Drag Queen Science Hour: The 243rd Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
In this 243rd in a series of live discussions with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying (both PhDs in Biology), we talk about the state of the world through an evolutionary lens.In this week’s episode, we discuss the evidence for the traps being laid by Goliath, continuing last episode’s discussion of the presidential debate. Then: sex, gender, meaning, and identity. What kind of science is being done that concludes that sex and gender are not just distinct, but unrelated? And why are 10 year ol...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream number 243.
Did I get it this time?
That's right.
243.
No clue what you can divide into 243, but probably a bunch of things.
3, 9, 27, 81.
That's a lot.
- Nine.
1 and 243.
- Oh goodness. - 27. - Yeah. - 81. - That's a lot. - One and 243. - Yeah.
So there's just nothing remotely prime here.
Right.
So anyway, lots going on.
You of course all saw us very recently if you're keeping up on Dark Horse, but we're back and the rate of stuff happening in the world is so high that even packing live streams together doesn't leave enough time to discuss it all.
Yeah, except we're not going to discuss anything that's happened since the last live stream, are we?
Oh yeah, we are.
Yes, we are.
Okay.
Thank you for being here.
Watch party going on live on Locals right now.
Please join us there.
We have a Q&A tomorrow on Locals at 11 a.m.
Pacific, and we're going to be back with another livestream on Tuesday, this Tuesday, and then take a break for a while, and the next time you might be able to see us is September 29th in D.C.
for Rescue the Republic Rally.
And speaking of that, can I just say that the Unity Movement, which will be gathering in one form in DC on December 29th, is going to be having a preliminary meeting today on X in Spaces at 2.30 Pacific Time, which is 5.30 Eastern Time.
So anyway, check out the Twitter spaces and come join us.
Lots of interesting people will be present.
I think it's a meeting not to be missed.
Excellent.
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All right.
Shall I start?
If you like.
Okay.
So we spoke last time, which was several days ago.
How many days ago was it?
Three.
Three days ago.
We spoke last time about... Can I interrupt?
Yes.
What does that say?
It's as healthier ground up.
Yeah.
It's... Because it's interpretable, and you would never say this, you would never write this down as, Heather, shut up.
I did not write that.
I can prove it.
My handwriting is doing me no favors.
No, don't shut up, please.
Continue as usual.
All is well.
Right, so we talked last time about traps in the social media environment.
My claim was that although Goliath has underappreciated the power of social media and podcast space, that it has become alarmed by the success of that space in defeating the public narrative.
During COVID and it has started targeting those of us in this space with traps that are designed to embarrass and Eliminate any credibility we might have and so I wanted to point out that in the space since our last podcast and this podcast a space of only a couple of days One of the traps has indeed been sprung, as I described it.
So you will recall that after the debate, that there was scuttlebutt online about the earring that Kamala Harris was wearing in the debate, which appears to match very closely the, um, an earring that is available that allows people to have Bluetooth connectivity, um, without having an earbud in.
You want to play the clip of what I said?
Can't play?
Oh no.
Okay, we're having technical difficulty.
But what I said in the clip is that the fact that the earring in the debate appears to be a match for this readily available Bluetooth earring uh was very likely to turn out to be a false lead and i said i don't know how that's going to play out but very likely there will be some other earring that doesn't have bluetooth connectivity that looks like it um
Or I offered that as a possibility and what has happened is it turns out that in fact there is an earring and in fact Kamala is known to wear it.
There's some very fancy $800 pair of Tiffany earrings that looks just like the thing and this was revealed.
So here's a tweet revealing the Tiffany earring that Kamala is known to wear that appears to be Similar, we can debate back and forth whether it's the exact earring, but certainly this looks like a nothing burger that will have embarrassed anybody who jumped on the idea that there was something anomalous about how well Kamala performed in that debate and will have leapt to the conclusion
That she was having somebody was talking to her ear in her ear and remember I said during that discussion that was very unlikely to be the mechanism because that would have caused her speech to be halting if somebody's talking in your ear it's very hard to be repeating what they're saying so either it would have been very little being said in her ear in which case there's no need because she had lots of preparation time she could just So anyway, this looks like a trap that we were correct about and has now been sprung.
It's a minor one.
But it does prove the point, more or less.
We can't say for sure that this was a plan but it certainly has all of the hallmarks of it.
Yeah, I don't think you mean it proves it.
Yeah, it doesn't prove it.
It satisfies a prediction of the model that you presented, but there are other possible explanations.
Right, but I would point out that because the prediction precedes the revelation here, that it is more than just an observation that this matches the pattern of a trap.
I said, hey, this looks like a trap to me.
I will point out there's another piece of information that I either was not aware of or was not focused on yet that points in the same direction.
Which is there was something anomalous going on on the other side of Kamala's head which I noticed because I'm I don't know a guy but her hair was Bizarrely frozen in place in a way that people who have experience in film tells me They tell me that it is a trick that is used in Hollywood to hide an earpiece A new hair that is stuck down in an unnatural way.
So this could be a second piece of bait suggesting the way the magic trick was done was somebody was talking in her ear.
I don't buy it for a second.
I don't think you could have delivered the performance she delivered with that.
And it took a matter of hours to reveal that there was in fact an innocent or innocent seeming explanation for The earring in question, but that's then leads to, um, the next issue, which is.
Something else emerged that matched what we talked about, uh, on our last live stream, which is a, uh, stay in account.
I did not recognize claiming that they have or have seen an affidavit that will be emerging this coming week.
Um, so can you show the inner tweet there?
Is that possible?
I will read it from an account called Black Insurrectionist and it says, I will be releasing an affidavit from an ABC whistleblower regarding the debate.
I have just signed a non-disclosure agreement with the attorney of the whistleblower.
The affidavit states how the Harris campaign was given sample questions, which were essentially the same questions delivered during the debate.
That's probably good enough.
Now there's a question about whether or not this affidavit that we are told is going to emerge is real evidence of cheating in the debate or whether the promise of an affidavit is going to cause accounts to jump and start retweeting it thinking that the evidence that the debate was a fraud is shortly to emerge only to be embarrassed later when it doesn't or when the affidavit does emerge and it turns out that the source of the affidavit is
Compromised or who knows what the mechanism will be.
But again, if the idea is that Goliath is very interested in unhooking the capacity of independent voices to call out their nonsense, that creating false leads and then blowing them up in a way that causes embarrassment will be a go-to technique.
So, do I know that that will happen here?
No, but it certainly does have that appearance.
Why tell us that an affidavit is coming rather than give us an affidavit or wait till next week and show us the affidavit, right?
Why give us the warning?
That's a perfect run-up to get people to harm their own credibility based on stories that are too good to be true.
And before I let you jump in, let me just say, I think the punchline here is You've got low-hanging fruit, or is it bait?
You see low-hanging fruit, is that really what it is, or is it low-hanging fruit because it's bait?
And in all of the cases, the fact that something is, you know, too good to be true, probably too good to be true from the point of view of people who, you know, are trying to explain what happened in the debate, for example.
Too good to be true probably is too good to be true.
You had something you wanted to say?
No, I really don't.
Okay.
I guess I don't know this landscape, so when you say, you know, why introduce the idea of an affidavit rather than just waiting to introduce the affidavit, I have no idea what the landscape might look like under other conditions.
So, it's very hard, and I suspect that I'm not alone in this regard, right?
Like, it just happens to be a part of the modern landscape that some educated people are very familiar with and some educated people have no familiarity with.
So, my sense listening to that is, you know, if it hinges on, you know, why introduce the idea of this before introducing the thing?
I don't know.
I have literally no idea what the history of such things is.
Without knowing basically what the population distribution of announcements about affidavits relative to the timing of the affidavits themselves looks like, I have no idea even to what degree I should be surprised here.
Well, I think in some ways that's exactly the point.
I think most of us are in exactly that position.
And so if you've got a lot of people who are trying to get their footing in social landscape space and, you know, they have a vague sense of what an affidavit might be, The idea that it is a, you know, in some way legally binding document in which somebody is effectively, you know, attesting to something in some way that could harm them if it turned out not to be true, that sounds like it's an important kind of evidence.
And the point is, well, I don't think it really is.
Not that I know, I'm not a lawyer, but The point is that, you know, what is the quality of the source and what is the mechanism by which they're producing an affidavit that says this is going to harm them?
You know, in part, it probably depends on whether or not ABC is inclined to go after them.
And if ABC, you know, if this is a trap, then ABC might not be inclined to go after them or might be inclined to go after them briefly and then drop it or something like that.
So anyway, I guess, It's tantalizing from the point of view that it sounds better than hearsay.
But at the moment, what we have is hearsay about a legal document that is maybe one step better than hearsay, if it even exists.
But it is alluring because we don't know that it actually doesn't really mean anything.
And that's what I'm getting at.
It's tantalizing is that, you know, we said on our podcast something, or I said, I'll take responsibility for it.
I said, I thought this looked like somebody who had had a long time to prepare with the questions they knew they were going to get, that this was very polished and that even somebody who was good at debating would tend to be, uh, less polished because they're thinking in real time and, and all of that.
So, you know, This looks like, aha, it was really true.
They had the questions and affidavit is coming.
So it kind of looks like a bait that, you know, I would tend to look past the defects of, and I'm just saying, Hey, I look at this and I say, well, wait a second.
And what do I know that I didn't know before I saw that tweet?
Nothing.
Some account I don't know has promised me something I have no information about.
Right.
So, but, you know, the prediction then that you would appear to be making is either the affidavit somehow is not forthcoming, which would be very damning of, um, any suggestion from, you know, someone else that, you know, you're being conspiratorial and, um, and, uh, it's just not thinking clearly.
Um, or I guess the other prediction is the affidavit does show up, but it doesn't mean what this tweet suggested it meant.
Now, that, too, could be explained away as, well, yes, people jump the gun, they misunderstand, they get overeager.
One would expect, if you're right about the traps, and I grant that there is growing predicted but still anecdotal evidence of traps that they would be built so as to be maximally explanatory through normal means.
Yes.
Precisely so that There are things that could happen that would make it really clear that this was a trap, but those things are unlikely to happen, precisely because the antagonist here, such as it is, Goliath, whatever the amalgam entity is here, is certainly smarter than to set a trap wherein it can be discovered through obvious means.
Right.
And so my point is then the only tool we really have is prediction if we can say here's what you know this is either going to not show up which seems unlikely or show up and be a nothing burger much more likely then that
Creates at least evidence that the model from which we are deducing those things has a validity if it can predict things that can't be predicted other ways It's it's has a greater overlap with the truth in all likelihood and the cover story is of course built in but I actually want to go back here because the history is Telling we talked a little bit last time about the history of the briefing book scandal with Carter and Reagan where Reagan appeared to have Carter's briefing book.
He did not have the questions, apparently, but he had Carter's preparation materials for the debate that they had.
But in this case, the relevant story is the Dan Rather story, which we've talked about.
So I'll only say it briefly.
But Dan Rather lost his job at CBS because he went to press on 60 Minutes, I believe, with a story that appeared to it was a document from George W. Bush's superior officer when he was in the Texas Air National Guard that reported that George W. Bush was not reporting for duty to fly his fancy plane and
That was a story that had been rumored and Dan Rather appeared to have the goods on him.
And Dan Rather went to press and the internet very quickly figured out that the document that Dan Rather had was a forgery that could not possibly have been from the era in which George W. Bush was in the Air National Guard because it was obviously produced on a computer and not a typewriter.
Okay, that story blew up.
It took Dan Rather out.
But the other thing that it did that is relevant here is it took out the story that George W. Bush had been derelict of duty when he was in the Air National Guard.
Right?
Because the story was true, but the evidence was false.
Right.
The story was true.
Probably the document.
So in a court of law, he should have been let go.
But in our understanding of what reality is, some journalists should have pursued the actual evidence such as it was and revealed what was true.
Yes.
And so somewhere behind the scenes, I don't know if it would have been Karl Rove or whoever, some genius figured out How you take an actual fact that damages your candidate and eliminate it from history.
An actual fact that is widely known.
How do you eliminate it?
You create a fraud that reflects that same fact and then you reveal the fraud.
Okay?
So, So you've tagged the fact forever to the demise of a renowned journalist.
Right.
People can only track a certain amount of complexity.
And so what they remember is that Dan Rather went to a press with a story that said that George W. Bush was a, you know, was derelict of duty in the Texas Air National Guard and it turned out to be a fraud.
And so then they then record he wasn't derelict of duty.
And it's like, oh man, that's genius.
Right?
In this case, let's suppose this affidavit either doesn't show up and a lot of people have said, oh my God, you cheated, or it does show up and then it nothing burgers because the source is compromised or something, right?
What it then does is it compromises all of the energy that we have seen in the direction of, hey, how did she do that?
That was not only was that a competent performance where people were expecting an incompetent performance, but it was actually a pretty, you know, empty in terms of content.
But in terms of presentation, that was that was well done.
How was that done?
Well, it compromises the energy in a couple of ways.
I don't know exactly what you meant by that.
It compromises the energy that was focused on whether or not cheating happened.
It makes people who are listening to those who are arguing that cheating may have happened less likely to believe those people in the future, so it makes the audience more skeptical of those people.
But it also makes those people less energized about continuing to pursue such things, because the more of these false flags you follow, the more you become sort of exhausted with the process. - Exactly. - So it wins both ways if this is what is going on. - Right, that is exactly it, is it creates fatigue both amongst those who are trying to figure out what they're looking at
and those who are listening, trying to, is this an era in which, you know, election manipulation is happening across the board, including right in front of you in a live debate, right?
That is a difficult question.
And if people keep getting burned because they think, oh, God, is that what happened?
And then it's like, oh, no, that wasn't real.
Oh, the earring.
You know, that that recoil just causes you to tune out that entire discussion, which, of course, then serves the conspirators if they exist.
Right.
That's the thing.
Conspirators.
uh want us to believe that conspiracy theories are inherently false.
Now there's there's no logic that a person could deploy that supports the idea that conspiracy theories are inherently false.
We have a word conspiracy because conspiracies happen.
They are natural.
People who have the ability to conspire do.
So, to believe that they are false is absurd, but to punish people who venture out of that camp and begin to try to figure out how to think about conspiracies, which is admittedly not easy, is a win for those who wish to conspire and not be exposed.
Okay, I have one more point and then I will get off this track for the moment.
I saw a second thing which fits in the same category.
It's a different kind of trap, but I want to call people's attention to it because the more of these traps that we can spot, the safer we are to have discussions.
So I came across this one where Richard Hanania?
Is that how you pronounce his name?
I think so.
Was Castigating Glenn Greenwald for flying off the handle on Twitter.
Do you have that tweet?
No, not that one Here we go, and can you make it a little bigger?
bigger so so i i apologize if i'm mispronouncing his name but richard hanania is saying to glenn greenwald - Did you send it to me as well?
I think so.
There it is.
Okay.
He says to Glenn Greenwald, when you see someone this emotional online, you should discount their opinions.
It's a sign they can't think clearly, which is why hyper-emotionality is the norm among those who are reflexively supportive of foreign dictatorships.
Well, that's quite an accusation of Glenn Greenwald.
But I want to chase this back and see how it happened.
So can we now click in on Glenn Greenwald's tweet that Hanania is responding to?
So Glenn Greenwald says, talk shit about my husband and kids only to my face, you cowardly putrid cunt.
And if you repeat the lie that I'm being paid by Russia, I'll sue you just for fun and we can go to court where you'll have to prove it.
He is responding to a tweet that says, I feel bad for your husband and child.
You used to have integrity.
I don't know what Russia pays you, but I hope it's enough from some account called Damon Clegg.
Now, here's what I want to point out.
I have this experience online.
Sometimes somebody will say, Glenn Greenwald has lost his husband in the last year.
His husband, I believe his name was David.
He died.
He died.
He didn't.
They didn't separate.
No, they did not separate.
He died tragically after a long battle with a mysterious illness.
This account has gone after Glenn Greenwald's husband and in a way that would infuriate anybody who had lost a spouse and is forced to confront somebody being a pig about it online.
Now I wanna point something out though.
When I get this kind of shit, when somebody goes after me and it is particularly pointed and personal or otherwise the kind of thing that triggers you to anger, I always click through to the account in question and here's what I find 9 out of 10 times.
Can you show the account that posted that obnoxious tweet?
Here's Damon Clegg.
Damon Clegg is following 5,100 accounts and only has 851 followers.
Okay, I would also point out he notes his location as he him, suggesting that this is a provocative account.
He him is not a location and it's also a trigger.
for many people.
And his bio strangely says, see tweets for psychological evaluation of patient.
So tongue in cheek, implying that we can see mental defects in people's tweets.
Now, here's my point.
But for me, the most salient thing on the screen right now is how old this account is.
Yeah.
Joined November 2011, which is right near the beginning of Twitter.
And I think It's several years after.
Is it?
Yeah.
I'm since 2009.
Okay.
But anyway, it's quite old.
It's quite old for someone who appears to be in the political space to have less than a thousand followers yet.
And And that, to me, the ratio of following to followers and the age of the account are often hallmarks.
And you started pointing this out a few years ago.
Yes.
So let me give the interpretation of the ratio.
Hallmarks of maybe this isn't a real person.
Right.
Well, I have the sense that it's probably a manned account.
I don't think it's a bot, but it's a sock puppet.
Right.
And it's a sock puppet with a purpose.
In fact, it's, in my opinion, very likely to be part of an operation designed to Damage the opposition of whoever hired it.
The ratio, the massive following number and the relatively small followers number I take to be indicative of the fact that many people have an automatic follow-back policy.
So if you follow a huge number of people you get a certain number of followers and what those people who aren't sophisticated about this tend to do is when they see somebody has a A certain number of followers, they take it to be a real account.
Why would 851 people be following an account that was useless?
And the answer is, well a lot of those, you know, if you follow 5,000 people, how many do you expect to follow back reflexively?
So those ratios are an absolute red flag to me.
Especially really high numbers of followings like what is the account that this guy is what is the chances that this guy is detached enough to only have 851 followers but he's really tuned into 5 000 people that he wants to hear from like that that's not coherent now I always wonder about these old accounts that have these profiles and I asked some sophisticated people about it and what they said is that these are likely accounts that have been purchased or hacked.
Dormant accounts that somebody picked up and you know very often the if you look at what they post there will be a lot of posts but the posts are either incoherent.
I sometimes find that the attacks that account me That attack me have posts of Tweets that I might think are favorable so it confuses me when I get there Why would somebody who sees the world in similar terms that I do be attacking me this way?
so anyway, all of these things are Suggestive and again when I have something like that just stands out as just meaner than normal like not normal interaction and I click through I nine out of ten times see a wildly off following to follower ratio and then I block them and when I don't see that I think very carefully about whether or not it's a real account because I don't want to block people just because They're nasty, probably I should.
But anyway, so I'm going to claim that this is another kind of trap.
And here you have one of the most important journalists in the world.
Like really, I could count the English language journalists who still matter on one hand at this point, right?
Here's one of them flying Greenwald now.
Greenwald, right.
Greenwald is flying off the handle publicly in a way that a large account like Richard Hanania can take him to task.
In a totally predictable human way.
Somebody attacks your recently dead spouse.
Like, who has the self-control not to fly off the handle?
So anyway, if somebody was targeting Glenn Greenwald because what Glenn Greenwald says is dangerous, it might look very well like this.
Very much like this.
So, anyway, alright.
End of rant on traps, but please be careful out there.
Things that...
match your priors too well might be the evidence that you've been waiting for or they might be a trap set to reduce the number of people who are willing to listen to you.
Yeah.
All right.
Is that where you're going?
Yep.
All right.
What I want to talk about today is really way too big for just a segment here.
It refers to some topics that we have certainly discussed before.
Sex and gender, always a recurring theme.
For us and for me in particular and what I have identified also as a distinction in terms of what adolescents are trying to establish for themselves between when we were growing up as Gen Xers and when we were coming of age in the 80s versus what people who are coming of age now and for the last 10-15 years have had.
So I assumed when we were growing up that the search for meaning was a fairly universal sort of, you know, if not right, because there's no inherent formality to it, but this was what you are doing as you are transitioning from child to adult, that you but this was what you are doing as you are transitioning from child to adult, that you
You are trying to figure out, you know, what can I become and what are my actions going to be in the world and how can I make the kind of difference that I can best make in the world.
And that search for meaning has been replaced in the modern era with a search for identity, which is a static thing.
Who am I?
You know, what am I really?
It's almost not even a who am I, because it's this reductionist, parts-based, demographic, you know, DEI often style, like, You know, what am I?
Am I, you know, a person of color?
Am I male or female?
And, um, bizarrely, you know, the things that, um, you know, aren't mutable are, uh, the things that are mutable are being taken as not, and vice versa, and sex is, sex is, uh, one of these.
Where, you know, you are what you are with regard to sex, and used to be, uh, we really did understand that, um, that should not constrain what you can achieve with some small limitations.
But now, of course, we have this highly regressive, highly antagonistic to mostly the advances that women have made in being able to do whatever they want outside of the home ideology that says, you know, if you're interested in what used to be understood to be female typical behaviors, well, then you must be a woman after all.
And if you are a woman who's not that interested in that stuff, you're probably secretly, cryptically, even to yourself, perhaps a man.
It's awful and regressive and damaging to children, to women, to homosexuals, to everyone, really.
And so I wanted to talk about some new research that has come out, but you have some notes first.
Well, I could hold them or not, but I guess I'll just add this.
I love your framing of this.
I don't remember how far back this framing goes, but you're framing about the distinction between the cusp of adulthood being the place where you're searching for meaning in the traditional form versus what it's been transmuted into where you are I don't even want to say searching for identity, but establishing identity instead of the search for meaning.
I think that is, um, it cuts the Gordian knot in many ways in terms of how to even understand what the change was.
And the thing I want to highlight, which hopefully we'll find more of in what you're going to present, is that there is something Cognitively different about these things.
It's not just a shift in focus, but the point is meaning is a reference to the external.
Right?
What does this mean?
And so it is inherently like, you know, well, I can identify as a carpenter all I want, but if I can't shape wood so that it sticks together into a piece of furniture and Causes you to understand it in a way that is useful and reasonable and hopefully beautiful Then the fact that I identify as a carpenter doesn't mean a damn thing, right?
But it doesn't mean if I if it's an identity if it's kind of like well chicks dig me when I say I'm a carpenter right if that's what it is, then the point is well, I get the little Hit of dopamine for being a carpenter even if the only thing about me that's a carpenter is that I say I'm one right?
So yeah, it's good.
You know it The point is it hands you the keys to like reward yourself.
And so that creates solipsism.
It creates narcissism.
It creates addiction.
Addiction to your own lies.
It creates helplessness because to the extent that you can reward yourself for being the carpenter that you aren't, you're not actually incentivized to become a carpenter because that's really what impresses people.
Right?
So anyway, there's something about it that is like, it's, It's not even polar opposites.
One of these things is constrained by the world and the other one is independent of the world and therefore makes you, you know, it makes you completely vulnerable to those who would manipulate you and turn you into their tool.
Yes.
No, precisely that.
And actually, before I get into talking a little bit about this paper and Some of the papers deepen the references in this paper.
I'm reminded of a kind of project that I first gave to a class of mine teaching alone, but then we gave on two occasions when we were teaching together, the Learn a Skill projects.
Which was framed, so remember we were professors at a college that had full-time programs.
So we had, you know, 16 hours-ish, you know, in class time with students every week and it was expected that this was literally a full-time job.
So we weren't just teaching evolutionary biology and sometimes statistics or, you know, field methods or, you know, philosophy of science, you know.
But there were a lot, there was a lot of time that we had to play with and that was one of the the geniuses of the of the curricular model honestly um that with that much time you can uh explore and discover what works for a particular group of students in a way that you just don't have the time for with three and four five credit classes so this learning skill project was a part of i think three programs that i did and two two of those were ones that we did together
what uh finish and then i'll add something you may or may not have forgotten okay um - Yeah.
The Learning Skill Project was one piece of each of these programs in which, and I didn't queue it up, but I've got all the sort of, I always gave very clear instructions for projects with lots and lots of room for exploration, such I always gave very clear instructions for projects with lots and lots of room for exploration, such that students who wanted to know where they were going and what the And students who right away said, oh, I got an idea and I want to go off in this direction.
Like, great, that's fine too.
You know, we want to be supportive of you, whichever sort of broad model that you are, your work style works best with.
But we would say, okay, you have to, you pick a thing that is actually represented in the physical universe, a skill that you could have.
And maybe it's carpentry, which is why I'm reminded of it.
Maybe it's playing the guitar.
Maybe it's two or three of our students wanting to build a forge.
Maybe it is learning how to bake.
And so, you know, learning how to bake as opposed to Let's see, I'm not going to come up with a great example here.
Baking is about chemistry, and there are demonstrable results with regard to whether or not you got that cake or that bread to rise, for instance.
Whereas, there's a lot of cooking where you can say, I think it tastes great, and other people will be like, you really didn't do it.
And so if the only way to assess whether or not you succeeded is social, it wasn't acceptable for this kind of project.
There had to be a physical rendering in the universe by which you could objectively assess, did you or did you not?
And the point was not by the end of 10 weeks.
And they were expected to spend four hours a week.
And so obviously, you know, 40 hours a week is not sufficient to learn to play the guitar or become a carpenter.
It should be enough to learn how to bake.
But But it is enough time to get started on a trajectory and specifically to learn something about your own roadblocks to learning.
Because the expectation was four hours a week and there was a check in halfway through the quarter where everyone had to present, you know, three minute increments.
We had 50 students and there was a lot going on.
Right.
But, you know, three minute increments.
Where are you at with the project?
And, you know, what do you see as what, you know, what you have or have not done that you need to correct going forward?
So this was part of what we in our book call the laboratory of the self.
And the idea was to actually observe your self learning in an environment in which success and failure is at least largely objective rather than subjective.
The point was not the carpentry, the guitar playing, the forge building, the baking.
The point was, did you even give yourself a chance to fail?
Succeed?
Awesome.
Fail?
Awesome.
Fail to fail?
No, that's what we need to show everyone how not to do that in the future.
If you failed to fail because you never got started, that's the only failure we actually care about.
Yep.
So there was motivational elements and there's a question of what you did that actually created the reward cycle that caused you to want to return to the project rather than to do it, uh, as an assignment.
So anyway, but the key thing is it forced interaction with the outside.
With the outside.
And the reason I was bringing it up here after what you were talking about was, I remember specifically because carpentry was one that we supplied a list of possibilities and then people could propose anything they wanted.
And sometimes we said, no, there is no physical objective assessment possible there.
But carpentry was one that a lot of people did.
And they had to be newbies.
For this project, it couldn't be like, I'm going to get better at the thing I already do.
No, you had to actually be starting from scratch.
And so the people who wanted to become adept in carpentry, and I think this was probably true across the board, but I remember the carpentry ones in particular, always drastically underestimated how much skill and work was required.
Because they had grown up in a world where carpenters existed and had built things.
And the assumption, and this wasn't based on, you know, privilege or smugness.
It was just a sort of like, well, all these things are around me all the time.
I guess it's just like people build these and I'm gonna learn how to build them.
And I believe to a person of all of those students across several programs who tried to learn carpentry, came away with a new sense of respect and awe for the work, for the skill.
They all learned a little something, at least, about carpentry itself, but actually came to understand how the constructed world is constructed, and how much skill it requires, and how few skills most of us actually have.
And back to your point about identity versus meaning.
And let's pair it up with this other point about we've been converted into consumers of all kinds of things that we used to actually do where we were producers.
You know, the sports fan used to play sports.
Now the sports fan watches sports, right?
Sex used to be a thing people did.
Now they watch it on their computer.
It's so tragic.
Right, it is tragic.
But all of these things, you know, music used to be something people made.
Now it's something they listen to.
We're just converted to consumers across the board.
And the problem is that you can appreciate Carpentry and never, you know, confront a saw and, you know, there is something to be said for the aesthetic understanding of, you know, what's a, you know, an interesting piece and what's just a throwaway, but it ain't nothing compared to having to think through, well, how actually did they do that?
Right?
Because I now know enough about it to say, huh, that's actually an interesting trick.
I wonder, um, I wonder what it is.
Uh, so.
Anyway, go on.
Well, that's really it.
Those, the consumer versus producer dichotomy and the meaning versus identity thing, I think are two ways into the same puzzle.
Well, I, so I actually, the consumer versus producer, something I'd said to you earlier today with regard to like where I think this specifically, um, it's not, it's not different.
I think that making meaning means production.
Like you make meaning in the world by producing something, and that something might be abstract, but you're still producing something.
And to some degree, what you're producing is yourself.
Yeah, you could even produce insight.
Right, exactly.
That's an abstraction.
Whereas identity, and I just wasn't going to get there until the end here, identity specifically makes you amenable to products and to corporate interests who can sell you things.
And because identity is largely framed as a static thing, and again, I was going to finish up here, but it is, you know, it's static as opposed to dynamic, and it is, you know, identity versus meaning static as opposed to dynamic.
It assumes that at, you know, call it 14, 16, 18, 20, 30, I don't care, honestly, you really think that this is who you are, not just now, about which you may be wrong, But forever, about which you are certainly wrong, because we change as we have experiences.
You cannot have all of the same beliefs about the world and who you are from even one year to the next, but certainly across your entire lifespan.
And so we are cementing in place the You know, exploratory delusions of children and adolescents as if they are adults.
And even if they were adults, it is the wrong move, because there is no static identity.
That doesn't make any sense.
One thing, though, that is static is what sex you are right like that that's the thing that you know all the things in biology there's not a lot like the borders between uh the borders between species in both space and time are vague the borders between ecosystems you know when have you moved from a forest to a prairie like you know there's there in humans the transition from being a child to an adult these things are all yeah
and you know death even like even death you know when do you become alive when does life end like all of these have some kind of fuzziness at the borders um male and female like less than pretty much all of them like it it happens to be not just way ancient you know one to two billion years old and at least 500 million years old within our own lineage uninterrupted but yeah
It is binary, based on the gametes that someone produces.
And so, you know, we've been all over this territory before, but just, you know, that little background before I introduce this article, which... Here it is.
You can show my screen here.
Published this year.
Functional brain networks are associated with both sex and gender in children.
So this got my attention because the idea of sort of startled surprise, which if you aren't used to reading scientific articles, this title evokes a kind of like, oh my goodness, not only are functional brain networks different by sex and children, but gender too.
And it's clear from this title that they are treating sex and gender as if they are actually unrelated.
As opposed to gender being effectively the social construct that is manifest by sex.
And frankly, we could do everything that we do about explaining what humans are without the concept of gender.
We don't need it.
So let me try this analogy on you.
Yeah.
The surprise that is evident in the title and presumably the rest of this paper is a little bit like announcing that you've discovered a correlation between the number of steering wheels and the number of regular wheels that are sold in the U.S.
every year.
Yes, except that the correlation between steering wheels and and car tires being correlated is actually a real correlation because cars exist and What this article is claiming is that sex and gender are just free floating of one another.
They're not even associated.
Which is an absolutely remarkable and completely batshit wrong conclusion.
But let's just read a little bit from it.
The introduction.
Over the last two decades, the interactions between sex, neurobiology, and behavior have been extensively researched.
Nine references to prove that.
However, these studies often report contradictory findings and fail to replicate.
The growing literature on sex differences and the lack of reproducibility of many of those reported differences suggest a potential bias and or misunderstanding in how we study, interpret, and report findings related to sex.
More recently, researchers have begun to question whether these observed differences between males and females are driven by biology, e.g.
sex, or whether they are a manifestation of social constructs, e.g.
gender.
The reality is more complicated and that sex and gender are both influenced by biological and social factors.
So right up top in this article is embedded in the language is the assumption that sex and gender are sort of equivalent categories and maybe we've been being too didactic about it and really they're different.
And the fact is that sex is a real category that is ancient and fundamental, and gender was invented yesterday, and they're being treated as if they're equivalent ideas.
Later on in the introduction.
However, Work in this area has largely operated with the assumption that the observed differences are a product of sex, not gender.
Moreover, studies examining the neuroscience of sex and gender have historically sought to identify basic biological differences between binary sexes.
Sex and gender are often conflated in biomedical research based on the incorrect assumption that they are determined by the same factors, and that the two are directly related to one another.
However, sex and gender are complex, multidimensional constructs associated with a host of biological, social, and environmental factors.
An understanding of the unique functional brain correlates of sex and gender is essential for the study of brain-related illnesses that exhibit differences across males and females.
So, this is a load of crap, but it's being presented in, you know, not just elite scientific journals, but as neuroscience.
So that's where the next assault on reality is coming in this particular domain of trans activism and trans ideology.
Well, but the neuroscientists know that there's a difference and that they're actually not related and so you have to honor my gender identity because we all know that it's totally separate from sex.
Bullshit!
It's not.
They just made up the concept of gender and to demonstrate that, Uh, let me, let's see, I think, yes, um, one of, oh, before I go there, um, the, the definition of.
Let's see, this is this article, so this is, um, sorry, um, this new article, I'm going to go back again, um, this new article, Damela et al., is published in 2024, and they cite Potter et al., 2022, Measurement of Gender and Sexuality in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study, in which they define gender and sexuality terms.
Sex, We're sex assigned at birth.
They're conflating those two right away.
The assignment is male or female, usually based on physical anatomy and or chromosomes at birth.
Sorry, that's not what sex is, but okay.
And then they cite the next paper I'll go to, which is variously cited as Potter et al.
2021 or 2020 for Stupid academic reasons.
But gender in 2022 is being defined as refers to, which is a weird way to start a definition.
Gender refers to the attitudes, feelings, and behaviors that a given culture associates with a person's biological sex.
Okay, so that right there tells you that even though we've made it up, like the culture made up this set of things, it's associated with a particular sex.
It ties them together.
They're tied together inherently.
And look at their citation.
Okay, so they've got a citation for their definition of gender, American Psychological Association, 2015.
We're going to go there in a second.
It looks like it's hotlinked.
Okay, cool.
Let's go see what they have to say.
But first, let's look at this paper here and what they have to say.
Well, this is going to be this one.
This is Potter et al., 2020, sometimes 2021.
Early Adolescent Gender Diversity and Mental Health in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study.
They've got a definition of sex, the assignment as male or female, usually based on physical anatomy and our chromosomes at birth.
That's very similar to what they say in their later paper.
This is a very similar group of researchers, some of them the same.
Gender, the social expectations placed on individuals based on their sex.
Interesting that a year or two apart, they've got somewhat different definitions of gender, Both of which understand that gender is downstream of sex.
I have said gender is the behavioral manifestation of sex.
You have said more broadly, and I think when we start talking about plants and such, that your definition encompasses more species, that gender is the software to sex.
Yeah, I don't know that it applies to plants, but yes, one of those two definitions works.
You've talked specifically about the word that we use in evolutionary biology, which I never loved, is the coyness of female plants in accepting or rejecting sperm and being choosy about potential mates, as opposed to the, yeah, let me have it attitude of male plants or male gametes.
That that's effectively a, that's a Gender role.
Well, it's a gender role in animals.
There's no point in going here.
It's a gender role in animals.
It's hard-coded, obviously, into the plants in a way that doesn't involve anything that I would want to call software.
So I would say that the plants don't really have a gender, even though they have a manifestation of the same property that we see in animals and would call it gender there.
But it's all continuous.
Yes.
And I think the discussions over language are part of Them tying us up in disagreements over language helps obscure the fact that across all plants and animals, sex is binary, and what sex you are is dependent on what gametes, type of gametes you produce.
Either tiny motile ones or relatively large, sessile ones.
And the behaviors that you engage in, to some degree, in some species much more than others, follows from what sex you are.
And those behaviors, that software, if you will, is gender.
And in other species, we call it sex role.
I want to point out a couple things.
One, there's something very odd about that definition.
It says gender is the social expectations placed on individuals based on their sex.
Right?
It actually It creates an oppressive dynamic rather than telling you what the gender is when it lands on the creature on which these expectations have been placed.
But that's of course totally consistent with what we're seeing.
Right.
With regard to the trans ideology.
But the other thing is, the way things normally work in science, somebody discovers something that has power beyond the limits of their paper.
Somebody discovers something that becomes the foundational insight of some new school of thought, and it propagates through the literature as this insight comes to be understood by more and more people.
It becomes something that you have to know in order to get your stuff published, blah, blah, blah.
It spreads through the literature, right?
That's an organic process.
Here, you have the inverse.
You have the invalidation of an insight that we have had forever in order for a cultish belief to spread through the literature in the same way.
So what I'm seeing here, and as you click back through these papers, is there's been a coup.
Some people who are going to insist on un-inventing our insight into the way sex and gender work are now in positions of increasing power.
Can I get my screen back so I can see what else I want to show?
Presumably you're a PI.
You've been a PI, a primary investigator, for quite some time and you've got people flowing through your lab.
You've got some postdocs who are as close to senior to you as anybody in your lab will be.
You've got a bunch of graduate students who will hopefully go on to be professors themselves.
You might have a few undergraduates doing grunt work.
But the point is, those young folks who have some new idea about what gender is, Exert very little power at first.
If a few undergraduates have some crazy idea, it doesn't take over your lab.
If a bunch of graduate students do, if it's like a plurality of your graduate students think this is important, they do exert some power, but not a ton.
If your graduate students and your Your postdocs are united in the belief that there is no such thing as sex, then you've got a problem.
And so anyway, what we're watching is a cult.
Imagine that you had a cult in your town.
Right.
And at first the dog catcher is a member of the cult and it doesn't have a tremendous amount of power because it's the dog catcher.
Right.
And then, you know, the treasurer has this belief and the treasurer has a certain amount of power, but it's not the mayor.
And then the mayor has this belief and it's suddenly like, well, if you don't have this belief, uh, you know, are you going to be fighting city hall?
So you're watching this spread through the literature.
And in this case it's detectable because it's not an insight that naturally profuses all the minds of the people in the field.
It's the opposite of an insight.
It's stupidity.
You're watching stupidity spread through the literature and it's like, Oh, let me tell you what gender is.
Here's another paper where you can point to a definition.
Oh, that definition doesn't even sound like a definition.
Right.
Right?
It sounds like you told me what causes it, but you didn't tell me what it is.
That's right.
Right?
Yep.
And their definition of sex, which is easily definable, is wrong.
Right.
So let's go back.
You can show my screen again here.
This paper, which is the full paper now, this 2022 paper, Measurement of Gender and Sexuality in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development, the ABCD study.
It's so fundamental.
It's the ABCDs.
Oh yeah.
Let's just scroll down a little bit.
I already showed you their definition of gender here.
Under measures, like how are they assessing?
Gender identity is included in the background items to the KITTI Schedule of Effective Disorders and Schizophrenia.
That's interesting.
That's from 1997.
...and has been administered annually since the baseline visit.
The item asks whether the child is transgender, with response options of yes, maybe, no, I don't know, I don't understand this question, and decline to answer.
This item has been identified as developmentally inappropriate for young adolescents, evidenced by 2 out of 5 youth aged 9 to 10 years not understanding what the question is asking.
So I think that is changing now, but just hold on to that.
Two out of five ten-year-olds, at some point in the past, when asked, are you transgender, say, I don't know what you mean by that.
And this is critically important because it points out that this idea Is itself a social construct?
Can you create more of the belief in a fiction by introducing it at every level, at every school, in every grade, in, you know, drag queen story hour across the board?
Can you introduce an idea and make it seem real?
Of course you can.
That's what we do.
That's what humans do.
So, uh, there were a certain number of kids when asked, 9, 10 year olds, uh, Are you transgender?
I said, I don't know, and that number, I believe, is changing.
The ABCD Studies Youth Gender Survey includes three core gender constructs.
Felt gender, two items that ask each participant, how much do you feel like a girl and how much do you feel like a boy?
Gender expression, dressing or acting like the sex not assigned at birth during play, and gender non-contentedness, wishing to be the sex not assigned at birth.
So let's just spend a little bit of time on these three, okay?
How much do you feel like a girl?
How much do you feel like a boy?
This is a nonsense question which has become normalized, exactly as you were just saying.
I don't care, and neither should you.
You are one or the other, and perhaps you are living in a framework.
My computer keeps dying.
Perhaps you are living in a culture, in a household, in a religious tradition where it's not easy or you think possible to live the life that you feel that you want to live because you want to be a doctor and you're a girl. in a religious tradition where it's not easy or you And in your tradition, girls don't become doctors.
And so you have become convinced that that must make you a boy.
It doesn't make you a boy.
It means that your interests are out of step with the familial or religious or cultural surroundings to which you happen to have been born.
That doesn't make you a boy.
It makes you a girl out of step with the norms in your culture.
That's what it makes you.
How much do you feel like a girl?
How much do you feel like a boy?
Out of step with the norms is not, I therefore am the thing.
Never has been, never will be, and yet that's what we're normalizing.
All right.
A classic case, I believe, of it's actually worse than that.
In general, as you know, with our children, when they would be very sure of something, I would always ask them to put a percentage on it because I wanted them to get in touch with the fact that there's really almost nothing that you can be totally certain of.
Yes.
In this case, this is not a survey.
It's a push-pull.
Yes, that's exactly what it is.
And it's pushed the entire population into becoming Interested in questioning whether or not they were assigned a sex at birth, or maybe that was just a construct too.
Right.
So a push-pull, for those who don't know, is a pull whose purpose is not to collect information, but actually to seed an idea, to get you to change your opinion by asking you about it.
You know, it's a kind of when did you stop beating your wife kind of trick.
So the idea is the push poll.
If partisans ask you questions designed to make their candidate look good, you know, how much do you think, you know, Donald Trump is like Hitler, right?
You know, that is designed to put the two concepts adjacent in your mind.
In this case, counter to what is usually true about most things where there is some doubt is, If you ask a boy, how much do you feel like a boy?
The answer is 100% by definition.
Whatever I feel like is what a boy feels like.
Right, but a 10-year-old can't be expected to come up with that.
100%.
That's my point.
The purpose of this is not to get information.
The purpose of this is to spread the idea that your boyness is somehow correlated to your feeling in some way.
And what we haven't said yet today is that much of this is possible to do because this has been pried away from the underlying biology that is, as you point out regularly, so ancient.
That the idea of people in some fad questioning things that go back half a billion, a billion years unbroken, right?
It's just preposterous.
Like, who are you?
And you know, you're going to be gone five minutes from now and you think you're going to alter the nature of sex?
Like, what is wrong with you?
So anyway, what's done here is sex and gender are equally biological.
Biology, culture is biology every bit as much as genes and it is only by separating these things that you can pretend that these two realms are telling us some very different thing when in fact what they're really telling you is that sex is fixed and binary and the way sex manifests in different environments is highly variable both across space and through time.
And therefore we have a plasticity.
How does sex manifest?
Right?
But it doesn't change the underlying sex.
So yes, gender is real, but only when you basically hard-code the idea that it is not biological can you play these stupid games.
So let me just pick up the second one here before we go into some of that.
The ABCD survey includes three core gender constructs, the second one of which is gender expression, dressing or acting like the sex not assigned at birth during play.
I'm going to read that again.
Gender expression, parentheses, dressing or acting like the sex not assigned at birth during play.
So put aside the assigned at birth bullshit.
Dressing or acting like the sex you're not during play.
How does the sex you are or the sex you're not act?
What is that?
What is the way that a boy acts or a girl acts?
Well, there are tendencies Like, boys are typically more interested in things, and girls are typically more interested in dolls and social interactions.
Not all, right?
There are plenty of girls out there who are more interested in the things and the rough-and-tumble play, and I was one of those girls.
And there are plenty of boys who are not as interested in things like sports and math and things and want to become poets.
And yet there are sex-typical behaviors that are, you know, often represented within a culture.
And you know what we call that?
We call that gender.
Right?
So the idea of dressing or acting like the sex that I assigned at birth during play, they've like wrapped sex, which they're acknowledging, into their definition of gender expression in a way that like the entire thing falls apart when you look at it funny.
Yeah, and it's also going to do something really strange.
If you take gender nonconformity as an indicator of transness.
Yeah.
Well, in this case, they're not looking for transness, they're looking for mental illness, actually.
Right, but we'll just play it through.
So, you say, well, how do you spot somebody who is non-binary, whatever, right?
Well, they're the non-conforming to their birth sex kids.
What do you do?
Well, I don't know, let's sterilize them.
Um, now what?
Now what have you done to the category of girl and boy?
You've made them stereotypical.
Exactly.
To the extent that you were claiming this was non-binary, you're now going to create something that is even behaviorally binary because you just sterilized or bewildered or hypnotized or whatever you did to all the kids who were doing something independent.
And if your point was, hey, don't you tell me what I am?
Then the kids who aren't conforming, they're the ones who are doing the thing that you're hoping more people will do.
Exactly.
You're taking exactly the people who are not allowing their sex to dictate what they get to do in the world, and you're, by sidelining them, you are defining sex very narrowly on both sides.
You know, that couldn't be more foolish.
It couldn't be more unfair.
It just, yeah, it's insane that we're here.
And I know we struggle for words, but yeah, damn.
Okay.
I want to go back to, uh, this Potter 2020 paper just to show, I know we already talked about this in language, but this is this early adolescent gender diversity and mental health in the adolescent brain cognitive development study paper in which the methods.
So I've just, this is three parts of the paper that I've just put together here.
Methods, the ABCD study is an ongoing longitudinal U.S.
cohort study.
Baseline data include 11,873 youth aged 9 and 10, 48% of which are female, and the almost 5,000 one-year follow-up visits, at which they were aged 10 to 11, still 48% female, completed prior to data release.
A novel gender survey at the one-year visit assessed felt gender, gender non-contentedness, and gender non-conformity using a five-point scale.
Mental health measures included youth and parent reports.
So there's a lot there.
One of the things to note is that the entire assessment about mental health is them basically sticking a microphone in the kids' faces and their parents' faces and going like, are you sick?
And Table 2, this is down in Table 2.
I just compressed it so that you don't have to look at a whole bunch of numbers that aren't relevant here.
Table 2 broadly uses the demographics for complete baseline cohort and one-year follow-up subset.
Are you transgender?
Yes, a very small number, maybe a slightly larger number, no orders of magnitude more than either.
You know, 12 yeses, 46 maybes, over 7,000 noes.
I don't understand.
4,689.
I don't understand.
That's 40% of the respondents.
I don't know what you're talking about.
I'm with them.
Right.
But this is a longitudinal cohort study.
Yeah.
Having been asked that question, you go back in to the same situation.
Your mom takes you back into the same building a year later and you get asked the same questions you're less likely now to say i don't know and also because rogd is real rapid onset gender dysphoria is real and social contagion is real especially among girls you are much more likely to say well maybe it's what the cool kids are doing well
and if i recall school correctly in what case is i don't understand the right answer Right?
We are trained from the beginning.
That's like the worst possible answer, right?
I can't answer the question is better than I don't even understand the question, yet it's the right answer here.
What are you talking about?
Yeah.
What are you talking about?
So the point is if you... And so if 10-year-olds can effectively say to researchers, you made that shit up.
Yeah.
And 40% of the 10-year-olds effectively said to researchers, you're making that shit up.
Like, all of these activists are telling us to listen to the children, which largely is not what we should be doing, but here, in their very own research, listen to them when they say, I don't know what you're talking about because you made that shit up.
Stop ramming this down people's throats and convincing them that they were born in the wrong body because they are gender nonconforming and actually live in a world in which a combination of democracy and progress and innovation has allowed boys to become teachers and girls to become astronauts.
It happens because the only guaranteed thing that girls do when they grow up, if they grow up, is they become women.
That's it.
This is it's a drag queen science hour.
And frankly, yeah, the problem here is we don't because the world is upside down.
We are stuck without the right language and empowerment for a 10 year old to say, look, I know you have a degree and I don't and I'm only 10.
But I think I know more about sex and gender than you do, apparently, based on your survey.
Or, I mean, more to the point, I think.
I'm 10.
I don't know what you're talking about, nor should you be talking to me about it.
Maybe I was particularly unusual in this regard, but I remember being around that age.
Let's see, 10 is what grade?
Do you know, Jen?
What grade is 10?
Fifth grade.
Perfect.
I thought you would know.
Fourth grade, I, like Kamala Harris, was bussed in L.A.
So I spent half of my year being bussed to a different school district, and then half the year I was in my home school, and the kids from the other district were bussed in, and this was California's attempt at integration.
And it didn't go well.
Not because the kids didn't get along, I don't actually remember any issues there, but just the whole thing was badly thought through and it didn't work out.
You know, busing stopped pretty quickly.
But I was on the bus there for a lot.
I was on the bus for like an hour and a half, two hours a day for that half a year.
And I was 10 or 11, young, and there was some 6th grader, because it was elementary school and elementary school went to 6th grade at that point, who was into me.
And he lived near me and he sometimes wanted to get off at my stop and come home.
I was like, No.
Gross.
Go.
Away.
I'm 10.
I was able to say, I can tell that you have some kind of interest here, that I am 10, no, stop.
And it wasn't like, oh, I just don't like you.
And you know, maybe some girls at that age are already sexual, although frankly I think that's Early because of what we've done to our environment, both chemically and socially and media wise.
But mostly at that age, clearly prepubescent.
You shouldn't be talking to kids about sex in this way.
Yeah.
It's not relevant.
I'm trying to come up with a What we have here is stranger danger, where the stranger is dressed up in a lab coat and doing surveys, and it's like- Absolutely!
Yeah.
My parents warned me not to talk to people like you.
Oh, but your parents brought you here, sweetie.
You can talk to us.
Like, uh, no, I still don't think so.
Yeah.
Okay, one more.
One more thing from this paper, the original paper that started me off down this road here.
So this is, again, this Damela et al.
paper from this year, 2024.
I read to you some of the pieces from the introduction, but let's look at what they did.
Okay, so before I scroll down, they're claiming that sex and gender are just totally unrelated in these different brain networks, and finally we know it's so complex, but sex and gender really have like nothing to do with each other.
And how did they find that?
How did they assess that?
It's fascinating.
Let's see if I can make this bigger without flipping my screen around.
Hey, it worked!
First, using brain-based predictive modeling approaches... I mean, that's really all I need to read.
Wow!
Brain-based predictive modeling approaches.
We demonstrate that both sex and gender are associated with individual variability and functional connectivity.
Yeah, no freaking kidding.
These concepts are complex and individuals vary.
That's all that means.
Next, evaluating whether shared or distinct functional connections are associated with sex and gender, we determine that although there is some overlap in the associations, sex and gender are uniquely represented in the brain.
How did they find that?
With their brain-based predictive modeling approaches, which is to say, there's nothing empirical here.
Finally, characterizing the functional network correlates of sex and gender, we reveal that sex is preferentially associated with somatomotor, visual control, and limbic networks, while the network correlates of gender are more distributed throughout the brain.
Remember how these people have defined gender.
Is that here?
It might not be here.
It might be here instead.
So these people have defined gender Actually, they use—these people's definition of gender refers to the attitudes, feelings, and behavior that a given culture associates with a person's biological sex.
Okay, given that they have defined sex narrowly—wrongly, but narrowly—and they define gender really expansively and also wrongly, of course, Their thing about gender, which is still very vague, is going to be found in more places in the brain.
It's tautological.
Ipso facto.
They have demonstrated nothing, and they did it with models.
It's a perfect storm of bad science.
It's worse than that.
I'm sorry, but it just is.
Okay.
Now let's take your, um, your original observation, run it through the idea that there is something fundamentally off about taking a natural orientation to the outside world and finding meaning there versus turning to the inside world and seeking identity that you can define.
And you can claim that you're a success or make yourself into whatever you are.
Um, Okay, so you've got kids, young adults, who are being induced to switch from the interaction with the outside world to an internally generated world that is more amenable to being altered at will.
And then you have these researchers, presumably, who are all downstream of that same tendency.
Moving into the lab, playing with models.
Yes.
Inherently internal, right?
This is like the internal world where, hey, don't bother me with the outside world.
It's not just the lab, it's the computer lab.
That's what I mean.
Yeah.
In the lab, you might look at how actual brains interact with the environment, and you might be forced to grapple with something that didn't match what you expected.
That's annoying, right?
So, what can you do to avoid that?
You can go into model space, where the point is the model is your understanding of the world, and so it's not going to challenge your understanding of the world, because it is your understanding of the world.
It's this self-referential bullshit, but here's why it's worse than that.
Okay.
You've got these people with their frickin internal models that are going to be unbothered by the fact that they conflict with the outside world who are now Going to go into the outside world and modify it in order to match their internal bullshit.
Right now.
And they're doing it.
They're doing it successfully.
They're actively doing it.
In fact, they're confronting in the process of interacting with a world of models.
They are actually surveying kids and raising the idea in them that however they feel might not be, you know, it might indicate that there's something not a boy about you.
Right.
And so anyway.
Have you ever thought that you might not be a boy?
I have never thought that.
I didn't think you have.
Um, but, but here's the crazy thing.
This isn't the only realm where they're doing this.
Of course not.
Okay.
Climate.
Problem is, these climate people went from thinking about whether or not the actual climate was being modified by what we're doing, to resorting to computer models, which we have said many times are incapable of testing hypotheses.
You could generate a hypothesis with a model, but then you've got to go out and check it in the world, and you've got to do so in a rigorous fashion.
But so, the climate people have stopped Doing any rigorous outdoor science.
I'm not saying there isn't science, but the point is it's all based on models, and if you come up with a model that suggests that this isn't a serious problem, you're not going to be able to publish it.
So the point is the models are increasingly hysterical, and it turns out That they are apparently both contemplating and maybe even involved in modifying the outside world.
Right?
So the point is, look, how long, how many places are we going to allow people who are so solipsistic that they have resorted to model world to go and modify the outside world to their liking?
There's another way in which the trans ideology and the climate science are similar.
This is kind of terrifying, actually.
Is something wrong with the health of America's children and young people?
Very much so.
Clearly.
Is there instability in the climate?
Probably.
I'm less certain of that, but yes, it looks like there's instability in the climate.
In both cases, A dominant model, hypothesis, they never use the word hypothesis, but a dominant hypothesis came to be, it went right from an idea in someone's head to like, this is the only explanation possible with regard to climate.
It's carbon.
It's carbon.
That's it.
We're done.
With regard to the children, it's gender identity.
We can make all of your problems better if you will just recognize that you were born in the wrong body and then your parents can be free from worrying about whether or not you're going to kill yourself because obviously a person would want to kill themselves if they were born in the wrong body.
All we have to do with regard to climate is deal with all the carbon and then everything's going to be fine.
In neither case is this true.
Does that mean that there aren't some kids who are living difficult lives precisely because they actually have ideas about what they want to do that is out of step with the particular cultural norms in their own religion and family?
Yes, that's absolutely true.
Does that mean that I think the production of coal smoke ad libitum by power plants is good for any of us?
No, I do not.
But is carbon the cause of whatever climate instability we're experiencing?
No one has demonstrated that.
What they're focusing on now is look at the instability, and again, that's model space, so we have to even question the conclusion, But they tie their conclusion, which may or may not be true, to a presupposition about what causes it, which they never tested.
Same thing with gender.
The lack of health of the children is presupposed to be, in work like this, about an inconsistency between sex and gender in these kids, and that's crap.
Okay.
Two things.
I think this is actually pretty interesting new territory.
One, the thing about model space is that it does not force you to grapple with things that you're ignoring, right?
Because you won't include them in your model.
So for example, if you say, well, what else might be messing with our climate?
And the answer is, oh, space weather.
Well, if it's not in your model, then you're not going to discover what its impact is.
And you'll then erroneously conclude that it's not having an impact, that it really is carbon instead of being like, oh, actually it might be something else.
And none of our remedies are going to work.
And in fact, they may make things worse.
And they're certainly going to cause us to run out the clock so that we're not preparing for changes in space weather, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
With fieldwork, and I'm not saying you can do all this work with fieldwork, with fieldwork you can't a priori exclude the things that you don't want to see because you're in the environment where the thing is taking place.
And I think actually part of why we think the way that we do and why we are presenting to people here is not just the evolutionary biology part, but the fieldwork part.
The You can be an evolutionary biologist and be lab-based and get confused by your own assumptions because the correctives to those assumptions are harder to come by.
Being out in the environment, and this is the same thing about doing stuff with physical manifestations in the world like carpentry or baking a cake or playing the guitar, you can't cheat the system.
You can claim all you want that that was a good song and other people listening going like, you just don't know how to play the guitar.
and you can claim all you want that like you've got the answers here in your model and you go outside and test it against reality like you you're missing something i don't know what you're missing but your model does not explain what we are empirically seeing in the world okay two things one From the point of view of knowing what it is.
So the beauty of science is that it will do what no other system does.
It will tell you what you need to know.
It will tell you what you don't want to know.
If you do it correctly, it will force you to confront the things you don't want to know.
Right?
Yes.
That's why it's good.
Every other system... Which is better for you in the long run, even if it hurts in the moment.
Right.
Now, so now we've got a hierarchy, right?
And I think you've, you nailed it earlier here, right?
You've got the field, which sucks in some ways.
It's very noisy and hard to run a careful experiment in the field because, you know, so many things, you know, a tree will fall on your, your experiment, right?
That doesn't happen to you in the lab very often, but...
So you got the field, the field which has its problems, but it does force you to deal with all the factors that are actually impinging on your system.
And so if there's something out there, you know, and you run proper experiments, it will impinge on your experiment and you'll discover it.
The limitation there is you don't see what's rare, which is something you we've both talked about before, but you wrote into your dissertation.
Right.
Yeah.
Then you've got the laboratory.
In the laboratory, you exclude most of the factors that might be impinging on the system that you're interested in, but you can see very slight alterations.
The laboratory environment controls for noise, and so it's very sensitive.
You get greater precision assuming that your assumptions going in about what to exclude were accurate, and you haven't excluded the actual explanatory factors.
Right, and the degree to which this is true varies a lot based on what you're studying.
If you're studying living cells, they drag in with them all of the stuff of a living cell, which is a huge amount of complexity.
But nonetheless, the lab does not always force you to confront the things that you need to know.
If you're studying, you know, a cell culture, you may not understand the organ, right?
And the interaction of the organ with the pathology or whatever.
But then the modelers are just completely divorced from any of these things.
They've got a self-referential system that they can tell themselves stories all day and then they can publish as if what they've done is studied it somewhere.
It's science.
Yeah, most people don't understand the danger of models, right?
The point is, oh, that's some kind of science.
They dress the same.
So, but it's that hierarchy.
But the other thing I wanted to point out.
Is that the irony of what they are doing here to gender, right?
If we just say, look, there is a cultural component of sexuality, right?
Something that is clearly flexible between cultures over time, something that alters, right?
It is more plastic than the fundamentals of sex, which are hard-coded into the genome.
But here's the interesting thing.
Why is there a cultural component to sexuality?
And the answer is for the same reason that culture exists everywhere else in our adaptive nature.
And that is because it is capable of adapting at a incredibly fast rate relative to genes.
So the genes have offloaded lots of stuff to the cultural layer, not because they don't care about it.
They care about it intensely, but they've offloaded it to the cultural layer so that it can adapt to things that are rapidly changing or opportunities that show up that need a rapid adaptation.
So here's the problem.
If you play these stupid goddamn games, what are you doing?
You are interfering with the ability of culture to solve the problem of we have created a new sexual dynamic and we don't know what to do about it.
Right?
You dump birth control on a species that's never had reliable birth control before and you create chaos.
What's the solution?
Adaptation that figures out what the new gender roles are going to be that can actually survive in that new environment.
But you're disrupting it here by deciding that people who are, you know, you're taking all of the variation of how people are addressing their sex as it
Functions in this new world and you're forcing them into categories based on your stupid goddamn models and you're gonna prevent Evolution from solving a problem that is squarely in the center of its toolkit to solve right this this is the dumbest thing you could do if you want gender to become something in which people can be at home in their bodies and their moment in history and all of it you're disrupting that very process and That's excellent.
I mean, not what they're doing.
No, no.
That part isn't so excellent.
Not at all.
Yeah.
The people who are calling themselves scientists are interrupting the natural adaptive process by which human culture should be now and has always solved the problems that humans have.
That accompany sex specifically.
Yep.
I mean, that's why there are so many different sex roles in different cultures is the fact is it's not the same solution in every culture, but none of them involve this sort of like, you know, surveys that ask children if they think they might be born in the wrong body or something, you know?
Yeah.
Yeah, and I guess maybe just to come back full circle to this, you know, meaning versus identity question, right?
You don't ask 10-year-olds what they think they are.
You let them tell you what they think they are and, you know, 10-year-olds, 8-year-olds, 6-year-olds, 4-year-olds, you know, and I've said this before, but, you know, maybe they think they're a turtle.
today, or dinosaur, it's not just Halloween when kids dress up and try, or literally trying on, in some cases, different identities.
How many kids want to go to school sometimes on non-Halloween days, you know, dressed in a cape or, you know, a tiara or a tutu, right?
Like, these are things that a lot of kids explore and I think this one took me a little while to come to, actually, because I wasn't really a dress-up kid.
I never really got Halloween.
It was never particularly appealing to me, but I see that in healthy America, In living history, there have been a large fraction, probably a majority, of children who at some age have really been excited to explore what they could be with dress-up, boys and girls alike.
And this thing which says, how do you feel right now?
That's what you are.
That's what you've always been.
That's what you're always going to be.
It's child abuse.
And it's destroying the children for the future.
And some of them will be able to find their way out, but it's getting harder and harder.
Because they're being told by the, you know, lab-coded authorities that what they believed at one point when they were, you know, X years old is their true and enduring identity forever.
And that's, you know, like I started with, that's not how identity should work.
That's how identity is being presented.
But that's part of why I think this identity is, you know, a legitimate concept that humans can wrestle with.
But in terms of what you should be doing during adolescence, Rather than figuring out what your identity is, searching for meaning is a more expansive, more exploratory, more productive, more joyous way of being in the world because it's dynamic.
Because it doesn't presume that whatever mistake you make today, whatever confusion you have today, whatever real thing you know to be true about you today, but it changes because you had a new experience six months from now.
None of that needs to define you forever.
And so looking for meaning is less about definition, and looking for identity is about definition.
Inherently static, inherently going to lead to the kind of despair we're seeing.
So I think we need a couple concepts.
What we're looking at here is toxic science.
And the questions these kids are being asked in the survey are poisonous.
And what I mean is, if you, let's take some, you know, because sex and gender have become contentious, it's hard to see this here.
But if you, if you approach a child and you say, I'm a scientist and I'd like to ask you a few questions to understand, uh, you know, the workings of the human mind.
Forget what you were told.
What species do you feel like?
Yeah.
No, any species.
Nevermind what you were told.
You know, it was a little shivery earlier on, and you know how the aspens, when the wind blows through their leaves, they, I mean, they're even called quaking aspens, so I feel like an aspen.
Yeah.
And, um, you know, I mean, I know how many birthdays you've been told that you have, but.
I don't remember all of them, so I don't know.
How old do you think you are?
Yeah.
187.
Wow.
That is old.
Um, you know, or, uh, you know, I know it's 2024, but what, Century do you feel like you're really a part of?
You know, I really like some of those clothes from the French Revolution.
They really seem cool to me.
So definitely a few hundred years later, earlier than what you say I'm living in.
Well, you've already told me that you're an old soul.
So yeah, that makes sense.
I was already old then though.
I guess so.
And then, you know, look, let me just tell you a little science.
Okay.
Okay.
Should I be taking notes?
I don't think you'll need to.
Oh yeah, this is going to require some math.
Do you know how many stars there are in the observable universe?
No, I forgot.
300 sextillion.
And do you know what percentage of them have planet-like things orbiting them?
This is not the place to discuss the...
Honestly, to some degree models by which we assess how many of those stars have planets, but what is the current estimate?
The scientific estimate is lots of them.
Now, here's my point, okay?
You're from a planet.
So you say.
But there are 306 trillion stars in the known universe and lots of them have planets.
Which planet do you think you're from?
See?
So, you know, toxic science and poisonous questions.
Whereas all of that could be done.
Maybe not all of it, but like the last thing you did could be like, that's what fantasy and science fiction are like.
This is when you frame it as like, think about what could be.
Think about what another life would be.
be like develop your theory of mind to understand what other beings either are experiencing or might be experiencing if they existed that's amazing that's expansive as opposed to you whatever you think in your head right now is true that's true yeah and everyone else has to live with it don't they so figure out how you're gonna make them obey your fantasy in your head follow the science kid it's the opposite of expansion yeah no it's the opposite of expansion But look, here's the thing.
As an educator and as somebody who struggled with school and somehow came out with an ability to think and all of that, I know that the only right lesson when somebody is approaching you with questions this toxic is it's the Milgram lesson, right?
You want to be the kid who stands up and says, nope.
I'm out.
You're crazy.
That question is stupid.
But there is no way that any culture that is actually interested in its future, and therefore its children, would expect 10-year-olds to pass the Milgram experiment, given how few adults passed it.
100% agree with you.
So it is incumbent on us adults not to inflict the Milgram experiment on kids, especially as a live-fire exercise.
The thing is, the Milgram experiment, no matter how well you did or didn't do, By the time you walked out of there, you understood what it was, right?
They didn't leave you under the misapprehension that they were shocking people to death and that you had participated in it when you walked out the door, right?
That's, that's cruel.
It's inhumane.
And what we are doing is inhumane to these children.
It's inhuman and inhumane.
That's all right.
I mean, that's all right.
It's fine.
That's all correct.
Yes.
Quite.
I think that brings us to the end in part because in half an hour, You're going to be doing ex-Twitter spaces with the Unity crew, including lots of great people.
The Unity movement.
And I can't tell you, there's lots of very strong rumors about who might be there, but there are some very important folks who will definitely be there.
Tulsi Gabbard will be there.
Bobby Kennedy will be there.
Jordan Peterson will be doing his first space ever.
What?
So, anyway, I would join that space.
What do you have to lose?
It's, you know, join your people.
The Unity Movement will be gathering on X in a space.
May the technical gods be with us.
So I don't know how spaces work.
Is there some chance we should keep the locals chat open so that people who are in our locals community can be on the spaces and, you know, or create a new one?
Yeah, I think that's, we can keep the watch party alive and they can watch if they want, uh, while chatting with each other.
I think that's a great idea.
Yeah.
So put the, put the link to the space.
I don't know any, I have any idea what I'm talking about.
You're doing fine.
Put the link to the spaces into the locals, uh, watch party so you can find it there.
Yep.
Cool.
All right, we have our two-hour Q&A tomorrow at 11 a.m.
for locals people only.
We have another one of these live streams this upcoming Tuesday and then you won't see us again until Rescue the Republic on September 29th and then we'll be back the Wednesday after that with a regular schedule for a week.
And can I ask a favor of our wonderful audience?
If you can come to DC, the DC, of course, if you can't, and even if you can spread the word, we need a massive turnout.
And there are lots of ways to be supportive of that.
Even if you can't make it, which we certainly understand.
Um, so spread the word, use the hashtag rescue the Republic, um, and, uh, come to the space at two 30 Pacific time.
I thought it was at two.
No, it's been moved.
It's been moved.
I see.
I was not made aware of that.
So it's an hour, not a half hour.
Um, okay.
Um, and to find out our schedule, um, stuff, uh, dark horse podcast.org.
You can also find our store there, uh, everything else.
And, uh, a reminder about our sponsors this week, which was crowd health.
Monokora Honey and Armra.
Great.
All of them.
Reminder that we are supported by you.
We appreciate you.
Thank you for subscribing, for liking, for joining locals, for coming over and reading Natural Selections by Substack.
And we will see you soon.
But until we do, be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
