#125 Alito Goes a Long Way (Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying DarkHorse Livestream)
In this 125th 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. This week, we discuss the new current thing. The new current thing is not the Pfizer data release that happened this week, although perhaps it should be. The new current thing is the leaked draft majority opinion from Judge Alito, Supreme Court Justice of the United States, which reveals that Roe v. Wade is likely to ...
So I somehow imagined that the last, the last livestream was a multiple of five.
Something, something has gone wrong.
No, here we are.
Perfectly, um, I wanted to say cubic.
A perfect cube.
A perfect, we are that square.
Yeah.
According to something.
So I do want to say, uh, The helicopter sound effect is new.
We're still dialing it in.
But I did want to say we apologize to our regular live viewers for coming to you at an odd hour.
We know that that is not ideal.
In this case, it was unavoidable.
When we travel and we interact with people, we are increasingly hearing that the Dark Horse Podcast is keeping people sane.
And we feel an intense obligation to people who feel that way.
So that's why we're slotting this in here.
In the middle of the week, but that's actually not the only population is another population that quite apart from being kept sane is being driven crazy by the Dark Horse podcast.
We also feel an obligation to those people.
And so here we are playing our role in the universe.
Indeed.
Yeah, so as I've mentioned in the last few episodes, we have a very strange schedule coming up, so today we're going to be talking to you about the new current thing.
Who's to say what that is?
I mean, it may change in the next five minutes, but we're going to be talking to you about the new current thing today.
But first, some logistics.
No Q&A today.
Basically, when we're coming to you in the middle of the week, we are not going to be doing Q&A.
We will come to you again this Saturday, though, in three short days at our normal time, 12 30 noon, 1230 Pacific on Saturday, May 7th, and we'll have a Q&A after that.
And then it's going to be two and a half weeks before we come back to you again.
We've got a lot of travel that we've just been doing, and it's coming up on Thursday, May 26th, and then Saturday, May 28th, and then a few Saturdays thereafter.
So We are trying to get a few of these episodes in because, as Brett said, we are so grateful for our audience and for the impact that we understand ourselves to be making.
So, um, we encourage you, as always, someone has stolen my prop.
Someone has stolen my copy of A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century.
Brett.
Why do you think it was me?
You're the only other person.
It doesn't matter.
We encourage you to read this book, which provides an evolutionary toolkit to modernity, and in fact, to grappling with the new current thing almost no matter what it is.
It's been COVID for a while, it was Ukraine for a while, and we'll be talking today about what it is now.
I just think we need to get our terminology in order.
It is useful for grappling with the current current thing.
Right?
That way, one and done, the current current thing, whatever it happens to be, this book will help.
I hope so.
I think so.
I hope so, yes.
We are live streaming right now on YouTube and Odyssey, and the video will also be available on Spotify, and then of course the audio anywhere you find your podcasts, Apple, etc.
In Natural Selections, my sub stack this week, I posted on the idea that seems to be common in many circles now, that if you don't agree with me it must be because you're ignorant.
And we're going to be sharing a little bit about that today, including the naming of the phenomenon by Dr. Ilana Redstone, who I was privileged to re-meet this week.
And I guess the only other logistics are to once again thank our audience.
We are supported by our audience.
We appreciate you subscribing and liking and sharing both the full videos that you can find here, wherever you're watching, and also at Dark Horse Podcast Clips, which are the stations?
That's not right.
What are they called?
Channels.
Channels on both Odyssey and YouTube.
Yeah, the Eclipse are very shareable, and they make great gifts.
Not really, but... Thought I'd try it out.
I don't know.
But they're imminently shareable, and yeah, just that.
And of course, we appreciate financial support from those who can afford it.
Most weeks you can ask questions on our Q&A.
Not today, though.
We won't be doing a Q&A.
You can join one of our Patreons where we have monthly private Q&As, and Brett has conversations.
With people, and of course we have sponsors, which we started doing a little more than a year ago, and we are grateful to them.
All of the sponsors that we read ads for are for products or services that we actually and truly vouch for.
So, as usual, we have three right at the top of the hour and then no more during the show.
Here we go!
Our first sponsor this week is Vivo Barefoot, which longtime viewers and listeners will be well familiar with.
Vivo Barefoot makes shoes made for feet.
Most shoes are made for someone's idea of what feet should be and be constrained by.
Vivos are made by people who know feet.
These shoes are a revelation.
We love them.
They're beyond comfortable.
The tactile feedback from the surfaces you're walking on is amazing and they cause no pain at all because there are no pressure points forcing your feet into odd positions.
They're fantastic.
Our feet are the products of millions of years of evolution.
Humans evolved to walk, move, and run barefoot, but modern shoes that are overly cushioned and strangely shaped have negatively impacted foot function and are contributing to a health crisis, one in which people move less than they might, in part because their shoes make their feet hurt.
Vivo Barefoot shoes are designed wide to provide natural stability, thin to enable you to feel more, and flexible to help you build your natural strength from the ground up.
Foot strength increases by 60% in a matter of months just by walking around in them.
The number of people wearing Vivo Barefoots is growing.
Once people start wearing these shoes, they don't seem to stop.
Vivo Barefoot has a great range of footwear for kids and adults, and for every activity from hiking to training to everyday wear.
They're a certified B Corp pioneering regenerative business principles and their footwear is produced using sustainably sourced natural and recycled materials with the aim to protect the natural world so you can run wild in it.
Go to vivobarefoot.com slash darkhorse to get an exclusive offer of 20% off.
Additionally, all new customers get a 100-day free trial so you can see if you love them as much as we do.
That's v-i-v-o-b-a-r-e-f-o-o-t dot com slash darkhorse.
Our second sponsor this week is MD Hearing Aid.
MD Hearing Aid was founded by an ENT surgeon who made it his mission to develop a quality hearing aid that anyone can afford.
Recognizing that about 95% of the people who need a hearing aid only require a few settings, he removed some of the less often needed components, and he cut out the middleman, and now MD Hearing Aid makes a rechargeable hearing aid that is FDA registered and costs a small fraction of what typical hearing aids cost.
These hearing aids aim to fit so well that no one will know you're wearing them.
The rechargeable batteries last up to 30 hours, their Volt Plus is water-resistant and up to 3 feet of water, and you don't need a prescription.
You buy it directly from the source, where audiologists and licensed hearing specialists are available 7 days a week.
Everyone can empathize with what it feels like to be left out of a conversation that others are enjoying.
Here's a testimonial from a friend of ours who has substantial hearing loss and who relies on hearing aids.
We asked her to try this product, since it doesn't make sense for us to do so, and this is what she said.
With my particular type of hearing loss, a deep male voice in a noisy room is the hardest situation for me to hear and understand speech.
I wore the MD hearing aid to have a conversation with a deep-voiced man in a room with a lot of white noise.
The MD hearing aid passed the test, as my conversation partner's voice was clear and understandable.
At a price point of under a thousand dollars, I was amazed at how effective they are." End quote.
MD Hearing Aid has brought affordable hearing to over 600,000 satisfied customers.
They offer a 45-day risk-free trial with a 100% money-back guarantee.
Get clinic-level care for 80% less with MD Hearing Aid.
Go to mdhearingaid.com and use promo code Dark Horse to get their buy one get one deal.
A pair of hearing aids cost just $299.99.
Plus, they are adding a free extra charging case, $100 value, just for listeners of Dark Horse.
So head to mdhearingaid.com.
Use our promo code Dark Horse, or you can even call them at 1-833-772-1392.
Our final sponsor this week is one we are very excited about.
It's a new sponsor, and I must say I don't do giddy, but I really couldn't be more thrilled to have this one as a sponsor.
It is Ralston College.
Ralston College is a new institution of higher education.
I think of it as the just-in-time university.
It is located in Savannah, Georgia.
It is both a revival and a reinvention of the university, an intellectual home for all those who seek truth with courage.
It offers online courses, podcasts, and live lectures.
This year, Ralston College is launching its first in-person degree program, a Master's in the Humanities.
The program features a multidisciplinary curriculum of philosophy, literature, art, music, and architecture, focused on the history and concept of the human self.
It starts with a term of language study in Greece.
For those of you who are interested in doing some Greco-Roman, this is perfect for you.
It's really not.
Greco-Roman.
No.
That's a decent pun.
Students will live and study on the island of Samos and will travel to key sites of the Hellenic world such as the Parthenon and Delphi.
The year will continue in Savannah, Georgia on a campus in the Historic Center.
All successful applicants will receive full scholarships.
Extraordinary students who seek to do the hard thinking our time demands are encouraged to apply.
The deadline for applications is May 21st.
Visit Ralston.ac slash Dark Horse.
That's R-A-L-S-T-O-N dot A-C slash Dark Horse for more information about this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
And I will say... Do you want to just end the ad read and let us riff a tiny bit about this?
Sure, let's do that.
Yeah, this is now us just talking on our own.
Let's just say we have had a conversation with the head of Ralston and we are very excited for multiple reasons.
One, we all know that something has to address the vacuum left by the collapse of the Academy and, you know, frankly anything that succeeds at the job is welcome.
But it is also the case that Ralston seems, when I first heard about it, I was a little dubious because it was very online.
But it turns out the plan is very much to have a physical campus, which will create an environment where the kind of teaching that you and I got so familiar with and used to such good effect at Evergreen can happen, which is marvelous.
But it also seems distinctly aware that removing the woke from the university system is necessary but not sufficient to build a system that works.
And so, in any case, this is an experiment that I think should very much be on everyone's radar and is a very hopeful sign at a moment when there are not so many hopeful signs.
Indeed.
So I will say that I was in Austin this weekend at a University of Austin event at the first First Principles Summit.
I think it's going to be the first First Principles Summit.
At any rate, the first summit.
And there are a lot of really extraordinary people there.
And
One of the things I said informally to the group as we were just being introduced to one another the night before the full day of sort of getting down to business was that I'm hopeful the University of Austin can be such an institution, and I did not, someone else actually did mention Ralston by name, but what I said without mentioning any other institutions by name, and there's actually a third initiative that we're aware of that we aren't going to be talking about publicly yet, we should all want
all of these initiatives to survive and to be extraordinary, to push each other to be their best selves and, you know, maybe more importantly yet, to therefore push any existing institutions that can still save themselves, that can still pull themselves out of their death spiral, to wake up and fix themselves and go far, far beyond, as you said, far, far beyond not being woke anymore, but to actually far beyond not being woke anymore, but to actually recovering the goals of of higher ed, to
To both honor and respect orthodoxy, and to leave space well open for heterodoxy, and to not confuse the new orthodoxy with something that is still heterodox, and preserve that at the cost of all else, and to not deny reality, and to not pretend that we aren't living shared lives in which we are dependent on one another.
I will also add another important sign in that direction is that Ralston is not going to have a vaccine requirement as I understand it for incoming students and what that means from our perspective is that as far as we know all defensible positions are welcome at Ralston and shouldn't that be a founding principle of every university?
Indeed.
So anyway, it's a great thing and we are very glad to have them As sponsors, and we are very pleased to be in conversation with them.
We hope and expect good things will come from this.
Indeed.
And just, you know, the ad read is long since over, but just to remind people, the reason that this is coming up right now is that May 21st is Ralston's deadline for applications for their first in-person degree program, which is an MA in the humanities, which will begin with a term in Greece doing language study and other study.
And you do not have to like the pun about doing some Greco-Roman.
That's a relief.
That's not required.
Yeah.
Reasonable people can differ over the quality of that pun.
Excellent.
Excellent.
Okay, so here we are.
Here we are midday on a beautiful spring day in the Pacific Northwest.
But of course, and our epic tabby Fairfax, for those of you just listening, has shown up, is interested in the birds.
He's thinking about spring, as all of us in the Northern Hemisphere ought to be free to do, and yet we are constantly compelled now to think only about the new current thing.
What is it that has grabbed us and dragged us this week?
into a frenzy of anger and retaliatory social media posts and frustration and depression sometimes and anxiety and, you know, all of the things that keep us at fever pitch, far from our best selves, far from being the most productive, creative, caring, loving, compassionate people that we can be.
So I thought, briefly this moment, So the new current thing, as you have said before here, was I believe Mark Andreessen's framing a couple many weeks ago now, basically when Putin, when Russia invaded Ukraine and suddenly no one's talking about COVID and everyone's talking about Ukraine and everyone's replaced needles with Ukrainian flags in their Twitter avatars, etc.
Andreessen said something to the effect of The new current thing is what we're allowed to talk about.
We are allowed to be nuanced about the... somehow he pointed out that we were allowed to be nuanced about the last current thing, but you're not allowed with the current current thing.
Right, and you know, it's not, the nuances, the being allowed to have nuance is going to take time, right?
So, you know, we're not really allowed to have nuance about COVID yet.
Oh no, you and I never will be.
That was my extension of this principle, is that we will never be vindicated no matter how right we were, because that's not how it works.
You can't very well vindicate people who were trying to be nuanced in real time, otherwise you validate the concept of being nuanced.
But if you were certain before, you're now allowed to quietly change your opinion without ever acknowledging it in any way and move forward.
Right, and in fact the powers that be, that presumably, whether they orchestrate these things or not, love the current thing, right?
Because it keeps us so divided when otherwise we might recognize what's going on.
Those people, they actually really like the folks who rush in, you know, a day late and a dollar short with the nuance because the point is that is who we then will herald as having been correct in order not to vindicate the process of being nuanced in real time.
Right.
That can be pointed to as if that is the success of democracy and discourse and all such.
Yep.
So the new current thing could have been the release of, boy I've seen it variously reported, but many tens of thousands of pages of documents from Pfizer this week.
That's a lot of documents.
Go on.
Which was on the calendar.
The date when it was going to be released was no surprise to anyone.
We have not gone through the many tens of thousands of pages in the Pfizer documents, and in fact, you know, we've both looked at it a little bit.
A little bit.
Search in any browser of your choice, you know, be it, you know, go Big Brother and go Chrome or go Brave or go, you know, anywhere in between.
Go Brave or go home.
That's my feeling.
Go Brave or go Chrome.
No!
Terrible.
I know.
So search in any browser on Pfizer data release or Pfizer documents.
Don't put in the words like data dump.
Don't put in the words that clearly have the connotation of the people who already have an opinion about this.
Put in as neutral search terms as you can, and at least as of mid to late morning Pacific time today on May 4th, 2022, nobody in the mainstream media is saying word one about this massive, this is the second of what's to be many, court-mandated release of documents.
And it was, as you said, on the calendar, and no one's saying anything about it.
And given that the mainstream media isn't saying anything about it, it can't possibly be the new current thing.
Right?
It's not allowed to be.
Pfizer is not the new current thing.
Right.
I want to point out about this mandate.
Pfizer wanted to wait 75 years before delivering these documents.
The court forced them to do it on a rapid schedule and there are bombshells in all of it.
And I don't know what all is in this one.
It's going to take time for people to carefully sort it out, but there are certainly indicators in there.
about what Pfizer knew and didn't know about the effect of its vaccines on pregnant women, on breastfeeding women.
And on the disease itself that it is supposedly vaccinating against.
And on the disease, the efficacy is the correct term of its vaccine relative to the outcomes, the contracting COVID.
And what was the last thing that was?
Oh, no, I don't remember.
But anyway, there are a number of interesting things in there that are definitely going to unfold over time.
But of course, we probably won't hear very much about them because the new current thing is so irresistible.
Yes.
The leak from the Supreme Court and the future of Roe vs. Wade is the new current thing, of course.
So that is what we are going to spend some time talking about today.
Yes.
Now I do think, you know, we have to pressure test Andreessen's point about the current thing, right?
I do think one challenge to it is that we have had something like four current things in the last few months in rapid succession.
And maybe that is part of the model.
Maybe that this, you know, to me, One always has to wonder whether or not the events that we see are fully organic, which is unlikely, fully synthetic, which is unlikely, or some mixture of the two.
And so which of these things are orchestrated to capture our attention and keep us nicely divided so we don't recognize our common interests?
Which of these things are just the unfolding of history in the way that it will, we don't know.
Augmented and exacerbated by the speed of communication that is not just possible, but almost required by social media.
Right.
And so, you know, we've had everything downstream of COVID was, you know, was the current thing for a very long time.
We've had Ukraine, we've had Elon Musk, Twitter, and free speech.
We've had Leah Thomas winning women's swimming.
Right.
So we've had these like... Winning, for those just listening, was in scare quotes.
We've had these brief current things, which may or may not... We will have to ask Mark what he intended and which of these things he thinks counts, or whether they all fit, because They simply do the the job of keeping us at each other's throats, but nonetheless it is certainly worth everything.
We are going to talk extensively today about the current thing, because what choice do we have?
No, I guess I, and I think I framed it kind of that way too, and I wanted to walk that back a little bit.
We have a lot of choice, and in fact, in general, it is not in our interest, or your interest, our audience, or anyone's interest, to feel compelled to think on and listen to thoughts on the new current thing, because we are being told that that is what one must think on.
It's precisely the opposite.
But in this case, There is sufficient overlap both with our expertise and many of the other cultural things going on at the moment that we are going to do so, you know, whereas by comparison, for instance, we said very little about Ukraine.
This is this is true And I also do not mean to imply that we actually have no choice but to talk about whatever is being delivered But in your case in my case There's actually every reason that I think we need to talk about this one that there is in fact a lot of content in
Relative to what it means that Rho V Wade is likely to be overturned here that is explicitly biological and evolutionary and frankly trying to do this without those pieces of toolkit available is a Incredibly dangerous and be a fool's errand, right?
These things are highly relevant So I think in your case in my case, we don't really have a choice, but I was being facetious about Of course, we must talk about whatever they want us talking about but in so doing Let us keep track of the two things separately, right?
And maybe it's even three things.
There's a, hey, the current thing has just been delivered.
Utterly predictable that it would captivate everyone, right?
It has been delivered by some force that wants us talking about it.
Whether that is one rogue individual who felt that this needed to be delivered into the world, or something larger than one rogue individual who had a purpose in making the conversation divert to this, we don't know.
But nonetheless, somebody wanted us talking about this, and we need to track what it is that that somebody hoped to accomplish.
It may be narrow, it may have to do with Roe v. Wade, it may be that they were trying to Change what the court was going to do and that public pressure was to be exerted.
But nonetheless that is an important question.
The second thing that is important is the fact of the leak itself, which is not absolutely unprecedented, but is close to it.
And so what kind of change does that imply about the rules of play in our system as it were?
Some of us think it's very dire.
Actually, others are like, well, okay, so we learned about this a few weeks early.
What's the big deal?
I'm definitely over in the, this is a very serious change in the way things are done.
It compromises the court even more compromised than it's already become.
And that's, that's danger.
It increases the danger to us.
Maybe we need to just say in a couple of sentences what has happened, because some people may not actually know, and you're smirking, but we also hope that people will listen to this, not right now.
And it is an error, always, of communication, and specifically of anything that attempts to be educational, to assume that your audience already knows what you're talking about and to just launch.
So, in February, I believe, there was a case heard by the Supreme Court of the United States, and there was a majority opinion drafted then with Justice Alito as the lead author.
with four other justices signing on, making it a five to four decision.
The four other justices being Clarence Thomas and then, and I am not casting aspersions here, but just for sort of Categorization purposes, the three appointees from the Trump administration, we have Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Coney Barrett signing on to the majority opinion that in its draft form was leaked, written by Alito, leaked this week, like two days ago, I guess.
And it makes it clear that the court is arguing that Roe v. Wade, the landmark So that is a nutshell.
Handed down by SCOTUS by the Supreme Court of the United States in 1973 Which provided federal protections for American women to get abortions?
Before the fetus is viable Will be overturned so that is that is a nutshell.
I hope I didn't make any errors there.
I didn't hear any So the document emerged in Politico.
People have argued that Politico is guilty of something for publishing it.
This is nonsense.
They were behaving in a journalistically responsible way.
Journalists can do what they do with what they get.
Right.
Whether or not they should have been given the document by anybody, the fact that they have the document makes it legitimate for them to report on.
This is a well-established principle and so they did that.
Right.
In any case, it emerged.
And so what we have is kind of a snapshot of the majority opinion back on, I think, February 10th, right?
That's quite a while ago in, you know, current thing time.
So it is possible that the And I should say, I have it open here.
I've not read all of it, but I've read some of it.
It's a 98-page opinion, as you would expect.
This is not a two-page brief.
This is a substantive document.
A substantive document, and most of the people who have intense opinions about it won't have read it.
Won't have read it.
And I think that's a terrible mistake because at least even just understanding what reasoning the court is deploying, the majority is deploying in presumably, you know, we don't know that the court in May of 2022 is in the same place that it was in early February.
It is not uncommon, I think.
I'm not a legal scholar, I'm a biologist, but it is not uncommon for the back and forth over these things to cause some wobble, and this is part of the reason that the veil behind which the court functions is so important, is that the court is actually a deliberative body, and That deliberative body, if it is, you know, just as Twitter is not an ideal place to discuss, you know, religion, right?
The court, if it has to do so in public, is not going to be in a position to, you know, to explore arguments as fully as they need to in order to serve the public's interest.
So, anyway, that veil was breached.
Somebody released this, which could mean You know, almost anything.
It could be a justice, it could be a clerk, it could be that some state-level actor tuned into communications and hijacked the thing and thought that creating chaos at the moment would be a good idea.
We don't know.
So before I say a little bit about just my position on abortion generally, you were framing a couple of things that you thought we need to keep track of, and I'm not sure they're actually things that I feel compelled to keep track of, but so far they were
There's the purpose of the leak, whether there's something else that we are not paying attention to that we probably should at this moment, that's an important question.
There's the fact of the leak, doesn't matter what you think of the content, doesn't matter what you think of the subject.
Right?
The fact of a leak is an important change in the way things function.
It is, you know, it's like the foul becoming an acceptable move, the intentional foul becoming an acceptable move in basketball, right?
It changes the game.
And then there's the question of the content itself, which has to be divided into two, right?
There's the question of, should abortion be a federally protected right?
And then there's a question of, is Roe the proper way to do that?
And these two things, there are lots of people, myself included, who believe that there should be a federal protection, but believe that actually Roe is a terrible way to do this, and that history has been shaped by the feebleness of that mechanism.
So I will say that I am even farther from a legal scholar than you are, because I don't have any lawyers in my natal family, whereas you do.
Don't rub it in.
It wasn't meant as an aspersion, but perhaps you could take it as one.
But I have talked to smart and, you know, beyond smart, beyond capable lawyers on both sides of this ideological divide.
um who have argued people lawyers who understand law well on both sides of this they do think that abortion should be a federally protected right or they do not believe it who say regardless of whether you think uh that the U.S.
should end up with abortion having a federally protected right uh that Roe should not stand that it itself is not is not good law and in fact um very quickly in the Alito document
The leaked document he starts and you know this is this is where I was skimming a lot because you know he starts to make on behalf of the five justices who are signing on to this that argument precisely that that this this was based in you know it it it borrows from precedent and too many amendments it seems inconsistent and I'm sort of going to drop it there with regard to any legal analysis because it's not my not my wheelhouse.
Well, let's come back to that because I think it is important.
But I will say, I believe even Ruth Bader Ginsburg believed that Roe was bad law, right?
And she, I believe, equally clearly was a strong advocate for a federal protection for abortion rights.
But the problem is that Unfortunately, the way our system works, if it is to work at all, it has to work on the basis of the court interpreting the Constitution, and it has to interpret it based on, you know, a legal theory.
Is it doing so in the modern context as a sort of pragmatic
Updating mechanism that can evaluate modern reality and impose it on a static document and say here's what the law should say some people believe this sort of thing others think that the only thing that matters is Original intent right original intent could be a matter of the founders themselves It could be a matter of the thought at the time that the founders or the writers of the amendments generated their their their work, but nonetheless the problem is
That as with science, right, the system has to work.
Otherwise, the product isn't any good, right?
So you can't say that because I believe that a woman's right to choose an abortion is at least sometimes so obvious that it should have a federal protection.
The question is, was the reasoning that the court used sufficiently robust to actually sustain it?
Or does it require us to keep bailing the boat as the water is flooding in?
And I would say, you know, at the very least, we should recognize that, you know, every election that I remember every presidential election has been held hostage to this question, right?
It haunts every presidential election.
It's not its only effect.
It has many others, but at the very least, That problem is one that has a significant force in history.
It prevents us from escaping the duopoly, for one thing, because the point of the argument is, how dare you suggest anything other than the duopoly because Roe is in jeopardy, right?
That's always the argument, right?
Now, maybe that changes downstream of this decision.
It's used as a bludgeon.
You can vote your conscience next time.
This time you have to vote X because we are defending the thing that we have made sure you have to continue to care about because it is under threat.
Interesting, though, that you bring up, that you compare this to science, because I think one of, science and the law are very, very different, right?
Science is inherently, the scientific process is about trying to discover what is true, and the law, you know, legal cases would like to discover what is true, but that is not, as I understand it, the actual, like, ultimate goal, right?
It's about, are we in agreement?
I'm sort of waiting for you to jump in here with the right language for like, what is the law ultimately trying to do?
And then...
I'm sorry, I have to interrupt you in mansplain because you've asked me to do it so nicely.
But then I do want to respond to what you were saying before.
Sure.
First of all, I only mean something very narrow, which is the relationship between the process and the product is the same as the relationship in science.
I don't mean that that's wrong.
You're not answering the question.
So don't go there.
If science is about discovering what is true, what is law about?
The court is about two things, and by the court I mean all of them.
They're about two things.
They're about findings of fact and findings of law.
So the findings of fact thing is really loosely analogous to the scientific process.
What actually happened?
And then the question is, well, okay, we agree that X person shot Y person.
Both sides could agree to that.
What are the implications?
Was the person acting in self-defense or is the person guilty of homicide?
That is a finding of law.
In science, long-held beliefs do tend to continue to be held because there is precedent, although we don't tend to use that kind of language in science.
But because what we have believed for a while tends to be the easiest thing to continue to believe, it is hard to dislodge long-held but wrong beliefs.
But it is understood by everyone who is doing science that that is a necessary thing to seek, even if you personally find it very hard to for whatever your perverse incentives might be.
Whereas in the law, there is an explicit category, I'm sure I'm using the wrong word, but stare decisis, the Latin term- A principle.
A principle.
Stare decisis, which you invoke by Alito in this opinion, which basically says if it has already been established by the same body, in this case by the Supreme Court, And then you should let it stand.
And that is, you know, de facto, we all tend to do this, like the things that we have already agreed on, even if we're kind of coming to realize, oh man, maybe not, we kind of continue to do it.
And it is explicitly part of the law and explicitly not part of science.
Okay, now this gets all tangled up here.
First of all, stare decisis is interesting.
Stare decisis is effectively Latin for Chesterton's fence at some level, right?
Basically, I'm kidding of course, but what it means is... But if other people in our positions earlier came to this decision, don't mess.
If the court has settled the law, then the court needs to think really hard about the wisdom of unsettling it.
But that is not an absolute.
In fact, the court unsettles itself all the time.
And in many cases, we regard this as very important.
Now, of course, I should point out yet again, and maybe I'll do it three or four more times.
I'm a biologist.
I'm not a legal scholar.
So if I get something wrong, yeah, hey, alert me.
I'm open to it.
But take, for example, the Plessy versus Ferguson decision in which separate but equal was upheld.
Bad law.
Yeah by the court and then this was reversed with good law in Brown versus Board of Education Right.
So this is a case.
I think that's right.
Yeah in which You know the court does what the court does which is it overcomes the burden?
Hey, let's leave well enough alone with respect to cases that are already adjudicated just because the current court might have adjudicated it differently doesn't justify us opening it up and On the other hand, when the court screws up, a future court has to fix it, right?
And so that's kind of the question that we are faced with.
And of course, courts will screw up.
But I think stare decisis operates, in fact, as you say, as Chesterton's fence, as brakes on the politicization of judges.
And, you know, judges are supposed to be, of course, outside of the executive and legislative branches, but they're still human beings, just like individual scientists are human beings with biases.
And that's why we have That's why we have statistics when they're well done, and replication when it's well done, and experimental design when it's well done, all of which are baffles against the bias of the individuals doing the work.
Similarly, you have nine judges, not one, on the Supreme Court of the United States, and you have principles like stare decisis, which say, eh, not so fast.
Hold on, you have to have a really high bar, basically, before you go back and tinker with decisions that have already been arrived at.
And imagine that you didn't have this, right?
imagine that every time an administration came in and appointed a judge and it changes potentially every decision of every past court, they want it all re-litigated and the court has no bias in favor of leaving well enough alone.
I'm just in my mind, I'm watching a fixed volume in which the heat just keeps going up and it's just going to explode.
There's no United States.
The walls are beginning to bulge.
They're bulging, but the point is a system that doesn't have a bias.
So I'm not quite fixed at this point.
Right.
Oh, and this is part of why the leak itself is so important is...
Listen, these are just people, right?
We treat them as sort of, you know, in fact... These, the Supreme Court justices.
Right.
My brother points out that they dress as a kind of religious order, that they are set apart by this bizarre garb and the circumstance surrounding the court.
It's like an oracle at Delphi.
And it's obviously absurd in the context of the fact that these are just people, right?
On the other hand, it kind of needs to be that in our minds in order for it to do the job that it has to do.
And even when it does stuff that we hate, you know, it doesn't, we have to respect that the process is actually keeping us alive, even if the process does things that we disagree with and may even be, you know, border on objectively wrong.
And so, to open up, hey, I know, we can start pressuring the court by leaking stuff about their internal deliberations.
Well, suddenly now, everybody on the court is worried, you know, about how the intermediate steps will look.
And then they are, it is going to look like Twitter.
And so, it's very, the leak itself is very serious.
If you don't see why, you need to go back and rethink it because you really do want a court that has the insulation to make good decisions because sometimes those decisions could potentially be, you know, life or death for the Republic.
Yeah.
Okay.
Can we pivot a little bit?
Yes, although we should probably touch on the question of why it's bad law and what might have been better.
Okay.
We are going to spend the whole rest of the time talking about all this.
Okay, then it'll come up in line, that's fine.
You can go for it.
Okay, well let's just put it on the table then.
So I think what the court did was it effectively, there's a decision, I think it's Griswold, in which the court rolled its eyes at I believe a Connecticut law that tried to bar the use of birth control even by married people.
And the court basically said, come on, you really want the state?
You know, like, I think Pete being Tom was actually the What's the informally?
were used, functioning like a peeping Tom in the bedrooms of married people who want to make one decision or another about the use of birth control.
This is so, this is, in fact, what they said was that it was effectively treading on an informally established principle in a way that was egregious.
And so- What's the informally?
So I don't, I don't know this story.
That basically people were entitled to make a certain amount of, to do, between couples that privacy of the bedroom allowed people to do a certain amount of decision making that was outside of the purview of government to say anything about.
Oh, okay.
But as I understand it, the right to privacy is not guaranteed, right?
The Constitution does not actually provide as much as much as I would like that to be in the Constitution.
It is.
No, it's there in the Fourth Amendment.
And the problem is, I think, and again, I'm a biologist, I'm not a legal scholar, so I'm working off the top of my head.
Alito claims it's not.
But the, well, it is inferred from the Fourth Amendment, but hold on, the place where Roe is built is the Fourteenth Amendment, which invokes
um privacy as a subordinate of liberty which is in the 14th amendment and so this is where you get into hey how robust is this law anyway to protect abortion as a matter of privacy is dubious whereas it could have been protected again in the 14th amendment by the equal protection clause right and so i think this is this was Ruth Bader Ginsburg's position is that the 14th amendment
has a clause which guarantees equal protection under the law.
And equal protection under the law is challenged by the notion that you could cross the border from, this is going to be an implausible example, but from California to Nevada And, you know, on one side of that border, a woman might be fully entitled to have an abortion.
And on the other side of that border, a woman in the identical circumstance might be guilty of murder.
And the question is, is that a violation of the right to equal protection under the law for these two women?
I think that is the more robust logic that many people would have preferred.
Boy, that seems to go right into the extraordinarily large rabbit warren that is states' rights arguments.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Which is another reason that this is so contentious, is that states' rights is simultaneously an important principle, for real, and also a mechanism for dodging good law, right?
It is a kind of sabotage.
And that tension won't disappear.
That tension cannot be disappeared.
That is a trade-off that is inherent in having Exactly.
This is, it is an inherent tension.
And I would point out that that's not entirely a bad thing.
That one of the things that... Trade-offs happen.
Well, not only trade-offs happen... And tension is valuable.
It's not... I will go one step further.
A dynamic system as complex as a nation, in order to work, is going to work through principles of tension between competing values, right?
It is exactly the way... Not just valuable, but necessary.
It is the way a biological organism functions for a reason, right?
Yeah, but you... I know, but not all of our listeners will know that you are not a Equating an organism with a society.
There are ways in which society may act as an evolved organism, but it is not the same.
No, but it is the same in one way, which I believe, you know, we'll find out if I've overlooked something here.
But my basic point as an evolutionary theorist, and this I am qualified to speak on professionally, is that what you have are two complex, not complicated, complex dynamic systems in need of regulation.
And the point is, a body to function is regulated, right?
A society to function is regulated.
And the question is, how will you regulate it?
You will do so through tensions between competing things.
And everything in the body is done this way.
Everything from, you know, picking up a pen because you have two opposing muscles that can, you know, can adjust the position of your arm to your temperature, to your pH, the whole thing, right?
Dynamic tension.
The fact that there is this dynamic tension between- Competing desires on the part of disparate or not so disparate parts of the body, where everything fails if one of them wins and thus drives the other extinct.
Those competing desires may cry, foul!
Wait, I didn't get what I wanted right then!
Sorry, it's about the body.
And the body politic is not an evolved organism the same way a body is, but there is an analogy.
So anyway, those tensions I think are good.
The state's rights versus federal one is an important one.
It's an uncomfortable one.
I mean, you know, on what issue do we not find ourselves gnashing our teeth on one side or the other of this thing?
Yeah, and actually this is a good segue to kind of where I wanted to go.
It seems to me that if Roe was reversed, an American woman in need of an abortion may be able to get one only in states that, yes, have legal abortion, but also engage in affirmative care, again with the air quotes, scare quotes, affirmative care for children who declare themselves to be the opposite sex.
Notice not having affirmative care for children who declare themselves to be tractors or umbrellas, rainbows.
So affirmative care only for the sex confused, briefly sex confused children will be available in the same states where abortions are available, and it may also be those states where parents don't have parental rights if their children decide to start transitioning socially at school, for instance.
And if the parents resist this batshit nuttery, then they are potentially themselves in breach of law.
All three of those things, one of which, the first, abortion rights with limits, I am absolutely in favor of, somehow go together now.
Somehow.
And then we will have states where none of those things are likely to be possible.
And, you know, I wouldn't want to rank these things in terms of their importance, and yet I find it to be a particularly egregious and insane moment that we find ourselves potentially in that situation, choosing between states in which those are the options.
So, I want to correct one thing that you said, because... Was it about batshit nuttery?
No, no, not at all.
I thought that was beautiful.
I think I'm going to keep that one.
Yeah, yeah.
More power to you.
But, you said abortion rights, which you are absolutely in favor of, and I know what you mean, right?
You are... I said with limits.
Did you?
Yes.
My brain hung up at absolute because I know, I think, what you mean is... I said I'm absolutely in favor of with limits.
Okay, good.
Well, then maybe I don't need to... Yeah, the helicopter sound is actually, it's very realistic, but... So...
Row was passed in 1973.
We were but toddlers.
Actually, I don't know.
Four toddlers?
Something like that.
I was still toddling at the time.
Um, and we might ask though, um, how the year 2022 is not like the year 1973.
You know, we, we grew up, I actually, I don't know, you know, and not being a girl as you never were, um, I don't know the degree to which- Have not yet been.
Nope, never, never, nope.
Um, this may not have been something that your mother ever talked to you about, but, uh, my mother, um, who was, you know, Lucky and made choices such that she was never in a position to have to try to get an illegal abortion, but told me stories from her own childhood that she heard about with regard to
You know, the kinds of, you know, back alley and coat hangers, you know, these terms that everyone who's thought about pre-Roe and who is pro-choice has in their head is this sort of, you know, this boogeyman of like, this could be where we go to again.
Uh, and, um, I certainly, you know, I, like I said, I am absolutely in favor of, um, abortion with limits.
Legal abortion with limits.
Um, but it is different now.
It is, so it's different.
There are more options.
There are, there are, um, chemical options.
Abortifacients.
For terminating, uh, unwanted pregnancies that didn't exist before.
And there are more ways to both spread funds and communicate between people, such that a kind of, you know, an underground situation that wasn't even all that underground seems much more plausible.
You clearly want to jump in here.
Well, I think those two, Plan B or its equivalent, and the different environment that would allow people to have good information, but there's also just simply the different A much relaxed social environment in which the stigma is greatly reduced.
The stigma of what?
The stigma of having become pregnant under unmarried circumstances, for example.
There's effectively, there's very little.
So that's going to run, well, presumably in some cultures and some subcultures and demographics there is still, but I feel like that runs in the opposite direction to the other two.
That the relaxed stigma means that there may be more unwanted pregnancies that people might end up wanting to terminate, whereas the other two
The other two changes mean that even if Roe gets overturned and is not quickly replaced with something else that guarantees the right to abortion across all 50 states, that young women will have access.
Well, so I agree that reduced stigma increases the chances of such pregnancies, but my point was We've got a couple things in play at once right there is the importance of the legal protection and then there's the question of how many actual pregnancies does it change the outcome of and the reduced stigma
I believe means that the number is lower because people, you know, the number of people who cannot drive to a across a state line where abortion is again going to be protected is going to be relatively small and the barriers to doing it are non-existent.
I think that is likely to be true for middle class people and higher.
I do not think that that is any more true now than it was before for poor people.
And in fact, the possibly decreased stigma against getting pregnant outside of wedlock, for instance, may mean that there is greater need and that the overturning of Roe means that there may mean that there is greater need and that the overturning of Roe And we know there will be at some level immediately reduced access, right?
So, there's a lot to say here, but how about this?
Let me go here next.
And I still haven't actually, no, let me, I'm going to skip forward.
I wrote about abortion in 2018, and I want to just share the first three paragraphs of that piece, and I'll link to it.
This was when Justice Kennedy had just announced retirement, and before Kavanaugh had ascended to the bench, I didn't know if ascended was the right word, I was trying to avoid the word ascended.
I think it is physically elevated so we can justify ascending.
Okay.
And of course at that point there was a lot of discussion about what that might mean for Ro.
And so you can show my screen if you like, Zach.
Like I say, I will also post this.
Oh yeah, now it's plugged in.
Just go ahead and read.
So this was published on August 24, 2018 in Aereo, and here are the first three paragraphs.
Nobody wants an abortion.
No woman wants one, and no man who has thought about the issue wants any woman he cares about to be in a position in which she feels compelled to have one.
Sometimes, though, in the service of the greater good, abortions are necessary.
In the wake of the announcement of American Supreme Court Justice Kennedy's imminent retirement, the issue of abortion once again became central in many news feeds.
It is a topic perennially guaranteed to provoke outrage.
All the more politically useful now that former hot-button topics like gay marriage and the legalization of marijuana have slid out of the maelstrom.
In Slate recently, William Salatan argued that, quote, most Americans are conflicted about abortion.
They don't like it, but they also don't like the idea of banning it.
End quote.
This argument is backed up it by poll numbers, but the position itself is not, contrary to what Celetan suggests, a conflicted one.
Believing abortion necessary while not "liking" it is internally consistent and both nuanced and moral.
I have friends who have had abortions.
Most people probably do, whether they know it or not.
One of my friends escaped an abusive home, became addicted to heroin, and got pregnant very young, before aborting the fetus, getting her act together, and becoming a scientist.
That part where she got her act together and became a scientist?
Far less likely had she been a teenage mother.
So, I explore a lot in this piece, and I really would hope for us to be able to show my screen.
I'm wondering if there's any chance of you showing... Can you try again, Zach?
Okay.
So there's the thing that I linked to in those paragraphs with regard to what Americans think is some Gallup poll numbers, which have since... I now have the numbers through 2021 and some graphs here, which I'd love to show.
And so maybe we can come back to it.
Don't just show my screen though, Zach.
Tell me when you want to try so that I can go back to the right place.
Yes, now or yes?
Okay, okay.
The point, and Alito actually writes this in the very opening paragraph of his opinion as well, is he talks about the three groups.
He says, you've got a group of Americans who think that abortion is always wrong no matter what the circumstances.
You have a group of Americans who think that abortion should be allowed under any circumstances.
And you have a third group, and the way he writes it, it almost seems like an afterthought, maybe a fringe group, maybe a tiny group, who thinks that abortion should be allowed, but with limits.
And what the Gallup numbers reveal, and what, frankly, you think it's showing now?
Yeah, great.
What these Gallup numbers show, great, is that the majority, actually, it's not quite the majority at this point, of Americans, about half of Americans feel that abortion should be legal, about half of Americans feel that abortion should be legal, and the wording here is only under certain circumstances.
So as of 2021, the last year for which data are available under the Gallup polls, You have 19% believing that abortion should be illegal in all circumstances, 32% believing that it should be legal under any circumstances, and 48% believing that abortion should be legal only under certain circumstances.
And I don't have access or I didn't find time to figure out what the wording exactly was, but I suspect actually that those two groups of legal under all circumstances and legal only under certain circumstances would change a little bit If the language was something like, under any circumstances, but not in the third trimester unless the life of the mother or the child are at risk.
Right.
And frankly, that right there, which I hadn't thought of before, but which is a framing that many, many, many people have used, is frankly where, and you know, should it be the end of the third trimester?
Should it be in the first trimester?
Should it be halfway through the second trimester?
There's a lot of gray area there, a lot of wiggle room there, but you know, no elective abortions in the third trimester is put, you know, me having that as my strongly held belief that I have had forever.
Even when I had a much less nuanced approach to this issue in other ways, would put me in this legal only under certain circumstances category, which fully half of Americans put themselves in.
Most people, if you really ask them carefully, do not actually think that elective abortion the day before a woman is due to give birth is okay.
Right?
So, A, this is reflective of the same dynamic that the Hidden Tribes Report found across almost everything, right?
Is that there is this vast middle ground that more or less agrees within, you know, a standard nuance or two about most of the issues that supposedly we can't come to agreement about.
And what's happening is that these fringes are bossing us around.
They are causing us to understand these as unresolvable issues.
Now, Rho itself contains this nuance.
Yes.
Right?
It has the language around viability, right?
Or is it Trim?
I don't remember.
I think it was viability and then it's modified by a later decision.
Nonetheless the point is and I think one of the things that we should do is we should stop Thinking of it in terms of fine until X because that causes the brain to hang up That's not really what's going on.
What's going on is the earlier you go in pregnancy the fewer moral issues exist there at all and at the point that you're talking about, you know, a an unimplanted cluster of cells, right?
There's really only one argument against it, maybe one and a half, and it's a religious argument, which I don't think is a necessarily bad argument.
People are entitled to have their own philosophical relationship with the universe, and to the extent that they feel like, That was going to be a human being.
And who gave you the right to say it doesn't get to be one?
I don't think people who hold that unusual position are in a place to tell the rest of us how to think about it.
But nonetheless, I don't think that they are saying something insane.
I think that it never goes to zero for me.
Yeah, if they are, there are people, and it is a small minority, who have strongly held consistent non-hypocritical positions with regard to the sanctity of human life.
And I will add human there because these are not people who believe in the sanctity of life.
You know, such people do exist.
Right?
Is it the Janes?
No, it's the, there's some, There's some group, um, in, in some religious group, uh, that really, you know, doesn't, tries not to tread on, you know, anything at all, but of course we're still eating live things, you know, things that we have killed to eat them, so it's just simply impossible, um, to try to preserve absolutely all life if you are yourself alive.
So, Sanctity of Human Life believers who are consistent on abortion and on the death penalty, for instance, are, you know, that is a position that is Not one that I agree with, but is well formed and arrived at honestly.
And I would hope that such people do not end up making policy that the rest of us have to live under.
But there it is.
There is a lot of hypocrisy in a lot of the positions that people have with regard to abortion.
And, you know, as I also say, Well, I mean, a couple of things, actually.
One is that it is estimated that a majority of human pregnancies miscarry before the woman even knows she's pregnant.
And so the fact of first trimester miscarriages, that is, when the body decides, or abortions, when the individual decides on behalf of the body, Miscarriages are common and miscarriages are in fact so common in part because a lot of combinations of gametes of egg and sperm just aren't viable.
There's some problem.
Early development is a fragile and difficult process Early in pregnancy is when exposure to any kinds of toxins are particularly damaging to the fetus, and this is, you know, this is why morning sickness, this is why food aversions tend to be concentrated early, you know, early in pregnancy in that first trimester.
There's a whole lot of insult and injury that can happen to a fetus, wanted or not, that, you know, the fetus being wanted or not, that can cause it to miscarry, to self-abort.
And so the earlier in a pregnancy that an abortion happens, the less moral quandary we should find ourselves in.
But your point is, it's not a black and white line, right?
And in fact, I again make this argument, too.
There are a couple of lines that we can point to, right?
In pregnancy, and in the beginning of human life, there is birth inside or outside the mom's body.
And there's conception.
You know, have the sperm and egg met or have they not?
And those two lines are the ones that people at those two extremes seem to be fighting over.
Many of us, and I think it's actually most of us, are saying, actually, those two hard and fast lines, their only virtues are that they are hard and fast and you can point to them.
They are non-arbitrary in one way and only one way.
In one way.
You can point to it and you can say, yes, inside the mother's body or outside, born or not, yes, egg and sperm have met or they have not.
And, you know, there are some others implanted in the uterine wall, all of this, but those are the two that are easiest to point to.
And neither of them, I posit, is the right line to draw any kind of border out with regard to abortion rights.
And I would point out also that a mature discussion, and I am not under the impression that civilization at large is about to have a mature discussion about this.
But the fact is, for people in subsistence circumstances, ancestors who did not live in a technological society but were subject to the...
The whims of nature with respect to how much resource it was going to deliver, right?
The question of, you know, humanness and what happens to an individual doesn't necessarily, you know, get settled at birth either.
In other words, infanticide is something that occurs in circumstances.
It's not even just in humans, right?
We see it in other animals.
And the point is, The fluctuations in the environment mean that the decision, the physiological decision to conceive is made in one circumstance and that circumstance can change or You know that's not the only way that this happens but the point is we live in a prosperous civilization.
We are perfectly well equipped to say you know what we can solve this dicey issue and we can say you know we can all agree that at the point you are born you are deserving of the protections of a human being and we can ask whether those protections extend backwards before you were born because we can recognize the absurdity of imagining that there is something
You know magical about the instant at which you transition right and even questions of something like it's a tough word there right even questions of something like viability are absurd if you scrutinize them from a biological perspective because the fact is human beings are so utterly helpless at birth that the fact that they transition to outside of the womb and they start taking in resources through their mouth rather than their umbilical cord
Selection is itself in a way arbitrary, right?
Selection has made human offspring utterly dependent on adult care for many years after they are born.
We remain the most altricial and is the most helpless and dependent on the adults who love us for so long.
For the longest period.
Right.
Of any organisms that we know of.
So, in any case, the point is, I actually think that if we were to do this philosophically, rather than with all of our amygdalas activated and, you know, fighting the next civil war here, if we were to do this properly, we would recognize that the moral and ethical considerations actually don't even start at conception, right?
There's a question about, you know, well, what do we think about whether or not it's cool to potentially impregnate somebody that you wouldn't Wouldn't want to have anything to do with if it made them pregnant, right?
Having sex with somebody who you have no intention of partnering with Should you be allowed to do that?
I think so.
Is it a good idea?
I don't think so.
But what are we to do?
You know, is there zero moral content in that question?
I don't think so.
I think that there is a question that starts even before conception, that conception, you know, is, as you point out, has one virtue as a starting point for the discussion, which is that it's non-arbitrary, right?
And birth has that same virtue.
It's non-arbitrary, but really the fact is what you've got is kind of You know, an asymptote towards, you know, birth where we reach a place where we all agree, no, this isn't your choice.
And we have, you know, a kind of power law tale of the distribution over at conception where it's like, well, actually, there's some question about, you know, how we're supposed to be interacting with each other sexually anyway.
And, you know, The basic point is, ha ha, we kind of all agree, not necessarily on how we feel about, you know, a particular point in the developmental trajectory, but we all agree, with the exception of these fringes that push us around, we all agree on the idea.
That there's some question that gets more and more precipitous the longer this fetus has been gestating.
And the crazy part is that given that we all, not all, given that the largest group of us agree on that, that this is a function, right, that gets The moral content becomes more Concentrated and important the later in the process we're talking about we should be able to navigate this and say well, okay What do we what do we collectively think at what point do enough of us agree that?
That this is a being deserving of protections That you know, we can rule it out beyond this point.
What do we do with the The fact that we may say, oh, this, you know, fetus has gotten to a point where we believe it deserves protections, but the mother also deserves protections, right?
These are questions that can be navigated.
Yeah, no, and I think, you know, this is an issue that of course comes up in some of the religious conversations around it.
You know, a child conceived by rape, it is argued, did nothing wrong.
The child should not suffer for the sins of their father, is how the saying goes, I think, unless I butchered that, which I think I didn't.
So the child should not suffer for the sins of their father, but the woman who was raped All right, so this is actually a kind of moving, you know, moving the punishment on, you know, moving more punishment onto someone who has already been actually victimized.
And, of course, any language about victim and victimhood and victimization has become so badly destroyed.
By the insane conversations that are happening on what I insist on calling the pseudo-left of late.
That it is hard to do this and know that I or we will be able to get the careful attention of people on the right.
Because people on the right, people on say the other side of the abortion issue or just in general who say, you know what, no I'm conservative.
You know why?
Because The left, until on May 2nd, 2022, this opinion was leaked.
So many on the left were gleefully pretending that men could turn into women and women could turn into men.
And they all know they can't.
They all know that's not true.
Like, maybe there's a tiny fringe of people and I'm sorry for them.
And, you know, they are suffering mental delusions.
But everyone knows that this can't happen, that mammals aren't hermaphrodites, never have been, never will be.
This does not pretend that intersex people don't exist.
It doesn't even pretend that true trans people don't exist, on which there are reasonable arguments, right?
But the idea that, oh, well, men can get pregnant.
Nope, sorry, you know better.
You know better, you always have.
And now This dancing.
The dancing around that's happening.
Like, oh, you know, women's rights, but also, uh, if you feel like wearing lipstick, you're a woman.
Wrong.
No, women's rights, but if you're convicted of a crime, you can declare yourself a woman and go to a woman's prison, even if the crime is one of sexual assault against women, right?
Where you may end up impregnating one of the inmates, if that's the kind of person you are, and guess what?
The inverse can't happen.
Why not?
Because claim all you want, you aren't a woman and therefore you can't get pregnant.
There used to be our chickens coming home to roost at some level and I am so angry at them.
Conclusions about, um, about much of what we would like to see in the world, and how to do it, and our virtues, and our worldview have not changed.
And we have seen things just slide out from under us, and they kept the language.
Like, they kept the words.
No.
You, like, you guys over there who destroyed our ability to talk about reality, and men being men, and women being women, and you can't go back and forth, um, that, that paved the way for a, a a conservative part of the country to say, I'm not going to listen to anything you say now.
I don't believe you if you're going to argue that actually women's rights are necessary and that we need to be able to have access to abortion because it is only in that way that some number of women are actually going to be able to end up being all that they can be in the world.
It is really hard to take people seriously when they say that if yesterday they were saying, I feel like a woman today, so therefore I am.
So we have a problem in getting to that conversation, which has to happen.
Yes.
The problem is that however we got here, the The dynamics of the argument are such that anybody who strays into the middle is going to find themselves picked off, sometimes by both sides, right?
That this is a third rail issue, we've called it a buzzsaw issue.
There's no room for anybody to express nuance.
Can I just say that I discovered this week, what I should have known before, is that the episode in which we talked about Dodging the Buzzsaw, and we named it Dodging the Buzzsaw, was one of the episodes that was redacted by YouTube and no longer exists on YouTube.
Just extraordinary.
I don't know what to think about this.
I didn't even know that it had been removed.
But anyway, we should come back to that and find out what happened.
It's very odd that that seems to be gone.
But nonetheless, the point is, A, I want to revive a principle, which I don't know when the last time I discussed it was.
I don't consider myself a centrist, right?
I think I have... I call myself a reluctant radical, and what I mean by that is I think only radical change can save our civilization and maybe our species, and therefore as terrifying as radical change is, I don't think we have any choice about it.
I don't want to be a radical.
I want to get to a position where I can stand down my radicalness because I don't think it is safe.
You have said that you want to live in a society where you can be a conservative.
I want to live in a society so good that I get to be a conservative, yes.
But for the moment, I'm a radical.
I'm a progressive, and that doesn't mean I believe what most other people who use that label believe.
In fact, I disagree with them about almost everything.
But nonetheless, the problem is We need to have a conversation in the center, right?
The center is not cool because that's where the truth is.
The center is where we meet to discuss how we are going to govern ourselves when we don't agree.
And we have to have this conversation.
And frankly, all sorts of people who you and I like disagree with us on this question.
They have what is, I think, at least in origin, a religious perspective that says, look, You don't have the right to end what would become a human being at any point after that process has started.
You have the right not to produce such a person, but you don't have the right, once the process is going, to override it.
I don't agree that that's likely to be right, and we can't govern ourselves that way.
You know, as you point out, a huge majority of people disagree with that, right?
There's the almost 50% in the middle who believe... Yeah, it's more than 80% who disagree with that position.
Right.
So we have to come to some agreement about, to the extent that there are going to be limits, what are they?
To the extent that there are going to be protections, what are they?
How can we minimize the harm of both?
I guess, I mean, that's maybe, I never said the numbers together, but maybe that's the most important take-home from that Gallup polling, is that as of the last poll on abortion by Gallup in 2021, more than 80% of Americans, they imagine, if the sample is accurate, felt that abortion needed to be legal, at least in some circumstances.
Right.
It should be.
And so again, I want to point out this asymmetry, right?
There are people who hold an absolute position on this, that it is never, abortion is never permissible, right?
I don't agree with them.
And I think that actually we can analytically point out why even given most religious positions that is not the logical endpoint of the question.
But nonetheless, I respect I respect the position, right?
I do not respect the position on the other side, right?
There is this ghoulish, anti-natal, hostile to babies, frankly, position on the other side that I find despicable.
And, right, that asymmetry, I don't believe that that's my asymmetry in perspective.
I believe that that is actually an asymmetry in intent on these two sides.
Yeah, I mean, I think it's... There have been many examples, but there has been sort of glee around the idea of allowing abortion all the way through the end of the third trimester, which again is to say right up until the moment of birth.
And, you know, that's not without precedent in other cultures.
Other cultures have infanticide.
We don't want to be those cultures.
We have no interest in being those cultures.
And yes, I am saying that in that regard, we are better than that.
We are better than that, and our cultural mores are better than that.
And I'm not saying that we are universally better than People who also have infanticide as part of their culture.
But in that regard, we are better than that.
And we are better than allowing abortion in the third trimester unless there are extenuating circumstances.
Specifically, the ones that come to the top of mind are the life of the mother or the baby are at risk.
Right.
Now, we do see on the other side, politically, we see an indifference in the case of rape, for example.
Yes, we do.
I believe we have just seen the governor of Oklahoma make an important announcement in which no allowance is being made for a rape victim.
And in this case, I think It is obvious that this is a political and be what would the term be misogynistic misogynistic and Deeply inhumane.
Yes, and the point that I would make is that You know, you've already heard me say, I don't think that the amount of moral question with respect to terminating a pregnancy drops to zero, even at conception.
I think it gets low enough that we can say, look, there's plenty of room for you to make your own decisions.
But what we can't do is say, well, actually, you know, that zygote has, it's going to be a human being.
So it is a human being.
And negate the fact that there's another human being who's already very much a human being who has just suffered a Terrible circumstance and you're about to inflict a change that you know turns that into a permanent condition on her and so the point is you have to do something with respect to the inherent rights of this woman who did not choose to be raped and You know and frankly any reasonable God would take that position.
Yeah, and even so take Take that out of the discussion for the moment.
Now we're not talking about a pregnancy that's due to rape, but now about a pregnancy that's due to a consensual act, but in which neither willing partner were interested in producing a baby.
Either they were stupid, or their birth control failed, or something else, right?
The fact is that men and women are different, and again every human being has ever recognized this, and it's just in the last, you know, two minutes in human history, not even so.
That some number of people have been gleefully pretending that that's not the case, but that when such a situation happens, it is one and only one of the two people who are participating on whom the entire brunt rests right and that is unfair and it's real and there's nothing to be done about the unfairness men and women are different it's biologically unfair
it is biologically unfair and biology has handed us some number of things that render us different and in some cases that difference actually makes us unequal That's just true.
And with regard to the sexes, which, you know, there are many places we can talk about this.
I've talked elsewhere and here as well about, you know, differences in interests, greater variability in intelligence in men.
Okay, that's true.
compared to women, but, you know, same average intelligence, you know, and, you know, different amount of like myelination in the brain, different sizes of corpus callosum, like so many things besides the totally obvious things that every human being has ever noticed.
So, okay, that's true.
It takes two to tango.
It takes two to make a pregnancy.
And then we have the pregnancy is only manifest in the woman.
So this is, this is a feminist issue in that it's not just a woman's issue.
It's a human issue that pertains to men as well, but it is a feminist issue in that we should be figuring out how to decrease the number of unwanted pregnancies as much as possible.
Well, Allow women who find themselves in the position of having gotten into an unwanted pregnancy a way to get out of that as early as possible with the understanding that the woman did not get herself into that situation on her own.
There was a man involved as well.
So that not just men who are free and clear once they maybe make a mistake that results in a pregnancy, but women too can Move forward with greater wisdom, with greater caution, and with still the capacity to make the difference in the world that they want to make.
I believe that that's right, and I believe that we make this argument in a different way in our book, and I think really this is the point about the middle ground here, which is You and I are not.
We will be understood to be arguing for some return to the past, and that is exactly not what we are arguing.
We are arguing for a renegotiation.
And the problem is we had a very naive renegotiation or maybe a total failure to negotiate anything at the sexual revolution where it just became a free-for-all that has brought us to this absurd and exploitative moment in history in which... Let's let women behave like men at their worst.
Right.
Exactly, which doesn't make women happy.
Not let.
Like, let's let, actually, because you did, and you said this before, like, we aren't, like, let, for sure, but let's encourage.
Right.
Like, let's, let's really push for, you know, everyone to behave like I don't know, I won't say.
But men at their worst, right?
No, why would we do that?
Why would we encourage newly bad behavior like the bad behavior that one's sex is already engaging in sometimes?
Why would we try to spread that around?
It's not even encourage.
We actually make women feel bad if they're not into the idea of casual sex, even though
The reason I mean the irony here and one of the reasons that you have to take a evolutionary biological perspective not to figuring out what to do next but to understanding how we ended up here right the fact is in fact I saw I saw Claire Lehman say on Twitter yesterday that basically if you
She was talking to men and she said something like, if you're the kind of man who would fuck a woman that you wouldn't want to marry if she got pregnant and you oppose abortion, you're a hypocrite.
Now, I don't actually disagree with what I think she's trying to say, but the word hypocrite doesn't belong in there because the fact is men are wired to try to impregnate women who will not require them to invest.
It's something we should oppose.
It's utterly immoral.
But the point is, that is actually an evolutionary wiring and women are wired to prevent men from getting away with it.
Irony of ironies produces the asymmetry in men and women that actually causes all of the intrigue around romance, right?
This is, you know, it's a very ugly way for this dynamic to get started, but the point is actually a lot of the richness of human existence is downstream of this, right?
Forcing bad men to reveal their intent and therefore limiting your choices to good men who are interested in investing in you long term is, you know, that's what courtship is about.
And so, in any case...
I don't know how we have this discussion if we have to pretend that's not true, right?
The asymmetry exists.
It's handed to us from a long lineage of ancestors.
It is modified radically at the point that control of birth becomes a conscious choice due to technology.
Well there's a, I mean this is obviously a much longer conversation, but there's a conflation between fast easy sex that's in front of me and sexual pleasure.
And the conflation results both in the confusion that you're talking about right now, that if you yourself say, you know what, casual sex not for me, you are understood to be a prude who actually isn't interested in sexual pleasure.
Similarly, at least one more example of this, although I think there are likely to be many, is, and this is true I think more for men than for women, but if you are a man who says, actually I don't watch porn,
In fact, you are much more likely to be a wonderful partner for some woman who actually cares much more and gets more sexual pleasure yourself, but actually is able to provide more, but you are understood by society to be out of the loop, somehow weird, like what's that about, right?
And that is Backwards.
That is the backwards version of what should actually be understood with regard to, um, how, you know, how porn is twisting, uh, especially men's, especially young men's visions of what sex is and what relationship is and what sexual pleasure can be, and, um, similarly casual sex.
Yes.
A little different.
Well, so we belittle women who do not sign up for- I don't.
No.
We, society, belittle women for not signing up for symmetry with men, which, as you point out here, is absurd because we shouldn't expect them to have a symmetrical view.
Now men are certainly wired to find the prospect of commitmentless sex very exciting because it's such an evolutionary bargain, right?
And the point, I don't know if we've made this point anywhere exactly, but I would argue We have made this argument in several different places, that men have two reproductive strategies, the no-investment one and the high-investment one.
And the high-investment one is not the same as the female strategy, but it's similar in the level of investment and the level of choosiness.
It's just over-consistent.
It's three.
Well, I'm going to lump the- Okay.
So, one of them, obviously, is rape, which has happened far too much.
I mean, any is too much, but the point is there's been a lot of it, and it is a no-investment strategy, and so- I think it's not useful to lump them.
I think because, for the following reason, there are large, broadly speaking, there are three male reproductive strategies.
There is rape, which is Should be universally understood to be deplorable and and we should try to minimize that to zero there is the You know love them and leave them the CAD the CAD there's a lot of these but you're one of your students also had a Oh, So and Go?
So and Go, the So and Go strategy, which is the strategy that has historically been only a male strategy, but which now women are being encouraged to engage in.
And then there is the investment with a partner and in the Children That Result strategy, which we don't have a fancy name for, and that's maybe part of why it's not as obviously sexy.
But you were lumping those first two together, and I don't think that's useful because it will be harder for those people who are Finding success with so-and-gos.
Like, hey, this is fun.
Like, I'm not a rapist.
Like, what do you do and why would you lump me with that?
You're right.
It was my error to lump them.
And one of the reasons that it's my error is because what I said is that men are wired to find commitmentless sex exciting.
And the point is- And some cretins do it one way and some do it another way.
Right, and I would point out, just to flag for later, one of the insane things that we are allowing to happen is an awful lot of rape play in porn and elsewhere, and this is normalizing that, which is making it more likely to occur in the world, when in fact what we need to do is take the potential for rape and rule it out at the software level, right?
Societally, we need to discourage... Yeah, that's actually not okay.
Right, but nonetheless, let's take the two strategies that are short of force of men, okay?
So you've got one strategy which is so-and-go, no investment, and the other strategy which is high investment and is yin-yang symmetrical with the female strategy.
One of these, the so-and-go strategy is antagonistic.
Okay?
The high investment strategy is collaborative.
And so, in my opinion, we ought to be discouraging antagonistic sexual relations.
It's bad for society.
It's bad for the people who participate in them.
Do I want to tell you you're not allowed to do that?
No, you're allowed to do it.
But do I think it's a good idea?
No, right?
It's like, you know, if you own a beautiful house, should you, you know, go at it with a sledgehammer and have a bonfire in the living room?
No, you shouldn't.
Should you be allowed to?
I guess.
But, you know, it's not wise, right?
So anyway, I don't know I don't know whether that distinction will land for people or not But I think the point a I think it's liable to be less intuitive for women because if you're not a man You may not understand that this is actually that you know, one of the attractions that men have for women is not Collaborative or flattering right?
It's predatory and the fact is yes, we can make it low consequence so the predatory, you know, it's a it's play predation, but basically the idea of Sticking a woman with a pregnancy and not intending to take care of that consequence, yes, it's an evolutionary bargain and, you know, so might invading your neighbor country because they don't have a lot of weapons, right?
Just because it's an evolutionary winner doesn't make it defensible.
That's right.
So did you have somewhere next you wanted to go?
I had one more thing on my... I think we're getting to the end here.
Why don't you do what you're going to do?
Well, I have concern about it because people will hear it incorrectly, which I know.
Maybe we can set the stage properly.
As evolutionary biologists, we are aware of the importance that genes play in the evolutionary story.
That is inherent.
Understanding what the genes are up to is fundamental to unpacking a question surrounding human reproduction and modern tech and all of that.
You have to understand what the genes are trying to do in order to figure out how to position yourself to defeat them when they're up to no good, etc.
Right?
In no way Am I or are we advocating that we do what the genes want done?
In fact, we have very directly said we have an obligation.
The genes are amoral.
What they want is to get into the future.
Many of the ways that they get into the future are utterly horrifying and must be opposed for moral reasons.
Some of the ways that they want to get into the future are utterly beautiful and should be amplified.
It's an a la carte world.
We have to choose the things that the genes want that we should agree with and we have to choose the things that we are forced to oppose for moral reasons.
So please don't take anything I'm saying here because I'm pointing out what the genes are up to as indicating that I am in any way suggesting we go along with it.
But there's an argument I never hear about the question of abortion, reproductive rights, etc.
We frequently talk about the need, which some people don't recognize, for an exception to any limit on abortion in the case of rape, right?
You and I believe firmly that there has to be an exception.
I believe it goes beyond that.
This is not that in fact the argument for an exception is effectively Absolute, from a genetic perspective.
And the reason for that is that there has been so much rape in human history that we all, every single living human, carries the genetic potential, right?
Many of us carry it.
We're just carriers, right?
We don't transmit it because decent upbringing and all make this a non-issue.
Many of us are also women, effectively incapable of rape.
Okay, but the point is the genetic potential for rape exists in us because there's been so much rape in human history and one of the great successes of society is in reducing the amount of it dramatically by punishing it severely and pursuing instances of it.
We drive the amount of it down, which is great and we should do better.
But here's the question if we do not Carve out an exception for a woman who has been raped, right?
If we compel a woman to give birth to a child and we say, well, why punish the child, you know, for the sins of the father?
Well, it's not a question of punishing the child.
Presumably you should want that abortion as early as possible.
There is no child.
There's a potential child, but there's no child and there is a woman.
Right?
She needs to be protected.
But more to the point, if you force raped people to give birth to the children that have been produced by this act, you are creating a conduit for any genetic predisposition towards rape to use this strategy to spread itself.
Right?
We cannot open that door.
Right?
We have to keep that door closed.
And the way you keep that door closed is you provide the opportunity for anyone who finds themselves in that terrible predicament to terminate the pregnancy so that rapists are not rewarded, that their strategy cannot work.
Right?
Rape is a strategy for putting your genes into the future by overriding someone else's consent.
Right?
And we cannot allow the genes to find that mechanism and we cannot allow rapists to figure out how to exploit it.
Right?
It has to be a zero-profit strategy and that requires that exception.
That's fascinating.
I hadn't thought about it in those terms before, and I didn't know where you were going.
And I didn't expect that from you, in part because you and I both, unlike what people expect from evolutionary biologists in general, tend to find genetic explanations for human behavior in many fewer places than most people, including many non-evolutionary biologists.
Like really, we are so much more software That is to say culture and consciousness than we are hardware, which is to say genetics that explains so much of what we are behaviorally that you will very rarely hear either of us make an argument that there might be a genetic basis for behavior X.
And in fact, you didn't argue that there is or that it is strongly genetically heritable.
What you argued is, given that there might be, and it's also true that even if it's not genetic, that there might be something epigenetically that is conveyed.
um you know methylation or something right uh that uh that there is a there is an additional reason to always allow whatever other restrictions there might be um and you know i would hope that there would be you know none up through at least the end of the first trimester and perhaps halfway through the second trimester on abortions um that rape victims are allowed
exemptions to any restrictions on abortion that there are.
Although, you know, any, I'm not, there will be gray area somewhere later on. - Sure, we can.
In the development of the fetus, the zygote fetus baby.
So you're absolutely right.
I don't think that there is liable to be... So when we talk about heritable, we're talking about the differences between individuals.
And that matters here for reasons that will be obscure to most people.
But the point is, You have to have a difference between individuals in their propensity to engage in the strategy at the genetic level in order for it to be heritable in the sense.
I'm not arguing that I think those things exist.
I'm arguing that they might.
And I'm arguing that if they do, they can't become an advantage or they will be elaborated.
So you're right.
You saw exactly why I structured it the way I did.
But I would also point out, given what you and I do believe, which is that, you know, Human genes are spectacularly unique in one important regard, which is that they create a mind in which all of the important stuff of humanity takes place on the software side, not the hardware side.
That's the strange and amazing thing about the human genome.
But even given that, and even given what it says about where these propensities are housed, the same argument still applies, right?
Who, whether he consciously understands what he's up to or not, is getting off on the idea of having sex with some fertile person and her dealing with the consequences and him walking away.
That person needs to know that there is no product of his activity that the state is going to force into being.
Okay, so to your credit, I think you do a terrible job caricaturing the mind of a rapist.
But I hear the arguments that will come back, like, oh, you know, rape isn't about sex, it's about power.
Wrong.
But, oh, no one's thinking about whether she's fertile or not.
It's like, I don't care what's in the conscious mind of the rapist, and I am quite certain that almost no rapist ever has had anything like the kinds of thoughts that you just imagined were in their minds, not consciously.
That doesn't mean that the strategy doesn't exist.
Well, let me take away the two negatives.
Still, the strategy does exist because it has functioned that way, regardless of what has been conscious in rapists' minds.
Yeah, so I'll say it yet a third way, which is something excites the rapist, and to the extent that it might be the prospect that the state is going to effectively side with them, no.
The state has to side with the woman.
It's unambiguous, and I agree.
Let's put it this way.
The absurdity of the religious position that would have to exist, and I know it does in some minds, but if you've thought about this issue, right?
Who exactly is this God that would cause one person to rape another and then condemn the raped person to give birth to the offspring of the rapist?
Now I'm not arguing- God loves her less?
Right.
What the hell?
What kind of God are we talking about?
Or, you know, did your God create a universe in which things happen and they put us in circumstances where we have to make uncomfortable judgments, and this is one of those things.
Right.
You know, I feel like almost all religious people would have to recognize that if they came to the table and looked at the actual, not just the issue that they're focused on, but the other issues that it is in tension with.
And in this case, there clearly are other issues.
Indeed.
Well, I think we've come to the end of it.
Yes.
You don't mean the end of civilization.
I don't know.
Hey, that could be the next current thing.
We'll be back in three days unless civilization has ended by then.
So we really will.
We'll be back in three short days.
You covered your bases there.
My god is it loud here today.
Um, well we're getting, we're, we're leaving the live stream just in time because someone nearby has decided to break out their, their gardening tools.
No, that's bees.
Not bees!
Very angry.
This is far beyond Africanized.
These are Antarcticanized bees.
Antarcticanized.
Actually, those look like snow bees.
Yeah, yeah, they are, they are badasses.
I mean, they wear perkas, but... Yeah, like wattle.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's not the waggle dance, it's the waddle dance.
Yeah, exactly.
Oh, Maddie knows it's over.
Okay.
Oh, we can't see her.
All right, we won't do a Q&A today, but we'll be back in three days on May 7th on Saturday at our usual time, and we will do a Q&A then.
In the meantime, boy, lots of things I could say, but let me just leave it at be good to the gun...
Try again.
I'm gonna try it again.
Be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
