March 3, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:21:23
3607 Human Biodiversity and Criminality | Brian Boutwell and Stefan Molyneux
What is the origin of criminal behavior? Stefan Molyneux and Brian Boutwell discuss the interplay between biology, genetics and environmental factors when it comes to accurately discussing the factors in criminal activity. Dr. Brian Boutwell is a Biosocial Criminologist and the Associate Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Saint Louis University. Dr. Boutwell is also the co-editor of the book "The Nurture Versus Biosocial Debate in Criminology: On the Origins of Criminal Behavior and Criminality" with Kevin Beaver and J. C. Barnes.The Nurture Versus Biosocial Debate in Criminologyhttp://www.fdrurl.com/criminologyTwitter: https://twitter.com/fsnole1Articles: http://quillette.com/author/brian-boutwell/Freedomain Radio is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by signing up for a monthly subscription or making a one time donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Main Radio, here with Dr.
Brian Boutwell.
He is a Biosocial Criminologist and the Associate Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at St.
Louis University.
You can follow him on Twitter at F-S-N-O-L-E-1.
We'll put a link to that below.
And he's got wonderful essays at Quillette, Q-U-I-L-L-E-T-T-E.com.
Dr.
Boutwell, thanks so much for taking the time today.
Oh, it's a pleasure.
Thanks for having me.
So, Biosocial Criminologist, I guess my first question is, why do you hate your academic career so much?
What are you thinking of by boxing yourself into looking at biological underpinnings to social behavior?
Yeah, it's an interesting way of putting it.
So, when I first got into graduate school, I guess this irony would have it, I was completely turned off.
I was introduced to it as a fairly new master's student at Florida State, and I found it morally dubious, to say the least.
But, you know, I'm also, I guess, kind of curious by nature, so I started chatting with a guy at the time who was a new faculty member, Kevin Beaver, who has been a guest on your show.
He had just arrived at Florida State.
He was doing this kind of new approach to the study of crime, this biosocial criminology.
I was, in both respects, kind of conflicted about it and also very curious about it, and so it turned into just a long conversation between Kevin and myself, and that grew slowly into an interest, which kind of grew alongside with the budding realization that I liked doing science.
And that people would actually pay you to do it.
And so, you know, it kind of morphed into what I think is the best job in the world, other than maybe a professional athlete or rock star or whatever.
So it's good.
As long as we've established the scapegoat, it's Kevin's fault.
It's completely Kevin's fault.
The question, as you pointed out in your essays, the question, of course, is why criminality, and of course, as soon as you start diving into criminality, you realize, of course, that criminality prevalence is not equally distributed across ethnicities, across genders, and so on.
Men, of course, tend to commit far more crimes than women do, and there's a hierarchy in criminology with regards to crime prevalence from sort of East Asians, well, Ashkenazi Jews, East Asians, whites, Hispanics, blacks, in terms of increasing prevalence of crime.
And this of course brings us to the challenging question of biological underpinnings to particular behaviors.
Now before we start diving into crime, you've recently written that there's no aspect of human nature that they can find that is untouched.
by genetics.
And that is a very startling thing for a lot of people because we've been so stewed in this argument from 100% environmentalism.
And I wonder if you could help people understand where the science is that currently seems to be actively hid from the general public by a variety of forces.
Where is the science these days on genetics and behavior?
Yeah, it's a great point.
I am happy to say I think it's becoming a bit more known in terms of common knowledge Among the general public, at least folks who tend to read pretty widely on different topics that are related to science, and I think it's also something that parents kind of innately figure out if they have more than one kid, as a colleague of mine is fond of saying.
You start to, on some level, understand that as a parent, you're not quite the The potter to your child's clay in terms of their personalities.
Children are unique.
They seem to come prepackaged with their own idiosyncrasies and that sort of thing.
These things really become magnified over time as the kids get older and develop their own interests and their own personalities and their temperaments begin to emerge.
I think on a I don't really like the term common sense, but on a common sense level, these things were something that existed in the consciousness of parents for quite a while.
In terms of where the science is at now, I think that's best embodied by a paper that was published in, I believe it was late 2015, analyzing around 50 years worth of quantitative behavioral genetic studies.
And so this is five decades worth of twin studies, not just in the States, but around the world.
Samples of varying size and just about every trait you can imagine.
Everything from psychological traits to physiological outcomes, medical outcomes.
And what the overall conclusion of the study published in Nature Genetics was that for virtually any trait you can imagine, including temperamental, psychological, psychiatric type outcomes, Part of the reason that humans differ from one another is because of genetic differences.
There are genetic differences that make us unique from each other, and those play a role in informing why we're more outgoing or shy or prone to depression.
Now, obviously, for different traits, genes contribute in different ways, and so you can Can take two very stark contrasts, and this is something that Steve Pinker has pointed out multiple times, Judith Rich Harris as well, that if you look at something like accent, the way that one speaks, you can hear mine coming through now.
That's a South Alabama, Northwest Florida accent, and it's a product of the fact that I was born and raised in that region of the country.
Had I been born and raised in New England, I would have a different accent.
So variation in accent is something that's environmentally shaped, whereas the ability to speak and acquire language is a genetic endowment, as is any deficits that might exist in the population in regards to language ability.
In that case, you're talking about a heritable outcome where genetic differences contribute to individual differences.
But nonetheless, what we see for traits that we care about is The big five personality traits, general intelligence, predisposition to violence, self-control.
Genes play a role in all of those.
And I think that is important to talk about for as long as there are folks out there who aren't aware of kind of that current state of the evidence.
And I think one of the reasons and the sort of pushback against this we can talk about a little bit because it's a very significant aspect and people are probably feeling it emotionally even while listening to us chat.
But genetics, of course, is not determinism.
I mean, there are genes for susceptibility to alcoholism, but if your religious beliefs or your personal beliefs forbid you from touching alcohol, they don't manifest.
And so, you know, people say, well, you know, if there's genetics involved, then our choice is reduced.
But my argument is that if there are genetics involved and we avoid the reality of genetics, then our choices are really reduced.
Like if I find out I have some genetic susceptibility to heart disease, I can change my diet, I can exercise more, I have a chance to push back.
But if I don't even know, If I know about any genetic susceptibility to heart disease, then I'm going to probably make life choices that aren't quite as heart beneficial.
And then I'm on a slippery slope to personal disaster.
So when you ignore, it's like sailing without any reference to Northeast, South and West.
I mean, the more facts we have, the more choices we have.
And I agree.
And I think it's important to point out too that it may very well be the case that knowing something about genetic influences on a particular trait Doesn't necessarily change how we approach dealing with that trait.
And I'll give you an example.
If we know from, say, good clinical trials, good experimental evidence that something like cognitive behavioral therapy is helpful for folks dealing with depression.
Also know that incarnations of depression are heritable as well, but still change the fact that CBT can be helpful for those folks.
And so, simply knowing that genetic differences contribute to differences in various psychological traits is not even guaranteed to change our approach.
Now, the kind of companion idea that goes along with that is it may very well help us tailor our approaches better.
What we may find out is that CBT works really well for a segment of the population, but for a different segment of the population owing in part to some genetic endowment, they To gain the biggest positive effect from therapy, it needs to be coupled with some type of antidepressant or something like that.
So these types of tweaks to existing approaches I think are important and can be informed by knowledge about genetic influences on a particular outcome.
Well, and if those genetic influences are ethnicity-specific, that's important.
I mean, imagine being a doctor and not being able to take into account any susceptibility that may be aggregating to an ethnic group, so blacks with hypertension, Ashkenazi Jews with certain particular kinds of ailments.
You'd actually be, I think, guilty of malpractice if you ignored genetic factors on health among various ethnicities, or genders, for that matter, of course.
Sure, absolutely.
I think...
Especially with medicine, the obligation is to be as thorough as you can be with the goal being to solve whatever problem exists for the patient as best you can do that.
If that means using any bit of information that you can, I think it's fairly clear that we should do that if the goal is to maximize the well-being of patients on the part of physicians.
Now, with criminality, of course, criminology, we get into race differences or ethnic differences.
I wonder if you could help people sort of understand, of course, everybody who goes into this field has this challenge, I think, kind of front and center.
And I wonder if you could help people understand this spread of criminal differences between ethnicities.
Right.
Right.
So it's really, excuse me, it's no secret and it's not even a point of disagreement for social scientists who study the topic of crime, whether they're sociologists by training or criminologists by training.
We all kind of the data bear it out that there are differences that emerge across racial and ethnic groups for involvement in crime, whether that involves self-reported arrests or self-reported criminal behavior or official statistics in crime.
We see very similar patterns emerge.
Now, obviously, the approach we've taken in the past and that we continue to use and for good reason is to try and understand social processes that might predict these differences, whether they be systemic bias in the criminal justice system, prejudice and discrimination against minority whether they be systemic bias in the criminal justice system, prejudice And those are incredibly important questions to ask, and we should continue to ask them and continue to take them seriously.
For biosocial criminologists, and I'll speak only for me, I think the The argument has always been, well, we should try to answer that question as thoroughly as we can.
And so part of that involves understanding systemic bias and institutional racism and those types of explanations for race differences.
But that might also involve exploring the possibility that there are personality factors that predispose individuals to crime.
And maybe these personality factors differ across population groups.
It's a question we can ask, and it's an empirical question, and we have some evidence bearing on that topic.
Now, like anything in science, the jury's out until the evidence is in, and so for some of these topics that are relevant to the question of why ethnic groups, population groups, differ from one another in terms of criminality, we've yet to do the studies.
We have a good idea of what we might expect to see, and we have some evidence pointing to In certain directions but there is still a lot of work to be done and part of the biggest problem I think that has faced kind of bio-social criminologists is the fact that to even suggest that these studies be done is still a pretty big taboo in our field and so it's difficult to even get over the hump of arguing that the studies be done and published in empirical journals
regardless of the findings.
So I think that's one of the big barriers that exist to understanding the nature of these differences that emerge for criminality, but the fact that the differences exist is well supported by the evidence and not really disputed by anybody in the field.
And I think this sort of ties into what I call the shell evolutionary theory, which is, of course, that, you know, human beings sort of emerged around 200,000 years ago around, you know, depending on how you view us around 50,000 years ago, you could say there was a sort of spread into the sort of three major races, the East Asian, Caucasian, and African.
And the argument, I think, from a lot of social sciences, at least the one that I was very aware of and was repeated almost at infinite when I was growing up, was the sort of shell evolution.
That yes, okay, skin color, nose shape, hair, and so on, these all adapted to local circumstances, but everything inside was sort of strangely immune from evolution.
There's a brain size and number of ridges in the spinal column and so on.
The evolution affected the outside of Of the human race is, but nothing else.
And I always found that to be just a little like, okay, so the inside is immune from evolution, but everyone on the outside is susceptible to evolution.
And that still seems to be very common, certainly in the mainstream media portrayals of where the science is at.
Yeah, it certainly is.
And so I think there are a number of important points that you had kind of packaged in there, and I'll try to unpack them one by one.
So certainly in...
Kind of a modern genomic age.
We're understanding with increasing clarity the kind of our genetic ancestry, right?
So as you talk about the migration out of Africa, how our ancestors moved into Europe and Asia and eventually into North America and throughout the globe.
And so we can, with increasing precision, understand at the level of the genome a person's ancestry.
You know, the extent to which their ancestors stem primarily from Africa or primarily from Northern Europe.
And, of course, with the knowledge that, to a very important extent, we all hail from that first African migration and from Africa.
And so we're answering some really important and interesting questions, and we're finding a great deal of information out about how How fine-grained analysis we can do with genomic data around the world to classify population groups.
And what we find is that in very important ways, genetic ancestry does cluster in the way we might expect and in some ways in ways we didn't expect.
And so when folks talk about things like social construction of race, there is a point in that worth considering to the extent that That genetic information is going to provide us a better picture than simply assuming anyone with dark skin is of a particular ancestry, if that makes sense.
Or someone with light skin is of a particular genetic ancestry.
To that extent, the science is exploding in recent years, and it does bring with it some uncomfortable possibilities.
One of which is what you were alluding to, the idea that differences that emerge across population groups might be at least in part due to genetic differences across those groups.
Some of those differences might have been shaped by natural selection.
We're already, I think, pretty well aware in recent years of how fast natural selection can work.
You see it work very quickly on traits like lactose tolerance.
And we're getting increasingly good at detecting evidence of recent evolution in human populations.
Now, it's kind of like related to the issue I mentioned before.
We still have a lot of territory to cover.
It's exceedingly possible that some of the differences we see emerge for psychological traits across, you know, Population groups will be partly due to genetic differences, but it's also completely plausible that for a number of important traits, they won't be.
It's an empirical question.
If the first issue was a thorny one in terms of understanding possible psychological contributions to race differences in criminal justice processing, this one is nuclear.
In terms of asking questions about could different groups of humans following our migration out of Africa been exposed to regional selection pressures that shaped differences?
Some colleagues and I have a paper forthcoming now in the journal Evolutionary Psychological Science that explores this possibility in really A lot of detail and proposes kind of adjustments we could make to a modern evolutionary psychological science,
which has been around for decades, to perhaps make it more kind of updated to the genomics age and understanding how these selection pressures might have shaped differences.
But we still have to get to the point where it's okay to test those types of questions.
Lactose tolerance is a pretty benign trait.
It's very interesting, and it likely played a huge role in the growth of civilization and our species.
But it's also not likely to get you in trouble.
You know, talking about cognitive differences, it can be ruinous for your career and reputation.
And that's something that I would like to see us get past in the Academy, because as I said in one of the essays on Quillette, If honest scientists aren't talking about this issue, it doesn't mean that it's just going to be left by the wayside and not discussed in the public.
People who are unqualified and absolutely ill-intentioned will talk about it.
You hear that chatter more and more on the airwaves even now.
I think we have an obligation on university campuses To ask even the hard questions, honestly, and openly.
Well, I mean, I think that's an excellent, excellent point.
I just sort of want to reinforce that, that we're either flying blind or we're flying with instruments.
But we're flying either way.
Nobody's going to drop the topic of race forever.
Nobody's going to drop the topic of differences in criminality between the races or the genders.
So we're either going to be doing it with facts or we're going to do it with blind prejudice or, you know, people who believe that the plural of anecdote is magically data and all of that.
So we need the facts because suppressing the conversation from experts is not going to suppress the conversation among amateurs.
It just means it's going to be wilder, less informed, and less restrained by the scientific method.
So now you had some great objections to the sort of standard objections to the idea that there's significant biological underpinnings to race.
So the argument that race is a social construct that the only external visible differences, that they're the only ones that really exist or really matter.
I wonder if we could just run through some of these objections because I'm really trying to get across to people who may not already have these perspectives, you know, watch the sort of professional objections are to these.
The first one is that people say, well, you can't really talk about race because it's a continuum, right?
I mean, there's not sort of one, you know, black and white and so on, right, so to speak.
And what is the pushback?
Say, well, you know, skin color is not in three shades.
You know, it's an infinity of shades.
It's as many shades of skin color as there are people.
And as I've noticed, as I age, it even changes and gets spotty over when you hit 50.
So what is the pushback against the idea that race doesn't exist because it tends to be a continuum?
Yeah, I think that's probably one of the more common objections you hear.
Certainly one of the ones we discuss both in our academic paper that's coming out and in one of the Quillette essays.
Look, it's not something I'm going to disagree with.
It's just patently true that in terms of platonic essences or however how you want to think about them, that's not how race exists in our species.
It's just not the case.
There is certainly, as the common phrase, fuzzy boundaries, groups that merge from one into another, there are not hard and fast lines.
And I think anyone who is arguing that there is is simply ignorant of the evidence or doesn't want to take account of the evidence.
And so the question then becomes, well, can we talk meaningfully about groups and also acknowledge that the boundaries are fuzzy and that they're not hard?
And I think we absolutely can.
We can do it empirically, which is the really valuable approach.
You can use statistical methods to just look at how certain genotypes cluster together from certain parts of the world.
It gives you an idea of ancestral history of that group and their migratory patterns and their intermingling with other groups.
We're getting increasingly better at doing that.
I think it's also important to say that Could this more fine-grained analysis do damage to some of the parochial assumptions about racial groups?
Absolutely.
Science has a history of doing damage to parochial assumptions.
We should be prepared for that.
Like everything else in social science and the natural science, our conceptions of the world should be updated and upgraded depending on What we continue to learn from the genomic sciences that are quickly and just rapidly expanding daily almost.
But that objection that race is...
We can even use population groups as a term because race is such a politically loaded word that population groups are meaningless as a concept because race is continuous.
That's simply not the case empirically.
These different genes cluster together depending on ancestral heritage.
And so it is meaningful to talk both about groups and both about continuums.
I think two things can be true at the same time.
And another objection that I've heard is this argument that genetic variation is far greater in a particular population than between populations.
So to take an obvious example, the variation in height between men is greater than the average variation of height between men and women, and therefore they say, well, variation between groups is of little scientific interest or value.
I don't quite follow that.
I don't really think that that makes much, much particular sense, but I wonder if you could give sort of the more professional pushback on that.
Yeah, so, you know, this is another very common objection, and very much in the same way as the first objection, it's an empirical issue, and it's true.
There is more variation within race than between, and the question then becomes, what does that mean?
I think the first thing to consider is what would be the amount of variation that's enough?
Would it need to be 30%, 40%, 50% of the difference that exists between races?
I mean, there's not a hard and fast number that would magically put us at, well, this is enough to be meaningful.
It's not unlike prior discussions before we had mapped the genome.
Clearly humans are so complex that we must have hundreds of thousands of genes.
Turns out we have about 24,000, which was shocking at the time.
And then the ultimate conclusion was, well, clearly genes can't matter for anything that's important for human nature because we have so few of them.
There's not enough to yield the vast complexity that we see with humans, which is patently untrue.
And we've revised and updated our thinking on that.
The other point to make about differences within and between races is the idea was first made popular by a very famous geneticist, Richard Lewontin, who was a brilliant thinker, but on this case, Professor Lewontin was a bit misguided in his assertions because one of the things we talk about in some of our writing is it's not necessarily the difference that matters so much as the The genes that differ
and how they're correlated across groups.
We might not expect to see vast differences, but if the genes that differ are relevant for certain traits that we care about, they could still matter in terms of differences in proportion of alleles across groups.
The other thing to keep in mind is much like the point about continuous distribution of groups, or of individuals rather, We're not, for the most part, talking about genes that are present in one population and absent in the other.
That's also not the point to take away.
You're going to see different frequencies of alleles in all groups, potentially.
The question then becomes, are they different in a greater or less proportion across groups for traits that might be relevant to behavioral outcomes or cognitive outcomes?
Again, I think that's kind of an open question that some work has been done on, but we're in need of updating those analyses.
I don't know if that, did that speak to your question?
Yeah, I mean, just empirically, it doesn't seem to make much sense.
If you look at a very tall group like the Danes versus a short group like pygmies, sure, there's variations among Danes and there's variations among pygmies, but the difference between the two on average is greater than the variation within each population.
I'm just guessing that would sort of make sense to me.
Sure.
I don't really understand.
You know, there are, of course, variations between Great Danes and Dashuans.
But, you know, the difference in height between the two is greater than the variation in height within the population.
So it's just one of these things that I've never really...
Again, this sort of common sense experience of the world stuff doesn't really add up to me.
Right.
And it's...
I think the...
The assertion about the importance of the amount of variation between groups was taken just as gospel truth for a lot of years, and that's understandable.
I mean, you have a really well-known, well-respected scientist, geneticist, saying that, look, this is a non-starter because there's not enough variation between groups to matter.
I think it's served as a point of confusion more than it has clarified anything in terms of understanding human evolution and differences across groups.
To the extent that the difference that exists between groups versus within matters is an empirical question.
We can investigate it and we can know whether those things matter.
But really troubling has been the tendency to attack scholars.
Pretty viciously and folks like Arthur Jensen come to mind in terms of folks who were attacked pretty viciously for suggesting that it might even be possible that group differences could be attributable to genetic differences and I think it's never we should never lose sight of the idea that just because something could be doesn't mean that it will be and us wishing something To go away and
not exist doesn't change the extent to which it exists in the real world.
And so these things are out there as topics of study and we should study them, but most importantly we should resist the urge to demonize folks who are interested in studying them.
Right, right.
And the third objection is the idea that racial classifications are arbitrary, that you could pick anything, lactose intolerance, antimalarial genes, height, and so on.
So why on earth would we try to cluster ethnicities or human groups around, I guess you could say, external racial characteristics that, you know, whichever way you slice the cake, you get a piece of cake.
So why one way rather than another?
Sure, and again, these are objections put forward by really intelligent people, folks like Jared Diamond, and they're important to take seriously.
I think they're a bit misleading in the sense that if we just employ some kind of common sense when classifying ethnic or population groups, this really becomes a non-problem.
The example that we've used before is with classifying movie genres.
If you take a movie like Nightmare on Elm Street, is it a comedy?
But no, it's clearly not a comedy.
So it doesn't have much in common with 21 Jump Street or any other comedy that might come to mind.
But it also has more in common with Friday the 13th, which is a different type of horror movie.
So the point is that, yeah, you could classify.
You might also, for some reason, classify Nightmare on Elm Street as some type of coming of age, teenage metaphor.
A man learning to live with his mask.
That's right, exactly.
Yeah, the struggles of folks with knives on their fingers.
But it kind of defies parsimony.
And so it's much more parsimonious to put data into a principal components analysis and see how they cluster together empirically.
And that's what we can do with modern genomic data.
Among many other more advanced techniques as well.
And so, it is true, there is certainly some arbitrariness to how we classify groups, and our vision can lead us astray.
We can suspect a person to belong to one ethnicity or one group when at a genetic level, they don't.
Their ancestry is better explained by different It's possible for us to classify incorrectly, but in a parsimonious sense, we can do it and do it meaningfully.
I think the objection that it's openly or rather overtly arbitrary just doesn't hold a lot of water when we just approach from the standpoint of how parsimoniously might we put these groups together and Take that approach.
Well, and I think that if we're going to start categorizing groups, it would be relevant to significant factors, right?
So, I mean, if you're going to start sorting people by height, it matters if you are auditioning people for a basketball team.
You know, that's a relevant characteristic.
It's not the only one.
I mean, youth and leanness and fast-twitch muscles and experience and all that kind of stuff, but height has some importance in that particular area.
And so if you're running a ski team, speed and skill and skiing and so on would be something you would standardize.
And so I don't think they're arbitrary.
I think that we're looking because we know in society that among the major races, there are differences in outcomes.
There are differences in outcomes educationally.
There are differences in outcomes in terms of income and savings and all of this kind of criminality and so on.
Well, these are all important things.
And of course, given the difference, you know, to sort of avoid the standard black-white thing, we can look at the difference between East Asians and Hispanics in terms of income and savings, educational attainment, and so on.
Well, there are differences.
And we, of course, as a society, we want everyone to do as well as humanly possible.
And if there are biases, racism, bigotries that are standing in the way of Hispanic achievement, we want to address those.
On the other hand, of course, if there are genetic differences between these two groups that have something to do with IQ on average or brain size or whatever it is, mathematical ability, who knows, then we don't solve the problem by pretending it's racism.
We just shift the injustice to another group.
And now we're calling, I don't know, let's say, we can say East Asians are racist against Hispanics because they do better and Hispanics do worse.
But if we say, well, there's no genetics involved and it's all the bigotry of East Asians, we haven't really solved the problem.
And what we're doing now is we're blaming East Asians for their racism, which may exist, but that doesn't explain everything.
And I think this idea that if we simply ignore genetics completely, we're solving any potential injustice in the world, I don't think it's true, because I think all that happens is we shift it to a collectivized blame against whoever's doing better in that society without looking at what may be underpinning some of those successes.
No, I agree.
And I think...
As a general rule, it's better to know more about a topic than less.
And so the more we can know and understand about why you see differences emerge for certain things, certain traits, certain outcomes for different population groups, different races, that's information we need to at least have in our vault of information.
Whether it lends us any type of actionable intelligence, that's yet to be seen.
It might.
But it's certainly going to benefit no one if it remains either hidden or distorted or simply unknown because folks are frightened to study it.
Which is still very much the case for a lot of different traits.
And one thing I found quite fascinating, sorry to keep wrenching the wheel of the debate back and forth, but one thing I really found fascinating was, I'm just going to quote directly from one of your articles, how good we are at identifying race.
Now, we're a tribal species, so you'd kind of think that would be part of our I'd like to be able to accurately identify genetic proximity because that's kind of what drives evolution as a preference for genetic proximity.
Our own children versus other people's children and so on.
But here, I wonder if you could talk a little bit about this.
You wrote, the geneticist Hua Tang and her colleagues, for instance, found that self-reported ethnicity corresponded almost perfectly with genetic clusters from 326 microsatellite markers.
A microsatellite marker is a piece of repetitive DNA in which a series of DNA base pairs are repeated.
Other studies have demonstrated even more power to identify people's ancestry accurately.
Now, why would we develop this if there was no particular difference?
Why would we even develop this amazing skill to detect fairly small changes in people's appearance and be able to accurately identify DNA if it didn't matter?
So are you asking why would humans be fairly good at detecting or correctly identifying our own kind of ancestral heritage, or why would we develop the technology to do it?
No, the technology I can understand.
That's just the general examination, but it is sort of remarkable how quickly people are able to identify racial characteristics and extraordinarily accurately, where, of course, if it was a social construct, wouldn't that be quite a bit harder?
One would expect that it might, yeah.
And kind of as we say in that piece, I think part of the reason you kind of face some scoffing among the general public at this idea or appreciating the idea of a social construction of race is because it seems to defy our eyesight.
There seems to be meaningful racial variation in the population.
We can see it.
And so when an academic tells you that it's a social construct, that seems to fly in the face of common sense.
Part of that confusion, because I have some really close friends who are sociologists, and we think differently on this topic, but I find them to be incredibly important colleagues because they continue to push my intuitions around and challenge me to think about hard issues.
And so when a sociologist often talks about, say, a social construction, they're not...
Oftentimes, they're not suggesting that it's impossible that biology matters when you're talking about race.
What they're talking about is how we respond and react and think about certain groups in the population could be informed by social processes.
I don't dispute that.
So that's an important issue to recognize.
But some of the friction that emerges is kind of the idea that, well, our eyes are telling us one thing.
The genomic data is telling us something very similar to then give the appearance that to acknowledge the existence of races, to display for the world your own racial prejudice, is going to be met with some rebuke among the general population because it just seems to cut hard against the grain of how they think about the world.
Now, that doesn't mean we shouldn't challenge how people think about the world.
That's a good thing to do.
But when the genomic data suggests something that, like they do, that population groups exist and that they tend to accord with how we think about racial classifications, you mentioned the Tang study, it's a very important one, given the fidelity that exists between self-reported race and genetic ancestry.
I think it doesn't do ourselves any favors in terms of credibility to then, in the face of that evidence, to say things like race doesn't exist or it couldn't possibly matter for any trait that a behavioral scientist might be interested in.
Yeah, I mean, I can't look at pictures of, say, white people and figure out what religion they are based upon their pictures, you know, absent any particular religious symbology on their person.
But, of course, we can tell race pretty quickly.
Now, let's talk about general intelligence.
That, to me, is one of the really fascinating areas of this kind of research.
And it's funny to me, and it's kind of ironic, and I think you pointed this out in an essay as well, that a lot of academics say, well, you know, general intelligence, it's really tough to measure.
It's not really that important.
It doesn't really matter.
But, boy, boy, try getting into a PhD program with average marks.
And they're like, no!
No!
No way!
Back of the line!
You get to drive my bus.
So, you know, it doesn't exist.
It doesn't matter.
But, man, when they're going over people's, you know, application essays and publication history, suddenly intelligence seems to matter quite a lot.
That's exactly right.
Yeah, it's pretty incredible to observe folks who will tell you to your face that intelligence either doesn't exist or, yes, it exists, but it's really not.
I mean, there are all these other things that are much more meaningful than Strike a very different tone when looking at graduate assistantships.
All of a sudden, the GREs and the GPAs and the CVs become really relevant to the extent that they capture the intellectual prowess of the candidate.
It is quite interesting to watch that unfold.
And the estimates seem to range enormously.
And of course, they change over time, the genetic influence on intelligence less when you're younger.
As you manifest later in life, I've heard estimates as high as 80%.
Once you get sort of past the mid-century, 80% of your intelligence being determined by your genetics for different groups and different genders, it tends to accelerate and decelerate at different times.
It's kind of a slippery fish.
To get your hands on, but it really does seem that intelligence has a very significant genetic basis.
And this doesn't mean, of course, that environment can't harm it.
I mean, you may be genetically programmed to be tall, you don't get enough food, you're malnourished, and you don't end up achieving your full height.
But it really does seem that in what is arguably one of the most important social resources, which is sort of raw intelligence, there is a horribly unfair distribution that is somewhat outside of people's control.
Yeah, and so I think, again, quite a bit of important things are packaged in what you just said.
So first of all, setting aside the causes of intelligence differences and where they come from, We can just ask the question, does intelligence predict anything meaningful in the world?
It absolutely does.
I was watching a couple days ago your chat with Linda Godforson.
Linda's one of my intellectual heroes.
She's incredibly brave and incredibly brilliant.
So much of Linda's work has been devoted to understanding intelligence.
The role that intelligence plays in just a variety of social outcomes, whether they're epidemiological outcomes, so avoiding certain diseases, taking care of oneself, avoiding accidents.
I mean, there are some things that are outside of our control, but there are a lot of things that are very much inside our control.
If a doctor gives us a prescription, can we follow the directions and take the medicine carefully?
As prescribed, in order to give ourselves the best chance at getting better.
Can we secure a job, perform well in that job, hold that job, and maybe even promote up in the ranks of that job?
Every outcome that is of interest to human beings, educational outcomes, social outcomes, occupational outcomes, Intelligence has a role in predicting it, and that's true outside of where you think intelligence comes from.
So that, as a standalone point, is incredibly important, and it's something that remarkably continues to be ignored by a whole cadre of social scientists who perhaps would even tell you that they think intelligence is an important construct.
Just not important enough to put in their studies and to control for in their analyses.
And it really is remarkable the absence of IQ measures just in the discipline of criminology, much less in the wider fields of sociology.
Now, there are obviously quite a few psychologists who understand how important it is and take account of it in their studies.
But it's really remarkable that Given the weight of evidence in favor of the importance of intelligence as a trait that predicts social outcomes, that it continues to be overlooked.
And so we have this really vast body of evidence suggesting that intelligence is important for understanding human flourishing and doing well in the world.
Then we can ask the next obvious question, why are some people smarter or, you know, Why are there differences in intelligence?
And do those differences matter?
Again, we know that they do for different outcomes.
Where do the differences come from?
And that's where behavioral genetic designs using twins and siblings and adopted kids are incredibly insightful, and they reveal exactly what you said, that early in life the heritability of intelligence is significant, but it's not as large as it becomes as the population ages.
As we get older, genetic differences explain most of the variation for individuals, for intelligence outcomes, with kind of measurement error and kind of the unique environmental experiences and the idiosyncrasies of life, something we call the non-shared environment, explaining the rest of that variance.
I was looking at a really excellent paper the other day by Robert Pullman and Ian Deary.
It was written, I think it was Again, 2015, it's just a very nice overview of genetics and intelligence, kind of what we know, what the current state of the evidence is.
And that's, you know, again, something that's very robust.
A large percentage of the variation that exists in the population for intelligence is explained by genetic differences.
And I mean, for me, this goes back to the 90s when the sort of twin shotgun shells of empirical shrapnel hit my forehead from Murray and Hernstein in the bell curve.
And recognizing that if my intelligence, let's say, is not something I've earned, not something that I just, well, you know, I just, I went to the gym more and that's why I'm stronger.
And like, if it's something that I just kind of have Yeah, I think
so, too.
Again, I think it would be true even if there wasn't a large genetic contribution to differences in general intelligence.
So let's say that we assume that differences in intelligence are completely the result of parenting practices.
That's not the case.
It's absolutely not the case.
I want to be clear about that.
But let's assume that it was.
Should we still hold an adult responsible for how they were parented from age zero to I mean, they're exerting no influence over their parents.
They're at the whim of their parents' parenting style.
And so it's equally out of their control in that situation what their intelligence, how it manifests, and how it grows and develops.
So, again, I do think that aspect of intelligence pushes us to think differently.
To at least appreciate the importance of intelligence when we think about hard social issues, whether they're the creation of jobs or a changing economy.
I mean, this is something Charles Murray wrote about a few years back in his book, Coming Apart.
And I think we're gaining a new appreciation of the things that both Richard Herrnstein and Charles wrote in 1994 and also what Charles wrote in 2013.
The idea that when you have a shifting economy where It increasingly calls for individuals to be pretty bright in order to maneuver in it and to be successful.
We should think about how we're going to make life as good as we can for the entire population.
Knowing that people differ in their abilities and their talents and their intellects and those differences matter and they complicate things in ways that go beyond simply talking in broad platitudes about Trickle down economics or trickle up economics or job creation or whatever.
They kind of surpass any political stance and they just create a real problem that we have to think about how to solve.
Right.
And this, I mean, I sort of want to reinforce and correct me if I go astray, of course, but I really want to reinforce to the audience here.
This stuff is about as validated as could conceivably be in the social sciences, right?
So, as you point out, this is a magnificent overview, a meta-analysis of five decades of twins research.
I mean, it's half a century of countless studies and countless people counting every number in those countless studies.
It further reinforced and validated the argument that Which I think basically now is a fairly established hypothesis that half the variation in most of human outcomes is the result of genetic differences.
It's a difficult thing.
You know, I don't know if it's just because I was raised in the environmentalist sphere, you know, because there is this argument from, particularly on the left, that it's environment determines, it comes from maybe sort of economic determinism from the left or whatever, but it's a painful thing to look at.
And I think people are kind of avoiding that pain of looking at the influence of genetics within and between different human groups and their outcomes.
Because we do like the idea that everyone can end up the same, that everyone can have the same opportunities.
And this, of course, means nothing in terms of judging individuals, and it means nothing in terms of equality under the law.
But it is difficult because we do have this egalitarian ideal that we can all end up the same.
And if there are genetic variances between groups, between genders that may diminish that capacity, that dream is at least on hold until sort of more information is gathered.
And I think because we do have this egalitarian ideal, anything which pushes back from a genetic standpoint against this egalitarian ideal, because it's become such a value and such a virtue, it almost feels like it's unraveling our capacity to have a good society.
I don't think it is, but I think that's the feeling that a lot of people get.
Yeah, I agree.
And I try to be as charitable as I can to folks that I disagree with.
And I fully believe that when I butt heads with other scholars on this topic, their motivations are as pure as mine in terms of wanting to understand how the world works.
wanting to increase the level of flourishing for every human as much as they can, and that they view the best way to do that as differently than maybe I would.
I think we're, on days when I'm feeling magnanimous, I think we're all pushing towards the same goal.
But I think probably the best encapsulation of this was in Steve Pinker's book, The Blank Slate, where he talks about being careful not to confuse people.
Sameness with equality, and you mentioned it when you mentioned being careful to think distinctively about equality before the law and the individuality of people in the population and treating individuals as such.
I think that really has to form the backbone of how we deal with these issues.
It's one of the things we said in the essay that you quoted from, that we take many of the concerns off the table If we just simply insist that individuals are dealt with as individuals, not as members of whatever group they might identify with,
whether it's a religious group or a particular gender identity or sexual orientation, that if that person, say, in a pool of job candidates is the most qualified individual, then the avenue should be open to them.
And we can have that goal.
Readily acknowledge that that hasn't always been the case in the past, and it may continue not to be the case now in certain ways.
There were times when there were clear, overt barriers to the professional ascension of females or minorities.
That's an abhorrent thing in a democracy, and we should take strides to make sure those barriers never become erected.
But we should also not confuse The equality of opportunity with the then moral imperative that every individual, every group have the same outcomes.
That is a dangerous proposition because what I think it forces people to do is choose between either being dishonest about the topic or ignoring it completely.
This is, again, one of the things my colleagues and I have discussed.
We could, for example, call, just simply as an academic community, we could decide, you know, studying race and studying race differences is dangerous.
It's unlikely to produce any societal good.
The neuroscientist Sam Harris uses the example, we might know exactly how to weaponize smallpox, right?
But we wouldn't want to put the instruction manual for doing that online because that could cause some problems.
And I don't disagree.
So it's true that we often have to think carefully about the knowledge that we accrue and how we disseminate it.
But that said, if academia were to declare a moratorium on topics that are controversial, it doesn't even have to be race.
It could be gender.
It could be sexual orientation.
These are all hot-button issues.
It could be religion.
That does not mean that all of the folks who have strong opinions about those topics that are less Empirically informed are also going to call a moratorium.
And so then we're in a situation where many academics are progressives and they might want to combat some of the ideas that would be promulgated from folks out in the population who have agendas, be they related to race or sexual orientation.
The best way to combat bad ideas is with good evidence, and if we've called a moratorium on these topics, where are we going to get our evidence from?
So from my perspective, and certainly I've been wrong before, it's happened, but from my perspective, the best approach is to study the topics as honestly as we can, always holding closely to the idea that we're not going to put artificial always holding closely to the idea that we're not going to put artificial barriers in front of individuals in our society simply because they identify with a certain group or
Yeah, I must say that there's no censorship you couldn't justify by comparing a proposition to weaponizing smallpox.
I mean, you could say anything about anything you disagree with and say, well, that's just like weaponizing smallpox, and therefore we can't do it.
And it's like, I don't think that examining...
Genetics is the same as, you know, that could be considered just a little bit on the hyperbole side.
But now, one of the things that we sort of share this as an interest in Philip Brushton's work, I've done some presentations under the gene was RK selection theory and so on.
Now, I don't know if this is a ridiculous thing to ask.
Maybe it is, but I'll throw it out there anyway and feel free to take as much time as you want if you want to pursue this.
You wrote, my co-authors and I have drawn on some of Rushton's insights in order to propose an evolutionary theory of criminal behavior.
Hmm.
That is tempting.
You're showing a little bit of leg there.
I'm stopping the car, opening the door.
Is there anything you'd like to share about an overview of what you and your co-authors have been working on?
Oh, absolutely.
So, in a series of papers going back a few years now...
We've been kind of developing the idea, drawing on Phil Rustin's work, and not just Rustin's work, but also folks like Lee Ellis, who have talked about the importance of life history traits and life history variation for human outcomes.
And I guess maybe we, I'm sure a lot of your viewers are familiar with the topic, but in case they're not, kind of a The oversimplified view of the topic of life history theory is the idea of trade-offs between either reproduction, reproductive output, so having a lot of offspring, or parental investment.
Having a few offspring and investing a lot of care and a lot of attention into them.
So even taking a long time to gestate the child, producing only a limited number of eggs or sperm over the course of a lifetime.
And so within that framework, we can talk about Species that run kind of a gambit between what we would call a faster life history where the emphasis is on reproduction or slower life history where the emphasis is on a limited number of offspring but heavy parental investment.
Human beings obviously have a slow life history.
Evolutionarily speaking, we have a limited number of offspring.
Females produce a limited number of eggs.
And we tend to invest quite a bit in child rearing.
Childhood lasts for a long time.
There's a very vulnerable period that exists.
And there's a lot of growth and development that has to take place outside the womb.
And so that necessitates for a lot of investment on the part of human parents.
And so that being the case, there is individual variation in the population in terms of different indicators of life history speed.
And this was first, as you mentioned, made famous or infamous by J.P. Rushton.
But as the decades have passed, life history speed and research into that topic has gained a lot of traction in developmental and evolutionary psychology, and a lot of really good work has been done.
And what we had hoped to accomplish in what we called kind of our unified theory of crime Was to draw both on really good modern criminological research, so a lot of the work done by the psychologist Terry Moffitt and her developmental theory of criminal behavior, which was published in 93, and also to draw on Rushton's work and Lee Ellis' work and try and make these things make sense together in kind of a coherent framework, because that's obviously what the goal of a theory is, is to unify a bunch of knowledge.
And so one of the things that we started out Looking at it, there's some really interesting findings that emerge regarding traits that correlate with crime.
And sometimes there are traits that we would expect, like general intelligence or low self-control.
You know, people who have lower self-control, lower general intelligence are more prone to crime.
And that's the sweet spot around IQ85, as far as I remember it.
IQ85 is where the general height of the bell curve of criminality occurs.
Lower than that, you can't plan.
Higher than that, you're better off in the free market.
Right.
Exactly.
And so those traits make sense because they involve planning, anticipating consequences, delaying gratification, all of the things that folks who commit a lot of crime aren't as good at.
But then there are some other things that are kind of surprising.
Like you look at traits like fertility rates are higher among individuals who are especially prone to crime.
Reaching Physical masturbation tends to be a trait that we see with a group that Moffitt called life course persistent offenders.
Now, on the flip side of that, what's kind of interesting is that folks who either engage in kind of a normal developmental level of crime, which is most of the population, will do things that are, if not blatantly illegal, kind of...
Forbidden based on one's age, so things like drinking, smoking, skipping school, being truant, breaking curfew, the kind of normal teenage behavior that most of us do.
Those folks tend to hit puberty at about the average time we would expect, so the population mean.
And what's even more interesting is that folks who tend to abstain from crime, and this is a pretty statistically aberrant group, there's not many of us who are truly abstainers, they're Hitting puberty much later.
And so there are certainly environmental influences on pubertal timing.
I would not suggest that there aren't.
Sorry to interrupt, but this is for those who don't know.
This is the argument that a father absence promotes earlier menses in girls and a more higher tendency to promiscuity and so on.
No, that's right.
And we actually, some colleagues and I just had a paper come out on that issue, so we can return to that in a second if you like, because I think it's a fascinating topic.
And so all of these are traits that are relevant for life history theory and its application to human criminality.
And so the simple essence of what we argue in our paper is that, look, Moffat's theory does a really great job at unifying knowledge about crime at the individual level.
If we layer on life history theory above that, we can perhaps talk more meaningfully about why Why criminality evolved over the history of our species and our simple contention is that what you're seeing is that faster life history speeds happen to drag with them a higher predisposition to criminality.
So, you know, it avoids the nonsense ideas of there being a crime gene or genes for picking locks.
I mean, those are non-starters and no one who knows anything about genetics thinks that.
But they do provide what I think is a really informative layer of explanation.
So talking about, you know, why we might see differences, say, not just across individuals, but across groups in the population, and including males and females, could be at least partly attributable to differences in life history speed.
And so even evolutionary differences that have emerged over time and could be a product of local regional evolution for certain groups.
Now, I think the added benefit of our approach in the use of life history speed is that it's also kind of well known and understood that life history speeds are not fully facultative, so they're not adjustable in full,
but they do adjust themselves within the lifetime of an individual, including You're seeing an emphasis on reproduction peak as an individual hits puberty and decline as a person ages.
They are in some ways tuned by local environments.
So this is sort of the epigenetic response to social cues.
So on the RK continuum, father absence would indicate either an unstable family bond or a presence of war or famine, and therefore your reproductive strategy would shift from K to R to having more children because you're in a more uncertain environment.
And these genetics may be tuned by environmental cues.
Possibly.
It's a...
Again, it's something we can investigate.
There's been a lot of really good work done on that.
One of the first formulations of that idea was by Jay Belsky some years back.
The paper that I mentioned that we just had come out dealt with that issue, and our caution was not that people shouldn't study the influence of rearing environment on reproductive output, more that when you do that, you have to control for what we call genetic confounding.
The idea that there are genetic influences on both puberty but also on family structure to the extent that families don't dissolve randomly in the population.
They can dissolve for a variety of reasons.
Maybe a spouse dies or there's an accident, but they could also dissolve because certain personality traits make it very difficult for some folks to be in long-term relationships.
We know from prior twin studies that divorce tendencies are heritable.
More specifically, the personality traits that predict divorce, negative emotionality, those types of things are heritable constructs.
And so all of that goes into the point of...
Family structures aren't randomly strewn about in the population, and there are heritable confounds that predict family structure.
Sorry to interrupt, but there would also be latent instabilities that would be brought more to the forefront, I would argue, by particular government programs.
Looking in particular at the black community, the black community at one point had a marital stability even higher than the white community.
This is sort of back in the 20s and 30s.
There are, I think, significant arguments to say that with the introduction of the welfare state, particularly targeted at inner cities, Where the woman makes more money if the father is not living with her, that you're basically paying for the destruction of the family within particular communities and therefore latent instabilities that would have been restrained by negative consequences.
When you remove those negative consequences, you get this kind of geyser of instability that erupts.
Yeah, it's an interesting point, and maybe we can return to it a bit.
I will say quickly that that was one of the topics Charles dealt with in coming apart, Charles Murray.
I think he's been on, and he may have chatted with you about this, but he's observed very similar rates in terms of marriage instability in the white population from about 1960 onward.
That's why I recommend the book so much.
It's a really fascinating analysis of what's happened in Just in an isolated population of white Americans.
But in terms of studying life history traits and criminological outcomes, really our point was not that now we have to do away with Moffat's theory.
It was actually precisely the opposite.
It was just simply a way to provide a broader context and understand why something like The developmental patterns that we see exist for criminal behavior, why most of the population engages in, you know, a fair amount of crime around the time of puberty and then it declines versus why is there this small subset of the population that appears to have behavioral problems before the age of five and things only tend to get worse in terms of their trajectory towards
crime and also why there might be a small segment of the population that, you That doesn't seem particularly predisposed to any criminal behavior.
These folks also have really high educational attainment, really high income, really good health outcomes, and not very many kids.
They tend to stay married and have kids later in life, but they tend to do quite well, as do normally developing individuals who may have engaged in some type of Teenage mischievous behavior or what have you.
Boundary testing, let's call it.
Yeah, exactly.
But I think an evolutionary perspective sheds a lot of light on that, and that was our goal.
It was interesting.
We did face some fairly harsh blowback.
That paper is published in a more psychologically oriented journal, not in a criminology journal, as I had originally hoped, because it's meant to be crime theory, so it's hopefully of interest to criminologists.
Psychology has made a lot of strides in appreciating how evolution serves as a guiding theoretical framework, just as it does in biology.
Social Sociology, criminology, not so much.
We're still very much a field that is hostile to any incursion of evolution into what we do.
Well, and this hostility or fear that the left or the environmental, 100% environmental people have about the incursion of basic empirical science and genetics into the field has always struck me as kind of precious because if we look at the damage done by the 100% environmentalist folk,
and you could just pick Communism, 100 million dead in the 20th century alone, because this was 100% entirely determined by economic relations to the means of productions and junk like that.
It's completely anti-scientific, more of a religion than a theory.
But if you look at the damage done by that, or the idea, you know, the welfare state saying, well, you know, the poor people are just like the rich people.
we just give them money and they'll be just like everyone else when what's happened is you've got, you know, a semi-permanent underclass and the destruction of the family and, you know, terrible outcomes for a lot of the youth.
So the 100% environmental thesis, particularly combined with the power of state redistribution, has produced, like, staggeringly horrifying, terrible outcomes and some positive, right?
I mean, it's a mixed bag, but the negatives seem to get completely brushed over.
And in the sort of the hindsight and in the wake of all of these social disasters from the 100% environmentalistic theory for them to say, well, you know, there could be risks involved in bringing genetics into it.
It's like, have you looked behind you?
There was kind of a bump in that car and a lot of people fell to the road.
No, I agree.
It's It's interesting you bring up this issue of welfare and the welfare state.
It's an interesting topic.
I have a colleague, Adam Perkins, who wrote a book about it not too long ago, about a year ago, I guess, called The Welfare Trait.
Adam is a neurobiologist by training, wonderful guy, really bright, and as you can imagine, faced an extreme amount of backlash, including, I believe, having talks canceled or boycotted.
The entire thesis of the book was simply this idea that could it be the case that while completely well-intentioned that welfare programs could have some negative outcomes?
It's not a new argument.
It's been around for a while.
And what I think was more upsetting is that while I don't know yet if all of Adam's ideas will be vindicated, some of them need to be tested.
He could be wrong about some of them.
But what is most troublesome to me about things like Adam's book and the reception to it is the idea that it's some type of sin to even suggest the possibility that we might have negative outcomes from well-intentioned social policy.
That's what I find more disconcerting.
It could be that when scholars a hundred years from now read Adam's book, they think, well, you know, It was a product of his time, but we know now he was wrong.
We say that about certain ideas now.
I don't know if that's true, but even if it's true, to me, the much more fruitful viewpoint on these issues is he was wrong, but he refined our thinking in very important ways, and we arrived at the truth of the matter much more quickly because his work existed, if that makes sense.
This, you know, Brian, I gotta tell you, I find it...
It's incomprehensible that science is so infested by the hysteria of offense.
I can't figure out how all of this is substantially any different from blasphemy laws.
It has turned into a literal witch hunt against people who you disagree with.
And this, again, not to oversimplify, coming from the left, the left claims to want all this diversity and all of this wonderful mix and let's bring everything to the table.
But then if something comes along that interferes with their particular thinking, they tend to sort of unleash a huge amount of vitriol and try as hard as they can to make people's lives as uncomfortable as possible and go for the source of their income and attempt to interfere with their careers.
That does not seem like diversity to me.
And it is a fundamentally religious approach, and it really seems to have come into academia just over the last couple of decades, maybe even 10 or 15 or 20 years.
I know that for the race and IQ stuff, it's been further back and all that, but it is...
A terrible disservice on the most important aspect of human inquiry, which is to follow the facts wherever they lead.
That's how civilization, knowledge, and I think eventually virtue advances.
I think so, too.
I think about when you mentioned the political stagnation, the academy, the work of Jonathan Haidt is so important in this area.
The books he's written over the past years, Ten or so years and more, the establishment of an organization called Heterodox Academy, which I'm a member of.
It was kind of the brainchild of John Haidt and some other scholars.
The idea being that we do have this, especially, as you said, in recent years, this incredible stagnation of political thought and political ideology in the academy, and that's likely to be harmful when it comes to understanding and understanding Challenging ideas, right?
And so, refining our thinking on tough issues is likely to benefit from having a variety of voices and a variety of viewpoints at the table, and you can look at the distribution of kind of self-described political orientation in the academy, and it varies by discipline, but it is overwhelmingly left-leaning, and in some cases far left-leaning, and in terms of Regarding the ratio of conservative to liberal thought.
And sadly it's not, as a lot of people have talked about lately, the classical liberal ideas of a marketplace of ideas and challenging everything and freedom of speech.
It's a much more oppressive form of left political philosophy that views certain ideas as dangerous and unacceptable on campuses.
And I think it's important to point out, I've tried to point this out several times, that both sides of the political spectrum have their share of science denial that goes on, and both have trouble with certain issues.
And that's why it's not necessarily just the case that we need political diversity for the sake of political diversity.
I think probably a better way of describing the nature of the problem and maybe the solution was by some of my colleagues, Bo and Ben Weingart, We should move away from this idea of sacred values in the social sciences.
It's not a good approach to doing science.
It only confuses the matter.
It doesn't mean that we can't think ethically and carefully about hard issues, and it doesn't mean that we have to reject the idea that sometimes we'll run into ethical quandaries.
But it does mean that when it comes to asking and answering questions, we can't afford to have any sacred values that distort our approach, whether they come from the right or the left.
It doesn't matter.
Well, and I have enormous optimism for the spread of rational empiricism in the social sciences.
I mean, it's still fairly, of course, fairly entrenched in the physical sciences, but for the simple reason that people who get offended and try and harm your career and get hysterical and upset, well, that's just another day they haven't learned how to debate properly.
And this question is eventually going to be settled by reason and evidence.
Or we have no civilization left at all, in which case, who cares, right?
But all that happens is when people get upset and offended and yell and scream and hold their breath until they turn blue, well, they're just not training to be in the ring with competent debaters.
I mean, I love a good debate.
I don't fear a good debate because if I lose a good debate, I have gained something enormous, which is, you know, better reason and evidence to buttress my opinion.
And so people who don't engage in debate but engage in character assassination are simply revealing their incompetence in the realm of debate and setting themselves up for failure when, as is inevitable, it's going to be settled by facts.
Yeah, I think one of the really, and so I'll return to some of the points that John Hyde has made.
too.
Kind of coupled along with that is an increasing realization that oftentimes we're not as rational as we would like to be, that our opinions emerge not from informed consumption of evidence on a topic, but rather much more kind of tailored consumption of evidence that fits with our viewpoints.
And this holds for everyone, me included.
I mean, I wish I could sit here and tell you I was born free of bias.
I wasn't.
I have them, and so does every other scientist working today.
And even if you're born free of bias, you have, of course, sunk costs into your particular perspectives, which you don't want to dislodge, of course, right?
Absolutely.
I have an investment in the evolutionary unified theory.
I want to be right.
Just like Darwin wanted to be right, and he was fantastically right, but no scientist, at least I don't, well, I'll speak for me.
I've never set out with the idea that, God, I hope I'm wrong about this.
I would like to be proven right, but I think that one of the benefits of having a more diverse academy, I know this is something Hyde has mentioned quite a bit, is that It allows us the ability to acknowledge our biases,
to recognize that we have them, and it sets up a situation where you have a diverse set of viewpoints that can help you spot a blind spot in your own thinking that maybe you just couldn't see otherwise.
That's incredibly valuable.
It's incredibly essential too if the goal ultimately is to be right in our theories and right in our predictions and those types of But it becomes a lot more difficult when everybody thinks the way you think, because what you get is just reinforcement about your viewpoint on a particular issue.
That's good sometimes, but it's often a barrier to scientific progress, and it's really problematic right now.
I mean, human biodiversity is one of these perspectives that I wished with all my heart was not the case, as far as it stands, particularly, of course, the increasing evidence for the genetic underpinnings for a lot of this sort of Human group or race or ethnic diversity differences.
It is one of these things that, for me at least, I really had to grit my teeth and just say, man, if this was false, this would be the best thing ever.
But as the evidence tends to accumulate, we have to put away our childish preferences and deal with what is.
I really do appreciate the work that you're doing.
I know that, I mean, I sort of get the feeling that maybe this is a bit of sort of self-praise for us both, but there is something about the forbidden fruit.
You know, when people say, "Well, you really can't talk about this," you know, I think the more sort of maybe high-T and ambitious people are like, "Oh, really?
Well maybe I've got some more interest in it now because, you know, it's the one room that's locked and therefore we become lock pickers." But I think that's sort of been my experience.
But I really do appreciate the work that you're doing.
I also really wanted to remind people, you know, follow you on Twitter.
We'll put the link below, just in case you're listening to this, F-S-N-O-L-E-1.
And quillette.com is where your essays are.
Dr.
Brian Boatwell, of course, remember, Biosocial Criminologist and the Associate Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at St.
Louis University.
Brian, a real pleasure.
Thank you so much for your time today.
It was very, very illuminating, and I think everyone's really, really appreciating the free lessons.
Well, hey, look, it was an honor, and I really appreciate you having me.
I hope we can do it again sometime, but it was really a thrill for me to join you and chat about these things, and I just really appreciate it.
