff from people. And I'm really proud to work for them, because it's kind of one of a kind, in terms of the kinds of stuff that we tackle. So they're collecting some, some cancelled academics, Bo Winegard, who was cancelled for being a eugenicist, even though he's not one. Yeah, he worked?
No, no. I have to say, Bo Winegard believes in human dignity. Go on
Actually, we were talking about the wisdom of repugnance, and we were talking about maybe we'll do, me and Bo will do a wisdom of repugnance. Because like, I'm totally disgust insensitive, and he's, like, even more disgust sensitive than you Razib. So it'd be interesting to to do, to do a conversation with him. But yeah, I do interviews there. I mean, it's gonna be a little while, but there's things that are gonna get released. There's an interview with Simone Collins, there's an interview with Aella, that will come out. I'm going to not work for a little while because I'm having a baby in literally 10 days. And then I also write a book called “How to Train Your boyfriend” It's about, I don't know, half drafted and I got an extension on that. And it's it's a behaviorist treatment of human relationships, a behaviorist evolutionary psychology treatment of human relationships. And that's another thing that people find disgusting, which I enjoy.
Wait, they find behaviorism or evolutionary psych, or wait do the find… ?
Yeah, they find any idea that people are consciously or unconsciously manipulating each other? You know, if you have a child, this is maybe another thing about childlessness. Children are incredibly manipulative. Some people I guess, are averse to that idea. They think that's disgusting. But yeah, the whole premise is that we are always using different kinds of techniques, you can call it manipulation, you can call it control, or you can just call it influence, to try to change one another's behavior. That's for evolutionary reasons. Our survival as individuals depended on how much other people were willing to help us, other people were willing to be nice to our kids, how much other people were willing to avoid doing things that would would harm us. And if you couldn't control other people's behavior, if there's a paradigm for that, which there is it's called behaviorism. Then why would that not be instantiated in human psychology? So that's the premise of how to train your boyfriend.
Mhmm. Okay. Yeah, I mean, it's news you can use that was a tagline for US News, which I don't know if that's, that's true anymore. But, so a lot of evolutionary psychology. You know, I feel like this about population genetics as well, you know, okay. So for example, you know, people are like, you know, people like, oh, well, you want to get a smart person, bla bla bla for your offspring, and there's like, Okay, you just do like a formula, like a modified form of the breeders equation and do regression to the mean, you can calculate the expected value, use the population sample variance as your, you know, offspring sample variants. So you can like, do some back of the envelope automatically, right. And I feel like evolutionary psychology is quite similar. It's very, very applied science in that way. And I know Jeffrey Miller, your husband has written some stuff in that vein, more recently. And so, you know, it's gonna have utility. And it's going to be contentious, because, you know, it's like therapy, like anything in the public eye. It's not like you guys are doing solid state physics. Something that is important, but it's not controversial. Right. It is controversial, although, I feel like as we're closing out, I mean, what is what do you think is the biggest misconception of people about evolutionary psychologists because I will tell you what I think, I think a lot of people in academia in particular, for some bizarre reason, think evolutionary psychologists are reactionaries. And they're pretty normal, normie liberals, right?
Yeah. So Josh Tiber, published a study back in, I think, 2008, about the political inclinations of evolutionary psychologists. They're largely progressive. So yeah, people think that evolutionary psychologists just make stuff up. Certainly, there's a lot of armchair evolutionary psychologists and a lot of popular evolutionary psychology, which is just made up stuff, but there's a lot of, I think, much harder evolutionary psychology. There's an unsavory connection with evolutionary psychology and reactionaries and the pickup artists community, which is not something that I think evolutionary psychology has cultivated. Certainly, if you give people information that corresponds with a cynical view of humanity, they're interested in it. So I don't think that, you know, pickup artists or reactionaries, there's a reason they like evolutionary psychology, but it's not because evolutionary psychologists have courted them. And, yeah, that I think those are the two, the two main ones, you know, people like, you know, Ed Hague, I mean, I certainly, it's been a while since I've been to an evolutionary psychology conference for a variety of reasons. But certainly, people like me and Jeffrey, are not considered, you know, core people, people are iffy about us because we are more right of center or more centrist than the average evolutionary psychologist is.
Okay, yeah. So I will put all the links, like we discussed a lot of things that you actually wrote about. So I'll put the links in the show notes and obviously, find you at Aporia. You know, I did tell you this privately. So I'll tell you this again, on the podcast, so people know, you are a good interviewer you are quite, you know, entertaining, you know, good content, as they say, you know, so I do recommend it. There are some people you know, who are not as dynamic, you know, and so, even even if the topics are interesting, you kind of just kind of a snooze fest. That's never it's never like that with you, Diana. So I really recommend, you know, the podcasts your hosting
Sprinkle on jokes. You’ve got to smile and sprinkle in jokes. You know, you got to give people a little bit of respite from serious stuff every once in a while, like every few minutes. You can’t just drag onto the serious-
You know, here's one thing like, you know, as we close out, I'm just gonna, like put this out there as the end just so people know. Your name is Diana Fleischman. And people think people think you're, you're a woman of the Jewish persuasion, you know, which you are are somewhat, but the reality is, you're not very Jewish. So why don’t you just like tell people that
I'm a Quadroon, as you would say,
Yeah, don't get me in trouble.
I don’t want to get in trouble again, I've already gotten in trouble. So my father's father was a German Jew, Walter Fleischman. Then he married a woman who is a mixture of various things. German, Czech, French, mostly German. And then my mother is Portuguese, tiny Portuguese lady, so I'm half Portuguese. Quarter Ashkenazi and a quarter mostly German.
Yeah. So you're the you know, my point here is like, you're actually a Latinx woman.
Diana: That's right.
You’re not a Jewish woman. And that people don't know that. So I just I just wanted that put that out there. You are, you are twice as Latinx as you are Jewish despite your name. And so with that with that, like big reveal, I will close this podcast. And you know, congratulations on the new baby soon and good luck on everything. All right.
Diana: Thanks for having me on, bye!
It's great talking to you.
Is this podcast for kids? This is my favorite podcast.
