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Razib Khan’s Unsupervised Learning.
Hey everybody, this is Razib with the Unsupervised Learning podcast, and tonight I am here with my friend Dr Nathan Lents, who I have known on the social medias for many, many years, but this is the first time that we're actually talking face to face. We got a video on here that you don't see. Dr Lents is a professor at John Jay College in New York City, and he's written some great books, “Human Errors”, “Not So Different: Finding Human Nature in Animals” And his most recent book, which you guys should check out. I did read it very, you know, for me the word dense is actually a compliment. There's a lot of facts in there, right? I like it. And I actually want to follow up on some of the literature that he cites, this stuff is my educational background, or whatever. Like, I haven't read some of this literature 20 years. I don't know where it's at, right? But the book is Sexual Evolution. “The Sexual Evolution” a provocative look at sexual behavior through the lens of evolution. And yeah, so it's about sex, and we're gonna talk about sex today, which I think most of my listeners are not asexual, so they will be interested in it. And if you are that's fine. Hi, Noah, but in any case, yeah. So it's gonna be a fun conversation. And actually, so Nathan, you reached out to me because I did it, and I don't usually do this, like, in terms of responsive podcast or whatever, but it was like, it's fine, because your book is very topical. Conn Carroll came on with “Sex and the Citizen” which was about monogamy, very pro monogamy book, talking about evolutionary psychology and anthropology, and then also, like, a lot of policy. So can you talk about - let's just start out, okay, because I get to the brass tacks the details of your book. But like, talk about your reaction to Conn’s podcast, like your issues with it.
Well, I want to first say that I'm not, like an anti monogamous or anything. And I know he wrote a very pro monogamy book. And I think the second half of your interview with him, I learned a lot about the legal history of marriage in the United States. There's a lot of really interesting things in the second half that I didn't necessarily take issue with. But I think the way that he talked about monogamy from the biological point of view, really, really got under my skin. Because, first of all, there's some things that are just not true that he said. Number one, he said that there are no hunter gatherers that are not monogamous. I mean, that's, come on, that's absolutely not true. There are tons and tons of different mating systems among contemporary hunter gatherer tribes and even what we know of some uncontacted tribes, and we can talk about that in a second. But the the biggest problem I had with the way he was talking about monogamy is he made no distinction between sexual monogamy or sexual fidelity, and social monogamy or economic monogamy. And if there's anything that we've learned from animal behavior about studying monogamy is those are very different things, and they almost never really go together anyway, but when they do, of course, that's interesting. And people find that to be the parallel of human marriage, of course, but the vast majority of species that practice social monogamy, meaning and what is social monogamy?
Well, that's when two creatures pair up and they have a neurohormone derived attachment, and they are each other's main social partners. They will share territory. They'd share resources. It's often, usually for the purpose of raising children, but it's really a partnership, and it's the and when you're talking about social monogamy, it's the bond itself that you're really interested in. Sexual monogamy, or fidelity. It really is about exclusivity. So you would be only having sex with your social monogamous partner that would meet the criteria of sexual monogamy, and that is extremely rare in nature. Not unheard of. There's a few examples of it. The example he gave is not correct, but there are some. And it's really interesting, of course, when that does happen, but the vast majority of socially monogamous species are not sexually monogamous, and that's really, that's really the problem that I saw on what he said. And so, for example, he talked about Gibbons, and he said that Gibbons are monogamous, but they cheat. Okay, that's a weird statement to me. So first of all, cheating is moralizing it as if they've made some sort of vow that they're now breaking. I mean, come on, these are gibbons . Secondly, there's 20 species of gibbons so I'm not sure which one he's talking about, because they have different mating systems in there. I think something like 10% of gibbon groups have more than one adult as a in their in their pairing. So obviously most of them do pair up, and Gibbons have long been a model of monogamy. But again, social monogamy. Sexual monogamy, does not follow, not in Gibbons, not in almost any other species. So that's really why I immediately wrote you. Because I remember you and I if you remember Razib, we had an appointment for me to talk about my last book. This was several years ago, and for some reason, it just didn't happen. I don't remember why. I think you got busy. And so when I went back to our Twitter messages, I realized we never actually completed that. So I was like, You know what? Let me just see if you'll be up for having a conversation about this, just because I am reacting to something that was on your podcast. If you want to ask any follow ups. I mean, I have more to say. But,
Well, I mean that's fair. I will say that, I mean, so Conn is very straightforward in terms of, he comes at it from an American conservative, social conservative viewpoint. And that's who the book is marketed at, you know? And I enjoyed the book, but you're right. I think you're making a fair point. When I read your book. And I did read it, I did read it yesterday, it does remind me of the way language is used differently in policy versus science. Okay? So in policy, I feel in policy and politics, it's like splitters versus lumpers. Which in biology, like splitters are like, okay, like you have all these different classifications, whereas lumpers like, put them in the same bucket. And so when he says monogamy, I think he's, he is actually like, being policy, politics focused. Like, look, can you imagine, we support family values and social monogamy. Now we understand that this is not absolute, you know, it's just like, that's not how it's gonna like, you know? iI's like, we understand that this is gonna be breached. Whereas in science, you want to cover, you want to describe all of the nuances of the phenomenon, because it's not prescriptive, it's descriptive.
Right. And the thing is I think, that the devil's in the details, Razib, because what social monogamy does for a species or for individuals, is very different than what sexual fidelity does for them, and that's what I try to talk about a lot in the book, is what motivates these behaviors and therefore - and what I mean by motivation, I don't mean like internal motivation. I mean, what does the creature get out of it? So in social monogamy, it's not at all hard to imagine what these individuals get out of it, right? Because they are better off together than they would be apart. And of course, the real stars of monogamy are birds, because it really does take two, two or more, because somebody has to be incubating the eggs in order for them to develop properly. And you can't hunt, you can't eat, you can't do anything else if you're incubating eggs. So when you have two of them, they can take turns, and that's exactly what they do. 90% of migratory bird species are monogamous, but almost none of them are sexually exclusive in that monogamy. They run off and they have extra pair copulations, and again, it seems like Conn would call that cheating. I mean, I don't know that there's deception going on, but there's certainly not promises made or whatever. It's just part of their behavior. Now, it doesn't mean that they that there isn't conflict about that. Of course, they're going to try to reduce each other's extra pair copulations. And I talk in the book about some interesting things that birds do to try to restrict the others. For example, when a female, I forget the species now, but when they accept an extra pair copulation, they're very loud. They make these mating calls, and the purpose of them is to get their mated pair, their mated partner, back. To say, Come back here, because they know. Well, they don't know, this is all instinctual, of course. But when he has extra pair copulations, he also will go and feed that secondary partner. And so that's what you see. It's sometimes it's not just a squirt and go approach these males will remember some of the people that they that they copulated with, and they'll try to feed them, because, of course, they're now, you know, their interests are linked to their genetics are intertwined, and so and it's all going on in the open. So I don't know that, you know, deception and cheating is the right kind of language for that, but I think that Conn is most, mostly interested in in mammals, and that's different, because you have internal gestation, so the partnerships are look very different between mammals.
I mean, I would say he's interested in mammals. He's interested in humans. He's interested in humans in complex societies. So that kind of colored everything else there. Yeah, there's a Telos to the narrative, and I think that that did probably affect how he framed other things.
Right, but I think, and that's the thing, is, I don't want you to think that I'm anti monogamy, and I certainly don't want you to think that I believe humans aren't built for monogamy. I think humans are built for lots of different possible mating systems and social arrangements. And sex, who we have sex with versus who we form lifelong bonds with, are often the same, but they're not always the same. And I think what you - when you survey hunter gatherer tribes and contemporary ones, but also even cultures, sort of before they had contact with the West, you saw a lot more diversity, even though we have indistinguishable genetics from in most cases. So I think what that tells us is that humans have an inherent flexibility when it comes to this, and we will conform to the cultural milieu that we're raised in. You absorb some of that stuff, and it comes to mind now where what was so what's interesting about it, to me, if you are interested in what's innate is what is cross cultural, right? So things like jealousy certainly are cross cultural. We do have a desire to restrict our mates sexual activity, so that's normal. That's natural. That doesn't that's not the same thing as saying we're built from monogamy. But I do think that the tendency for humans to form dyads is universal. I do think we have that tendency. That doesn't mean that there's anything wrong with polyamory. It doesn't mean that there's anything wrong with being promiscuous and not bonded. It just means that it's too common around the world, the forming of dyads for that to be a coincidence.
Yeah, there's so much to unpack. I think I'm just gonna give a heads up. You know, sometimes I have long conversations on this podcast. I think it's gonna be a long one, because we've got a lot of topics to cover, like on the science, but also it's just like, in terms of the definitions and the lexicon, you know, like the term wrong, I mean, science doesn't really have a wrong. Science just is. Wrong emerges in the context of an ethical normative framework that you know we agree on as a culture. You're very clear about that. So for example, you describe cultures where there's pedophilia, and then you bracket it out, and you said, you know, I'm describing this. I'm not saying that it's all like hunky dory, but you're describing it as a scientist. You're not describing that as like Nathan Lents, who you like are having dinner with and has his own views on a variety of things, right?
Right, yeah. And I am very careful to say that we don't have to model any of these things and proliferate them if we don't want to. Obviously, there are some, and this is humans too, that have these societies that don't really respect age of consent and things like this. And of course, I find it as abhorrent as anybody else, and in my -
Not everybody else, not everybody else, finds it abhorrent
Okay yeah that’s true. Not everybody does. But I guess my point is not that any of that is natural or unnatural or desirable or undesirable. It's just these things happen. They're out there. And what it what it does tell us is that there's a diversity that's sort of natural that will develop naturally in human inclinations, human behavior, the way that we form relationships. And I think that that's the strength of our species. And way, way, way at the end of the book, if you made it this far Razib, and if anybody makes it to the end of my book, it'll be you. But way, way at the end, the thing I talk about is this is in keeping with other aspects of human biology and human psychology in that we are the ultimate generalists. We really are. We don't just thrive in one environment or with one diet, one way of using our body. We really are, and that's why we are successful as we are, is that we're flexible and adaptable. And in order to be that, you have to have a sort of generic sense of some of these instincts that then only takes shape in a cultural environment. So we have a cultural environment that is really pressed upon us, sexual monogamy, and most people conform to that because of it. I don't think - that's not bad, exactly, but I do think it's optional. It could have turned out a different way.
Yeah, you know. So I think one thing is, I'm, you know, talking about evolutionary psychology, but there's also, like, the new field, cultural evolution, and I think cultural evolution is actually very relevant. And, like, we actually talk about cultural evolution with my podcast, with Conn with Joe Henrick, you know, and I think with Conn, he was focusing on kind of a particular portion of Henrick’s oeuvre, of that project of looking at Western, modern societies, whereas what you're covering is a survey of all these different societies, and you bring up things like that are well known. Like where does polyandry emerge? Well, it tends to be in these societies with resource scarcity and other things like that. I also want to say, go back to the animals. You know, animals are not cheating, or they're not, it's not immoral. What's going on here? I mean, part of it is, we don't need to get totally Dawkinsian. But, you know, the genes exist. They exist in a behavioral context. And a lot of this is like, let's talk about game theory, like, what is going on? Like, how are they optimizing within this context, over this environmental - you know, this period, the environment, and this relates to part of some of the things that you were talking about with sexual reproduction, which I want to get to where among like spiders and stuff, there are clonal lineages that reproduce really fast, and yet they all tend to be very young, whereas the sexual reproduction, sexually reproducing species have, like, very, very deep phylogenies. And like the theory there is the clonal ones overfit to a local environment, and they just go extinct. They always, like, reemerge. They always just re emerge as well. Like, when you think about, like, the game theory, if you think about the the gene, genes that are looking over the long term, want to be in these -you know, I like, “want to” all these words are, like, really weird to use, but it's like, that's, this is how you have to think about it, where there's like, this panoply of like scenarios, and there are different strategies, crawling around and exploring the parameter space of the certain scenarios, right?
Right. Because asexual reproduction gives you a lot of short term gains, but not long term robustness, because you have to be robust in the face of a changing environment. If you over fit, as you say, to your particular local environment, that is not a good long term strategy, right? Because the environment changes, you're screwed. If everyone lives and dies the same way, then you're really in trouble. So sexual reproduction has ends up being favored in all the major lineages of eukaryotes because it makes you robust. Someone in your species will have the right combination of alleles to survive whatever the next Cataclysm is. I mean, that's sort of the strategy. That's the game theory, if you will. But what I think is interesting is that when it comes to sex and gender and reproduction and mating and all of these things, we haven't thought about it that way, about how diversity in gender, diversity in sexuality, diversity in how you form relationships, is another form of biological diversity that would tend to be favored over the long term, over doubling down on one particular way of being. So I think it's fitting that biology is kind of really we've understood that diversity is good and that sexual reproduction produces diversity and spreads diversity and unlinks all of the diversity. So why wouldn't sex itself follow those same rules? Like, I don't think that should really be that surprising, and I do think that the cultural bias against some of this stuff really prevented scientists from seeing it as it really was. You'll probably remember my opening to the chapter on monogamy. I talk about how everyone thought birds were sexually monogamous. Everyone thought that all of the ornithologists for a 100 years, you know, from Conrad Lorenz through everybody else. And then all it took, was DNA evidence, and within a year, everyone realized, Oh, holy crap, those eggs that they're roosting aren't necessarily the product of at least one member of the pair, and sometimes even two. I don't talk about brood parasitism in this book, but I have an article coming out about it, because that's another way that we're you know, it's not, it's not what you think. You know. If you want a simplistic look at what the animal world is, then you're really not going to capture it all.
Yeah. I mean, you're talking about social social monogamy versus sexual monogamy. You know, it depends on what your disciplinary lens is too, you know, like, I tend to think things in terms of genetics and so I think of terms like reproductive skew, you know and like, the proportion of extra - So if you say a species is monogamous, and it turns out like, well, let's give a concrete example. We know that, like Eurasian societies, it's a couple of percent extra parent paternity per generation. I mean, it's not 100% but that’s pretty monogamous, right
Over what time frame? Are you talking? Recently?
Over a 1000 years, let’s say. So these are not small scale societies. They're sized with patrilineages and, etc, etc, you know, you look at rare surnames, and you look at which Y chromosomes are in there, and it's like, you estimate, like, one to 2% introgression, you know, whatever.
So I thought I remembered it being a little bit higher than that. Higher than that prior to, like, blood testing in the 1940s and 50s
I think part of - Yeah, that's fair. It's gone down. I think it's gone down since then, actually,
Yeah, now that DNA testing is available, it’s gone way down.
Well, um. Yeah. How do I say this? Well, okay, this is not part of the - I heard from someone. I heard from a genetic counselor, the people most likely to make extensive use of DNA testing are the people least likely to need it
Okay, okay,
Let's just say, like, the type of people that would engage in, like, more extra parent paternity issues, just like, you know, they don't keep track of, you know, but, like, a lot of people are, like, of like, more professional, managerial class or more paranoid about this stuff, right? So a lot of the earlier estimates that you know, have ascertainment biases, because they come out of paternity clinics. And even in those those situations, most of the men who were suspicious were wrong, you know? But like, 20 or 10% of the time they were right. But that was an enormous inflation,
Nathan: Right. Because they had a reaso to be there in the first place.
I mean, you know, one thing I would say is, you know, this is like, Okay, some of the listeners know this, I have a friend, okay, the Arabs do a lot of Y chromosome phylogenetic stuff. Okay? They buy like, extremely expensive kids, and they can, like, tell, like, cousin from cousin by like, you know, whatever, like, five mutations. Because, like, they really care about the paternal lineages. And I asked a friend of mine, this is 10 years ago. I was like, Hey, are you worried that they're gonna find an extra pair blah, blah, blah, and like, you know someone's gonna get killed? I don't know, you know. And he's like, actually, no, because its never happened. So their social controls in the Arabian Peninsula, what's okay after, after he told me? I was like, Yeah, I see that, you know. I see that, you know. So some societies have extremely strong social controls, because, like, everything is so dependent on these paternal lineages. And so, for example, the lineage of the Prophet Muhammad, a lot of these families, the Hashemites, the Moroccan royal family, they have the they have the exact same Y chromosome as a branch of J1 haplo group, right,? And so obviously, the Banu Hashem, like that family. They've been keeping track of this and all this stuff. In other cases, it's not true. There was like a case in China where actually the Kong clan descended from Confucius, whatever, his family. There's a bunch of them. And there was like a rumor that one of them weren't real Kongs. And that turned out to be true. It was a totally different Y chromosome so someone passed himself off as a descendant of Confuciu. Anyway, there's a lot of stuff like that. I always think about this when I hear about, like, anthropological descriptions, or just these stylized descriptions, well, they're polygamous or polygynous, or they're polyandrous, or they're monogamous. And I'm like, what does that mean? Like, what's the distribution of genetic outcomes and all of these terms that we're using, and I'm sorry I'm talking a lot here, they're terms that are useful for us as human beings, but they don't really exist in nature as such. In nature there's just behaviors. Behaviors and reproduction and cooperation and conflict and these other things, but these, like iterative things that we classify as monogamy or polygamy. They're for us.
They’re for us, and they don't, don't have these sharp borders between these different categories that we like to think they do, right? They all kind of bleed together. You never have a society that perfectly fits anything with all members obeying the rules and all that kind of thing. And you mentioned social control. Social evolution is, as you said, a very hot area right now, because the way that these things - and Darwin even just first predicted that, like, we're kind of beyond where the biology really predicts who's going to succeed, right? It's really the social and psychological factors are far out and outweigh and cultural factors far outweigh biological factors in terms of who's reproducing. And I mean, if you look at the just the United States, I mean, there are several presidents, I mean, it doesn't get more powerful than that, who have no descendants, no direct descendants, right? Abraham Lincoln, no direct descendants. George Washington, no direct descendants. But then you have Maureen Duvall, who, I understand was, was somewhat influential in the 1600s he probably has 2 million direct descendants, right? Barack Obama's descended from him and Dick Cheney and everybody else. So you have these really uneven amounts of reproduction that come down mostly to chance. Right? Largely to chance. I mean, of course, it's a weighted die, you know, a weighted pair of dice, but it's, it's still mostly based on chance. And I don't, and I think that that's that plays out in the natural world as well. And so, of course, you stack the deck in features that will make it more successful. And what I think is most telling, though, is, like I said, when you see cross cultural things, or when you see things that pop up in species again and again. And menopause is a great example of that, because I did try to make a little list of some of the things I agree with Conn on, Conn and you on some of this. And menopause is one of these things where among primates, although actually a former student of mine, they're seeing signs of menopause and orangutans, so that's going to be interesting. But anyway, menopause was influential in creating the social, you know, the family as we think of it, right? The invention of menopause. What does that do? Well, this is where I disagree with a lot of people. How they describe it is, Why are women still alive when they can't reproduce anymore? That's totally backwards thinking, right? It's not that their lifespan has been extended. It's that their reproductive senescence happens earlier in their lifespan. So why does that happen? That happens on purpose, right? And the idea is that when you live in the kind of groups that humans lived in after a certain point, just pumping out more children doesn't help long term, right? Because they're just going to compete with each other. So if you cease your reproduction, particularly when reproduction itself is risky, right? As in humans, it always is. So when you cease doing that, and instead you invest in the next generation and the next generation after that, then your genes have a much greater chance of being successful than if they were all competing with each other. You know, that's a good example of game theory. So, but I don't think that has anything to do with monogamy. And Conn was trying to connect menopause with monogamy, and the idea being only if you're certain of paternity, would some of this stuff evolve? And I don't see that at all, especially when you consider that toothed whales are where we the other place we're seeing menopause. None of them are monogamous.
Razib: They're matrilineal.
They're matrilineal. They're the polygynous or just promiscuous, most of them, so there's no connection to monogamy there.
Yeah. I mean, that's fair. So I would say I did jump in here, but I know that they're, you know, Virpi Lummaa in Finland and others have taught there's an extensive literature, not just her, there's an extensive literature that what really matters is your matrilineal grandmother, actually. Because, well, I mean, there's, like, a bunch of reasons. I mean, it could be some paternity certainty issue, but also the connection between mothers and daughters -
They’re reservoirs of cultural knowledge, right? I mean, I think that's -
And I do have to say, like, so when I was interested in this topic, you know, we're talking about culture versus Evolution, or, like, how they interact. So in the Indian subcontinent, like, where my family's from, in Bengal, it's a very patrilineal society, officially patrifocal, officially, very patriarchal, right? Um, whereas, like in the Meghalaya and the highlands, it's matrilineal. And so okay these two cultures are, like, really different. But, they were looking at grandmother effect and stuff like that. And like the anthropologist, like in this paper that I was reading, they actually were talking about how in the lowland Bengali society, it's like, oh, the paternal grandmother is supposed to matter a lot because, well, I mean, it's your father who creates your identity, your lineage group. But it turns out a lot of times that's just breached, and that's just, like, not adhered to. And I, you know, I'm from Bengali family, I can tell you that's just true. A lot of the time, maternal family just matters more, even though the cultural norm is the cultural norm is actually re emphasizes over and over again it's your paternal family that matters. But a lot of times that's just not true,
Right. How they talk about it versus how it really is isn't always the same thing, and that's why they have to enforce the idea that it's patrilineal -
They talk about it all the time because they're just like, just so you know, your uncle, your maternal uncles are cool, but like that's not your real family or, I mean, the words are a little different, but you know what I'm saying? The point here is, I think that there is, and, like, you know, in Indo-European mythology, there's this whole thing. There's a tension in these patrilineal patriarchal societies where maternal uncles are somehow important. The motif recurs over and over again. And I think that that, honestly, is probably something deeply evolutionary, evolutionary between like a mother or the mother and her brothers, who are gonna have a strong interest in her survival and flourishing, no matter, like whether they're exogamous patrilocal.
Well, that may be true. I think you were coming close to making - the point I thought you were going to be making there was that really, with, with civilized, I shouldn't say civilized sorry, sedentary life was when a lot of this came about, right? And so the concentration, once you had resources that you could take with you, there was ownership of land. There's all those things that came from agriculture. Was when I think it started to emphasize patrilines, and it started to emphasize inheritance. You know, all the ideas - when you could pass something on, when you had when land could be dominated by a certain person, that's when you had strong men, right? And their idea, and, of course, the evolutionary instinct to protect your lineage is always going to be there. But the idea that men could overpower women and control and dominate resources that really only came about with sedentary life, and that's where you know me, you, and Conn probably all agree. Because before that, everything we can tell from both both archeology and from contemporary foraging societies is that it is much more egalitarian. Then actually, women have a lot of social control in those environments for various reasons. That doesn't mean that they're in complete control, but they have a lot of social a lot more social control than, for example, early agricultural societies. I do think it's kind of funny hearing you and Conn both speak romantically about the egalitarian things as conservatives, but anyway. You guys oppose any kind of political enforcement of egalitarianism, even though you understand its value and its benefits. But that's getting into politics, which we can do later. But I think that there's lots of other stuff that I think we agree on, like you mentioned how a lot of leftists are down on marriage, and they talk about romantic love as having been a recent innovation by the poets more than anything else. Totally disagree with that. I totally disagree with that. If you look at foraging societies, you see lots of individuals falling madly in love based on their sexual activity, right? So there's nothing unnatural about the idea that you become extremely attached to someone by having sex with them, or wanting to have sex with them, and that's the romantic love that we talk about, and it's very idealized. It's often suspends other values that you have and things like that. That is universal. I do believe in that. So I think that we have a lot - the right and the left on some of these issues have a lot more in common, and sort of the crazies on both sides I think exacerbate the real divisions that most of us have are probably we would circle around, you know, a lot closer.
Or it could be kind of almost like a horseshoe theory thing, you know, sometimes that happens. Okay, I do want to say one thing, and then I want to move to sex, like, in terms of a more abstract way, because that's where you start your book. And, I mean, basically you start your book is like, kind of like evolutionary genetics, like, what is sex? And then, how does, you know? Then you it kind of like, you know, to me, it's like, okay, this is, like gender and animals, like, that's kind of like, it was a little bit mind blowing, although it kind of made sense. Some of it was, like, semantic like, okay, like, you want to, you know, whatever, like, I knew a lot of these things. And then you kind of like, worked through the animal kingdom, and then the primates, and eventually the humans, and some other things. Like, homosexuality, gay identity, all that near the end, right? And so it's like, it made sense, you covered a lot of topics here. I want to ask about sex. But first, I do want to say one thing, neanderthals. You know, there could be. I mean, the Neanderthals are, like hundreds of 1000s of years over, like a huge span so far, though, all of the DNA we have indicates that they are patrilineal in terms of within their groups, the Y chromosomes are the they're like related men and the females tend to be unrelated. And, Neanderthal culture, I don't know, it's not as variable.
It could also could be female dispersal, right? So that when you're gonna have you're gonna
It might not be the correct term. Patrifocal, maybe would be what I would be saying there.
Because many, how many Neanderthal Y chromosomes do we really have? Like, 20, 30?
No, I think it's actually considerably more than that. Not whole genomes. You know what I'm saying.
Because I study whole genomes. And yeah, I know it's not that many. But -
I would say dozens? Not like hundreds. Dozens.
Yeah. I do see your point that it does tell us something, I think when you have clusters of, for example, Y chromosomes, but that can be explained a lot of different ways, particularly if you have only a small subset of the original data. And I think that female dispersal doesn't necessarily mean male dominance, but it can, and there's every reason to think that physical strength was super, super important in Neanderthal life. So that's the kind of thing that would favor the higher testosterone individuals, right? Because of the muscle mass that you get. So what does that tell us about us? Well, if these if that were also true of our ancestors that began to settle down, that also explains why patriarchy took hold pretty much everywhere that agrarian societies took hold, right? It is that they were patriarchal, probably because that physical strength was important for the earliest seeds of power and the social control that women had was lost once resources became part of it. I mean, this is handwashing a little bit, but, but this is where, this is what some of the theorizing is,
Yeah, and just like the discussion we have about these things is kind of like, kind of exposes, unlike the skeleton, or kind of like the understructure of our assumptions, of the terms that we're using here. So I want to move that, like back to kind of, like the atomic unit of like, sex. Okay, so how do I explain this? There's a joke, as you know, Nathan, like, geneticists don't know, like Real biology. I just gotta say I kind of like, do population genetic stuff here, and like, I know what sex is like. I read WD Hamilton. I love his books, actually, you know, evolution of sex, like the one of those, I think it was like the second volume. It was a second volume anyway, you know, I love this stuff. But, you know, in terms of definitions, honestly, it's just like, it's kind of like, kind of take it for granted. But then you get into, like, gametes, and, you know, the anatomy and all these other things. And the, the thing that's always, like, blown my mind is that there are males, even when I was a little kid, there's male and female organs. Male and female organs in plants. You know, I wouldn't have been like, shocked if there and female and mammals that everything else was totally different. You bring up hermaphrodites, which, like, you know, really well known from annelids, but they're in other organisms. And those of us that have worked with C. elegans know they're hermaphrodites. And then there's like, a male minority. And what's interesting is your diversity that you go over, can you just like survey it for the listener.
So, you know, making eggs, making sperm does set up some differences, right? Is some different reproductive goals with that initial investment, but I think that has been way overblown in a lot of creatures. The different reproductive interests in male and females are not that big, until you get to mammals. In Birds, it's more than in other creatures. But in fish and various reptiles and everything else, the reproductive investment of sperm or the eggs is such a minuscule difference that I think it's -
Fish make sense. Can you, like, explain that, like, gamete size and like the resources and all that stuff. And also there's the generation and mammals, whatever, right?
So with so with fish, we'll take it. It's always external fertilization, right? So both sexes just simply squirt their gametes and go. There's no external genitalia. There's no sexual intercourse. They squirt and go, both of them. And so because of that, you don't see a large difference in their reproductive interest. And so you'll have, for example, in sunfish, I spend a lot of pages talking about sunfish. The males do all the nest building. They spend two weeks in North American sunfish building a nest, and then another two weeks guarding the eggs of that nest. The females show up, squirt their eggs and go, that's literally it. They're the deadbeat mothers of the animal kingdom. But that just goes to show you that when it when you are just doing that external fertilization, everything we think of in terms of maternal and paternal investment doesn't apply. And so you don't tend to see the differences that you see between males and females in birds and then again, in mammals. And so I talk a lot about fish and how sex just doesn't operate the same way. And then, and when you do have animals that can switch switch genders or switch sexes, I should say. They do that in response to changes in the environment that, once again, make it more suited for that particular ecology. And we know about, we think about the environment just as like abiotic features, you know, climate or temperature, whatever. But there's biotic elements about the environment. You know, everything could be fine, and then the animal you like to eat is suddenly gone, right? And so it doesn't, it doesn't really look any different, it doesn't feel any different, but the thing you've been eating is gone. So think about that also in the social environment. So if you're living in groups of 40 or 50, and then suddenly you get to a nice open grassland with lots of food, and all sudden you're in a group of 20 or 30. That's a very different social environment. And so the calculation of what works best in that in the sort of reproductive conflict that we're all in that will be different. And then those groups compete against other groups. I mean, I know you're you and David Sloan Wilson, have, you know, do a lot of stuff together, and he's really big on on modeling groups in competition with one another, and how that actually promotes cooperation. And I it's funny, because competition and cooperation are often presented to us as opposites, but if you think about the cognitive skills that are required to compete against someone, they're the exact same as the cognitive skills required to cooperate with them, right? Cognitive empathy and emotional empathy, you know, understanding someone else's point of view, and you know, all of that kind of thing is part of how we work together and how we compete. And why do I tell that example? What does I have to do with sex? Well, it just shows you that the same set of features can be switched from from a totally different goal. With no real changes in cognitive ability or anatomy or anything like that, you can completely switch what a certain trait is used for. And so I think that same kind of diversity is present in sex and engendered behaviors. And I use the term gender with animals, where a lot of biologists would never do that, and I know I'm out on a limb a little bit with that, but all I mean by that is that there's different ways to be a male, there's different ways to be a female that can find success, and sometimes being minority is itself an advantage, right? That's called frequency dependent selection among you geneticists and the oddball hypothesis, that's what promotes diversity and maintains it in an environment.
Yeah, there's something actually I want to bring up before we get back into the brass tacks of chromosomes and all these other things, which I think I want to talk about, because I love chromosomes. But years ago, I don't even remember the details. So it was like, Jordan B Peterson was talking about lobsters and monogamy and all this stuff. And, I mean, I thought it was kind of silly. Honestly, it was like, naturalistic fallacy type stuff. I think, you know, you go look, and that's basically, like, for the, you know, for the listener, it's basically like, it's in nature, therefore it's good, you know,
Yeah, I think it was about dominance, right? About how lobsters that are more dominant will have more serotonin, which is like in the reward system, and so if they lose fights, they get depressed and go away, and if they win fights, they are happy and succeed. And he uses this as a defense of social stratification in humans, which I think is really, really big leap.
Yeah. Well, I mean the main issue, I would say, is like, if you're going to do that, like, You got to get phylogenetically close. But anyway, exactly that in the book, because you're an evolutionary guy and, like, that's what we got to think, phylogenetically. But I do have to say, I remember being kind of annoyed by a lot of scientists making fun of him because, part of it was like, in group out group stuff. It was kind of silly. But, candidly, these are the same people that are like, talk about, like, gender stuff and transitions. They're like, well, the fish at the temperature. Why are you bringing up fish and the temperature. What does that? What does that have to do? You know? And so I think people can be very, very selective when it's like, oh, well, that's a naturalistic fallacy. You know,
You make a good point, because both sides will cherry pick the examples that they think makes their point. So what I try to do, like, for example, let me briefly defend Jordan Peterson's example, not the example itself, but what he's trying to show is that he tries to get a little bit mechanistic with it, right? He talks about serotonin, and he talks about what dominance would do for the lobster compared to other lobsters, and then using that as a model for human behavior. So I don't have any problem with that. The fact that we're very distantly related, that's not the problem, because some of the features of it are the same, and that's okay, whether or not his example is relevant to humans or not, isn't my point. And I do that in the book too, not as to say, hey, let's look at how Barbary macaques live. They're really the best model for humans. That's not really. What I'm trying to say is. I'm trying to say, what do Barbara macaques do, and how is that good for them, like, how does it promote their flourishing, you know? And for like, for example, Conn really liked to use Gibbons as an example of monogamy. And then I think he mentioned tamarinds, which that can't be right, because most tamarinds are actually polyandrous. They're not monogamous at all. But there is a South American primate called the Coppery Titi which is both sexually and socially monogamous. So it's one of like six or seven mammals that we found. And I think it is really interesting to study Coppery Titi, even though we're not closely related, they're New World monkeys, right? So they're pretty far away, but they have some things in common with us, that if we study how they approach it, then we actually can learn a little bit about ourselves. One thing that they have is female choice is very dominant in Coppery Titi, and they have a complete division of labor. So high paternal investment. And that's another thing that's kind of peculiar about humans. We have high paternal investments. Fathers care about their children, and they want to support them and all that, whereas in lots of mammals, they just don't care at all, right? Or if they do, it's very indirect. But the problem is, the other species where you see high paternal investment aren't like Coppery Titis. So I talk about Barbary macaques. You know, in the Northern African macaques, they have the opposite. They're completely promiscuous. There's no bonding whatever, among sexual partners. They do have social bonding, of course, but not among sexual partners. And they have allo parenting, cooperative alloparenting almost unheard of in mammals, where they will parent each other's children happily. And you also see a lot of same sex dyads that form in these creatures, because they just don't care who’s genetically related to who, right? And so to me, that's a that's a closer model to humans. Why is that? Of course, we do care about our genetic offspring, but we also drop our kids off at daycare, and somebody else educates them. Somebody else cares for their them when they're sick, you know, they go to the hospital. So to me, cooperative Alloparenting is a closer model to what humans actually do. We do take care of each other's children. Of course, we prefer our own. You know, when we have to choose, but you will care for your friends kids. Sometimes even at great personal cost. And I think that's Barbary macaques. They do, because if you want to look at Coppery Titi’s as a model of humans, those groups live in pure isolation. You have a nuclear family in no contact with any others. They're territorial. So to me, the analogy breaks down when you see a family just in isolation like that. We live in community. It's very much part of who we are,
Yeah again, I'm gonna push you back to the chromosome, and the evolution of sex, because we’re out of control here. But,
I'm just gonna, like let's just go with it, right? I think it's very interesting. Because actually, I do agree with you in terms of, like human social organization, social complexity, and our cooperation, all these things. I mean, they're pretty amazing. And I think, candidly, scientists that have been trying to figure out what's simple inclusive fitness or something like that, it just doesn't work. And so it's got to be more than inclusive fitness. I'm not saying it's like just inclusive fitness or reciprocal altruism, but there's all these things. Like, we have these, you know, we're both citizens in the United States, 350 million people. You know, you live the city of New York, you live in a city of millions. And like, yeah, there are some anti social people, but like generally, you're pretty safe. You know, there's just all these, like, miraculous goings on. And you mentioned it in the book, where it's like if a chimpanzee stranger shows up, they'll kill it and eat it or or something, you know?
Yeah if you’re from a different troupe, you're a mortal enemy. Actually, have you, have you talked to Mark Moffat? Have you had him on your show?
I haven't, you know. So my previous I have his book, “Human Swarm” right?
Nathan: It is excellent.
I actually like I was supposed to have him on on The Insight, my previous podcast, and the pandemic happens.
Okay. I can connect you to him. He's a friend of mine, if I can connect you to him if you want. Because Mark talks about this a lot, that humans really, we define our group with these symbols and identifiers, and it really comes down to predictability. So if you see someone who looks like you, dresses like you, speaks your language, then you can predict their behaviors relatively quickly. But someone who's very foreign to you is unpredictable. That's kind of how he would put it. And so we form these nested groups, basically. So we have, you know, our small group, our large group, large group within larger groups, and that nested social relationships. That's, if you look at other animals, that's really a good model of human sociality. And of course, he's most interested in ants, as you know, he's E O Wilson’s student, yeah. He’s very much in on the ants, but, but they have that same thing. Like, remember, he gives this example of, if you take a an ant from a different species, but right across the street, and then you put it into that group, they'll attack it and kill it. But you can move an ant from San Francisco down to San Diego, and if it's part of the same society in that species, they will immediately accept it, because they recognize each other with these hydrocarbons, these aromatic hydrocarbons, and that's what humans do, right? So, if you're in an airport, you know, in Sri Lanka, and you recognize someone from your town, country, whatever, you will immediately go over to them and start interacting with them socially, right? And that sense of familiarity, you know. We don't use aromatic hydrocarbons, right? But we use things like language or clothing or whatever. And so this is kind of getting a little bit further away from the topic of my book. But if, but you mentioned that that societies and how they form, really, you should have Mark Moffat on your show. It's a great conversation.
This is like, we're just gonna, like, Mark is going to come on, and then someone's gonna respond to him. And this is just like, never ending, like, daisy chain of conversations.
That’s how it’s supposed to work. That's social evolution.
I think I mentioned this before. I don't know which book I read it in, but you're talking about like, Oh, someone sees someone else from Sri Lanka. Well, the weirdest example that I ever remember about this was in a book, and it was, it was guy, it was a white guy, you know, he was a professor or something. But he was from the south. He had a southern accent. And, you know, he was in Japan on some work trip, and he was walking down the street in Tokyo. This is 1970 so not that many foreigners. There’s many more in Tokyo now. And he was walking down the street, and sees a guy with an afro, like, running at him. And he's like, Okay, what's going on here? The guy's like, Hey, I'm from America. I'm from America. It's a black guy. And like, how are you doing? And like, the guy's got a southern accent, and apparently, like, I remember, like, the guy who with the southern accent was a little self conscious. He's like, I don't want him to, you know, it's the 1970s I don't want him to think that I'm racist. But the Black guy was just like, super happy to see him. Was like, where are you from? And like, how you doing? And like, how long have you been Tokyo? The whole point here was like, okay, like, the black guy, he meets this white southern guy. The guy is obviously southern from his accent, but black guy is just super excited to meet another American.
Another American. But you know what's funny in the opposite direction? I don't know that the white guy's running up to the black guy to say, hey, right?
Maybe not. That was not what happened. It's just interesting. It's interesting how, like, you know, all of a sudden you realize the similarities you might have with someone in your own culture, where there is kind of a narcissism of small differences, right?
Well, that brings us back to Darwin. I think it was Darwin that first said that too, is that the when two groups collide, the biological difference between them is irrelevant. It's the cultural difference between them that determines the outcome of that collision, you know.
Yeah, I mean, we'll loop back to this. But things like tattoos and accents Symbolists, you know, I mean, with humans in particular the cultural differences become very salient. I want to go back to sexual evolution. We kind of already alluded to it. Talk about asexuality, diploidy, you know, or the polyploidy, whatever, ploidy in general. And then also, just like, talking about sex, why it's around. And actually, like, you know, you kind of alluded to it, but I used to read this literature, and like there's the whole, like, Red Queen, like pathogen co evolution stuff going on. Other people said, Oh, it's just like some structural lock in and all these other things. I would like you to just, like, give me a general sense of where the origins of sex, sexual reproduction are, like, in, in, you know, the mid 2020s because I honestly haven't paid attention in 15 years. Because, you know, that's how science is. You specialize. Like, give them, give them listener, like a general -
Sure. To start at the most basic level, like asexual reproduction is just cloning, copying, right, which is very fast, very efficient. You know, energy usage is low. There's no risk. It's it's great, very prolific, but it doesn't create any diversity or any resiliency, and it also, you can tend to accumulate what's called negative deleterious mutations in that in that setting. But sexual reproduction comes about as a way of combining and mixing genetic material for the new generation. So that's great, because you can unlink traits. So if someone's tall and fast versus tall and slow, or whatever, like the different traits all get unlinked. So that's one aspect of of sexuality that's important, or sexual reproduction. But even more fundamental is, as you mentioned, diploidy. So humans and all other sexually reproducing creatures have two versions of every gene, two versions of every chromosome, whereas bacteria and other asexual reproducers have only one. And why that's important is when you have two copies of something, first of all, you have a template if one of them gets damaged, right? So by DNA, you know, radiation DNA damage, single strand break down, whatever. You can use the other chromosome as a copy, and then as a template to copy and then fix.
Really quick I’m going to pause, like, just in genetics example, people give of like, where this isn't working is retinoblastoma, where people have only a single working copy. And so these kids, they can see fine, but then their teens and young adulthood, they start like fading, because a lot of their lot of their like, they don't have any redundancy, and they're starting to, like, get mutations,
Exactly. One copy is already damaged, so it can't serve as a template to fix the other one. And you are getting, we are bombarded by DNA damaging agents. No matter what you do, you're gonna get, you're gonna experience mutations, and having that backup copy gives you a way to fix it. That's advantage number one. But the advantage number two is even more profound, and it also allows you to play around with one version. And maybe some of these mutations that come about are beneficial, right? It's rare. Most mutations are obviously going to be harmful, because it's like a lightning strike, you know, it very rarely does a lightning strike build a house, you know? It usually tears the house down. But every once in a while, you can get a mutation that's good. And so by having a backup copy, it allows you more flexibility to play around. And that alternate copy that you might have maybe has no advantage for you right now, but down the road, it could. So what it allows you to do by having two copies and sexual reproduction, you need both of these to work, but when you do that, you create a diverse gene pool. So that's the other thing is, don't think about just a single individual. You have to think about a populations of hundreds of individuals over hundreds of generations. They're going to circulate all these alleles, and they're going to be moving in and out of all the different organisms and separate from one another. That's another key thing is that the alleles don't necessarily end up in the same person, and so each one can be selected for its own merit. And therefore, as a population, it gradually gets rid of bad alleles and accumulates good alleles, and then new ones pop in and they get circulated. That's really only possible in a sexually reproducing species. And so that's why plants, animals, fungi, and even the larger protists, you know seaweed, things like this, they've all gone in the sexual direction because it has such long term advantages over the short term advantages of asexual. But even that is a value judgment, right? Because we think of humans as more successful than E coli, which is a bacteria that lives in our gut, but they outnumber us. Even in our own body, right? There's at least twice as many bacterial cells in your gut as there are human cells in your whole body. So it's really hard to say that we're better than them, considering they've done pretty well going the other direction, which is streamlining. So to me, that's almost the point, right? Is that there's many different ways to succeed, and one of them is diversity.
Yeah, and then you have, like, male and female. We already kind of, like talked about this. I mean, I think your take is in general, like, you know, we're kind of like mammal centric, emphasizing these gamete size differences and like the different behavior of male and females. I mean, I actually like point, well, take it like, I know that male and female, like there's dimorphism, sexual dimorphism you're alluding to, but there's a lot of species where it's like, not the way that we're expecting, or there's that much dimorphism, right? And so like, whatever -
Dimorphism is interesting because I think it's both been over interpreted and under appreciated. What I mean by that is so for example, it's why we didn't realize that from a third to a fourth of Albatross pairings are same sex, because albatrosses look the same all females and male, you can't tell them apart, even even a really experienced ornithologist can't tell them apart because they don't have external genitals, right? And we didn't realize that a lot of the pairings that we saw were actually two females. So because they have no dimorphism. And then in mammals people interpret dimorphism as as telling you something about monogamy, and it can in certain circumstances, like, for example, gorillas have huge dimorphism. The males are about twice as big as the females, and that's because the males compete with each other and then dominate a smaller group of females. And by the way, that's not in all gorilla groups, but that's one way. That's the sort of the dominant way. And then if you look at chimpanzees, it's much more close to the same size, although they do have some dimorphism. Humans you can't really tell, because we're only about 15% bigger the males versus the females, so we're closer to being sort of the same size. And so a lot of people have said, Oh, well, that's a sign of monogamy. Monogamy is what happens when, when - I mean two sexes of the same size is a sign of monogamy? Well, that's not true for bonobos, which are have less dimorphism than almost any primate, and they're completely promiscuous. They don't do pair binding at all. So the monogamy doesn't that doesn't work with with dimorphism with our closest relatives, but also we're dimorphic in other ways that many creatures aren’t. So for example, the most obvious feature that humans have is our face, right? We're really attuned to faces, and that's also the hairiest part of a man and the hairless part of a woman, right? So we are extremely dimorphic when it comes to our facial presentation. So to say that we're not a dimorphic species is really odd, considering the thing that we concentrate most on is the most dimorphic. So I don't think you can read too much into that in terms of monogamy.
Yeah, yeah, okay. I mean, yeah, that was fascinating. And so you also talked about the heterogametic sex. And so, you know, a lot of people think of X, Y chromosomes, but in chicken, the female is a hetero gametic sex. And yeah, some different patterns there. And we don't usually do too much into detail, but in terms of chromosome evolution and sex determination, there's just a lot of ways you could do this where Ii is subject to evolution, you know, right? Sex chromosomes change. They disappear and they get reinvented, right?
We talked about a shrinking Y chromosome in the human lineage. But that doesn't mean that. Doesn't mean that males are going away, or you see these weird articles that people interpret-
Sorry. Steve Jones
Yeah, it doesn’t mean that males are going anywhere, but it is interesting, because you do see that right, where new forms of sexual determination will emerge. And the ones that are the environmentally sensitive are the most interesting, because that does give them a way to respond to environmental needs. And I talked about that in the book, there's a species of eel that is purely based on population density. So at very low density, they favor females, and then very high density they favor males, and that's because males can then compete with each other and try to sort of improve the gene pool over time, whereas females are the productive sex, right? The ones that you need lots of eggs for, and so you know by switching back and forth, but based on population density, again, you're more robust and it becomes more efficient. It's sort of akin to menopause. In the way that it's a realization that just simply producing more children isn't always the best way to succeed for your own genetic stock, particularly in humans, where we have very long gestation times and we have very long interbirth intervals, we really plan our life history is the plan to plan for every child to succeed. Like that's really the goal. Whereas, fish squirt 500,000 eggs, if one or two make it, then they're doing fine, and that investment that we have -
Yeah well, evolutionary ecologists call that R and K selected
Right. R selected would be, R selected is if you have fewer offspring and you really invest in them. And K selection is if you have like an oak tree dropping acorns every year, they don't really invest anything except for that one one shot and but both can succeed. There's many, many oak trees in the world, right? And both ways, can succeed. I think it's pretty clear that humans are selected, though, because we we stop nursing fairly early compared to where what our ancestors did. If women nursed longer, the birth interval would be closer to four or five years. You know, women aren't going to be having 20 kids in a hunter gatherer society, just because they nurse them for a lot longer, you don't ovulate, at least not as often when you're nursing. And you see that with with the other apes as well, that there you can predict their inter birth interval based on how long they nurse, because there's a pretty good correlation there.
Yeah, no, that's, that's, um, yeah, that's -
You know, there's a movement, this is on the left, but there's a movement to nurse kids a lot longer than the previous generation, did you know to nurse them for four or five and six years? That would, that would reduce fertility, which, I don't know that's the reasoning, but there's really good arguments that that's what's what our ancestors did.
Yeah. I mean, I know with my three kids, after they stopped breastfeeding, the other one showed up. So, yeah,
Exactly. That's how it works. And remember, if you stop breastfeeding for just for four or five days, then you you can't anymore after that, right? So it switches off with the idea of being well, it's time to - either this one's died or moved on. It's time to create another one. I mean, we're romanticizing this and putting more intentionality than it's really there, especially when you consider the variability that we see among women and among societies. But that's the point. To me, it's always been the point, the variability, the variation, it's a feature, not a bug, of our of our species, to be able to thrive in all of these different ways. I mean, we are the only species that certainly among mammals, but I think probably the only vertebrate that can live in the desert and the rain forest and the tundra, temperate rainforest, tropical rainforest. Seafaring people. There are societies that live almost exclusively at sea, right? And then there's those in the desert, and you can thrive either way. So, you know, there's no, no animal that really accomplishes that the way that we do, and I think that's that's really telling, because what it talks about is we're not built to do any one thing or live any one kind of way. We’re the ultimate generalists. We’re omnivores, both metaphorically and literally. And there are species that can run faster, that jump higher, throw better, but we can run and jump and swim and throw, you know, we can do it all. And then you use, you know, whatever, based on your environment. And when you apply that same thinking to gender diversity, for example, and sexuality and sexual attraction and even mating systems, you apply that same logic there, then you would expect to see a whole bunch of diversity in different times and places. So I think that's what's happening now, as you see young people, especially, really exploring these different things, it reflects the fact that we've removed a lot of social control on that, and that natural diversity is allowed to flourish. And so I would really hesitate, you know, try to clamp back down on it. I don't know what we what we want to gain by doing that, but that doesn't mean that we're not built for monogamy or dyads. It doesn't mean that. It just means we can thrive lots of different ways.
I’m gonna, okay. We're gonna get to that and like, we got to talk about homosexuality and stuff and trans. So I think I'm gonna skip, I have some notes about hyenas. And like, the hyena stuff is this cool? There's, like, the sneaky fuckers, you know, different morphs. I mean, there's so many topics in this book I have to, I mean, partly, it's just like, okay, like I am, like, a biological sciences person, so there was a lot here. And I kind of got a little greedy with my topic list. So at this point I think, like, I'm gonna, okay, like, let's just, like, move. So sex and gender, and you we talked about sex. These terms - This is something where the idea of gender came out of, like, the idea of gender as a separate thing from sex, came out of academia relatively recently, within the last generation. But it's actually very, very intelligible, because on some level, it's just defining what we already know terms of there are people you know, you know, if I was like Judith Butler, I would say they perform, but whatever we know what they mean, it's like you present in a certain way that conforms to the expectation of what your sex is. And there are some people that are at variance with this, and we all know they're like, you know, third sexes, quote, unquote, in a lot of societies, you know, we're just scrambling our words here to define cultural, biosocial phenomenon. I'm going to use that word, right? So the way, I think the people normally talk about is there's two dimensions. So there is biological variation of sex where it's our anatomy. There are intersex people, a very small number, but they are intersex, yes, like, they have a mixture, kind of, like a, not a chimera, but, you know, just, like, whatever. Like they have internal testes present, as female on the outside, etc, whatever. There's, like, a lot of different little, small number there, and then gender aspect, where it's, I don't know when Achilles was dressed like a maiden, because his mother did not want him to go to fight in battle. But, you know, I think Odysseus, like, had a bunch of, like, jewelry, and then he had a sword in there, and Achilles ran for the sword. He's like, Oh, I gotcha, you know. So he might have looked like a female, because he's very beautiful, but he still behaved, going for the sword, right? So the point there is, obviously, there's different performances, whatever. That's how, that's how we understand it. Can you talk a little bit about that? Because you go into a lot more detail with animals and everything like that. Like, I feel like, let's just say, like, I'm gonna say the humanities, like, you know, gender theory type is more almost like, top down, whereas, like, you're starting from bottom up, biologically, in terms of how this does that make sense?
I think that's exactly right, because it begins with a sexed body, right? So sex refers to bodies, right? It's a physical property of bodies, right? And gender is a psychosocial phenomenon, so it's the way that you interact with other people. It'd be very hard to imagine gender if someone's living alone on an island, right? But they are, they're going to have a sex but gender really is how you relate to other people and it often aligns with sex, but it doesn't purely align with sex, and there's variation. And the point is that the variation that appears is often another way to find success potentially, or not. And the variation that we see in animals, for example, often comes about as a reproductive strategy that finds success. So we talk about sneakers are those males that, you know, they're they're not going to bother trying to fight with the other males, but they're going to try to sneak up on the female, so to speak. And the females don't always resist them, right? And the logic there is, well, that's a successful strategy, and my children will inherit that, and then they'll have a successful strategy. So it only works until it becomes a majority, and then it would swing back the other way. But those, those kind of cycles of variation, the appearance of variation, the selection for it, I think, is, is part and parcel to that. And then with human gender, as you mentioned, like it emerged in academia, but, but actually, it goes way beyond that, right? The word gender referred to language, right? It was, it was declensions that you have in certain languages where you have masculine and feminine pronouns. Well, in English, it's really just like pronouns that get declensions gender declensions, but in lots of other languages words have gender. And to me, I like that in the sense that it shows that there's nothing sexual about a chair, right? But it but a chair can have gender. And so it's another property. It's separate from the physical aspect. It's more of a hard to define, sort of essence, or something like that. And I think that's closer to what we mean by gender, is that it's the way you live in your sexed body, but among other people and their sexed bodies and how you behave. So I think gender is a behavior. It is a performance, but I don't mean it as it's inauthentic. It's just how you live. And so of course, hair, makeup, clothing, that's going to be different from society to society, but feminine means something in all societies. Masculine means something in all societies. And so playing around with the feminine, playing around with the masculine, regardless of your sex. That's what I mean when I say gender diversity. And that's what we see in other animals. They play around with that a little bit. And they sometimes, they call it female mimicry, where you have a male who sort of pretends to be a female in some way. I critique some of those examples. I don't think that's mimicry is really what's going on. It's more of signaling, but we can talk about that, that's that's kind of technical, but in other cases, it almost certainly is mimicry. So I talked about the garter snakes, where, you know, garter snakes hibernate. So when they come out of hibernation after winter, they're very sluggish, right? It's very cold and slow, and they're exothermic, so, right? So they have to get their body heat from the environment. They don't generate it themselves. Well, one thing that they do is they swarm around with other snakes, and they kind of warm each other up. Well there, of course, some variants have existed where the males will put out female pheromones. And what does that do? It makes all the other males mob them, and they're going to try to mate with them at the beginning of the breeding season? Well, they're not going to successfully mate. What they're going to do, though, is pass their body heat so by mimicking a female, a garter snake can steal body heat from the others and then warm himself up faster. And by the way, he's tired the other guys out so and then he's now warm ready to go, ready to go find those females, and he's tired out his competition. So that's an example where gender diversity has an advantage, right? It's not just a runt. It's not just some submissive male. He's got a leg up on the other males by pretending to be a female, right? So that was that's a classic example. I'm not the first one to write about that, obviously, but I give other examples in the book we're actually doing that acting in sex atypical ways gives you an edge. And so why wouldn't nature play around with that a little bit?
Yeah. I mean one issue here is if you read the Bible or whatever, you know, just human constructs and constructions, we carve nature at its joints in very, very simple, stark, often dichotomous ways. But nature occupies distributions, various sorts of Poisson distribution, a Galton distribution, like, you know what I'm talking about,
Modal distribution,
Yeah yeah exactly. But the bimodal distribution, you know, like, we call, like, the binary sex, you know, issue, which is, like, a huge argument that's happening here. Honestly as I'm reading a lot of your - as I was reading this, I was like, I can see this argument. And I think a lot of the issues here happen to be how we choose to define the limit of the distribution and how we want to kind of, I just feel like, me and you could actually like, let's just say, like, look at the distribution of sex definition by some sorts of, like, anatomical criteria. Let's just do it that way. Okay, stuff. And we would actually, like, create a histogram. And we would both be like, Okay, we agree on the histogram, you know. But that would be a whole argument. Like, Well, is there like, two sexes? Is it three sexes? How do we define this? Is it actually three sexes, but we have to start with two sexes. And a lot of this just has to do, like, outside of the scientific domain, with the policy stuff
Exactly. That's what I was saying, is what you just described, is this distribution that we see. That's what nature is. We need labels and words, and we call, okay, this is our cut off for for a male. This is our cut off for a female, and we can ignore the ones in between. And you know, for 95% of us that's probably going to be okay. But the point is, first of all, the people in the middle exist, and they deserve dignity and rights and everything else. They're only guilty of being different. That's one thing. But secondly, the fact that they're different and that there is a variance speaks to nature's love of diversity. And what I mean by nature's love of diversity is mutations are always happening. Developmental programs are plastic, and things are designed to be what we call stochastic, where even if you rewind the tape on your own embryonic development and then replay it, you will not come out exactly the same way. There's just some chance that's at play, and that's by design. Again, that's a feature, not a bug, because the less we're all a monolith, the more robust the species is, right? And the thing is, biologists get that in almost every other way except sex and gender Biologists get that. They accept that. They understand that variation is natural. It's gonna happen. It's generally good. And then selection can either trim off the extremes and reduce the diversity, or it can destabilize, right? So that's selection, but the emergence of the diversity is natural. It's just the way nature is. And so I hope, even if we can disagree about what's good for the society, I hope we can at least agree that the appearance of people who are transgender or intersex or whatever is a natural phenomena. They deserve dignity. They should be allowed to thrive. And people get really, really angry and upset at their very existence, or they think that they're faking. They're making it up. Well, I don't know why someone would make up gender dysphoria when you consider there's no better way to get picked on by the on the in the schoolyard, or getting ostracized from your family and all of this. Like, come on, they're not making this up
We could talk about gender dystoria, but let me talk about intersex actually, because, like, that's a bit more concrete. I think, actually, like, I think it was 1999 long, long ago. I read some early Alice Gregor, and she actually wrote a fair amount about intersex. And this is something, this is back when they were still modifying intersex individuals as infants to make them, usually make them look female. Like, if they had, like, a small penis, they would cut it off. And Alice was not a fan of this. She described it, but she expressed her opinion. And, you know, as I was reading it, I was like, we need to talk about this. Because, like, yeah, like, I'm not sure. I mean, honestly, like, how I felt about it was like, Okay, this is kind of fucked up. Like, I, you know, being intersex, you're a minority, okay, you’re a biological minority. Like, it's like being a quadriplegic okay. Like, you know, I'm not gonna get into it, but, like, you know, there's some struggles with that, you know, whatever, and, but, but, I mean, what you gonna take this infant? Like, I don't want to describe it, but you know what I'm trying to say here?
And that's what's happened for a long, long time, and that's even just the surgical intervention socially, the social abandonment and the malignant, you know, there's all kinds of things happen to people who whose difference, particularly in the genital anatomy isn't what's expected. Now, the thing is the vast majority of intersex individuals are healthy. The vast majority of them are fertile, sometimes with medical assistance, sometimes not, and the vast majority of them do not seek surgical correction. Some do. And generally, you get surgical correction when you're really kind of close to one hump or the other of the distribution, you kind of like, push it over, yeah, just push it over the other way, particularly if you have an identification with that. And if you know there's a chromosomal sex and there's all that. They are going to align more often than they're not. And so that might be what happens. But increasingly, as intersex individuals have found each other, you know, and formed communities of solidarity, there's way less intervention going on. To say that, look, you can live a happy life, a normal life. You can even find a mate who's not also intersex, who might not care about your genital anatomy or even be attracted to it. And that is nothing wrong with that either, right? So as long as people are allowed to thrive and so forth. And one thing that's interesting is that intersex people have always had an easier time convincing people that they shouldn't be cast aside or discarded, or whatever. More recently than transgender people have because transgender people, it's often thought that this is optional. This is a choice that you're making, and we can talk you out of it. But if it's a bodily variation, we seem to be more accepting of the fact it was inevitable, and, yeah,
I mean, one thing that I'm gonna say here, though, is like we're talking both, both of us, like, we live in America. It's a liberal, democratic society. We have, like, a range of viewpoints about, the term is like bodily autonomy or individual liberty, you know, and just kind of like the ability to like flourish as who you are. And that's informing our agreements here, you know. Let's just put it that way. This is a normative expression of two individuals who are from the same culture talking about something that is descriptively, materially in the world out there. If we were from a different culture, frankly if we were living 50 years earlier, we don't know, right? I just want to put that out there and be really clear. And I think separating these sorts of things are important. I think you do a good job in the book, because you take, you do the asides, you know, where you bracket yourself out of it and say, Look, I'm describing how the Greeks were. I'm not condoning it, but also, like they are different than us, right? I mean, this is a fundamental issue, but I do think that this is a problem, honestly, with some of these discussions because sometimes if you describe something people think you are making some normative judgment. So for example, I will say, heterosexuality is the majority sexual orientation on average among humans. Okay, that's not, I'm not saying that it's good or bad, you know. I mean, you know what, like? This is like, kind of strange. Just I know a lot of young males, I'm in tech, and I don't know how to say, well like I’ll just put it out there, because, like, this is gonna be in the paywall initially, you know, like, they're just like, you know, I wish I wasn't straight, because it would be easier for me to get a raise and, like, dating and everything like this. Like, can I get a pill to be gay, right? And, like you know, I'm Gen X. Like,
That’s not something previous generations would have ever said,
You can see the cultural context has changed, you know. But what I do tell people, though, is, like, you know, okay, like, obviously people can experiment. And we're gonna talk about different cultures of the past. But I do tell them, I'm just like, Look, maybe you think that you weren't born into easy mode, you know, easy mode, frankly, like, sex is easier. It's the same gender, you know, like they understand me all this stuff. And also, there's some mentorship issues that I want to get into right now in tech, you know, but I'm just like, you're straight. I know how it is. I'm straight. This is how it's always been. It’s definitely my strong orientation. And just deal with it, right? Like, this is who you are. And I'm not making a big moralistic judgment. I'm just saying like, this is, this is like these. This is like the die you've been given. Maybe you can try to, like, change and like, there are people who've done anyway. My only point is, like, we have like these orientations, and then we have these cultural contexts that change all around us, right? And then we have intersecting with it, all these moralistic judgments to go in and out so -
Let me ask you Razib how do you just, how do you define heterosexual?
I would say, I would say, like, this is a little bit like the gender - you just play a trick. I think, I think he just, like, made me,
Nathan: this isn’t my first rodeo,
I think you just like, put me into a trap here. Okay, so the reality is, like, there are cases like you're in prison where there are men who I would call heterosexual. They do not engage in heterosexual behavior. They engage in homosexual behavior because, you know, they're sexual, right? And at some point, like, you have to have an outlet. But, you know, one day I woke up when I was 13, and you know what I'm saying, you know, in contrast, like, I have gay friends that that knew from a very early age, or like sometimes in elementary school, I mean, I knew I was I definitely had a straight orientation, even when I was in elementary school, in terms of, like, I kind of had a vague feeling, although I didn't hit puberty. And then I have gay friends who, like, they've said, Oh yeah, I didn't have that one. I had the other, you know? And then I had a lot of friends. I have friends who are some gay and some straight, who, like, we're very inchoate actually, in pre puberty, right? So there's an internal preference that you kind of sense, and then it develops over your lifetime, and it expresses in a social context. That's how I would say it,
Okay but just, what is heterosexual? What is the definition of that particular orientation? Because it's not purely attraction to the opposite sex, because other orientations have that, bisexuals have that, pansexuals have that.
I would say, like, it's not totally obligate, but like, in an environment of, like, well I think in some ways I have said, I have said, you know, like, I've been canceled so many times I can say whatever, right? But I've said that my generation, in some ways in the United States of Gen X males were the straightest generation ever, because there was still homophobia, right? But sexual revolution had happened, so women were available for us to have sex with as teenagers. That was accepted. But homosexuality, it wasn't like the 1950s or 60s, but still, it was like, you knoww
Yeah, they wouldn't kill you, but you would -
It would still be taboo. Whereas, like, in previous generations. And I've done, I've done the reading on this, like, I mean, there was, like, homoerotic homosexual behavior among straight men, right?
Exactly. They just didn't call themselves anything.
It was just like, it's not gay if you're not, if you're the pitcher, you know, or whatever, no. And, like, we can go into, like, the historical of that. So in my generation it was very different, like, in fact, like, candidly, like, it's like, we're, like, the strangest generation, because, like, a lot of Zoomers, they have much more, like, you know, experimentation, you know.
They do. And I was gonna say Gen X is not just the straightest generation. They're probably the gayest generation too, because the if you're gay as a Gen Xer, you're expected to be gay and playing around with a -
A lot of Gen X Men do not think bisexual men exist. Gen X gay very strong. They're very, very strident about that
That's right. That's right. And of course, what we what we're seeing now as more of that social control it lifts, is you do see the hetero flexible and the pansexuals and the sexually fluid and and you see this. And what I think is most interesting about this is that we're starting to see sex differences on these things, where women are more sexually fluid than men. And I believe that, I don't think that's just purely enculturation. I think that women are more flexible in their attractions. And we can talk about why that might be. But the point I was trying to make, though, when asking about heterosexuality, is that heterosexuality is the only sexual orientation that is defined by its aversions. So you're not attracted to members of the same sex, right? That's a key part of being straight. And if you think about it, from all the examples I give in the book, that in many ways could put you at a disadvantage if you're absolutely not open to forming a sexual alliance with a member of your same sex. That's half the population that is not available to you as a social partner or whatever. And if you, if you put it in, in ancient Greece, for example, if you simply refuse to participate in pederasty, which was that relationship, you would have missed out on all the mentoring that takes place in it. Now, obviously, of course, we're not going to emulate that. I have no interest in emulating that. I'm as creeped out by it as anybody else, but the idea being that orientation clearly has to be more flexible than we were led to believe. It has to be more able to be shaped and molded by the society. I think the aversion that we now associate with heterosexuality, that is more of culture speaking than biology. I do think that most men are attracted to women, and I do think that most women are attracted to men, but the where the aversions come in to me, that reeks of culture.
Yeah. I mean, when we know this, anyone who's been stationed in Afghanistan in the last 20 years knows, Bacha bazi that's still here. It's still there. And though that's in a society where it's like and actually a lot of those pederas societies were extremely sex segregated. Athens, for example, like elite women were basically what we would call Purdah today. You know, in like Islamic societies and Islamic societies, as many of you know listeners out there were much more. You know, the word liberal is a weird word to use, but homosexual behavior was actually like, much more open in a lot of Islamic societies than they were in Europe, partly just because that segregation was just much stronger. And so that's sexual outlet. And then there was, like, some changes in the 19th and 20th century. And so there's a lot of -
Even in animals too, right? There are some species that are very sex segregated, and they have a lot of sex within those sex segregated groups. And then when the two sex groups come together. They have sexual activity for the purpose of fertilization, but then they go back to their sex aggregated groups.
I want to talk about the history. And, like, getting less anecdotal, but I do have to say something really strange. I was actually in San Francisco recently, like, on business stuff, and I was, like, hanging out with some friends. And, I mean, I was just like, we've talked about this before. It's like gay men in tech, you know, they have a really cohesive bond. I'm saying this in, like, in a period. Way, I'm just saying this like a single gender man, and it's just like, they're tight, whereas, like us straight guys, you know, like we're cross linked, there is no, I mean, I'm just gonna be like, honest, like, I can't imagine my life being complete without a woman, you know, and vice versa. But as anyone knows, men and women, we drive each other crazy, you know? And then, of course, like, in terms of between, like my bros, like, my straight male friends, obviously, like, we're tight, but there's certain types of intimacy that aren't there. Do you know what I'm saying? Yeah, weird to talk about it. Because I was just like, yeah, like, we're just different. And like, you know, you don't because, like, I've had, like, younger gay men in particular, sometimes do not understand, honestly, they do not understand the straight male experience, because they didn't have to perform being us.
Right. Like, my generation did.
They didn't have to try. They didn't have to date women because, like, sometimes they'll say things like, because I have, like, a lot of young male friends that are gay, not a lot, but I have a fair number. Okay, like, whatever I want to make it seem weird, but you know what I'm saying. And like, they'll just be like, say something. And like, because I'm trying to date or something, they're just like, and I'm like, no you don't understand. This is a woman, Dude
Nathan: yeah, exactly.
Okay, well, how different can they be? Have you ever dated one? He's like, no. You ever plan to? No, hell no, you know. And it's like, okay, there you go. That's just like, just step off anyway. I'm just thinking that's interesting, because we would, you would, like, understand, because you were, candidly, expected to be like us, like we were the standard, and we're no longer the standard anymore. It's just everyone do what you want to do, do as I will, right? And that's created, like, a totally different socialization that I've noticed, and it's not good or it's bad, it's just different. It's different and it's weird, because it's like, I'm in, I'm like, a I sometimes I feel like a generational anthropologist, because I hang out with a lot of founders, not a lot, but a fair number of founders that didn't go to college, that are 20, and they’ve been like, running their company for three years, and, you know, they're either straight or gay or asexual or whatever, and it's a whole different they've come up in a whole different world. They don't remember before gay marriage,
Nathan: Yeah, right, it always was,
They like, read some of the stuff, and they're just like, Yeah, you remember that stuff? And I'm like, yeah, like, I'm old, you know. Anyway, sorry, just
No, no. I agree with you 100% because the experience now of those who are coming up and coming out gay is very different than even just mine. I'm not that old, you know, I'm a Gen Xer, and it's a very, very different kinds of experience. And but you touched on something about how into this brings it back to sex when you have dating relationships, particularly dating is what I'm talking about. I'm not even talking about marriage. I'm not talking about sex. I'm talking about dating. The differences between the sexes. I think that's - or the genders, I should say that's when it's at its most intense. Is the dating, the courtship phase, right? Because social relationships I have, very close friendships with women, very close friendships with men, straight, gay, whatever, and then marriage, so is so far beyond just, you know, genital sexual intercourse, that then then they're not so different either. Two gay men, two lesbians, straight couples, they have way more in common than they have in difference. But it's the dating phase, the rules around courtship and how you pose that that's really where you where you see this difference. And I used to always make the joke is, I don't know how you can really have any relationship with someone when you're not even the same gender. I don't know how you can make that work. You don't think the same way you have you know your approach to sex is different. I'm joking. Of course
I mean I’m divorced, trust me, I know
That’s what I mean, but it really is the courtship phase, the dating phase, when those differences are most intense. And to bring this conversation 100% full circle, we're back to the issue of monogamy. Because ultimately, what dating is is feeling people out to see if you're going to form a dyad with him. It's not about sex. It really isn't. It doesn't mean you're not having sex. I mean, sex isn’t important. It's really, are we gonna form at least a long term relationship? And that's the interesting part to me, because it's not inherently sexual, but it is so sexualized that, you know, I don't know, I don't have the answer. But,
I was telling a friend, a young friend of mine, this is, like, this is, like, much more personal podcast than I was expecting to do. But just like, we'll go there is because, like he was talking about relationships, and he's had sexual relationships, but he hasn't had a serious relationship. Like, a 28 year old guy, like, whatever, anonymous enough that I don't need, I can say the age and, you know in our generation, I feel like by the time you're 28 you should have had - but this is actually much rarer today, not rare, but this is not an uncommon pattern. I'll put it this way. And I was explaining to him, you know, and I'm saying, saying symbolically, just because you have sex with someone doesn't mean you're one flesh, you know, like that's, that's symbolic of something much deeper, and you haven't experienced that. And, maybe you don't want to, I'm not like, here to, like, preach at you, but I think, you know, I was basically because there was something lacking in his life. And I'm like, that is what is lacking. You know, neither of us are Christians, but like, it's in the Bible, like, a man cleaves to a woman, becomes one flesh, and that can be the same same sex to same gender, right? It's like, it is, like, symbolic and represent, and I feel like Jordan Peterson right now, but representative of something deeper in our society as a culture, what that is representing as a corporate unit, right? Like, you can’t be compelled to testify against each other in court, you know, like, usually, like family, you have children. You know what I'm saying. It's like, now there's, like, a generational connection. Like, this is the future of you. Like, now you are bound to the future of the human species through these small human beings, you know. And so it's like, this much bigger thing than copulation, which is necessary and foundational in some ways. Although, as as couples grow older, a lot of them become, frankly, asexual, but they still love each other romantically. Yeah, so how do we deal with all this complexity with these youth? And I'm just like, oh my god, I'm old.
No, I couldn't agree with you more of what you just said, the idea of that when two people do kind of decide to share their life together, they're more than the sum of their parts, right? Because they can do things together that they can never do separately. You know, whether it's and think about birds and nesting, but you think about animals and care, but just think about humans and rent. You gotta pay your rent, right? It is much easier to share space with someone in a room when you're having sex with them, right? You do not mind sleeping in the same bedroom and sharing a closet as long as you're having sex, but you don't know any roommates who are not sexual, just roommates, no matter how close that share a bed and share a closet, right? They never would. But something about having sex creates a different kind of bond, and that's that my whole monogamy paradox, if I can use that, to borrow that phrase from Sue Carter, is that it really changes the nature of a relationship in ways that aren't in any way connected to sex. That have nothing to do with sexual intercourse or even the sex or gender of the individual, but when you're having sex with them, the rules are totally different in your relationship.
Yeah. I mean, like again, I don't believe in the supernatural personally, but, like, the word spiritual does get at something that's ineffable, and that's like, holistic that we're trying to get out of here.
Anybody who's had really good sex is at least temporarily spiritual.
That's fair, that's fair, but that's, I think Greeks have different words for these sorts of love, right? But, let's talk about, like, homosexuality, gayness, and then like, loop back to monogamy. And like, kind of close the loop. Because I think, you know, I think we've talked about a lot of different things. I think, I hope the listener will find it interesting. And I've probably done a little bit too much TMI, but whatever. The science is at the center, because the science is there, like, that's the foundation here. You know, you have a chapter on homosexuality and, well, I mean, hosexuality, you mentioned because it said animals and stuff like that. And there's, like, the gayness, the gay rights movement, the gay identity. And one thing I remember, like it was 2006 or 2007 Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran said something where he said, Well, we don't have gay people like you do. And everyone started laughing, because, like, everyone's like, well, of course they have homosexuals which is true. Like, you know, everyone actually, like Islamic world is pretty well known for its homosexual behavior. I think what he was trying to get at, although he might not have, like, understood it, like, in an articulate way, is they don't have a recognized gay identity like we have in the West. So I think homosexual orientation, or whatever, how you want to say that preference is in there. And a lot of people, it's always been in there. A lot of people. You mentioned things in Babylonia and elsewhere a long time. Okay, that was there, but we have created in the modern West a certain style of expression of that orientation in a relationship context which is unique and distinct. And I want to go back to ancient Rome and Greece in particular. You were talking about pederasty. So Kyle Harper has a book about sexuality, the ancient world and when Coon and I talked. It's like, honestly, like I told Conn, it's a disturbing book to me, because the relationship between power and sex there is just, like, so perverted. And the perverted is literally, like, there's like, child prostitutes all over the place, and like children slaves in cages, and you can have sex with them. And basically the idea is, like, you know, in the ancient world, and actually much of the Islamic world today, and to some extent, other parts of the world, you know, it's about like, whether you're penetrative or being penetrated. And so, you know, I know Caligula was mentioned, not Caligula. Claudius didn’t ever engage in homosexuality with a slave. So that was kind of weird. So basically the idea is, like, you know, just like a normal, like, red blooded Roman, Greco Roman man would have sex with young male slaves, often boys or, you know,
And as long as you weren't penetrating a Roman citizen, it was fne u
That to them was like what they were talking about. And like, they were very tolerant of that, but they were not tolerant of, say, Elagabalus the third century emperor who was a catamite, right, right? So, an emperor as a catamite, so that means he's passive. And there's, like, I mean, some of this is probably made up, but like, you know, they're like, oh, like, he wanted to talk to a surgeon about creating a vagina.
But Razib it’s the same thing. Because Ahmadinejad wouldn't have a problem with people having sex. He'd have a problem with them having a gay pride parade. And they might be celibate, but they're affirming -
It's the social disruption of the society between man and a woman. And so that's why, you know, transitions of trans is okay in Iran, because it maintains the social ideal of that binary dyad right, right? And so that. And I think Americans like, candidly, we don't know about other cultures, like a lot of people don't read history, and they just try to interpret everything in American like, late 20th century, early 21st century terms as we didn't understand that. But like, you know, we're seeing like homosexual behavior all across the world, but it instantiates in different ways in different cultures right?ht
rYeah, exactly. That's right. And that's to me, it's the universal that speaks to biological and then the differences speak to cultural influences, and they're both valid. They're both real. They're part of our experience, an attraction to a certain kind of sex. And the other thing is that when you have pederasty or ancient Rome or whatever, the attraction is so focused on the genital penetration that you wouldn't even call these individuals same sex attracted. They're just attracted to an ass that looks a certain way, if I can be crude, right? It's really quite specific. It has nothing to do with gay identity or gay bonding or anything like that. And so because it didn't violate any norms, they were free to explore that particular attraction. And so your attractions you know, are very vague. You know, the wiring for our attractions are very, very, very vague, and they're influenced by your childhood experiences and everything else. But then the cultural gets in on it, and then trims it a little bit right, and kind of hems it in a little bit. And because of societal expectations, I think it comes down to social control really, because why else would Ahmadinejad care about someone raising a Pride Parade, a pride flag, except that it violates this norm, right? You know, it doesn't matter what the individual is actually doing in private, because if he did there's people who do that anyway. Probably Ahmadinejad has done it. That's not the problem. The flaunting of social control, that's the problem. And it's the same thing, by the way. So transgender individuals have always existed, right? And when, and even the correction, the gender reassignment, is not brand new, right? You know, we're looking at 100 years of history on that surgical procedure, and it was always fine when the person really mimicked the sex that they were acquiring as long as you kind of, if your goal was to pass, then that was fine too, because that didn't disrupt the social order. We were very compassionate towards transsexuals. This was what we called them, right? But transgender individuals now are realizing that they're never going to fit the buckets perfectly, so they're going to play around with it. They're going to acquire masculine and femininity in whatever way makes sense to them. And that's the problem. Now, you're violating social norms because you're not fitting into one of the other bucket, and we don't know what to do with you. We don't have the right label. What pronouns should I use? All of these things. That's why it's upsetting, is it violates the social order.
Yeah, I mean, I think I will, like, maybe, like, a little bit of argument with you here at the end about that sort of stuff, because I do think this is a discussion that needs to be had, and not in a hateful way. But we just talk about, like, what we as a society want, and maybe people disagree, and we just need to talk about it. And it’s a democratic society things happen. You know, Supreme Court will make decisions. Like, you know, people who are against gay marriage, have to accept it, right? And vice versa. Maybe other things will happen. Like, you know, there are people who don't want to have, who don't who don't have children. You know, the child free movement which you're not a member of. But like, you know, there's pretty pissed about child tax credits. You know, what? Like, fuck them because, I mean, I'm just gonna say it because, like, our kids are gonna, you know, make sure that their retirement goes well. I mean, anyway, I don't want to get into that detail, but you know what I'm saying, like, we make choices as a society about what we value, right? But before I get to that, I want to ask you about, you know, years ago, and like, my friend Steve Phelps, actually, who I think I mentioned earlier, before we were recording. He's a professor here at UT. He did a op ed with one of the authors of, you know, the gay wasps, you know. So you know, homosexuality is like, you know, behavior, whatever, however you define a gay identity, you know, category, I haven't looked deeply into the literature recently. It's moderately heritable, but not very, like 25% heritability, or something like that. So there's concordance between identical twins, but it's not like, height or something, right. So that indicates that there's some, like, biological issues going on here. It might not necessarily be genetic, because obviously things happen in utero. It could be biological, but not heritable, not genetic. But they have been looking for genes, and they found some statistically significant genes. And what they found about those genes, from what I remember in the paper, and again, I haven't followed the literature, is when they're found in people that are just just heterosexual, just vanilla heterosexual. In the British UK Biobank, those people tend to have more sexual partners. And so the hypothesis here is, like, it's involved in some sort of sexual development, and occasionally people tend to be homosexual or bisexual, I guess. I mean, part of this is like, I just wonder if, let's just say they're more pansexual and more open and express it in a certain way, because a lot of these behavioral things kind of like hard to get a handle on. But like, at the time, there was actually a lot of controversy. I was at the American Society of Human Genetics meetings, and there was a lot of hostility from the audience, even though, I mean, like, the lead researchers were gay. They were homosexual. You know, they were gay men mostly. I mean, I don't think there's any lesbian, but you know what I'm saying. But they were getting, like, a lot of crap incoming from the audience, and like, people were shaking and getting angry. And I was just like, I mean, okay, I mean, like, Dean hammer, who I think is gay at Arizona State, he was like, early on in this stuff. And it was just like, people were just like, people were just interested in themselves and how they came to be, right? Then it became, like, highly politicized in the audience, because they're like, are you targeting gay people? And like, one of the guys is like, Well, I mean, you know, I was like, he didn't really want to say, like, I'm gay. He's gay. He's gay. Do you see him saying,
Originally, the. Goal of a lot of that was just if we could, find a biological explanation for something, then it would, it would at least eliminate the whole Oh, well, you were sexually abused as a child or Oh, you're just trying to be different or get attention. So it was, it legitimized the gay orientation to search for that. But then it very quickly, the politics flipped to, okay, now are you trying to breed it out? Are you trying to fix it? Are you trying to? And the thing is, I talk about this in chapter seven in the book, where, if you read the literature on the mechanism of of homosexuality, it's really hard not to read it as if they're saying they're looking for what went wrong. You know, what's wrong about this? What's different? And so, so I understand the defensiveness, because, you know, if you frame it that way you're gonna make people a little suspicious about what your goals are. And so I think it's changed a little bit. But to be honest, I think it's changed even further since then, since the time of, you know, when it was all in the X chromosome, everyone was looking for, what is it? XQ28 or whatever it was, whatever
From the New York Times in the year 2000 right?
Yeah, the gay gene. Whatever. So we've moved now to this diffusely, you know, genetic trait or whatever. But the idea being now you know how it takes shape, and are we going to breed it out? But I think the understanding of animal behavior has a lot to say about this debate, because what we see in animals is a much more generic sex drive that then takes shape in these different environments. And I think that's what we're going to see. Of course, as you said, there's a distribution. There'll be people who would be oriented more one way or the other, but you're going to be impacted by your environment, and you're going to, it's going to take shape in that way. And, you know, so the classic study that was done, well, there was two studies. One was, I found a lot of victims of sexual abuse grow up to be homosexual. That was thought through the 80s as something that was true. And of course, why that came to be as long since been debunked. But a colleague of mine, her name is Kathy Widom, if you ever want to have a really interesting psychologist on your show you might consider her. So she studies what's called the cycle of violence, and she had children who were abused at an early age, and she has followed and the data sets like 800 and she has followed them now for 30 plus years. And she has a perfectly, not perfectly, but a very well matched control group. So these are kids from the same environment, same zip code, same social, economic everything, and about similar size, 800 and followed them. And so you're looking at what's different. She's found one thing is that abused people are not destined to become abusers. That was the first big finding is that, you know, Hurt people hurt people, is what they used to always say. So it's not so simple when you can control for these other variables it goes away. But the second thing she she found is that people, children who are sexually abused, are not more likely to become gay, like identify as gay, but they are more likely to have at least one same sex experience, and when they look deeper, is they found that people who were sexually abused are more likely to go through a phase of sexual exploration, and that would include members of the same sex as well as the opposite sex, and then they'll end up wherever they end up. They're more likely, or they're not more likely, to end up gay or straight, but they go through that exploratory phase, and you could talk about why that is. One theory is it's a reclaiming of their sexual autonomy and identity. Another one is that promiscuity is just like a side effect of abuse, whatever, whatever the reason is. To me, I find it fascinating, because it speaks of that flexibility of that okay, and during that exploratory phase before I have to choose what I am, humans have this and the idea that they were abused is what kind of allowed that exploratory phase to take shape, but they still ended up wherever they were going to, at least statistically speaking. So I think it that's a great study, and I wish more people knew about that study, because it shows that first of all, you're not destined - your childhood experiences don't destin you to anything sexual. But it also shows that an exploratory phase, while normal, is, you know, can be impacted by some of these adverse childhood experiences.
Yeah okay, I could go into a behavior genetic, like, just like a tangent, not a tangent, but actually, like a rabbit hole. I'm gonna skip that. I'm gonna hold my piece on this. Okay, I think some of the listeners gonna be like, Razib; blah, blah, blah, blah. Why are you talking about behavioral genetics? Well, you know what? I wanna talk about monogamy. And I want to kind of like, not argue with you, but like say my piece, or maybe like, defend some of Conn's viewpoints, although I'm not sure if we, like, necessarily disagree too much. Okay, so I - I've never been, just so listeners know, because, like, some people who are like right wing, like were like left wing, and they change. I've always been like, either libertarian or conservative. I've never really been on the left, but I've never really had a problem with gay people, because, honestly, my parents didn't talk to me about it. When I first found out about it when I was 10, I was like, okay, that's weird, but that was, like, my main reaction. Gay marriage, like, I supported it back in the 90s, when it was, like, weird, and mostly it's just because, like, it was, you know, okay, like growing up in our generation, you know, people where it's like, there was tragedies because they had to hide their relationship and then one person sick, like, these sorts of things like this is, this is what really impelled a lot of us to just be like, just come on. Like, let's just, like, formalize this, get it out of the shadows. So my attitude with gay people in general, whatever is just like, you know, just let them be right. Like, no one bugs me about, you know, or like, okay, like, I was in an interracial marriage. That's what we used to call it back then, you know what I'm saying? No one bugs me about that or bugged me about it. No one cares. You know? Similarly, that was my attitude, right? And so I did support gay marriage, actually, very early on. I wasn't like, super militant about it, but I was like, always, like, Yeah, I mean, they got the same rights, you know, whatever. I mean, they love someone, and it's different sex, whatever, like, the logic of that is clear, but I was always skeptical about polygamy, okay? And the reason is, 1) polygamous societies are quite different. There are some like, correlated differences, right? And so, you know, the for me, gay marriage is just marriage, except they're gay. It's like, it's actually like a simple, you know what I'm trying to say, like, if in a gay world, it was like, marriage, this is like, okay, like, easy to understand. When you're talking about polygamy, though, for example. Or like, let's say like, like, formal recognition of, say graph-like, poly relationships, which I am friends in the Bay Area that are in that. Okay, like, our whole society is going to be, like, reorganized, too to bottom. So it's like, I am actually, like, pretty, like, strident that, like, gay marriage is fine in terms of like it's a simple modification to the same system whereas polygamy is fundamentally different. Now I'm talking about social, legal, polygamy here. Okay, I am well aware that there are cheaters and people have different relationships and different understandings, and there are people who are married, who are in poly triads and tetrads and all these other things, right? But one of the aspects in Conn's book that I think was very good was he pointed out that the emergence of Greco Roman monogamy had to do with legitimacy and inheritance. And some of this is unjust like I actually don't think that the way bastards were treated was necessarily just, but the idea is the society needs to have rules to organize the transmission of property and social relations. Now my my late friend, David Boaz, who was a gay man, he did propose many, many decades ago, before gay marriage happened, that we just turn marriage into a civil contract of some sort, to some extent the Islamic world. That's what a Nikah is. In Islam it’s a civil contract. It's not it's not a sacrament. But operationally, it's not just like a simple contract between between two people, like we were talking earlier. It's to become one flesh. It's like representing something as a corporate unit about our society, our liberal, democratic society, about the value that we put on these dyads, even if we breach that sanctity, or whatever you want to call it, right? And when I was younger, I'm not sure I would be as vociferous about that. And as a divorced person, like I failed, you know, like it didn't work. You know?
I mean, why do you paint it that way? I don't paint - You know the termination of one relationship. You know that it had a certain amount of time that was less than the length of your life? Why is that a failure? I don't get that. I think that you failed in a certain set of societal expectations. But for example, there's lots of animals that get together for a breeding season, right? And then they move on and they -
I am not an animal. I am not an animal.
Nathan: You are definitely an animal. You're a vertebrate. You're-
I'm a particular type of animal. And we have certain, I think, goals and ideals, I honestly candidly a lot of it just has to do with children.
Of course. Here’s why it’s different. Let me just tell you this Razib. I am in the gay community in New York City, so I know people with every kind of arrangement in their relationship that you can imagine. And let me tell you something, the No rules, no labels, does not get you out of the drama at all, and the jealousy and the rule breaking and the cheating, it's all there. So they're really not that different in that way. And so the idea of creating marriage as a contract does make sense a little bit, because that way, you're acknowledging what's different and what is different is the sharing of resources. You know, it's that social monogamy. And I was talking about how you get together, you have a homestead, you have children, if you do. And you have an extended future and that kind of a thing. And so I think it's interesting that the no labels, or no you know, those movements, it really is going to come back to the same issues that straight couples have always had. And how permanent is this? And what.
Gay marriage open the door to gay divorce.
That's right. That's right. Gays were never getting divorced before 2010
Yeah. So going back to polygamy, so for example a lot of social conservatives would say gay marriage is against, like, God's law, and it's against nature, and it's just like, a total radical disruption. And even if, like, in the United States, they're against polygamy because they're from a Christian background, Western Christian background, they'd be like, Well, I mean, lot of societies have been polygamous, at least. That's, that's like, within the normal range. And, you know, there's polyandry, there's polygamy, there's different types of polygamy, like an African polygamy, there might be, like, the women, I'm very independent homes, whereas in, say, like Arabian style polygamy, you know, it's like they're all like in the same compound and whatnot. But my point here is that is a way some societies are organized, but for a for a liberal democratic society, that is not optimal. And, you know, some people say, Well, if we're like, I'll be sorry, for example, like, I just give you a real example, Freddie deBoer, who I do enjoy his writing, and I do subscribe to the substack. You know, he's been saying for like, 15-20 years, once you have gay marriage, you should start to think about, like, polygamy and legalizing it. And he says it as a positive thing, because he's like, there's no moral reason to just have monogamy. I'm not making a moral case. I'm making like, a sociological case where, you know, we're talking about egalitarianism, polygamy opens the door to a level of sexual inegalitarianism. And I'm focusing mostly on straight people right now, just to make it simple, you know? And all of a sudden, I think there's gonna be, like, more violence, crime, lower trust. I think there's gonna be a lot of other things. We can make the same sorts of arguments about cousin marriage, that's a totally different podcast. But these things, even if you don't think that they're immoral, and even if they exist in a lot of societies, we as a society can say, You know what? That's not gonna - we're gonna clamp down on this particular individual liberty in relation to the law, right? Because we're never gonna ban cousins from having sex in this country, but we can discourage marriage of cousins, whether socially or legally. Similarly, we're never going to man ban men in particular of high status, like, I don't know, Sergey Brin or whatever, from having these like polygamous relationships. But we as a society have decided, You know what, you're not going to get yourself this legal harem and produce like, 100 little kids. Sorry, Elon, it's not legally recognized. That's why, I just think, like social conservatives, they do have a point there. It's just that it does get wrapped up into views about gays that are just, frankly, just not very popular among younger people, which is, like, they don't have purchase, right? I worry that that actually causes problems with the argument about monogamy. Does that make sense? So anyway,
Yeah, it does. I think, I think what you I approach this as a biologist, right? So just describing the natural world is what we try to do. And public policy has a very different goal, which is, what kind of society do we want to build collectively. So you can discourage or encourage certain behaviors, reward them, and whether or not polygyny, and you're saying polygamy, but I think you mean polygyny, because the other way around. Polyandry is
Polyandry is not very common
It’s not very common and you said, let's focus on straight people. And the reason why that's different is the power dynamic that has between men and women, right? And the historical power dynamic and resources would be unequal and but in a society that is getting more flat when it comes to at least for the genders and so forth, the idea that we could revisit the debate on polygyny and polyandry polygamy, I think we're gonna hear that more and more.
Razib: We're already hearing it,
Y I don't think that there's necessarily a moral evil there. I don't necessarily not a biological imperative either way. But that doesn't mean that there aren't pluses and minuses for the society. And so the individual flourishing, how is that impacted by allowing this? Well, here's the problem is, we don't have a lot of data on that, like, if a society allows multiple marriage, individual marriage, gay marriage, you know if everything goes, what does that allow maximum liberty? Does that lead to maximum flourishing? I don't know. A lot of libertarians would say, the more freedom, the more flourishing. So this is not going to cut - this is going to cut across the different right, left divide. Because, yeah, but you know, goal oriented policy making is very different than just describing the natural world. So I am not going to do a lot of policy stuff, because I want to stay out of it
I just wanted to put that out there. Like,
No, you're right. You're right. We have, we have opened that door. So we got to have that conversation.
Yeah and this is an issue where, like, feminists and some social conservatives are going to be like, okay, like, not yes, you know.
I think it'd be a really good thing that the political siloing breaks down a little bit, because right now, if you tell me what you think about guns, I'll tell you what you think about abortion. And that's bullshit, that all of these views are just completely wrapped up on the right and the left, and the United States has it much more than other countries, where every single issue, predicts every other issue when it comes to the major, major issues, so the more that we can unite the right and the left, whether it's the crazies or the normals, would be good, because we got to break down these silos. It's not helpful at all to getting anything done on any of the issues, right? And I think the right would agree with that too, right?
Yeah. I mean, I think we all, as Americans, you know, agree with that sort of that we have a problem with negative polarization, and it's, you know, part of it is, like, if we just get off the fucking X and just like, talk to people, we're much more humane with each other and it's common sense why. You know, we're much more humane? Y
Yeah, Razib, you and I are perfect example. I think we're on opposite ends of the political spectrum and I know many people who flock with me they dislike a caricature of you. You know, they don't know you. They don't know you well enough to like or dislike, but they dislike the caricature of you.
I’m gonna lie. I'm a little spicy on Twitter, but yeah, I speak from a lot of people who can keep their piece. So that's part of it, honestly, yeah, there's a role for that. I mean, you know, there is like me as the individual. And I think, I guess the individual, I'm not like that atypical but I do have, like, an atypical bundle of beliefs, and I will put them out there. And, I do have to say, Nathan, I do appreciate it. You have stood up for just my right to just like, candidly speak, I think today it's not as big of a deal, honestly, but there was a period five years ago. Yeah. I mean, this is unrelated to our conversation, but, like, some of the funniest things were people who were like just such close friends with me, and like people I even mentored, encouraged in grad school, like, denouncing me, and like my other friends were like, What the fuck is going on here, you know? And that was, like, very disturbing. And I do have to say, much respect to you. You have always been who you were. You know, that's not always, as people out there know that's not always common. So whatever ideological disagreements we have, which we do have, I'm sure. You know, we're both scientists. We we both want to know the truth of the world, like the conclusions we draw from it might differ. You know, lifestyles are different. I don't really think that matters. I mean, honestly, like you're married, and live a very bourgeois life. And I wish I had that right now, but that's the whole thing, you know. But I think we've had a great conversation here. I think it's the longest podcast I've ever had.
Well I’m honored. I've had a great time
Yeah, yeah. And this book, I'm just gonna, like, Name Check it again, “The Sexual Evolution:” You know, provocative look at sexual behavior. It is provocative. There's a lot of stuff in there, if you have a biological sciences background you’ll recognize some of it. If you don't, it's going to be, like, candidly, like, a little mind blowing. And just go with it. Take from it what you want, right? Like this is you're putting the information out there, and you're letting people draw your their conclusions. You interpolate a little your own self, but that's you got to have the authorial voice. And so I think that that's fine. And, yeah, I mean, I think this is a really great work. It's really provocative. I mean, it's, it's a provocative book with provocative in the subtitle, but it is actually provocative. And I hope it gets a discussion going. And I think that's what we need more of in the society today, going forward as we're recording this, you know, there's an administration change, and some people have hopes, some people have fears, but we all live in the same country, and you know, you know what they say, you know we're gonna stick together, or we're gonna to Hang apart, yeah. And you know, I don't want to seem like too, you know,
I'm worried. I'm very worried, and not just about the administration, about the polarization, about our ability to live together peacefully, as really, social media was supposed to bring us together. That was what the promise was. And it really has not. It has really, really amplified differences, and it's made, as I said, it's it's shaped people's views to more match their ideological peers. And that can't be good. It can't be good for truth, but it definitely can't be good for society. So Razib you and I coming together, let's model this more people and some of my closest colleagues, we disagree on a lot of stuff.
We're role models people. But I do have to say things, you know, before we close off. One of the things I sometimes do is I don't really know what a specific topic, whatever specific issue trending, whether it's right or left, and I'll just express my opinion, and then, like, it apparently happens to be my opinions, the liberal opinion or something. And like, people be like, you fucking shit lib. And I'm just like, What the hell? But it's like something really banal that has, like, nothing to do with politics, but somehow it's gotten polarized. Isn't that crazy? Yeah, have you that where you're just like, wait a second, why is this conservative? Why is this liberal? Like, What? What? It's just someone just decided to glom onto it, and then everyone just kind of, like, positive feedback loops to their side. And, you know, it's just like, it's really dispiriting. But like, you know, I'm not gonna lie. Like, I like, just like, I don't know, some of my friends are like, they're like, you just need to get over yourself. I like poking at my own side because the-
You poke the bear. You know, you got to get people to clarify why they believe what they believe, because that's the first step. That's the first step to opening minds and having a real conversation and say, Why do you believe that? Why do you why do you think this is what would happen? And that's when conversation begins, but it's also when people put up the defenses because they want to know why you're asking them. Well, what are you trying to say? And when people can sit down with a beer and talk about these things. And I think, I think people like me have an advantage, because I grew up in what is a very conservative part of the country, and now I live in a very liberal part, so I can speak both languages. I go back and visit my mom, you know, and I have to interact with people who are very different than I am now. But I recognize that, and and that's why I tell people who are born and raised in New York, I'm like, go live somewhere else. You can come back New York will be here, but go live somewhere else and meet people that look different, that think different, and you will be - Your own views will be more rich for having engaged with the other side. You might even change your mind on an issue or two. Yeah.
But you know, 99.99% same DNA, were the same biology and like, yet out of that, like, is this like, endless forms of culture most beautiful or not, yeah? All right, all right. Are like, Dr Lents I will let you go.
Nathan: Thank you very much.
Yeah, I obviously, I think, like, people could tell like people could tell, like we enjoyed this conversation. I hope you guys enjoyed it. You know, I know that, you know, some people are gonna be like, ooh, like, a little offended about this or that. But you know what, if you're not engaging ideas that offend you every now and then, maybe you're not engaging enough
