In this 98th in a series of live discussions with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying (both PhDs in Biology), we discuss the state of the world through an evolutionary lens.In this episode, we discuss critique, and specifically dissect two negative reviews of our book—one of which, in an establishment outfit, is not really a review; the other of which, posted on amazon, is actually careful and cogent. We discuss the difference being uninformed (or scientifically illiterate), and being unwilling...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream number 90 something, 90 what is it?
98.
It's 98.
It is, you've probably noticed, it's autumn.
Autumn is no longer coming.
It's here, so saddle up the dire wolves, we ride tonight.
You didn't see that coming, did you?
I did not.
I forgot to source any dire wolves when I was down at the farmer's market this morning, but I think actually now that I reflect on what I was finding, it's that amazing season where we're still getting the berries and the stone fruits, but we're also getting many of the fall, like the brassicas and such, and I did not see any dire wolves there this morning on offer.
Not a one.
Not a one.
That's a shame.
Maybe they're not at the farmer's market.
Were there farmers there?
If so, that implies the dire wolves are not at least dense on the ground.
That's probably true.
Yeah.
All right.
We've got stuff to do.
We've got stuff to talk about.
Today we're going to talk about our book, Continuing To, and some of the critique that has come at it and what critique is and what it is doing in the world and its value.
We're going to talk about some of the earliest Americans, a new scientific result out this week, which is consistent with the view of the peopling of the Americas that we reflect on in our book.
And in service of that, we're also going to talk about this concept of stolen land and understanding human history and how history is often being taught.
And a couple of weeks ago or so in the Q&A, we got asked if we knew of this Roger Scruton essay called Dying in Time, and neither of us did.
And I have since read it, and we're going to share a little bit of it and talk about the value of courage.
All right, but before we do that, we have some logistics.
Okay, if you've gotten the book, A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century, Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life, and you have enjoyed it, please consider giving a review.
That said, Amazon has been sold out since three days after publication date and it remains sold out to this day.
We know there are more books coming But if you are looking for it, Barnes & Noble still has copies, and we encourage you to go there.
Most local booksellers apparently are out as well.
There are more copies coming, but supply chains and the incredible response to this book have both caused there to be shortages where we were hoping there would not be any.
Should point out, though, that the audiobook is doing spectacularly well, anomalously well, which might partially be because our voices are well-known and so people are preferring that mode, but it also may be that people who aren't finding the hardcover are buying that, and hopefully they will enjoy it.
It is read by us.
Yep, it is read by us, and strangely it's not available in a large part of the world, and I think that may also be a supply chain issue.
It is a supply chain issue, yes.
The supply of vibrations of air molecules is apparently not sufficient to meet the demand.
Yeah, yeah.
No, it's really hard to fathom, and the publisher on the other side of the pond is working on it.
It's not their fault.
It's unclear why, but for those of you in other English-speaking parts of the world who are looking for the audiobook, it is available apparently everywhere but Audible, but Audible in the UK, not so much.
Okay, if you're watching on YouTube, consider switching over to Odyssey.
That's where the chat is happening if you are watching live and you want to be participating in the chat.
You may ask us questions.
We're going to try to prioritize questions about the book this week, but there's always room for a lot more, and you can ask questions at www.darkhorsesubmissions.com.
Consider joining our Patreons.
Tomorrow is the monthly private Q&A on my Patreon.
The questions have already been asked for this month, but it's small enough, it's intimate enough that we are able to engage the chat in real time and often can respond to questions that are asked in real time, and then those stay up afterwards for patrons to watch if they can't do it in real time.
So that's tomorrow at 11 a.m.
from 11 to 1 pacific time and maybe we'll just go right to our ads before then jumping into the main part of the program.
So visual listeners, visual watchers, I suppose, will see the border around the screen indicating that we are reading ads.
For those of you who are listening, if you would put on your ad colored glasses, that would be useful.
Very, very good.
Yeah.
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Let's talk about critique.
Let's do it.
Critique is an utterly necessary part of many aspects of human endeavor.
Science, for sure.
Art, as well.
It looks a little bit different in general in art.
But anyone who has taken, for instance, studio art classes understands the value and the necessary place of critique.
In assessing even something like art, which might be understood to be, you know, sometimes representational, but even so there is obviously interpretation involved.
All right, I want to stop here.
So, I have said that very often we have a term in which there's the legitimate version of something and the malignant version.
And there's a question about whether we should be saying, I think, critique Is one of the most useful things in the universe very hard to come by because in general people have perverse incentives even people who are on your team may not want to give you honest feedback because they don't want to hurt your feelings or it may complicate your relationship and so getting Honest feedback is fantastic.
It's the thing that allows you to navigate and improve.
But it's tough.
But it's rare.
It's tough to deliver and it's tough to receive.
Right.
If it's negative.
Yeah, nobody likes delivering critique to somebody that they value, right?
So it's an important but rare phenomenon in the universe.
And it is different from criticism, which can be motivated by all kinds of things, right?
So maybe critique is a version of criticism.
It's an honorable exploration of what might be changed or improved or what isn't right, rather than just simply the allegation that something isn't right, which may or may not be well-founded.
Is that fair?
Yeah, I think that is fair.
I think some forms of critique are more common in some cultures than others, and I think it also may be gendered.
In fact, I'm certain that it is.
So with regard to cultures, I think, for instance, somewhat stereotypically but accurately, the Jewish dinner table tends to be one in which there's talking over one another, and there's disagreement, and it's often very lively, and none of that disagreement, which sometimes is critique, is imagined to be about hatefulness or discouragement of thinking into areas where you might be wrong or more capable of making errors than in others, right?
It's all, it's about, it's exactly about in being in service of both the, you know, the family dynamic and community and also truth.
Right, and I'm hesitant here because I don't have a lot of experience with Japanese culture, but the reputation of Japanese culture is that the critique is delivered so subtly that one has to read deeply in in order to get it.
It's not that it isn't there, but the point is your calibration has to be very different, right?
Because if you're expecting for somebody to just say flat out, hey, this is what you did wrong and here's what you might do, and somebody is really, you know, If it's written between the lines or something like that, you may have to go after it in order to even get the value of it.
And of course, you know, if in your home culture, you will be expected to understand exactly the form that the critique comes in, and be either unable to detect or flabbergasted by the directness of critique that may come at you, depending on, you know, which end of the spectrum your home culture happened to have.
And I would say that we also know this, you know, cultural differences are different from sex differences, because every single culture has both sexes and always has.
And so, you know, this is one of the many reasons that the kinds of isms that people talk about are not simply of a type, right?
That sexism and sex differences are very different than, say, racism and possible race differences.
But something that I have been thinking about a lot of late, and I've begun to talk about a little bit in some of the very many interviews we've been doing about the book, is the differences in male and female Strategies with regard to establishing and maintaining dominance.
That, you know, we all need because we are now living in a world, thankfully, gratefully, in which men and women can interact as, you know, on a par, as equals in the intellectual space.
But pretending that we don't have differences that are more ancient than that ability is a fool's errand.
And in general, across species that have them, and certainly across human cultures and time and space, we see that dominance hierarchies in males are typically created and maintained by rather overt mechanisms.
And in the form of critique, that would be being really direct, you know, saying very directly, actually, no, I think you're wrong, here's why.
And female dominance hierarchies, both in other species and in humans throughout time and space, are much more likely to be covert in nature.
And so use more subtlety, more nuance, sometimes going around, you know, skirting the actual person with whom you might have a critique and talking to someone else about it.
And, you know, on these topics, I have much, much more to say.
And, you know, I'm not making value judgment here.
I am observing what we know to be true.
But this is part of the reason that men and women coming together into sort of professional spaces often have problems.
That the nature of how we expect, on average, you know, population level differences, critique to come, and how it feels to a woman, say, if someone is very direct, or to a man if someone is really not direct.
You know, a man is less likely to hear their critique, and that's not necessarily because he's being daft.
It may be because that's really not the culture that he comes from, and a woman may be more likely to feel attacked by a direct critique, even if attack was never the intention nor the desire of the person giving it.
So, recognizing the many types of ways that critique occurs, even in good faith environments, I think is valuable.
Yes, and there is, you know, I quite like the point you make about the differences between male and female being of a fundamentally different kind than the differences between people from different cultures, right?
To the extent that you're correct, and I think you are correct, that female kinds of jockeying involve more covert mechanisms.
At the point that we start intermingling in a space where high-quality critique is extremely valuable, it may be misread.
In other words, it may be understood to not be literal, but to be a subtle attempt to undermine or something like that.
And that's a recipe for disaster, right?
You're either in an environment Where critique is understood to be highly valuable or it's a weaponized environment where critique is used to destabilize someone and you've got to know which one of those you're in in order to even interpret what you're hearing.
True, so a person could hear what you just said and map on those two things to male-female, and I would say that's absolutely not correct, and I don't think that's what you meant to say, that the idea that critique is weaponization is a female way of going about things.
Well, I would say that would be a covert mechanism.
Yes, but it's one of very many.
It's hardly true that the ways that women engage in critique is inherently weaponized.
No, I'm not saying that, but what I am saying is that if you are going to avail yourself of Covert mechanisms for jockeying, then critique that is not what it appears to be is one.
And, you know, in an environment in, you know, let's say, a scientific environment, you know, it's one thing between labs, but within lab, for example, you want to have very high quality critique coming from people who in the end have an interest in you succeeding.
And frankly, that is direct.
And in fact, so I haven't talked about it extensively because it's not out yet, but I've got a scientific article coming out on exactly this, as you know, that's been sort of in press forever.
Exactly positing that we, in fact, in some situations that have been traditionally male, like science, like business, The more male typical style of critique, which is overt, is likely to be the one that we need to default to.
So that I'll just, I'll just asterisk that and we'll come back to it once that paper is out and I can share it and talk more about it.
But we wanted We wanted to do a tiny little compare and contrast between two pieces of criticism our book has received.
We've got both a careful analytical review on Amazon that's two stars.
We disagree, but it's careful and we'll talk about that in a second.
Then we have a review.
I'm going to put it in quotes.
In The Guardian, in which the reviewer appears to have no background in or interest in actual scientific thinking.
And let me preface this by saying, actually having no background in science, you know, effectively being scientifically literate is totally fine.
You know, we're all born with scientific capabilities to some degree with like an interest in exploring what the world is.
And for most of us, we don't get exposed to how to think carefully scientifically in school or even actually, you know, kills that instinct off in us.
And so the fact that most people, most adults are walking around without really a sense of what science is and how it operates isn't damning.
And it's unfortunately true.
I wish it weren't, but it is.
But what is concerning is how many people think that they're being scientific and are actually utterly resistant to any kind of scientific thinking.
And, you know, part of the blame here goes to the way that social science has evolved over the last 20 or 30 years, right?
That this sort of social constructionist view of humanity has become dominant in sociology and anthropology and psychology and in pretty much all the social sciences.
And with that has come a complete misunderstanding of what an evolutionary framework is and would do.
And so people who engage in social constructionist thinking often imagine that they're doing something careful, but they're not.
So, one way that we can see that we're not engaging with criticism of a scientific sort is when we can see that the conclusion was arrived at before the actual review was written and when the review was not actually about the thing that it's supposedly reviewing.
So here's just one quote from this Guardian review.
Hying and Weinstein's advocacy of the still-unproven lab leak hypothesis gel nicely with the don't play God, mind the unforeseen consequences, stick to the traditional worldview that the book promotes.
So I would just say two points to this before you say what you want to say about it, Brett.
The idea that this reviewer is bringing up lab leak or anything about COVID at all points to exactly what I'm saying.
This isn't a book about COVID.
In fact, the first draft was finished before COVID was a thing.
And the idea that that has a place in a review that's supposedly about a book tells us right away that this isn't what it appears.
It's not a book review.
And then the idea that this is a stick-to-the-traditional worldview that this book is promoting suggests either that the reviewer did not in fact read the book, which is quite possible, or that he is willfully either misunderstanding Or at least misrepresenting what he does understand to be the case, because we are quite explicitly not arguing for a traditional worldview, and we say it over and over and over again.
So this is either sloppy or anti-scientific, or it reflects a conclusion that was arrived at long before the book was written, which means that this is not a person who should have been put in charge of reviewing such a book.
Well, I think actually, I read the review and I think it implies something even more troubling, if a bit subtle and common.
What it implies is that this person is a verificationist, right?
Because what our book argues very clearly and explicitly
across the entire thing is we cannot go back we have to go forward that is dangerous and we must figure out what that we bring with us from the past is still relevant and useful and what has to be replaced now the problem is if you are a a person a traditionalist and a verificationist you will find conservatism in our book if you are a progressive and an advocate for
A different and better world, you will find radicalism in our book, and the idea that one has to balance these things is really what the book is about, right?
But somebody who's out to deliver a negative review, and this person clearly is, a few clicks reveal that they actually have this position, and either the Guardian knew they were sourcing somebody who would deliver a scathing review, or they didn't know and should have, but either way, That's what they did.
But in any case, a verificationist going through the book and finding reason to dismiss it on the basis that it is about some sort of a conservative traditional worldview tells you that if they read it, they got half of it.
But the other thing is, what a fascinating week to deploy this trope about the lab leak, right?
Because the lab leak, as much as people had realized that it was extremely likely as of, you know, Jon Stewart's beginning to mock it as he
Did took another leap, you know, the remainder of the distance Was largely covered by the discovery that there had been a grant proposal to induce to introduce exactly the furrin site that we find in SARS-CoV-2 That had been delivered by EcoHealth Alliance and Peter Daszak So we know that this exact change had been proposed now that grant proposal was rejected, but it doesn't matter the point is
What a week to just press that button, oh lab leak conspiracy theory, when in fact all the reasonable people have realized that it was, you know, it was never a dismissible conspiracy theory.
It was always viable and there's an awful lot of evidence for it.
Well, it seems to me there's an analogy here that not only is a lot of sort of, you know, this person who I imagine is sort of immersed in woke world and in social constructionist world, so much of that world is actually biologically essentialist in a way that an actual understanding of human evolution would not support.
And similarly, this so-called progressive world is actually highly reliant on authorities and institutions that are pretending to speak truth but actually coming to conclusions behind closed doors and never showing us the analysis.
And so part of what we're doing and we've been doing for a while now on the show is You know, not so much in the last couple of months as we've been focused on the book, but looking at analyses and assessing whether or not those analyses make sense.
And part of the reason that we find ourselves out of step with some of what is being promoted as public health policy right now is that almost nothing that has emerged during this pandemic from public health officials or the CDC, the WHO, whatever, comes with a description of the analysis that was done.
Sometimes there are some references to datasets, but the actual analysis is elided.
It is hidden.
It is obscured, which is exactly antithetical to science.
Not just the results of science need to be in public view, but the actual scientific process.
And so the analyses that we've been relying on as we come to conclusions that are wildly out of step sometimes with what some public health officials would say, are exactly that.
They're analyses in which we can actually look at and assess the analyses done.
So that's what scientists do.
Right.
That's what scientists do.
And you make the point that a review can't start with its conclusion.
It's not a valid review.
And you can say the exact same thing about science.
I don't care how sophisticated your measurement apparatus was, I don't care how fancy the laboratory, I don't care what degree you have, if you started with a conclusion and worked backwards from it, it's not only not science, it's the opposite of science, right?
A review that starts with its conclusion isn't a review.
Well, you know, a review, you know, you could imagine a review that's written which did not begin the book with the conclusion, but now that they're writing it, they've come to the conclusion.
But so, you know, a reviewer who approaches the book that they are supposed to be reviewing already with their conclusion in their head is not capable of writing a review.
The process of review, right?
You have to be open to the possibility that there's something there before you declare that it's absent.
That's right.
So let's just talk a little bit about this two-star review on Amazon by a guy named Ryan Boissoneau, whose name I'm unfortunately probably butchering here.
Let me see if I can pull it up.
Here we go.
Should we show it, or…?
Why not?
Okay.
So I should just say… So you can show this, Zach.
You know, we were watching the book go live and reviews show up.
Someone called our attention to this review, it was the first negative review, and I went and read it and I thought, actually...
It's wrong.
I think I know why it's wrong, but the person did an honest – they made an honest attempt at evaluating it.
They reached a conclusion that I think is actually very much the beginning of an important discussion.
This is what a review of the book should look like that is negative, right?
So obviously we disagree because if we didn't, we wouldn't have written the book that we did, right?
So, you know, we have lots of reviews.
You know, we have many, many – I can't.
Okay, sorry guys.
We've many, many reviews that are positive and careful and reflective of what's in the book, and there's one negative review that feels to us like what a negative review should sound like.
So let's talk about, so he basically disagrees, and you can take my screen off now, Zach.
The title of the review is Culture Does Not Exist to Serve the Genome, which is him pushing back against one of the theoretical concepts that we introduce in the book, right?
This is not already out there in the scientific literature.
This is new with us.
Which we introduced in the first chapter, which is the Omega Principle.
We can understand why you might not agree with the Omega Principle, but as we have argued elsewhere, if you don't, you have to explain then what culture is.
And if you're simply blackboxing culture and saying it can't possibly be evolutionary, it can't possibly be serving Yeah, so the omega principle is a two-part principle.
Basically, we choose omega because it's a Greek letter.
It's supposed to evoke pi, which specifies the precise relationship between the diameter and circumference of a circle.
And likewise, Omega specifies what we say is the precise relationship, the obligate relationship, between culture and other epigenetic phenomenon on the one hand, phenomena on the one hand, and the genome on the other.
And the relationship is epigenetic phenomena evolve more rapidly, they're more adaptable, but they are obligated to the objectives of the genome.
That is, they serve the genome's ends.
And this is indeed a very provocative claim.
Now, I will say something even more provocative here, which is that of course you would get some pushback on this, right?
Because the implications of this principle are so profound that they really change everything You know for most creatures.
It doesn't change your evolutionary analysis.
It doesn't have almost anything to say about You know well at least as far as culture goes obviously doesn't have anything to say about plants or fungi or most animals but as You get to humans it changes everything about the meaning of what we are and how we ended up this way and so if we are incorrect about this It actually renders a huge amount of the analysis that we do in the book wrong, but we are not incorrect.
We show our work and... I don't actually even think that's true.
I was expecting a little pushback, but the reason that it is... Because there's so much else in the book that is consistent with, you know, mismatch hypothesis or Scientism as replacing scientific thinking or reductionism and over-reliance on metrics.
All of which are, you know, everything that we do is consistent with one or more of those, but there's plenty that doesn't actually rely on Omega, although Omega is consistent with everything that we talk about in the book.
No, I would say it differently.
I would say there are many things in the book that are True, irrespective of Omega, but that the central idea, right, is predicated on the basis that our apparatus for generating culture, the conscious apparatus that then generates culture, is consistent with an evolutionary analysis.
That it is not the cultural layer in conflict with the genetic layer.
It may be that our ancient culture is out of step with our current environment, but it is not that our culture is out of step with our genome.
Yeah, no, I see this.
So, you know, mismatch hypothesis, which has been discussed by many, many people, might be absent an understanding of omega principle, be imagined to be this is just, you know, this is just the derangement that modernity brings us because, you know, culture.
And we are trying to explain something more consistently, more deeply by saying, well yes, you know culture, but culture is itself, at least that culture which is long-standing and expensive to maintain or create and variable in extent, is itself inherently an adaptation.
Right.
So, the point is, this principle is going to end up being right, and the reason that we know it's going to end up being right is that the logic that explains why it has to be right is actually not complex at all, right?
The fact is, a cultural brain is the product of a genome, which puts the genes in a perfect position to shut it down if it isn't serving the genome's ends, and what people, the step people miss is, it's impossible for cultural stuff to be cost-free, right?
Cultural stuff that has you doing something is wasting the time and energy of the genome.
Cultural stuff that forbids you from doing something is limiting opportunities.
So these things are costly to the genome and therefore for the genome to have facilitated a mind that gets filled with this stuff, it has to have on average paid.
Yeah.
Right.
That said, once you get to that step, right, this is something 1976, Dawkins introduces mimetic evolution.
It's a brilliant introduction, but he makes what we claim is an error.
He says culture is a new primeval soup.
It's basically a new tree of life.
Cultural phenomena evolve, he argues correctly, but he's arguing that they're evolving independent of the layer that they They ride on top of and were that true it describes a whole a very complex and in fact a Landscape that can't even really be analyzed because many things hover between layers, right?
Language has both phenomena and it has purely cultural stuff and it has a you know, genetic underpinning What do you make of that evolutionarily if these two things are independent on the other hand?
If they're both serving genetic ends, then you can analyze this, and the point is, whoa, a whole bunch of stuff that is paradoxical if we treat it as independent of the genome is no longer paradoxical.
It becomes tractable if we approach these things with this assumption.
Yeah.
I'm reminded, you know, so we have a section at the very end, Recommended Further Reading, where we recommend a couple of books unrelated to our own work that we have learned from and that speak to some of the issues in that chapter.
And so at the very end we say, more technical texts that are nonetheless excellent include, and one of the two here is this Jablanka and Lamb text, and I would have pulled up the book but it's not in this room right now, From 2014, called Evolution in Four Dimensions, Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral, and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life.
This is an extraordinary book.
It's super dense.
You know, it's not easy going, even for us.
I once tried to just give a sort of a page-long excerpt to freshmen, and it didn't go over too well.
You know, advanced undergraduates would have been different, but it's dense, I'll warn you, but it's truly a terrific book.
But the title, Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral, and Symbolic something-something in the Evolution of Life, would seem to imply that these are different things.
And so I'm sorry if I missed it, but I think one thing you didn't say in your description of The Omega Principle this time is that we are talking about genetic phenomena, and everyone has a pretty decent model of what that means, and then epigenetic phenomena.
And epigenetic just means above the genome.
And back when we were in grad school, it actually was used in this sensu lata way, this broad way, to mean anything that was above the level of the genome that could impact the genome.
And then in modern times, most people, including many biologists, but certainly most non-biologists, when they hear epigenetic, they assume that what you're talking about is molecular mechanisms, which is a very sensu stricto, a very narrow sense of what epigenetic might mean.
So things like DNA methylation.
And what we argue is that we have circumscribed our understanding of epigenetics to our peril.
That there are things like culture that are epigenetic sensu lato that are just as much downstream of genetics and also ultimately serving genetic ends.
So, not only downstream, but the shocking thing, the part that still surprises me, is that actually the analogy between something like culture and something like these molecular mechanisms that regulate gene expression actually do belong very much in the same category because they do the same thing, right?
So, if you think about it, for those of you who are not experienced with it, Well, these molecular mechanisms regulate which genes get expressed where, and so you have… And when.
Right.
Where and when.
So the fact that your eyes and your eye cells and your liver cells look very different despite having the same genome is the result of the fact that there are these molecular… To some degree, how, too, actually.
Sorry.
Right.
But anyway, it allows you to be a complex organism rather than just a puddle of like cells, right?
And so that is… Which is good for most of us.
It's pretty darn great, and so, you know, imagine that we recently figured out this landscape enough to begin talking about how that process works.
So this is the last several decades.
And you can imagine that there would be a lot of excitement about that because, you know, a single genome doesn't an organism make.
But the separate regulation allows all sorts of things to unfold.
I mean, including two genomes that are alike but express one as a male and one as a female, right?
These are all epigenetically regulated phenomena.
But that excitement about what the epigenetic regulators of genes do obscures this other thing which is specifically relevant to humans.
And the point is culture regulates the expression of genes too, right?
It regulates the fact that your body will be in church on Sunday morning or, you know, not, right?
Those sorts of things.
So the point is it's still shaping the way the genome is expressed in the world, which is why it subscribes to the same rule.
Okay, go ahead.
Well, slight pivot.
I'm very interested, and we're going to talk a little bit about some of the – we continue to do lots of interviews, sometimes multiple ones a day, and it's going to continue on into the future, for which we are grateful.
Although, it's super fascinating to see how different the approach of, say, professional scientists is when they talk to us about the book, as opposed to people with audiences That don't at least understand themselves to be scientific at all.
And one of the places where this happened to just be me was interviewed was on the Jim Rett podcast, and we talked about this a little bit last week.
But I was particularly taken with this quote from his show notes, just to reflect.
And this is not his description of our book, but his description of his and my conversation about the book.
And this is of course not a complete list, but In his show notes for the show that he and I did together, and again, Jim is himself a scientist, Yeah, he's a complexity scientist.
I mean, not by degree, but by professional history.
Yeah, former head of the Santa Fe Institute, etc.
Quote, they, meaning Jim and me, discuss hyper-novelty and its challenges, niche-switching as the human niche, the naturalistic fallacy, the ancient Beringians' entry into the Americas, the hubris of reductionism and neo-cornucopianism, humans as the blankest slates, metaphorical and literal campfires,
Scaling Laws and Social Groups, Theory of Mind, Social Media's Flattening Effects, Including Flattened Affects, Social Media Sabbaticals, The Sucker's Folly, something we introduce in the book, Human Population Explosion, The Personal Responsibility Vortex, which is from an earlier TED Talk of yours, Brett, Proto-B Communities, The Lineage View of Evolution, Understanding Exponentials and Fat-Tail Events, Culture as Evolutionary Adaptation, The Omega Principle, again, something we introduce in the book.
Humanity's Fourth Frontier, again, something we introduce in the book.
I just love that list.
It's an accurate and yet still not complete list of the conversation that Jim and I had, and it's certainly not a complete telling of what it is that we cover in this book.
Part of the challenge for people who would hate on us and this book is that it's really, really hard to pigeonhole us.
And the idea that the book is filled with pseudoscience because we have ideas in it that haven't been vetted by other people, well, that is of course what science does.
So I noticed another kind of critique coming back at us, which I want to point to, which I think is actually in its own way a very positive indication.
In a number of different places, on Twitter and on Reddit, I encountered criticisms about All sorts of things that people claim we don't talk about, and it's a critical failure of the book, like genetic drift, founder effects, genetic sweeps.
As I pointed out, we also didn't include Punnett squares.
Right, but I would point out that this is an echo of a It's a long-standing battle in evolutionary biology that you and I have been part of for decades.
It's not like we're unaware of genetic drift, but the basic thing you need to understand to know what this is about is, so evolution is defined as the change in gene frequency in a population over time.
That's evolution.
Almost always when people invoke evolution, they mean adaptation, which is something different.
It's one of four mechanisms of evolution.
Right?
And so, what they are effectively... And the thing that you need to understand is that almost all evolutionary change... Heather is closing the window because somebody is, I don't know, tearing up the street or something like that.
Almost all evolutionary change is non-adaptive, right?
It is mostly the result of drift and these other lesser mechanisms.
migration and mutation.
Now all adaptation ultimately traces back to mutations that then got favored by selection, but the basic point is almost all evolution is not adaptive.
Almost everything that matters is in that tiny subset that is adaptive.
And so this critique is like a lashing about Yeah, well, I mean, it's a sorry, but it's it's the same old same old like I have, I almost have less patience for this one, because it's The driftists, as some in evolutionary biology would call those who see drift as majorly explanatory, drift being the random element in evolution.
That is, if you happened to be walking under the window when the piano fell out, then your death is due to drift, as opposed to you were helping.
You were somehow involved there as a feature of the piano being there, and you died, and then that would be selection.
Randomness doesn't build complexity.
That's the argument at its base.
That's all it takes.
Drift is the random element in evolution.
Mutation is the origin of all change.
Gene flow is just the movement between populations, which is utterly important.
But the four mechanisms of microevolution – mutation, origin of all variation, drift, the random element, flow, the movement between populations, and selection Selection is that which builds complexity.
And so, is it more rare than drift?
Sure.
But it builds complexity and randomness can't.
Right, it can't do it.
And, you know, we could go on at length about this.
But the reason that I'm focused on this is that at the point that multiple people are leveling this criticism, right, what it tells you is They don't have anything else, right?
It's pretty empty.
And I had one delightful experience I have to relate to.
So I saw one of these criticisms.
Somebody on Reddit specifically took us to task in the book for not dealing with genetic sweep, founder effects, and Drift and I pointed out in a reply that in fact though these terms are not mentioned in there I gave an example of each phenomenon and I basically said look this is not important because it isn't relevant to the subject matter of the book
And the person responded by accusing me of not having read the book, which I thought was… So you're not showing up as yourself somehow?
If you knew enough about us, you probably could have figured out it was me, but the basic nature of Reddit is that people's names aren't their names.
So anyway, yes, I thought that was lovely, and I should have screenshotted it, right?
Yes, you should have.
That one should have gone on my wall, but somebody then alerted him to who he was talking to, and he edited it.
But anyway.
Well, that's funny, yeah.
Soon we'll start seeing that critique.
You haven't even read your own.
Wait, who wrote it then?
Okay.
So I guess I want to just cap this off by saying that if you're scientifically uninterested, especially if you are also unshakable in what turns out to be a scientifically incoherent ideology such as wokeness or trust the authorities, Our book's going to be a threat to you, and it's not meant to be a threat to anyone.
It's meant to be a way, to some degree a guidebook, although it also does dive deep and introduces several new evolutionary concepts while also bringing people up to speed on several things that we know to be true in evolution that were other people's contributions.
It's meant to bring everyone in on the conversation about what it is to be human and how best to move forward.
It's not a threat to actual scientists, nor is it a threat to those without scientific background who are eager to learn.
Again, it's not that if you happen to be scientifically illiterate, you can't go here with us.
Of course you can.
I'm reminded of an interaction we had with our wonderful editor shortly after we signed the book, and we really didn't know her at all.
We signed the contract for the book a couple years ago, and she said, who is your intended audience?
And I said, everyone.
And I think she thought I was kidding.
But I actually haven't asked Helen this, but I doubt she does now, because what I said to her was, look, certainly, you know, us teaching at a not prestigious college still didn't get us access to all of what humanity has, although we've also traveled widely enough and interacted with so many, so many types of people.
But in our classrooms, we reached across differences that were far greater than you would expect to see in most college classrooms.
And we found our common humanity there.
And we found that people who came in, even people who came in as creationists, who came in specifically seeking to be armed against our kinds of ways of approaching the world, found things to embrace and to honor and to speak to in an evolutionary worldview.
So this is exactly what we found ourselves doing for 15 years in classrooms.
And it's not, it's the evolutionary worldview and an understanding of humanity and other organisms that is what you and I are driven by much more deeply,
But because we had this, what turns out to have been an interlude of 15 years, really learning how to educate and how to reach people who don't look or sound like us or believe the same things we do or have the same developmental histories, we feel like not only do all people deserve this kind of evolutionary toolkit, but they are capable of receiving it.
So, I was thinking a little bit about the taxonomy of people who don't accept things like the Omega Principle.
And, you know, the point is it has to be proposed and you have to decide whether to accept it.
But we get several different kinds of resistance, right?
I see three kinds that we've encountered.
One has to do with people who believe that you shouldn't analyze human behavior and culture with these tools.
Not that it doesn't work, but that it's too dangerous, right?
Now I am stunned by this.
Dawkins, when I met with him in October of 2018 in Chicago, I think it was 2018, In any case, whenever that may have been, espoused this perspective that he thought there was something dangerous about looking at human history through the lens of evolution, which shocked me, right?
It seemed to me that he had switched positions from where he would have been in his previous incarnation.
But nonetheless, there's an awful lot That's common among actually smart evolutionary biologists.
I've heard it.
I'm not going to name other names here, but I've heard it a lot.
Right, but it was the motivating force, it appears, behind Gould and Lewontin and all sorts of people who were on the other side of the question of adaptation, or as it is dismissed, adaptationism.
Right, so there was effectively a group of scientists who sought to, and were successful in many regards, in derailing the evolutionary analysis of people.
So in the aftermath of sociobiology being coined as a term, there was this pushback, right?
And it was disguised in many regards as, this doesn't work, but really what it was is, that's not a good idea.
There are some questions you should not ask.
Right.
The second group, I would say, are a group of people who are confused about whether or not this is true.
Evolution stops at the neck, people.
Well, I don't want to dismiss them that way.
I think you shouldn't accept Omega until you see why it has to be right.
The burden of proof is on those of us who believe in something like Omega.
Until you've met that burden, you shouldn't accept it, and then once you see it, hopefully the burden shifts.
But anyway, I respect this group and I see it as our obligation to convince them of why this is an important thing to understand and what it does to the understanding of people downstream of it.
But the third group, the one that troubles me most, are people who are threatened in a career sense by the exploration of human beings as an evolutionary phenomenon.
So for example, people in the humanities, right?
More likely people in social sciences.
I would say, actually, we see it in both.
But, you know, if you look at, for example, just by... But these modern bastardizations of fields that actually should have a tremendous amount to offer.
Well, I think they do potentially have a tremendous amount to offer.
The problem is what the nominal field has to offer and the incentives of the individuals in it are quite different.
And so if you look at something like the reaction that historians had to guns, germs, and steel, right, it was very, very negative.
But when you look at the quality of the critique, It's not about the fact that it doesn't work.
It's about its territoriality, right?
And so the idea that, you know, if you're going to do cultural anthropology, right, and you don't want to have to do an analysis that deals with adaptation as a phenomenon, you just simply want to, you know, zoom in and look at cultures and compare them and imagine that you're not looking at a biological phenomenon, right?
Then you need Omega not to be right.
Right.
It's stay-in-your-lane-ism as a form of social territoriality.
In an environment in which the market causes this to emerge, because people who are not going to be able to participate in that discussion nonetheless want to hold their position within the fields, and so these fields pretend that what they're doing is not impacted by evolutionary dynamics as a matter of, you know... Which means you have to build all sorts of epicycles, and you know, like, the evolutionary view is clarifying, and once you know it, you can also figure out better
You have a better chance of figuring out how to avoid and evade the reprehensible parts of what our evolution has made us prone to.
Right.
That's the best way to make ourselves better is to know what it is that we have inherited from the past.
Right.
And, you know, to the extent that you believe that something like cultural evolution or a study of cultures has a lot to offer, Right?
You want the most powerful tools with which to analyze it so you understand what it means rather than just being a purely descriptive phenomenon.
And so, you know, we the public pay for fields to study things, right?
We subsidize this work.
And so the question is, are we getting what we have paid for?
And we will get it much more successfully if we accept that there are simplifying rubrics that actually unite this into one story rather than making all of these things separate.
Okay, um...
I guess I would finish by saying and recognize that we are almost supposedly done and we have only gotten to a tiny bit of what we were hoping to get to today.
I would say that our book is an invitation to think deeply about what we are and how to live better lives at both the individual and the societal level.
Quite explicitly, that's what it is.
So if you reject that goal out of hand, I wonder what your goal is.
What is it that you are serving and what is it that you are trying to achieve?
You may disagree with us, as the one review that we discuss does, and I think your taxonomy of the three types of ways that you come to disagreement with something like the Omega Principle is apt.
I like that.
So, I wanted also to say here before we move on to talking about this new research out of New Mexico, really, with regard to the peopling of the Americas, is that most of this stuff isn't out yet, but we did some more interviews this week that were so varied in how they came across that It's just worth mentioning.
We were on Coast to Coast AM, which is apparently the longest running radio show out there, and it's very much not a science show.
We got pushback on religion.
We talked about the realignment.
No, not we talked about.
We were on the realignment.
I was trying to understand, are you sending me a message?
We were on the realignment with hosts Sagar and Jetty and Marshall Kosloff, I hope I'm pronouncing Marshall's last name correctly, which was largely a political discussion, but we had in there a really nice dive actually into some of what many people who I think have been trained in social sciences and humanities, even just at the college level, imagine a Darwinian approach to human behavior would provide us.
And so we're in that conversation, we talk about Why it is that this is not an invitation to social Darwinism.
This is not an invitation to go backwards, and it's not an invitation to pursue our worst angels at all, quite the opposite.
We talked with Brian Keating with Into the Impossible, which he describes as a podcast of stories, ideas, and speculations from the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination.
He's an astrophysicist and a distinguished professor of physics at UC San Diego.
In that conversation, we got to finally talk a little bit about aliens too, which I thought was fun.
And then Sounds of Film with Tom Needham, a different feel entirely.
The show has been on the air for 30 years, and you've been on it before, but we were able to talk in just such a very different way.
I'm just thrilled to be able to be having the diversity of conversations we're having.
It's not just with scientists, and it's not just not with scientists, and it's not just with people who come from a religious perspective or not.
It's across the board.
And so, in service of that, before we talk about the evidence of humans in North America during the last glacial maximum, did you want to say a few things about the anomalies that we've been seeing with regard to the availability of the book before we sort of move on beyond talking about this book?
Here's our one copy.
Here's the copy we've got.
We don't know what to make of the weird – there is obviously a supply chain issue, but we also know that tens of thousands of books have been printed and presumably delivered to retailers, and we see Amazon oscillating, for example, between – Temporarily out of stock, and briefly it said in stock soon with a delivery date in November, and now it's back to temporarily out of stock.
Right, so we don't know what to make of it, but we would ask people to just, if you are looking for it, either order it and it will come hopefully sooner than those projections, or it's available on Barnes & Noble still, lots of other places are out.
It sure is.
You know, we forgot to say at the very start, we made the New York Times bestseller list.
This is true.
Yeah, and it just feels amazing.
We're the second highest-selling book in nonfiction on Amazon last week.
That's sure not to be the case this week because they literally haven't had any copies to sell the entire week.
They haven't had any copies since the third day after publication, which feels good, but it also feels frustrating.
If you want the book and you don't have it, Barnes & Noble does still have it.
All right.
We have this paper this year that came out, Zachary, if you would show my screen.
This is Bennett et al.
in science, evidence of humans in North America during the last glacial maximum.
And actually take my screen off for a moment because I'm not logged in there, but I'm going to pull up the PDF so we can show the amazing pictures.
Some of the amazing pictures and some of what I've seen.
So here you can show my screen again.
This is again published in Science this week, Evidence of Humans in North America During the Last Glacial Maximum.
They are finding, because what they've done is they found footprints in modern-day New Mexico that they can date to 23,000 years ago-ish.
to 23,000 years ago-ish.
And as they say here, and what I've got highlighted, fossil human footprints provide an alternative source of evidence for human presence.
Unlike cultural artifacts, modified bones, or other more conventional fossils, footprints have a primary depositional context and are fixed on the imprinted surface.
All of that is science speak for actually we can date footprints with greater accuracy and precision than we can date many other types of evidence.
So I must say this is a million miles from either of our specialty.
I do wonder, right, so that the history is that we have a earliest date on which we all agree for the presence of humans in North America, right?
The Clovis people.
Early.
You don't mean early.
We have a farthest back in time date on which we all agree it goes back at least this far.
At least?
At least this far.
And then there are all of these claims about evidence that go farther back.
And these claims are very contentious.
Some of them are stronger than others.
Some of them are clearly nonsense.
Well, I mean, we actually open the book, like the very first chapter, right?
It goes into the Beringians and the people in the Americas, and we say that we tend towards these earlier dates, but a conservative estimate is sometime between 10 and 30,000 years.
That's a huge span.
Sometime between 10 and 30,000 years ago, the Americas were peopled for the first time.
But the evidence to our eyes has looked, even before this, like more than 20,000 years ago seems much more likely.
Right.
And I should say there are some other remote contingencies which we should get rid of.
Like there's the possibility that human beings landed in the Americas went extinct, and so that could be true and have no implication whatsoever for the peopling of the Americas that matters from the point of view of all of the Native cultures that were here.
So anyway, that's a possibility.
There's also some people are still arguing for crossing the Pacific, right, as opposed to going through what is now submerged Under the Bering Strait, but Beringia as a landmass that was that was a landmass for several thousand years, right nonetheless So I do wonder about the security of the evidence here, right?
So it's possible that it's as secure as they're claiming but it's also true that there are various processes that can confuse you, right?
So These there's a process for example called reworking right?
There are certain things like clams that will actually take material and in their excavation for their clam burrows will move it around, and so they can put things in the strata that it doesn't belong in, right?
But having a 2D, having what is effectively parietal, and that that is not itself disrupted by such possible reworking seems to provide good evidence that this depositional site has not been reworked.
But what I want to know, it may be that these folks know exactly what they're doing, and they've ruled out every possibility.
But imagine, for example, that footprints had been very, very shallow, and that they had caused a difference in water to accumulate in versus outside of.
In other words, water would run off the Substrate where there was no footprint and where there was a footprint you would get extra erosion because of a positive feedback could it work at a footprint work its way down into strata that weren't where it was where it was made I don't know hopefully these people have ruled that out but.
Yeah, really far outside anything that we have done directly, but sort of, I think you are proposing a process a little bit like the fossilization of wood.
Or, you know, fossilization at all, at some level.
Just, you know, replacement of the original material.
Just that a physical process could move, you know, these are not going to be carbon dated, right?
These are going to be dated by the strata in which the footprint is made, which seems to be unambiguous.
And I read it, but I don't remember what exactly the methods are here.
I don't remember.
But anyway, what you want, first of all, if this is true, for there to have been footprints 23,000 years ago in the Americas, nails down.
Even if you never found another shred of evidence for it, the point is if those footprints really are, That old, then it says there were people to make those footprints then.
So the point is, you want to be really sure that there is nothing that could conceivably have misled you about how old those footprints were before you decide, well, they were here 23,000 years ago and that's just a simple fact.
So, anyway, we'll see whether the result holds up.
But if it does, it has many, many implications, right?
One of which is, let me just read another little tiny bit from the paper, uh, ichthnofossils of extinct late Pleistocene fauna occur widely on the margins of the Playa and include tracts of proboscidea, mammoth, folivora, ground sloth, carnivora, both canid and felid, and sedardiodactyl, bovid and camelid, most of which are associated with human footprints.
So we've got mammoths, ground sloths, wild dogs and cats of unspecified species, and both cowish things and camelids present in the same place as the footprints, which charismatic megafauna all.
This puts humans there at the same time as they were abundant, which provides further evidence potentially for the idea that we helped hasten their extinctions.
Well, actually, I was wondering about whether it doesn't do exactly the opposite.
If 23,000 years is a good date, then human beings were not facing the retreating ice sheets they skirted under them or came across by ship.
Well, you're not arguing across by ship, you're talking about coastal route down by skin boat and canoe.
No, no.
I'm leaving open the remote possibility of some other introductory mechanism formation.
Ship seems like a strange word here.
Boat.
Okay.
The model, the easiest model, is there were people living in Beringia, which there were, and that that population, as the waters rose, moved, right?
And that some of them ended up in North America.
If 23,000 years is the date, then it may be that… Well, earlier, because New Mexico isn't, you know, Olympia.
Right, but it could be, you know… Could take 50 years to go that distance.
There's not inherently a reason for people to move that fast.
But the point is, moving during the glaciated period is certainly possible.
It suggests certain routes and not others, right?
It narrows down the likely And it puts people in North America not at exactly the moment of the elimination of many of these megafauna, if I understand it correctly.
And so one of the pieces of evidence that people point to with respect to the human over hunting hypothesis, which to me is very plausible because these animals would have had no experience with human hunting and therefore would have behaved the way we see creatures behave in the Galapagos where they don't run away from you, for example.
They would have been easy prey and therefore easily hunted out.
But I believe this would interface with that and suggest that it isn't such a tight correlation in time.
I'd like to know better whether or not that's accurate.
Yeah, I think the strongest evidence that I've seen against the extinction of the North American charismatic megafauna not being due to humans has been that at least Clovis first suggested, if I've got my dates right, that the that humans basically showed up after at least some of the extinctions had already happened or were already clearly on the decline.
So it was sort of like, you know, Pizarro and company arrived on Mayan shores and, yes, killed them off, but the Maya were already in decline at that point.
And so this has people present well before we have any evidence that the charismatic megafauna populations were already in decline, suggesting that our existence here is possibly causal.
Alright, interesting.
We should talk to some of our paleo friends and see how this actually plays out.
Indeed.
Now, did you want me to show some of these images?
Yeah, it's worth seeing them.
I was pretty impressed.
Exactly.
So we're talking about modern New Mexico, of course, and here we have these images, for those only listening, of some of the footprints that these authors are finding.
And they really are, you know, as tends to be the way with footprints as opposed to a lot of other kinds of archaeological and paleoanthropological evidence.
Footprints tend to look like footprints.
They're really compelling in a way.
Parietal art is often very compelling, that is to say things like cave drawings, but a lot of pot shards and such often is not compelling unless you already know what you're looking for.
But footprints Footprints do something for the visceral brain and body of the person of the modern observing them.
Yes.
When I went to look at the paper, I was expecting not to be terribly convinced by the pictures, which doesn't mean that they're not footprints, but I was expecting to have to take their word for it that that's what they were.
And I was like, oh, no, I'm compelled.
Those do look like footprints.
Yeah, very much so.
Okay, so this is amazing.
This is amazing discovery on the part of the researchers, and it also represents discovery of a geographic frontier on the part of the people who laid down those footprints.
And we in the book, and we've talked about this previously on this podcast and elsewhere, and it's in the book, talk about these three types of frontiers that humans have historically encountered.
Geographic frontiers, technological frontiers, and transfer of resource frontiers, the latter of which is a form of theft and is immoral.
Human history, though, is full of these moments of geographic discovery, of, you know, however it is and whenever it was that the first Americans arrived on the shores of America, you know, be it 10,000 years ago, seems not 20,000 years ago, probably not 25, years ago, seems not 20,000 years ago, probably not 25, 30,000 years ago, maybe.
Whenever that was, that was discovery.
There was a moment at which people first set foot on this landmass that offered two continents worth of opportunity.
And because geographic discovery tends to come so early in human history, it doesn't tend to come with texts.
These aren't people who are writing things down by and large.
We have later people showing up and thinking they've discovered things, who have writing, and who write about those things.
But those are transfer of resource frontiers, right?
You know, the Spaniards coming to the New World were not engaged in geographic frontiersism.
They were engaged in transfer of resource frontiersism, whether or not they knew that or not.
Some of them presumably quickly did come to know that, and many of them presumably did not.
Columbus discovered Americans.
That's right.
Yeah, exactly.
So, because history, the way that history is taught, and history even, I was shocked when I learned this, and I was well into adulthood when I learned that actually history understands itself to be the study of the written texts of what humans have left behind.
And anything before that is called prehistory.
Well, because history is biased in this way, and a bias it is, it's going to vastly underrepresent geographic frontiers and what happens when humans come upon them and how they explore in that space.
And of course, it's part of what paleoanthropologists do and archaeologists, and it's part of what we are doing in the book and in our thinking is trying to figure out how it is that humans have engaged in discovery, even as, you know, at this point in time, there is almost nothing left to be discovered, at least on this planet, with regard to geographic frontiers.
So that bias in history, because of its bias on texts, will steer us away from deep history, it'll steer us away from stories of non-literate people, Um, and as has often been noted, it's going to be more likely to reflect the tales of the victors of wars or the otherwise privileged, um, for whatever reason that they were the ones able to tell, to tell their stories, not just tell their stories, but write down their stories and have those written archives make it into the, into the future, which is to say the now.
So the guns, terms, and steel analysis, because the idea is the cultures that are likely to win when two cultures come into conflict are the ones that have slight advantage by being a few hundred years ahead, technologically speaking.
And those are likely to be ones that do have also the capacity to write a description of what took place.
Precisely.
And it's one of the reasons that what happened to the Maya is so, I mean, it's always going to be tragic, but it's particularly tragic because they did have written language and they did have libraries and just We can imagine that they had extraordinary histories and scientific textbooks.
I don't know if they would have called them textbooks, but they had astronomy.
They had the concept of zero.
Roads and city-states and politics and just extraordinary stuff.
And one of the things that the Spaniards did is they destroyed it.
So we're left basically with a tiny bit of those things that were inscribed on pyramids, and we're not left with the library.
But we have one text.
Um, that was written on, uh, some other material, but the rest of it was burned.
That which was flammable was burned.
Yeah.
Um, so.
And that's, you know, that's, that's a transfer resource frontier right there.
You know, part of what you do is you destroy the history that comes before so that, um, so as to obscure it.
Well, I would just in passing point out that whatever that instinct is that causes a population to actually, instead of preserving the relics of populations that they have run across to destroy them, right, that is some sort of an evolutionary lineage against lineage instinct.
And we are seeing it.
We are watching, right, the destruction of… It's one of the reprehensible evolutionary instincts.
It's a reprehensible evolutionary instinct that we are seeing within our own culture, right?
The tearing down of statues, the fact that the elk statue in Portland, you know, was successfully removed by crazy people who, you know, obviously couldn't possibly have had a complaint about, you know, the abhorrent views of elk, because they don't presumably have any abhorrent views.
You may underestimate the people and their views on the abhorrent views of elk.
Yes, but in any case, the point is the instinct to be tearing down statues of Lincoln and whatever elk happened to be memorialized in your city and all of that is this ancient instinct to destroy something as you take power and overwrite the prior history.
So we should be aware it's unfolding and we can, you know, you can zoom in too close and think it's about something that it really isn't.
Yes, absolutely.
So many places we could go here, but I guess one of the things that I wanted to get to was to say that actually Zachary, our producer here, our older son, has had several extraordinary history teachers.
And I want to point out that That what I'm about to say is not true of all of the ways that history is being taught now, but we also know of more than one high school history class, for instance, we've heard tell, where the focus is entirely on that third type of frontier that we just talked about.
So not on geographic frontiers for this sort of reason, this bias that's built into history where it doesn't talk about those things which haven't been written down.
But also not on technological frontiers, wherein humans with their ingenuity make more of some resource than what was possible before the technological innovation.
But instead of focus entirely on these transfer of resource frontiers, which are not a legitimate form of frontier, they are theft.
And certainly it has happened a lot.
There has been a lot of land theft, for instance, in human history.
But rather than exploring the diversity of types of frontiers that humans have engaged in, or talking about how technological innovation, for instance, has allowed people to make systems that are functional for some period of time, Instead, we have increasingly with the ideology that is spreading in modern history classrooms, many of them, not all of them, a focus entirely on theft.
And I know you want to talk a little bit about exactly a form of theft that seems to be happening right now, but be it land theft or resource theft or people theft in the form of slavery.
It's a real part of human history to be sure, but it's not the only part.
And also, this excuses nothing, but very often the people who were being robbed of their land had themselves dispatched to whoever came before them.
And so, you know, we have this sort of noble, savage view of people who came before and who had their land stolen from them.
And the people who were doing the stealing are supervillains, and the people who had the land stolen from them were somehow perfect.
And frankly, that's a fairly racist view of those people as well.
Every civilization that has left a mark has engaged in some combination of cooperation and competition.
This again is a theme of the book, right?
Every single one of us and every single civilization has left any sort of mark Are some civilizations more brutal than others?
For sure.
And some less.
But pretending that land theft or resource theft or people theft is the only thing worth talking about in human history?
That is both a sign of your own privilege to be able to talk about that to the exclusion of all of the wondrous things that humans have done, but it also creates in children, the children who are receiving these lessons, a sense of futility.
You know, it's actually a kind of, I'm just going to say, like, it's a kind of child abuse to teach children over and over and over again that land theft is the thing that has been what has happened in human history and to not talk about the glorious things and the technological frontiers and the geographic frontiers and the ways that we have learned to get along with one another and to merge and to flourish.
But also, I think most troublingly, creates no path forward.
Precisely.
So if you were to say, well, what we should do is we should restore everything to the people from whom it was stolen, you can't, right?
The point is you will have to stop arbitrarily.
The people who are present are not the people from whom something was stolen.
No mechanism where you could operationalize anything useful.
And I think it is important to say, first time I heard a declaration about stolen land, I was actually favorable to it.
I thought, you know what?
This is an important recognition, right?
This is a historical recognition and a useful one.
But the obligation to it, the motivation, has become so pathological.
And what it doesn't do is focus on the one answer that addresses all of that theft, right?
The one answer is to take what we've got, stabilize it, make what we're doing sustainable, and democratize it so everyone has access and people will make different amounts of it.
But the point is, the really abhorrent thing Is that opportunity is so far from equal right that's the place the focus should be the way we ended up here is some story that is going to be arbitrary depending upon how far back you want to look and so anyway while we are
Dicking around with this stupid, guilt-driven, obnoxious mechanism, we are, you know, allowing the destruction to continue, and we are avoiding, we are running out the clock while we really have a lot to do with respect to making the place continually viable for the next 500 or 1,000 years.
That's right.
I mean, it looks like there were people in modern New Mexico 23,000 years ago.
How glorious!
How amazing!
How did they get there?
What decisions can we imagine they made that got them there?
What technological innovations did they make while they were there that allowed them to persist?
These are the sorts of questions that I want to be exploring, and I want my children to be exploring, and I want everyone who's interested in the human condition and both history and future to be exploring.
Not just, were they displaced at some point later?
Were their descendants displaced wrongfully?
Yeah.
Yeah, they were.
That's one piece of their story.
That's one piece.
Yeah, and, you know, our book talks about the mechanism by which people figure out how to switch niches.
I would recommend, though, and we recommend in the book, 1491, which describes the world in the Americas just before Columbus arrived in the New World, right?
And this, I've called it the greatest story never told, and the idea is All of that niche switching produced this incredible diversity of cultures and insights and innovations, and if there's one thing we can say about them, we know that they happened completely independently of the correlated stuff that happened in the old world, because there was no contact between the old and the new world, right?
Yeah, the Mayan Enlightenment happened well before, many hundreds of years before the European Enlightenment.
And it really is, you know, it's not an exact match, but it's a rough match for essentially the Greeks.
And you can make an argument that the Inca were similar in their own way to the Romans.
You have this parallelism and these discoveries, which are very human in their nature, the way they come about is part of this process.
And most of us don't know anything about it, right?
So anyway, 1491 is a great way to dive in and have some sense of what the Americas looked like before Europeans came, and it isn't what you've been taught, right?
It's an amazing diversity and highly recommended.
That's right, yeah.
And that book, 1491, Charles C. Mann, I believe is his name, wrote a shorter piece, and I can't remember if it was Harper's or The Atlantic, that is a great starting point, too, if you don't want to do the whole book.
It's a big book.
Did you want to talk briefly about the Chinese flu?
Yes, and I think it actually fits this discussion.
Yeah, and then we'll do a little bit from Roger Scruton before signing off.
All right, so the story which I came to through an AP report that was circulating on Twitter, I saw it this morning, is about an absolutely impossibly gigantic Chinese fleet of fishing vessels that are fishing currently off of South America, off of Galapagos.
In fact, they have also done a bunch of fishing off of Argentina and Chile.
Zach, do you want to show that little video?
So this fishing fleet is apparently currently fishing for Humboldt squid.
And what you'll see here is a video.
These are actual lights.
This is taken from space.
So this giant fleet of 500 ships uses these giant lights to attract squid up to the surface, which they're harvesting at an incredible rate.
Now these animals are very common, but of course many very common creatures have been hunted to extinction by humans.
It's something that we do.
And the point that needs to be made is one… So this is resource theft at some level?
This is resource theft, but from whom, right?
Right.
Now there are in theory, you know, maritime laws, but this fleet appears to be in violation of many of them.
These ships turn off the transponders they're required to have on.
Nobody knows why, but it is something that is done when somebody is going to violate maritime rules.
This, you know, if you have the sense of like a fishing fleet is boats that go out and they do fishing and they bring back their catch.
No, no, no, no, no.
This is a permanently at sea fleet.
How are they getting their catch back to them?
Well, that's the thing, is there are ships that are presumably transporting things from them and refueling them at sea, and it's incredible.
There's an Indonesian crew there that says they've been trapped at sea for years on these boats, right?
So this is not like anything we have a good model for.
This is some impossibly intense world-altering kind of behavior.
I'm not arguing that Chinese invented this, right?
There are fleets harvesting from the world's oceans and wrecking them, but we on land don't have a good sense for what's taking place and what its long term implications are.
And we don't have the structures necessary to say, hey, actually, that behavior can't go on because you'll wreck, you know, you'll wreck this population and it won't exist for future humans.
There was something else I wanted to show, but I can't remember.
I can't remember what it was.
So I just, oh yeah, I know what it was.
Would you show that, I just want to by analogy point out that the idea that this is somehow fishing in the sense that we intuitively understand fishing and therefore intuitively have some sense of how destructive it might be is about like the idea of loggers, you know, cutting down trees, right?
Take a look at what, you wanna play that, Zach?
Okay, here we go.
This is what logging can now look like.
This is a guy, one guy in an excavator, operating this object that just liquidates trees.
I mean, look at how quickly this tree is limbed and turned into identically sized logs that are ready to go off to the lumber yard.
It's the analog of factory farming.
It's even beyond that.
It's industrial logging, right?
You can imagine an industrial lumber mill, but this is just the liquidation of a forest.
It's surely safer for the people involved?
No doubt.
And to the extent that there's some overarching plan about how much lumber you can harvest Right?
Why not be efficient about it?
But on the other hand, you can imagine that if you have the same perverse incentives you have in every other industry dictating, you know, that you'll make your money liquidating resources in some region.
Can we take that off?
Yeah.
That makes me very sad.
Yes.
That video is terrible.
It's really terrible.
And yet, you know, we are consumers.
We're consumers of wood, right?
So, you know, the solution isn't no efficient wood harvesting, please.
That is not the solution.
But at some level you're looking at a world that does not have the mechanisms necessary to regulate this kind of power, whether we're talking about the fishing of Humboldt squid or the harvesting of
Lumber, we need to be aware that the rules that we inherited from 18th century visionaries for regulating how we would interact with each other just aren't up to the challenge of dealing with this kind of technology, which means this is why the last chapter of the book is the fourth frontier.
The idea is we need to figure out a way that doesn't look like us liquidating the planet out from under us, or we won't survive, because that's what we will continue to do.
You know, the ocean issue is Classic tragedy of the commons where, you know, if the Chinese didn't liquidate the Humboldt squid out of the Southern Pacific, someone else would.
Right.
And obviously it has to be addressed.
Yes, absolutely.
Let me read the final two paragraphs of this Roger Scruton essay that is called Dying in Time, if I can find it on this site here.
Here we go.
You can show my screen if you want, Zach.
I'm just going to be reading it as I scroll.
I recommend the entire essay, and I'll link in the video description, in the show notes.
Courage, therefore, is the sine qua non of any attempt to deal with the threat of senility.
Courage to face the truth and to live fully in the face of it.
With courage, a person can go about living in another way, a way that will give maximum chance of dying with his faculties intact.
This other way is not the way of the welfare culture in which we are all immersed.
It does not involve the constant search for comfort or the obsessive pursuit of health.
On the contrary, it is a way of benign shabbiness and self-neglect, of risky enjoyments and bold adventures.
It involves constant exercise, but not of the body.
Rather, exercise of the person through relationships with others, through sacrifice, through the search for opportunities to be involved and exposed.
Such, at least, is my intuition.
The life of benign shabbiness is not a life of excess.
Of course, you should drink, smoke, eat fatty foods, but not to the point of gluttony.
The purpose is to weaken the body while strengthening the mind.
The risks you take should not damage your will or your relationships, but only your chances of survival.
Officious doctors and health fascists will assail you, telling you to correct your diet, to take better forms of exercise, to drink more water and less wine.
If you pursue a life of risk-taking and defiance, the thought police will track you down and your lifestyle will be held up to ridicule and contempt.
It is not that anyone intends you to live beyond your time.
Rather, to use Adam Smith's famous image, the old people's gulag arises by an invisible hand from a false conception of human life, a conception that does not see death as a part of life and timely death as the fruit of it.
Each of us must decide for himself what the life of benign shabbiness requires of him.
Obviously, dangerous pursuits like hunting and mountaineering have a part to play.
Equally important is the forthright expression of opinion, so as to, with grateful friends and implacable enemies, a process that enhances both the constellations of social life and the tensions of day-to-day living.
I am not sure that I could live with my friend, no, I am not sure that I could live like my friend, the writer and campaigner Ayaan Hirsi Ali, but there is an adorable recklessness in her truth-directed way of life that makes each moment of it worthwhile.
Going out to help others in ways that involve danger and the threat of disease is also a useful form of exposure.
The main point, it seems to me, is to maintain a life of active risk and affection while helping the body along the path of decay, remembering always that the value of life does not consist in its length, but in its depth.
I love this essay.
I don't agree with all of it.
I love reading things which strike me as getting to the heart of an issue in a way that I had not thought to, and coming to conclusions not all of which I agree with, either for simply differences in values to some slight degree, but differences in perspective, but being able to stand in scrutin shoes and read this and think,
I'm still going to advise our audience at the end of this show to eat good food.
And I don't think of myself as a health fascist.
And this is not about eating well so that you can live to the absolute extension of your possible life, but to eat good food so that you can do more with the body and the life that you have.
Yeah, it strikes me, this resonates on a bunch of different levels, various things that we talk about.
This is the opposite of reductionism, right?
I agree with you, there's some things in there that strike me as not, I wouldn't say they're not right, but I would say that they're not universal, and he's making an argument that makes them sound as if they are.
But really the point is, look, the length of life is one factor in an equation of something that doesn't have a name that you should be maximizing, right?
And so the point is, yes, if you're living well, then living longer gives you more of that If you are living pointlessly, then lengthening it does very little to increase the amount of whatever it is that you might do.
Let's call it meaning for lack of a better term.
The point is you should be monitoring that thing and you should be balancing how much do I want to just stick around on this planet as long as possible against how much do I want to have, you know, pushed the outside of the envelope before I go, right?
How much would I have liked to have integrated into my model?
How much would I have liked to have contributed to our understanding of ourselves or something like that?
And so, you know, it isn't very easy.
To specify what it is we should be maximizing, but the point is we should be maximizing something synthetic, which is antithetical to trying to maximize length of life.
That's right.
And lots of things are like this, you know?
Even the approach to punishment, for example, if you're raising children or pets, right?
You can say, well, I don't want to punish.
Well, yeah, you shouldn't want to punish.
But how do you punish so as to minimize the amount of punishment?
It's going to involve punishing well so that you don't have to do it very often.
Yeah.
If because you don't like the thing that needs to be done, you do it poorly, you increase the likelihood that you will have to do more of it in the future.
And if you continue to do it poorly, you will create this positive feedback loop where you create more and more requirement that you do it, and the more poorly you do it, the more requirement there is for the thing.
Right.
And we don't, you know, I think this also goes to what we talk about with respect to the importance of interacting with systems that are not socially defined as you are educated or as you educate yourself, because those systems will We'll continue to tell you that if you try to maximize a single parameter, you'll accomplish nothing, right?
Whereas a authority figure might tell you, oh, that's wonderful.
You've accomplished so much.
And so if you want to learn these lessons, it might be that you have to step outside the social in order to even see them, which we do less and less.
That's right.
All right, I think we're there.
I think we are.
I think we're there.
So we thank you for being here with us this week.
If you are watching live, stick around.
We'll take a break as we get the Q&A set up, and then we'll be back to answer the questions that you have posed at darkhorsesubmissions.com.
You can also join us tomorrow at my Patreon at 11 a.m.
Pacific for our monthly private Q&A.
The questions have already been asked, but we are able to engage with people in real time in the chat there.
We, you may have heard, we have this book out, A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century, and it will soon again be available everywhere books are sold, but it is sold out so many places, but we know that at least the beginning of this podcast it was still available at Barnes & Noble, so if you're looking for a copy and you want it soon, try there.
Hopefully all of the supply chain blockages will resolve themselves soon.
Anything else you want to say?
No, except so many of you have bought it and thank you.
It has been very important to us to see how well received it has been and how eager people are to read it.
That's extremely rewarding and we are grateful.
Yes, we're hoping to start a conversation that goes across many, many borders and that continues to resonate for many years to come.
So, until next time, be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
