Dinesh D'Souza - BIOLOGY AND DESTINY Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1142

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Aug. 7, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza

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BIOLOGY AND DESTINY Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1142

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	Coming up, this is going to be a special edition of the podcast.
	One of the issues I don't talk a lot about on the podcast is the trans issue.
	I address it tangentially and occasionally, but it's not an issue I've really covered in detail.
	And part of the reason for that is it's been a topic in the past that's been subject to sort of vehement and stringent censorship.
	And another topic of mine that is of continuing interest is the topic of Christian apologetics.
	Well, I'm going to be having a freewheeling conversation that I'm looking forward to with evolutionary biologist Colin Wright.
	And this guy has proven to be a very sane voice speaking out against trans ideology and the politicization of science.
	So we'll talk about that.
	But at the same time, he is a non-believer who regards religious faith as some kind of an illusion.
	So I'm going to try to bring out some agreements and some disagreements in a lively exchange.
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	This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
	Music America needs this voice.
	The times are crazy.
	In a time of confusion, division, and lies.
	We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
	This is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
	Guys, I'm delighted to welcome back to the podcast Dr. Colin Wright.
	He is an evolutionary biologist.
	He is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute in New York.
	He's also a member of the Killarney Group, the world's leading think tank on sex and gender.
	His website, Dr. DRColinWright, W-R-I-G-H-T.com.
	You can follow him on X at swipe Wright, W-R-I-G-H-T.
	So, Colin got his PhD in evolutionary biology from UC Santa Barbara.
	He was an Eberly Research Fellow at Penn State.
	He's been writing all over the place, The Wall Street Journal, Quillette, the New York Post, Newsweek, City Journal.
	He's also been on Trigonometry, the podcast, Tucker Carlson, Timcast, the Joe Rogan experience, and many others.
	Colin, you and I did a podcast hit, I guess, several months ago now, but we only touched upon a couple of topics in the news.
	And I thought it'd be fun to do a little more wide-ranging and freewheeling conversation, kind of a special episode, if you will.
	But let me begin with the topic that you seem to be focused on the most these days, and that is the persistently exasperating Trans issue.
	And can you begin by talking about how you got into that issue?
	What is it that alerted you to this issue?
	And what is it that you thought that biology can bring to clarifying the stakes and the issues involved?
	Yeah, that's a good place to start, probably.
	And it's a question I ask myself a lot too.
	Like, how did I get in the position where I'm just like the go-to person where I just tell people that males and females are real?
	Like, I never thought this is what I'd be doing when I got a PhD in biology.
	So, I mean, if we go a little back before, I guess, I was in academia, I used to run like a website, a blog, if you will, back when I guess blogs were popular.
	I dealt a lot with like the creationism, intelligent design, evolution type stuff.
	And it was also kind of like a general debunking of pseudoscience, you know, not just about like creationism and other things related to it.
	And so that's kind of in my blood, just sort of like debunking what I view as pseudoscientific claims.
	And I would always get plenty of praise in academia for doing these types of things, especially if it's like dunking on Christians or whatever.
	That's just kind of the culture of academia.
	And then I just noticed a lot of weird claims being made where people were talking about the biology of sex in a way that just frankly was untrue.
	You know, we can talk about the differences between sex and gender that was commonly said.
	They're saying, you know, sex is your biology, whether you're male and female, but gender is how you identify.
	And at the time, I was kind of a progressive and it's like, okay, but as a biologist, as long as we need to maintain that wall between how people identify, which I guess anyone can identify however they want to, and like objective biology.
	And then there was an article in 2015 in Nature.
	You know, I had seen articles that were blurring that distinction in sort of the popular blogosphere type of thing.
	But then it was a nature article called Sex Redefined.
	And then the subtitle was, Biologists Now Think Sex is More Complex or is a Spectrum.
	And reading it just really blew my mind that this is now like the most prestigious journal in the world making these claims that I'd only seen on like Tumblr and among activist circles.
	And so I initially tried to just sort of approach this as I would have debunked any pseudoscientific claim.
	And I expected my colleagues to respond how you might expect your scientific colleagues to respond, which is, oh, no, you're wrong because of X, Y, and Z. This is different evidence.
	So we're using words like this.
	But it was just immediately like, you're a bigot, you're a transphobe, you are parroting far-right, you know, white supremacists, all that type of stuff.
	So it blew me away.
	And then I just, I couldn't stop going back to that topic because I just kind of viewed my job as a person who had a PhD in evolutionary biology, just a biologist in general, is to say true things about biology.
	And then when you look at the real world consequences of these ideas, it's not just like, oh, sex is a spectrum and, you know, so what?
	This is just an esoteric idea.
	Well, we're using that idea to say that, oh, we can change a kid's sex.
	You know, if they have a brain that mismatches their body, we can give them hormones and surgeries to change them on the sex spectrum to more or less male or female.
	We get men and women's sports, which if you're just denying the biology of sex, that's the only reason we're seeing that happen.
	And so there's just major real-world consequences, more so than I think, than denying that evolution happens and things like that.
	Like I always justified my defense of evolution on the grounds that there's real world consequences.
	But if we're talking about real-world consequences for a pseudoscientific belief, it doesn't get much more consequential than denying the fundamental aspect of male and female.
	So that's kind of an overview.
	Do you think that the reason that this kind of blurring bit of the male-female distinction became plausible to people is because it rode a piggyback on the civil rights movement.
	In other words, the civil rights movement was dedicated to showing that racial differences or ethnic differences were, you can almost say, Skin deep.
	Obviously, they're real in the sense that there is melanin, there's pigment, people who are black and white and brown look different from each other.
	But the idea was that they don't differ in the content of their character, or they don't differ in their sort of inner experience of being human.
	And so the racial line, such as it is in law and in policy, appear to be kind of arbitrary.
	And so that creates a sort of precedent where people go, well, maybe the difference between men and women is the same thing, that people are male and female because they are, quote, assigned this status at birth, or maybe there's a culture of discrimination.
	Do you think that, because normally for an idea that is so far-fetched to gain steam, there has to be some underlying plausibility to it.
	And do you think that the analogy to race is part of what made this kind of thinking somewhat respectable?
	I think so.
	There is a lot of that piggybacking going on of like the LGBT movement.
	You constantly see the trans movement, the gender ideology movement trying to attach themselves onto gay rights.
	You know, they don't just want to be like, we're the TQ part.
	Any attack against them is an attack on the LGBTQ community because in many areas of politics, the LGBs largely won their case and their appeal to society for equal rights in many ways.
	There's also been that rise of what I would just call this postmodern queer theory, which is just completely opposed to any kind of categorization scheme.
	And in context of like race, it actually makes a little bit of sense because you can actually be mixed race.
	Everyone is a mutt if you go back far enough.
	If you go back even far enough, we're talking about evolution, we're related to other animals and things like that.
	So yeah, you cannot draw like strict lines around certain racial groups.
	There's the kind of blur admission to one another.
	So it kind of makes sense there.
	But when we're talking about biology, it just makes no sense, especially about male and female.
	Because these, again, these are categories defined by like a reproductive capacity type of thing.
	So yeah, you have the piggybacking on the civil rights movement as sort of a shield to get them like a Trojan horse to get these ideas.
	You have this rise of queer theory that is just denying categorization.
	It's inherently oppressive to do so, to put people in categories.
	And I think we can't discount the sort of blank slate feminism as well that has given rise to a lot of this.
	The idea that there's no differences between the personalities and behaviors and all these types of things between males and females.
	They're all social constructs.
	That was sort of like a cognitive blank slateism, and that has just kind of metastasized to the physical body now as well.
	So all of those, I think, kind of converged into this perfect storm that has given us male and female or social constructs, at least by that group of people.
	Now, even though there is a seeming political continuum when you say LGBTQ plus between the L's and the Gs and later on the T's, isn't there an inherent tension or contradiction built into that?
	And here's what I mean.
	If I think back to the claims of the LG community before the American public, they went something like this.
	You're demanding that I should be a heterosexual, but that is not who I am.
	In other words, I don't know if it's nature or if it's nurture, but what I do know is that I am, in a sense, wired or constituted a certain way, and I don't really have a choice in the matter.
	I would hear people say things like, are you crazy?
	If I could be heterosexual, I certainly would.
	Why would I want to face all the societal prejudice of being gay?
	No, I can't help being gay.
	And so I want society to recognize a condition over which I have little or no choice.
	Now, contrast this with the T, right?
	Because the T argument is entirely different.
	The T argument is that, regardless of what My biology might suggest, or might communicate to a doctor, I can identify as I wish with my own sex, with the opposite sex, maybe with some third category called non-binary, maybe with other exotic definitions that I come up with.
	I've even seen people who say I identify as a cat.
	So this appears to be an assertion of the will and an assertion of a triumph of psychology over biology.
	So am I missing something in terms of the tension or contradiction between these two propositions, the LG proposition, if you will, and the T proposition?
	You're not missing anything.
	That distinction is kind of what got me out of the lab and writing about this in the first place.
	Because as you mentioned, you know, the LGs and even the Bs, to a large extent, they were just asking us to acknowledge what was essentially just the reality of their attraction.
	And you can't test whether someone's, I mean, you can just, you have to just kind of take their word for it.
	Like, I promise I'm attracted to members of whatever sex and just to not discriminate on that basis.
	And there was no ideology that was surrounding it.
	You didn't have to believe untrue facts about the world.
	And I would say that this was also true of like the early T movement.
	Okay.
	This for a long time, they'd refer the, when we called people trans, it didn't mean transgender.
	It meant transsexual.
	And this was largely meant to just refer to a group of people who felt a deep internal sense that there was some incongruence, but who were nevertheless very, very aware that they were not the sex that they wanted to be, but nevertheless, they felt that it was psychologically beneficial to them to take steps to at least pass that way in society.
	But they were never fundamentally confused about what sex they actually were.
	In fact, they were probably more aware of it than anyone else, given like the distress that they felt at that fact.
	It wasn't until, I guess, the Obama years where we saw this shift from trans referring to transsexuals to transgender.
	And if you look at just like how the CDC, how the Endocrine Society, the American Academy of Pediatrics, how they're defining this, it is just this wild umbrella term now that is synonymous for anyone who identifies or behaves or expresses themselves in ways that are not traditionally expected of a person who is, you know, they would say, assigned whatever sex at birth, but of their sex.
	So this just now encompasses common sex nonconformity.
	It encompasses masculine girls and feminine boys.
	These are all now under the trans umbrella.
	So yeah, there is a major ideological shift.
	That's why in modern times, you can't really separate the T's from the Q's, the queer theory part, because that ideological shift was due to the queer theory aspect that injected this ideology that we can't actually draw lines between categories because doing so is an oppressive act.
	Let's drill into this a little bit, Colin, because one of the common things, and you've heard this more than anyone else, is the attempt to obliterate the male-female distinction by pointing to seemingly intermediate anomalies.
	I think it was Samuel Johnson who said a long time ago that the fact of twilight doesn't mean that we can't distinguish between day and night.
	But nevertheless, we have seemingly these twilight categories, right?
	Somebody is born with like one testicle.
	So it's like, okay, well, listen, he's not entirely a guy, but he's somewhat in between a guy and a girl because he's only got one testicle.
	And of course, there are people who are born with genital abnormalities whose names, I mean, not the names of the people, but the names of the abnormalities, I don't know, but you know.
	Talk a little bit about how the presence of these so-called intersex individuals in no way removes the critical biological distinction between male and female.
	Yeah, so if we're talking about what a male and a female is, is this individual is a male or is a female.
	It's fundamentally relating to whether they have the function to produce either small or large, and I'll use a technical term here, gametes, which is just a fancy word for whether they make sperm or ova.
	These are the cells that fuse to and fertilize one another during reproduction that forms a new organism.
	Okay, so males are by definition the individuals that have the function to produce small gametes or sperm, and females are just defined as the individuals that produce larger gametes, otherwise known as eggs.
	Because there's only two types of gametes that an individual can have their reproductive systems organized around to have the function to produce, there can only be two sexes.
	To be a third sex, you would need literally a third gamete type that a body can be organized around to produce.
	Now, being a male or female, it's a functional category.
	Doesn't mean you need to actually have that current function.
	You can have individuals that are sterile for whatever reason, they have a condition, but nevertheless, they still have that function.
	So ambiguous cases, if we have someone, maybe they have like gonadal agenesis, they just never developed gonads.
	I'm actually not opposed to saying that there are some actually really difficult cases and saying, which sex do you belong to as an individual?
	But an important thing to point out here is that sex ambiguity, to the extent that it exists, isn't a third sex.
	So regardless of how ambiguous someone could potentially be with regard to their sex, they're not a third sex.
	There's not a third sex category.
	Just like in nature, when you like a common garden snail, for instance, is a true hermaphrodite.
	It is making both sperm and ova at the same time.
	It's still not a third sex.
	It's both male and female at the same time.
	It really encompasses the sex binary in a single individual.
	Humans, we're different.
	We encompass the sex binary in separate individuals, but there's nevertheless still only two sexes.
	There just isn't a third gamete, so there cannot be a third sex.
	That's really all there is to it in that sense.
	And I think what you're saying is that if you happen to have either a woman or a man that has some sort of a sex defect, that simply makes them a male with a defect or a female with a defect.
	It doesn't make them the other sex, nor does it make them some third invented category.
	They remain males or females, albeit with those suffering from those conditions, perhaps.
	Isn't that right?
	Yeah, so that is correct.
	I am at least open to the possibility that, you know, because individual sex is ultimately an outcome of development, I leave open the case that it's possible for someone potentially to be sexually ambiguous if they just didn't develop any primary sex organs or to speak of.
	So sex ambiguity does not in any way defeat the fact that there's still only two sexes to the extent that ambiguity actually exists.
	There's some people that would disagree with that, but you don't have to agree with that in order to still maintain the idea that there's only two sexes and that sex is binary.
	And moreover, when you see all these undergraduates and all these young people claiming to be femmes or claiming to be non-binaries and claiming to be this and claiming to be that, it's not like all those people are saying, well, guess what?
	If you happen to check out my genitalia, I've got these ambiguous categories.
	In other words, what we have is large numbers of people purporting to be trans who, if a doctor were to examine them, would turn out to be sexually quite normal, right?
	That's exactly right.
	So the whole, I think the non-binary identity really gives away how ideological it really has become.
	And it's really just synonymous with a person's expression of their masculine or feminine tendencies.
	You know, we used to just be able to call people androgynous.
	That's largely what non-binary means.
	It's sort of a mashup.
	They kind of have features that are maybe somewhere in between, or even personality traits now.
	I think the personality aspect of what the non-binary kids are picking up nowadays.
	Queer is a big identity now that people have, where there's some variation whether they identify or that behave some way that's outside of the norm.
	None of this impacts whether or not someone is male or female.
	That strictly has to do with their primary reproductive organs.
	But we see that blurring of the line.
	We see that blurring of the line in areas like sports, and for instance, like Leah Thomas, where people will use these categories, these intersex conditions, and they'll say that this proves that sex is a spectrum.
	Then they'll use someone like Leah Thomas who doesn't have any sort of sex ambiguity whatsoever as a reason that this person can somehow just identify into this opposite category.
	You only get there when you have like this total reality dying ideology, and that's kind of what the non-binary exposes.
	I mean, it seems to me like it's been understood for centuries, if not millennia, that we can all as humans identify.
	And by that, I mean imaginatively put ourselves into the places of other people or other beings that are not us, right?
	You and I can imagine what it might be like, let's say, to be a Martian, and that's how we can, you know, create a movie like ET.
	It's like, wow, if it was a Martian, maybe it would look like this, maybe it would look like that.
	Or if you're reading a novel, let's say Jane Austen, I can identify with the female characters by going, wow, you know, Elizabeth, she's really spunky.
	This is what she must be thinking as a woman.
	I don't for a moment think I'm a woman.
	I can identify with her without, while recognizing that there is a kind of clear psychic distance between me and this character that I'm identifying with.
	And somehow it seems like we've lost that simple ability to recognize that just because we identify, I identify as Napoleon, I identify as Caesar, doesn't make me Julius Caesar.
	I mean, yeah, that's exactly correct.
	We've just really prioritized this identify as over any sort of empirical reality.
	But as you've seen, you know, the memes go around on X and stuff like that.
	Like, if you have to identify as something, that's a dead giveaway that you are not that thing.
	Because I, Colin Wright, don't identify as a man.
	I don't need to identify as one because I just am one by the nature of my biology.
	So the moment you bring in identify, that just gives away the case that you are not that thing.
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	What do you think, Colin?
	When I find things that are really odd like this, and we probe them, we sort of refute them, we examine them, put them under a microscope, so to speak.
	But sometimes there's like something else going on in the sense that we have to try to understand why are people drawn to this?
	This is not, it was not a phenomenon in the past.
	It appears to be a relatively recent development.
	Do you think that the trans ideology is a subset of the gay community and it kind of was incubated inside of that and driven maybe in part by this kind of Foucaultian ideology of like everything is subjective, it comes down to power.
	There are no real categories in nature.
	I mean, we hear this kind of talk, and I sometimes ask myself, who does this appeal to and why?
	I don't think it arose out of the gay community at all.
	In fact, I think it's kind of parasitic of that community that uses them.
	And in many ways, we hear so much shrieking about conversion therapy on the left, which I agree we shouldn't try to electro shock people into changing their sexuality.
	But yet they fail to notice that while traditional conversion therapy was an attempt to change people's brains to match their bodies, what gender ideology does, and especially gender-affirming care, is it gets to the same end point by having bodies that match minds, but it does it by trying to change the body through hormones and surgeries to match the mind.
	Most of the kids who are getting swept up in this gender ideology are gay and lesbian, or will, or these kids who are sex non-conforming and will probably grow up to be gay and lesbian, but they're using their evidence of sex non-conformity, which is prevalent among gays and lesbians.
	It's part of what makes them attracted to the same sex.
	That's about as sex non-conforming as you can get in your attraction.
	The ideology is telling them that because you have some preferences and behaviors and mannerisms that might more closely align with members of the opposite sex, therefore your internal identity, your gender identity is the opposite sex, and you have this mismatch between your gender identity and your biological sex.
	But oh, we can change that with hormones and surgeries and things like that.
	So, again, the old school LGBs didn't have this ideology.
	There was no reality denying component that said they had a brain-body mismatch or anything like that.
	It was purely just in terms of norms, but natural variation among humans.
	It's really, again, the queer theory, the Q, the Q part of the LGBTQ is that was introduced and it just threw a grenade in the entire thing, just a big wrench in this entire civil rights movement and is now taking it over and using them as a shield, saying, you can't criticize this crazy ideology without us accusing you of hating the gay people in the movement as well.
	And I think we're seeing more and more people in the gay community.
	We see like the LGB Alliance, we're seeing LGB drop the T, we're seeing these types of slogans because they realize that if they let the Q's and T's drag them off that cliff, they will.
	And it's going to take away the rights that they view they've won along the way with it.
	You mentioned earlier in our conversation that what really got you going was an article that you saw in Nature magazine, and that raises in my mind this question, which is to say that you have these academic communities that have prestigious journals of which Nature was really the top of the list.
	And it must be quite a process for a group of activists, particularly if they're trying to overturn something really fundamental.
	They're not just trying to make some, you know, cherry on the top of the cake.
	They're trying to take a distinction that is at the very base of modern biology and essentially say that that is arbitrary or that is, quote, in the mind.
	How do you go about getting the academic community to succumb to you, surrender to you, bow down to you to such a point that they're even willing to debase and degrade their intellectual credentials to make implausible apologias for your nonsense and attach their own credibility to it?
	How do you pull that off?
	I think a lot of it, at least early on, was fear, to be honest, of criticizing this because the people, well, academia is largely populated with very left-of-center individuals.
	And basically, you had a lot of leftist activists in these circles link this idea of queer theory as applied to biology with a civil rights cause that almost everyone on the left agreed with and did not want to see themselves or have others accuse them of being on the other side of this.
	This is what happened to me when I first started criticizing it.
	You were a far-right white supremacist, even though I didn't talk about race at all.
	I was just talking about sex, but they just throw everything at you they possibly can and want to take your career down.
	I was a violent transphobe.
	I'm advocating for the genocide of trans people.
	This is the type of rhetoric they use.
	So they see someone like me who gets run out of academia for using these kinds of, you know, for just criticizing purely scientific ideas about what the sexes are.
	And it just makes people keep their heads down.
	So the only ones that are shouting this are the true believers and then the people who want to be seen positively by those groups.
	And so fear plays a massive role in the way they do this.
	And then there's the other way that they do it by just sort of, again, it's kind of a queer theory approach where they just poke little holes.
	It's that critical theory thing where they don't actually educate you on things.
	They just want to poke little holes and say, oh, look how this is more complicated than we once thought.
	Therefore, we don't really know anything about this.
	So they'll use these sleight of hand arguments.
	They want to bring up sex chromosomes.
	They want to bring up hormones and other differences between males and females that do exist.
	But they're trying to use those to blur like the fundamental difference, which again is like the reproductive capacity rooted in sperm and ova.
	They'll bring up there's average differences in height that aren't categorical.
	That hormone milieu is in our bodies, they're kind of overlapping distributions, at least to some degree.
	Some intersex conditions make genitalia look ambiguous.
	And they'll use these ideas of traits that are secondary to one's sex that do overlap as this idea to just sort of push this idea that sex itself is this non-binary characteristic as well.
	And that if I were to want to say that, no, but gametes is the fundamental one, they'd just say, well, that's just one of many traits, even though that's not the case.
	Like there is a fundamental reality that there's a reason why gametes are the fundamental distinction.
	And all the other traits they try to use, they actually presuppose the gametic foundation behind them if you scratch a little deeper on those things.
	Very interesting.
	Colin, I just remembered that, and this may be part of just the DEI regime in these universities that is happily now under assault and maybe at least in the beginning, process of being dismantled.
	But you discovered that you have these universities excluding applicants on the basis of race, on the basis of I'm not sure of gender as well, but certainly race and ethnicity.
	And you are challenging this, aren't you?
	Can you talk a little bit about how you've decided to step forward and fight this, not just ideologically or rhetorically, but actually fight it legally?
	Yeah, so this has been a development that just happened this last week.
	I had an article in the Wall Street Journal announcing that I'm taking legal action against Cornell University for racial discrimination.
	When I was in academia, you know, I was in there, I was a postdoc between 2018 and 2020.
	I left academia in 2020, but I was applying to countless numbers of faculty positions, almost all of which, especially after 2020 and George Floyd stuff, required these DEI statements, diversity, equity, and inclusion.
	Basically, every university was scrambling to hire diverse candidates, which is just a code word for non-white people, especially non, you know, especially white men.
	This was largely assumed was going on.
	If you talk to anyone who's on hiring committees, you know, it's just kind of this wink-wink-nudge-nudge, like we're looking to hire someone who's diverse, and everyone knows what that kind of meant.
	And so it was maddening to be in that environment where I was on the job market, knowing that, you know, one, I have to lie on my DEI statement about what I believe in.
	And I didn't lie on it, but I knew that my statement was probably going to be put in the trash because it wasn't saying all those progressive talking points.
	But then, regardless of the DEI statement, just the fact that I'm not a diverse candidate by almost any criteria according to the progressive ideology.
	Recently, internal emails were FOIA from Cornell.
	And it turns out that they actually had a job search in 2020 for an evolutionary biologist.
	I had applied to Cornell in 2020 for a different position in their neurobiology and behavior program.
	And I would have applied to this other job for the evolutionary biology position, but they specifically kept it hidden.
	And the emails show that they kept it hidden because they wanted a diversity hire.
	They wanted us to reach out to individuals one by one, their preferred diverse categories.
	They're the people of color candidates they wanted and would invite them one at a time to interview and then offer them the job.
	So it was specifically made to exclude qualified candidates who had white skin or were male like me.
	So I saw this online that Chris Ruffo, many people know him, he posted this on X. I quote tweeted it and I just said, I actually applied to Cornell a month before this for a different program and I would have applied to this if I had known about it.
	And then the America First Policy Institute sent me a DM and said, do you want to sue Cornell?
	We've been, you're the plaintiff we've been looking for.
	And I said, absolutely, because I want to take it to these universities.
	It can't just be a slap on the wrist.
	It can't just be like, promise they'll never do it again because if Democrats win again, everything we're doing now is going to be overturned.
	They need to know that there's major consequences for this.
	And I'm hoping that my case can maybe be used, you know, if I'm successful and win, it'll help and encourage others to file similar suits or at least make sure the universities are really clamping down on the types of hiring practices that they're allowing to operate within them.
	All of this shows me that similar to what you were saying about the trans, a lot of times these things start off with some relatively moderate claim, and pretty soon they become something entirely different.
	I mean, my mind flashes back to the original defenses of affirmative action now kind of called DEI.
	And it was like, well, Dinesh, well, you know, we're not talking about any kind of quotas.
	We're just talking about having a goal.
	We're just talking about going out into the black neighborhood and letting them know, hey, guys, you can apply to these Ivy League colleges if you want, and they're going to consider your application.
	So even in the Baki decision, they talked about race being a plus or race being a mechanism or a surrogate for promoting diversity.
	None of this was based on the idea that we have A job, we're just not going to look at any white males.
	We're just going to not advertise the job and make some backroom phone calls to make sure that we get the kind of applicant.
	So it looks like the actual practice of these DEI policies is far worse than any public justification that was given for them.
	Yeah, I mean, completely.
	I don't think it was ever true that it's just we're going to expand the applicant pool to neighborhoods and communities that maybe we didn't reach out to before.
	That might have been true for a split second, and then it just becomes a justification for explicit racial discrimination.
	And that's just what's been going on.
	That's what affirmative action is.
	And I think DEI is basically just affirmative action on steroids.
	It's explicitly talks about these different racial categories.
	I remember applying to universities and it said it would have a statement.
	It's very common.
	It's just like, we're especially interested in applicants from, and it would list, you know, women and people with disabilities and minorities.
	And, you know, you can kind of see who they're trying to exclude if you look at what identities or classes of people they're trying to keep out.
	And it was always like, well, the two things that are missing here are white and men.
	And I fit both of those boxes.
	So you can't just say we're promoting these groups.
	You know, it's just giving them a plus.
	It's a zero-sum game if you're all trying to go after a finite number of faculty positions.
	And so if you give certain groups a plus, you're necessarily giving other people a minus.
	And that's sort of my main argument here.
	I don't think the race should be used in hiring practices.
	I think if you were to reverse the races that Cornell in the Cornell situation, if it was this covert attempt to hire only white applicants and they, you know, their emails, it's just confidential and keep this here.
	We're going to reach out to individual white men to make sure they're not in competition with black people.
	I mean, this would be like a textbook, a landmark civil rights case.
	The ACLU would be up in arms and it would be just a national scandal, and rightfully so.
	I just don't see how flipping the races really changes the moral calculus, even though if you look at the people responding to my article, people are losing their minds and calling me a racist and a white supremacist, even though this was clearly geared explicitly against hiring people of my race.
	I mean, it seems to me that the key issue here is, and this is something that was gradually argued starting in the 70s, but I think more explicitly in the 80s and 90s, there was an attempt made to make a distinction between benign discrimination and invidious discrimination.
	So evidently, discrimination by whites against people of color is inherently invidious.
	That should like never be allowed.
	But discrimination against whites and white males in particular was seen as a benign corrective to earlier discrimination that was conducted by white males at the top.
	And so it was seen as a kind of compensatory discrimination.
	I think what you're saying is that, look, there is no such thing as benign discrimination.
	All discrimination that is keeping out qualified applicants is invidious, especially considering that, I mean, look, it would be one thing if somebody could show that over the course of your life, you have been systematically discriminating against other minorities and that somehow there's a reason that Colin Wright needs to be kept out of academia.
	No, whatever crimes were committed in the past, why should the burden of those crimes fall on you?
	I mean, isn't that the case against this bogus distinction between benign and invidious discrimination?
	Exactly.
	I just fundamentally reject this idea that we need to look at people in terms of group identity.
	You know, just because the people who owned slaves in the United States hundreds of years ago happened to share a skin tone with me doesn't mean that you can discriminate against me, an individual who had nothing to do with that whatsoever.
	It's just, I don't look in the world in terms of like, what did one group do to another group?
	We're all composed of individuals.
	There were plenty of white people at the time who were the abolitionists who weren't for it.
	And, you know, we're not, we're only defining these groups by their worst actors.
	We just need to treat everyone as individuals because where does it stop if you just keep doing this generational group level tribalism?
	It's totally tribal.
	It's totally backwards.
	If you want to get rid of racial discrimination, then stop discriminating on the basis of race.
	It's not like my even saying my people, other white people, I have no relationship to them other than just we happen to maybe share DNA because we're more closely related.
	But other than that, that's it.
	We're all individuals and should be treated as such.
	It's not justified to discriminate against anyone based on just immutable characteristics they happen to share with people hundreds of years ago who've done something bad.
	Like that is just a fundamentally insane and completely amoral idea to me.
	Colin, I was planning to draw you into a debate about evolution and creation and design.
	And I think that's going to have to wait for another day because of limitations of time.
	We've only got about five minutes, but let me lead you in that direction a little bit by asking you about a recent study.
	I actually saw this publicized by the Discovery Institute, and I don't know what you think about those guys, but they were talking about apparently a recent study in, I think it was Nature magazine by a guy named you, you and colleagues, evidently showing that the famous claim that human beings and chimpanzees have essentially identical DNA with maybe a 1% variation is in fact wrong.
	And that in fact, the distinction between chimps and humans is much bigger, something like 13 or 14% of variation in the DNA.
	I saw that just in the last few days and it kind of perked my interest because, well, we know that sort of in terms of phenotype or behavior, humans and chimps are really quite different, different certainly in size and different in perhaps in moral faculties and other ways.
	Did you see this study and do you have any thoughts about the sort of genetic distance between man and his nearest animal relative?
	You know, I didn't see this study, but I can imagine what they're talking about.
	And the degree of overlap and what percentage of similarity are we between us and chimpanzees or bonobos and going back and forth of bananas or whatever.
	It depends on like what you're comparing.
	So if you do just what they call SNPs or single nucleotide polymorphisms, these are just the individual smallest component of genes, basically, like single exons.
	Then you get like these large overlaps.
	That's where you get like the 98% similarity.
	Okay.
	But if you're looking at just the level of genes themselves as functional genes that are actually coding for things, they are highly mutated.
	Like we can still look at a gene between humans and chimps for something like digesting lactose or something.
	And they're going to be similar.
	We can still view it as like a lactose digesting gene, but they're still going to have different mutations.
	So in one sense, like they're kind of the same gene, but another sense, they're actually quite different.
	So if you take like a gene-level view of things, you get much wider gaps in relatedness.
	And it better maps onto like differences that are actually functional, that are actually resulting in different body types.
	So that's important to look at.
	And then there's stuff that's less easy to see, such as sort of the epigenetic factors.
	How are different genes being turned on and off and regulated and that type of thing?
	And that can throw in so much variation because we could have a big overlap in genes, but if they're being shut off and managed in different ways and expressed in different ways, well, then that's a whole other layer of complexity on top of that.
	So it's hard to just say, like, what percentage do we share in common?
	You have to go a little further and ask another question, like, well, what is the criteria we're looking at?
	And which is the Most relevant to the question that we're actually asking.
	Good stuff, Colin.
	Well, with your consent, we will do another round sometime in the future where we take up these other topics.
	But thank you for joining me.
	I appreciate it.
	Guys, I've been talking to Dr. Colin Wright, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, evolutionary biologist.
	Follow him on X at swipe right.
	And the website is drdrcolinwright.com.
	Colin, a real pleasure, and thank you for joining me.
	Thank you.
	It was a pleasure talking to you.
	Subscribe to the Dinesh D'Souza podcast on Apple, Google, and Spotify.

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