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July 14, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
43:07
Development and Epigenetics | Darcia Narvaez and Stefan Molyneux
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Hi, everybody. This is Stefan Molyne from Freedom Aid Radio.
I'm extremely pleased to have Darsha Navaya as professor of the Department of Psychology and senior provost for Faculty Affairs, which I think means that she arranges Who Sleeps With Whom, at the University of Notre Dame, editor also of the Journal of Moral Education.
So thank you so much for taking the time.
We really appreciate it.
You're welcome. Now, I've been peppering psychological experts with this question probably for four years or so, and you actually wrote something quite explicit about this that I'd like to ask you about.
You wrote recently, life outcomes for American youth are worsening, especially in comparison to 50 years ago.
Because I think the question of whether childhood is getting better or worse seems to me like a highly complex and ambivalent one.
And I was wondering if you could make the case as to how in general it's getting worse for kids in America these days.
I base my conclusion on people's reports that are looking back 50 years, and that's James Heckman, the Nobel Laureate, came out with a report in 2008.
And then recently this year, in January, the National Research Council looked at people under age 50 in a comparison of developed nations, and the USA was pretty much at the bottom of 17 nations.
On all sorts of health outcomes, early child death, suicide, obesity, drug use, and many diseases.
I had Robert Whitaker on the show, I guess about a year ago, you may be aware of him, he wrote Anatomy of an Epidemic, because of course, In terms of mental health outcomes for American youth, given the amount of medication that's currently being applied on them, sort of the SSRIs and psychotropic meds, it seems odd that their mental health would be getting worse.
I mean, I know it's not causal, but the degree to which the medication use is increasing.
Do you think there's any correlation as he points out to that?
I'm not a psychiatrist or a drug expert, so I can't really speak to that, except I know that sometimes the medicines make you worse.
They don't work over time.
There's some newer papers on that.
But it's not a surprise if you understand that babies and young children need certain types of environments to thrive, and that if they don't have these environments in early life, their whole health and their mental health and physical health is affected for a lifetime, unless you give them drugs to try to remediate it.
Right. Now, you've talked about that.
I've talked about that a little bit on the show.
Of course, I'm no particular expert, but this epigenetics that people...
When I was growing up, it was like, well, it's genes or environment.
And the interrelationship between genes and environment was not...
I don't think it was even explicated back, I don't know, 30 years ago or whatever.
But now, I think you've made the case and others have made the case that...
Simple things like holding your baby, breastfeeding your baby, carrying your baby, actually is turning on and off hundreds of different genes which have a significant effect on personality, growth, intelligence and so on.
I wonder if you could delve into that a little bit, the degree to which we are literally potters shaping the personalities of our babies.
That's right. The epigenetics is just a whole universe of information and knowledge that we're starting to uncover.
Michael Meaney is the most well-known researcher in this area.
He's been doing this for 20 years, looking at rat babies, and they're either high or low-nurturing mothers.
And if you have a low-nurturing mother in the first 10 days of life, Certain genes don't get turned on that control anxiety for the rest of your life.
And it's too bad. You're out of luck.
Unless they give you a drug later.
But that's only one of hundreds of genes that are affected by caregiving.
The drug would only mask the symptoms.
Of course, there's no reactivation of deactivated genetics, right?
That's right, at least as far as we know.
Although, you know, people like to say the brain is plastic, and it is to some degree, but there's certain thresholds and kind of parameters of systems that get set in early life, and we don't know exactly which ones can be changed and which ones you can't change later on.
So it's all kind of a mystery, and my argument is if we just pay attention to what we evolved to need, And we can know that by looking at mammals in general, social mammals in particular, and then human societies that really operate the way that most of our genus history has lived, and they live in those kinds of societies, and look at what they do.
And they behave very differently towards their babies than we do, at least in the USA now.
We've sort of forgotten what babies need and sort of, in my view, treat babies like plants, you know.
We water them once in a while, you know, stick them on the shelf over there in this little carrier and, you know, as long as you know, pat them on the head once in a while, it's sort of what John Watson, the behaviorist psychologist, said in 1928.
We still have that mindset where it's coming back and, you know, it's not everybody, but there's too many people, I think, who think like that about babies.
Right. Now, something you also wrote that I thought was really fascinating was you wrote, instead of being held, infants spend much more time in carriers, car seats, and strollers than they did in the past.
I was just at the mall today with my daughter, and she's four, and she's always up in my arms.
She always wants to be held and carried.
And we went... I was just...
Yeah, having...
Since she was a baby, she not only wanted to be carried, but walked around.
She didn't even like to sort of be held in a lap.
She always wanted something new to see.
But... I couldn't see any other parents, all the parents in car seats, sorry, they were in strollers.
They have these little sort of fire engine strollers that carry kids around in the mall.
And I was really struck by what you said.
Of course, we think that they're sort of, in a sense, being held or contained when they're in car seats, carriers, and strollers, but it's the physical touch that they need much more than that, if I understand what you're saying.
Yes, we have research that shows that mammals actually, when mammal babies are separated from the mother, it's usually the mother that's tested.
Because that's usually who cares for other mammal babies, but in humans it's many adults.
But when the mother is separated from the offspring, all sorts of systems start to get dysregulated.
DNA synthesis stops, growth hormone stops functioning or slows down, respiration starts to get disorganized, cardiac, all sorts of things that makes you realize that it's not crazy for moms and dads to sleep near their young infants.
Because they need help regulating themselves.
They need help to learn how to live in this world after, you know, nine months in the womb, which was much cushier.
Yeah, one of the greatest things that we learned, my wife and I learned before becoming parents was to recognize that The infant and the parents are a system, a combined system.
I don't even know what you'd call it, some sort of Borg mutual parasitical nonsense, but they're not a separate entity.
Their entire internal systems are heavily regulated by what we as parents do.
And that has, I think, kind of new.
Like you sort of got this idea that you got this baby and as long as you didn't do terrible things and the baby was the baby was.
It was going to be the way that grows up.
Like we got this sort of fixed thing.
But it seems that what we sort of understood in doing our research, and I was lucky enough to have great People like Alison Gopnik on the show to press them with questions.
And this idea that the babies and moms in particular are a unit, a sort of biological unit, that just because they've left the womb doesn't mean that the regulation needs to cease.
And we're still continuing to incredibly and intensely affect the child's development through simple things like touch or non-touch, eye contact or non-eye contact.
A soothing voice versus a raised voice.
Peace versus stress. I don't think people understand the degree to which we put ripples in that never go away into these ponds.
Yeah, that's right. And it's important to understand, too, that we're born very early because of human evolution, the bipedalism allowing us to walk on two legs, the pelvis had to shrink, and babies had to be born earlier because the heads would otherwise be too big and they wouldn't be born.
Probably women died from having babies with heads that were too big way back, too.
But we're born really at full-term birth with only 25% of the brain intact at adult size.
And 90% gets finished by age 5, 80% by age 3.
This is on average. And so all the...
Well, some people argue that we're born nine months early in terms of mobility and being able to move around.
Compared to other animals.
Other people say it's 18 months early because of the way the bones aren't quite finished.
So really, in those 9 to 18 months after birth, we should be providing, and this is Ashley Montague's idea, an external womb.
Extero gestation, he calls it.
And that means providing a caring, comforting environment with little distress, because that distress in those early years sets up stress-reactive systems.
It misdevelops the HPA axis, the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal gland axis.
It can As we said earlier, epigenetics have effect on anxiety control, but also the vagus nerve, which is related to all sorts of, well, all aspects of your body.
If that doesn't get set properly as an adult, you can have seizures, you can have irritable bowel, you can have breathing problems, heart problems.
The vagus nerve needs those parents to keep the baby calm as it's setting its Thresholds and its parameters for function.
It even affects how you socialize.
If it doesn't get set properly, you're going to be less able to have intimate relations.
And actually, it's also related to morality.
So people who have compassion, who feel compassion, their vagus nerve is operating well.
Right. And I'm really being fascinated by the development of empathy.
It seems like such an obvious thing, put yourself in other people's shoes, try and understand other people.
But it seems to be this very, I think it was a recent writer I was reading who said it's like 12 or 13 complicated brain systems that are required for the development and expression of empathy.
And, you know, I guess we can go either way to empathy or non-empathy depending on how we're treated.
Is empathy a complicated thing to develop?
Does it simply require sort of eye contact and back and forth?
Because, I mean, he argued that it's the greatest human resource that we need in the world.
You know, we think we need, you know, oil or energy.
Empathy, I think, and I think it's a really good case.
Empathy is really the primary resource we need.
What are the key factors in helping people to...
Help their children or help their babies really, I think, develop empathy.
Well, I think Adam Smith would agree with you.
Empathy is important for all economic functions or the functions of a society.
We can't really get along well cooperatively without it.
So our work is looking at the effects of a set of parenting practices, what we call the evolved developmental niche.
So it's sort of a nest That we evolved to provide for children because they're so needy when they're born, humans are.
And these practices then have been identified among the hunter-gatherer communities that represent 99% of our history.
What we do is we ask moms about these practices, and then we look at three-year-olds and three to five-year-olds' empathy development.
And the ones that we're looking at are breastfeeding.
So our evolved needs are from two to five years of breast milk, On average, meaning among hunter-gatherers is H4. Now you think, wow, why do you need so much breast milk?
Well, it turns out that it has all the building blocks for the immune system, and the immune system really isn't done until about H5. It's around the time, H5-6, when the first adult molar comes in, and that's a signal.
That's a cognitive shift of development as well at that time.
So breast milk, we're finding that that matters.
Having been breastfed at all matters.
Breastfeeding length matters for empathy.
Touch. So how much a mother is touching a child or says they positively touch them.
Negative touch is bad.
Positive touch is good.
So no spanking, but lots of affection.
Responsiveness to the child.
You know, we've got a lot of decades of research on responsiveness to the needs of the child and how that's related to conscience development and empathy.
And self-regulation.
And our work is showing the similar findings there.
We usually control for responsiveness because we already know that works.
These other things matter, too, is what we ask.
Another one is play, free play, best in nature outside without toys even, just climbing around trees and things.
And then lots of social support.
For the mother, for the child and mother diet, and then natural childbirth, too.
We look at the effects of C-sections and find that that has an effect on empathy as well.
Oh, so C-sections can have an effect on empathy, even controlling for other variables.
Is that right? Yes.
That's astonishing. Wow.
Now, since we are in the realm of morality and ethics, or at least that's part of your specialty, obviously, I'm sure you've heard of the marshmallow test.
You give to kids a couple of years old the choice.
You can have one marshmallow now, but if you wait 10 minutes, you can have two marshmallows.
And of course, those who sort of take the two generally have been found to do better in life and so on.
And this idea that, of course, we have impulses and we have only a second or two to intercept Impulses from the amygdala, the sort of fight or flight base of the brain, from the prefrontal cortex.
Whatever strengthens the capacity of the prefrontal cortex, the sort of front, I would say, you know, the seat of reason and of self-control and the deferral of gratification, anything which strengthens that regulation of the amygdala seems, I think, would be contributing positively to world peace and a lack of criminality and perhaps even empathy as well.
And I know that they've done some work.
I think you've quoted some of the work that's been done to help children to strengthen self-control, impulse control.
We don't want to eliminate impulses because there's a lot of creativity and spontaneity that comes out of those.
But self-regulation seems to me to be very key in the development.
What are the things that parents can do to really help that process move forward?
Well, Alan Shore has pointed to this extensively in several books of his.
He's a clinical psychiatrist from UCLA. And he describes how important it is those first couple years of life, especially the first two years or so, in establishing prefrontal control over subcortical impulses.
And a lot of what's happening in that time period is the right brain is developing rapidly.
It has a spurt at that time.
And there's several systems that are lateralized to the right brain control.
So the vagus nerve that I mentioned earlier is one of those.
And there's others, too.
So, again, it's these parenting practices in those first two years of life.
Just keep your baby calm.
Keep the baby with you.
Preferably give them breast milk exclusively for at least six months.
Because if you give them formula...
The other thing we haven't mentioned is the immune system is mostly in the gut.
90% of your immune system, some people say, is there.
And breast milk provides all the food for good bacteria to live there.
Formula tends to give you...
A different and more pathological balance of bacteria there, which affects your health apparently for the rest of your life.
So they're doing studies now of fecal transplants to help people who have the wrong kind of Fecal matter in their gut.
And they've done this in rats or mice as well, with a set of mice that are very aggressive versus a very pacifistic mice strain.
And they switch the gut bacteria and their personalities shift.
So I think we have to pay attention in the 21st century to the microbiome.
And all the bacteria that are really keeping us alive.
Only 10% of the genes that we carry in our bodies are human genes.
The rest are all these creatures that are keeping us going.
Could you just explain that last bit?
I want to make sure I follow that fully.
I'm still pondering fecal transplants.
I'm going to have to look that up later.
I think that's the very first time this topic has come up on this show.
And I must really congratulate you for that.
We've crossed a new threshold of colostomy bag lobbing or whatever it is, however it is that they do that.
But what was the last thing you said, the other creatures that keep us alive?
You mean that it's sort of the bacteria in our gut and all that kind of stuff?
Yes, and on our bodies and on your eyelashes, all the creatures that are genetically on us, in us, that rely on us to stay alive are keeping us alive.
We're a cooperative community, each of us.
Right. Yeah, we think of ourselves as an I, but we're actually quite an ecosystem.
Yes, we are. It has sort of struck me that one of the things that seems kind of tragic is that kids who are put into daycare usually don't, obviously, are not breastfed because they're in daycare all day.
And daycare, of course, is like this medieval germ pit.
You know, like one of my neighbors is terrible.
Every time this kid goes back into daycare, he's like sick for the weekend kind of thing because they come home with some, you know, truly Stone Age pathogen.
And so the kids who have weakened immune systems from not being breastfed are put into these bio pits of, you know, Tubercular hell.
And it seems that that level of illness being exposed to kids or kids being exposed to that level of illness when their immune systems are compromised by a lack of breastfeeding I think could do nothing but produce long-term problems and certainly I think ends up with a wild over prescription of antibiotics and other things like that.
Does that seem to make any sense to you?
That makes sense to me. I can't say too much about it, but I agree with you.
Now, if – I mean, you, of course, living in the United States are at sort of ground zero for problematic infancies.
At least if you look at sort of government policies, it's kind of a truism but still important, I think, which is that over in Europe and particularly in northern Europe, in Scandinavia and Denmark and so on, they have these luxurious maternity leave benefits and so on to go on for a couple of years and they have these luxurious maternity leave benefits and so on to go on for
And I think Sweden was the first country, I think, of the 70s to outlaw spanking and there is this gentleness towards children that comes out of Europe, whereas in America, I don't know.
It's hard to imagine.
I don't know if they view them as just, you know, small soldiers in training or something like that.
But, you know, the six weeks of maternity leave, then, you know, get thee back to work and, you know, email them some milk in a bag or something.
It just seems... Why do you think in America it's so different than it is in Europe in terms of how infancy is viewed?
Well, we've got the pioneering spirit here.
Every man for himself, literally.
And I think that long heritage of mistrust of government, of do-it-yourself, is sort of infused into the bones of the Americans.
And then this communist scare and everything that's socialist is labeled communist and anything about the common good these days is badmouth.
So there's a whole host of factors, I think.
We do have our government, though, now pressing hospitals to become more breastfeeding friendly.
They call that baby friendly in the World Health Organization.
In 2011, our government put out a report and said that only 4% of U.S. hospitals are baby friendly, breastfeeding friendly.
And that last year, well, 2012, it went up to 6%, so there was some progress.
But it's quite a shock.
That Sweden changed all their hospitals to be baby-friendly in the 90s when the WHO suggested it.
But the U.S. is now just finally thinking about it.
What does baby-friendly mean?
I mean, is it the information?
I guess both, right?
The information plus the environment.
What specifically was the World Health Organization suggesting?
Right. There's ten steps that hospitals need to take to be certified as baby-friendly.
And so there's hospitals all over the country who are trying to do that now, which is great news.
But it includes things like not giving babies formula for no medical reason, which 80% of hospitals were doing in 2011, at least according to that report.
It also means not giving them pacifiers, not separating the mother and baby.
It's especially important that first hour after birth is when a lot of the bonding occurs and breastfeeding success relies on that interaction at that time.
So those kinds of practices.
Right, right.
One of the things I think that has not been successfully communicated to a lot of parents, you know, I'm obviously not pointing specifically at you.
But one of the things I think that's not been successfully communicated is this early investment.
There's a heartbreaking story that one psychologist related who was in charge of sort of the criminally – the real criminals, you know, hardcore criminals.
And, you know, their parents would come to visit them like every weekend and so on.
And he'd always think to himself, you have time now to come and visit everyone.
Why didn't you have time when they were babies to treat them in the right way to take your time off?
And I always make the case to parents like I'm a stay-at-home dad and I say, well, look, I mean, you took time off for college, didn't you?
And that paid off.
And if you take a couple of years off when your kids are babies, it pays off.
You know, parenting is really like pay me now or pay me a lot more.
I mean, it seems there's good scientific case, there's a really great scientific case to be made for this investment for the first couple of years.
How would you make the case if you had a megaphone to speak to all the parents to be in the world?
Well, I would remind them how needy babies are at birth and that they're building the brain.
If it's only 25% constructed at birth, then what the parent is doing is pretty much building the rest.
And so whatever they do or don't do is going to affect the personality and health and well-being of that child for their life.
I think in this country, in the States, there's a lot of pressure on parents to not give in to babies.
There's a belief that you can spoil a baby, so you want to control them from the beginning.
So it's a power struggle.
Unfortunately, even medical personnel recommend things like crying it out, sleep training, to little babies.
I get emails all the time from parents who are following advice from their friends or from specialists, sleep clinics even, saying, oh yes, go ahead and sleep train your six-week-old baby.
Because you have to go back to work anyway.
And so they're having these horrible nights and desperately emailing saying, oh, I don't know what to do.
The baby's been crying for three hours.
They told me to put it in the laundry room so I wouldn't hear the baby cry, but I can't take it anymore.
What do I do? So it's just horrible what's happening.
The cultures, there's a lot of pressure.
And I hate to say this, but it seems that some of the professionals who are women, maybe men too, but I find it more among women, don't want to hear that they should have breastfed their babies or that breastfeeding is better than formula or that they should be sleeping with the baby in the same room at least or all these different practices that really help babies that we know in the medical field really help.
People don't really want to hear it.
The challenge though, the gauntlet is down.
What do we do for, how do we lure parents in to really realizing that these things are important?
And I think part of it is starting with the young people, developing interventions in secondary schools and colleges.
And what I have my students do is they read the Science of Parenting book or the Continuum concept.
These are really great books to get an idea of what's going on.
The Continuum Concept is an anthropological kind of personal story of a woman who stayed with an Amazonian tribe and realized that everything she had learned about parenting from the States was kind of wrong.
And the Science of Parenting is about the science of it with lots of helpful tips about what to do with tantrums and things like that.
So I think we have to keep chipping away at the Kind of culture of me first among some parents.
It seems that, I don't know, there's so many different issues.
I guess that's one of them but there's a lot more.
Well, there is this belief.
There's this terrible belief that, you know, I had some friends who were thinking about having a baby.
They said, you know, I really hope that a baby fits in with my lifestyle.
And I'm like, I think you may not understand what parenting is all about.
The baby becomes the sun at the center of the universe and you rotate around the baby at least for the first couple of years.
To me, that would be like saying, well, I'm a single guy.
I really like to go out to bars to pick up women.
I want to get married, but I really hope that marriage doesn't interfere with my lifestyle.
It's like, I hope that it does because you have to change your priorities when that happens.
Yeah. Of course they're not.
They're just doing what they're supposed to be doing and they're actually trying to communicate with parents all the time about how to best serve their needs, which we hope serves the parents' needs since they should be one and the same.
But of course, if this idea that babies were like enemies, infiltrators that need to be broken and molded to whatever is convenient to the parents, if that really works, then...
Americans should have the most self-restraint and the most high ethics.
There should be no empire.
There should be no obesity.
There should be no extravagant criminality and all of these things.
It's like the empiricism of adulthood never impacts upon the theories of babyhood.
Sorry for the rant, but it just gets a little frustrating.
Yes, I agree. We still have the behaviorist, and there are many behaviorist advisors still saying you've got to condition the baby to not need you, in a sense, to sleep alone, to not cry out when they want something, and that's a good thing.
The head of the American Psychological Association wrote his book on parenting in 1928.
It was published and he said, you know, don't hug your children.
You might spoil them, pat them on the head once in a while, shake their hand when they go to bed.
And that idea of being so detached from babies, it came in in part because of the fear of germs and all the Hospitals that were, they started just because of so many kids dying in hospitals, they decided it was germ-caused rather than isolation, caused from isolation from not being touched or given affection.
But they thought it was germs, and so then the psychologists kind of jumped on that wagon.
Yes, we're going to be a science now and, you know, follow these rules of conditioning as if, you know, people are rats, but...
Or plants, again.
So, total misunderstanding of human nature, of how humans develop, and how important those early years are for what kind of nature you develop as a person.
Yeah, this tabula rasa idea.
I think that this idea that babies are born like clay, and clay doesn't care if you mold it into an ashtray or a pot or a cup or whatever.
This idea to just mold it into your local culture or your local preferences, and the clay doesn't care.
It's a blank slate. But of course, now I think we understand that babies are born with very specific and very important needs that are universal.
And this idea that we can take this Prussian-based toilet-train-them-at-gunpoint approach to children and think that we can somehow end up with healthy, functioning adults, I hope, is beginning to go by the wayside.
Now, one of the things that you've – no, go ahead.
Europe is ahead of us on that.
Thank you.
Right, right. And there are some strong indicators.
I'm very much a fan of Lloyd DeMoss who's been on the show a couple of times as well.
He runs Psychohistory.com.
He's written a book that I'm reading.
It's an audiobook called The Origins of War and Child Abuse.
And he points out, as has Robin Grille in Parenting for a Peaceful World, that the countries that are most gentle on their children tend to be the least interested or involved in wars.
And it's actually quite geographically specific, like the majority...
American soldiers come from the South and the South has the highest prevalence of spanking and also hitting children in school, which is still legal in like 23 US states, most of which are in the South.
So there is this shadow of early aggression towards babies and toddlers that casts its very, very long shadow in the world stage in the most horrible and fatal of human conflicts and human addictions of war and violence.
So, you know, the hand that rocks the cradle truly does Rule the world and certainly rules the kind of evils that are so prevalent among adults.
I think they have very early roots.
And the more aggressive and demonic the adult personality, it would seem to me, the more repressed and abused was the infancy.
And so it's a huge thing to change.
But really, I think, this early childhood stuff has the greatest capacity or possibility or potential to rid us of some of the most ancient afflictions of the species.
I agree with you. And my theory of moral development is that we have three propensities based on our evolved brain strata that Paul McLean identified.
He called the oldest one the reptilian brain, although that gives reptiles a bad name, I think.
But it's those survival systems.
It's those things that keep us alive, right?
So it's the anger and fear and freezing and So fight, flight, freeze, faint, those things that we're born with, essentially, but they get conditioned by early life.
And then we have the next brain strata is what he calls the paleomammalian, which is the mammalian feature.
Some of these things we share with birds, too, but it's the emotions of care and play.
And then the third strata is the neomammalian, so those are the frontal lobe.
And for him is the prefrontal cortex especially and those executive functions that we were talking about.
And my theory is that if you don't get the good care in early life, you're going to have a tendency to flip into your what I call the safety ethic when you approach others and when you make moral decisions in social situations.
You'll be more stress reactive and then that will take energy away from your other systems and In the moment it does that, but you will habitually do that if you don't have good care in early life because you've ramped up the power of these systems and you've neglected That right brain development that helps you control those systems.
And then you've neglected also those caring and love, all those things.
I have to look at that article you mentioned on all the different components of empathy.
All those things are fostered by that loving care and that comfort and that, you know, just being present with the baby and being, you know, intersubjectively playing and interacting and creating narratives together.
These things are really important for compassionate morality.
And they call that second system engagement ethic.
So what happens with the way we're raising kids now is it makes it really hard to be here and now fully attentive to what you're doing and who you're with.
Because you need all that stuff from early life to be set up properly.
And so instead, I think I see more and more students that are coming in with this little shield up.
And they act that way and they're very kind of closed.
They might be really smart and get high test scores.
That's another part.
That's what I call detached imagination.
And IQs in the States are going up now over the 20th century.
But if you look at what Flynn, that's called the Flynn effect, and if you look at what Flynn says about it, it's the ability to answer hypothetical questions that's going up.
Well, that actually is quite interesting because the hunter-gatherers, when people have studied them and asked them hypothetical questions, they refuse to answer those questions.
Should Heinz steal the drug to save the life of his wife?
Heinz? I don't know Heinz.
Do you know Heinz? How should I know what Heinz should do?
So they refused to play those kinds of games, but we're creating kids who are really good at playing those kinds of games.
For better or for worse, I mean, there are good things about detached imagination, but you have to also have, for human, at least I think human capacities at their fullest, is communal imaginations.
The ability to use your abstract thinking capabilities, your reflectiveness, for the benefit of the community.
And it's not just...
And I use hunter-gatherers as a baseline for our optimal capacities because these small-band hunter-gatherers that have been studied, and fortunately they're under a lot of stress now, but they show much more intelligence than we have.
They're much more perceptive and hear and see better.
Of course, if you had five years of breast milk, we all probably would.
But they also have a sense of communal self, that they're connected to the earth, that they're part of the earth, that there's, in the hunter-gatherers that have been studied, the more settled ones, they call it a common self.
The sense that, you know, that tree is an agent, that mountain is an agent, as well as the goat over there.
They're all agents, and we're all agents together, and humans are not above the rest, except in terms of their imaginations and keeping things going, keeping the earth alive in various ways, like the Aborigines do, and they do their song lines there.
To keep the earth together.
So, for me, what we've done now, and it's been happening over centuries, is we've narrowed our morality.
We now think that human nature is naturally evil and selfish and aggressive, but that's only because that's the way we're raising children.
And we think that being a smart person means you have high reason and verbal, conscious knowledge of things.
But that's just a little tiny piece of what our hunter-gatherer cousins know.
They know so much more.
They have much more sense of these other realms that we cannot access if you don't have your right brain working all that well.
Ian McGilchrist has a great book.
You should talk to him. Maybe you have already.
It's The Master and His Emissary, he calls it, because in the story, The master sends his emissary out to see how the kingdom is doing, and the emissary starts to think he's in charge.
And he says that's the left brain.
The left brain is so, in a Western civilization, has been so hyped up and attended to that the master, the right brain, Is now denigrated and all that awareness that's much more in the non-scientific realms of knowledge is neglected and to our detriment because we're destroying the earth.
So that's my biggest concern is that we really, if we don't have this full capacity of our morality, we're really not going to live very long and we're killing all sorts of other species at the same time.
It is, I think one of the, there's an old Bible quote that says, he who increases knowledge increases sorrow.
And it is of course a great tragedy that we are always and forever only about five years away from a perfect world.
You know, like if we could just get every single parent.
In the world for the next five years to do what science says is great for the babies, you know, breastfeed, stay home, caress and chat and sing and laugh and be gentle and so on.
I know it's a fantasy, but I mean, if five years, just a little five year slice in the entire 150,000 odd year lifespan of the species, five years, we could completely turn this planet around.
I know, but it's so close.
It's so close, and science tells us exactly what to do.
It's like, just wash your hands. You don't get sick.
Just treat your babies well, and we've got a peaceful world.
But anyway, it is so close.
The problem is we've got all these stress-reactive adults, and they can't.
Their higher-order thinking capacities and compassion are kind of impaired because they're just going, ah, they're so anxious about what's going on.
And there's epigenetic inheritance effects, too.
We hardly know very much about that, but we know that if, like, a...
A mouse is exposed to a poison, for example.
I think it's actually BPA plastic.
For four generations, at least several generations, the offspring are less social.
And we've got all these pollutants we've got in the environment, especially in the States.
At least Europe is trying to control those.
But all these things that are having effects that we hardly know.
I wonder if we could just spend the last minute or two on circumcision, which for my European audience, it's something they may not know much at all.
But in the US, now the rates are dropping considerably.
And it is, I remember reading about how in China in the 19th century, this gruesome practice of foot binding, where you curl the women's, the girls, I guess, toes back into what's their heel and basically turn them into hooves.
This all ended in like one generation.
Nobody could tell exactly why just something happened and It seems to be happening with circumcision as well, but I think whatever we can do to move that process along is fantastic.
And, of course, you've written about this in your blog, and I'll put the link to the blog in the low bar for the video in the notes of the podcast.
If you wanted to give a briefcase against circumcision, because there seems to be some mealy-mouthed stuff coming out of the Pediatrics Association's around things like penile cancer and STDs and I was wondering if you could just give a briefcase to any parents out there who may be pondering this decision.
This is a tough one and there's experts.
I have a set of blog posts on this topic but they're written mostly by people who know this much better than I do because I think it's really important but it's not my expertise but what I can say is that the American Academy of Pediatrics put their report out,
I believe it was last year, suggesting that infant circumcision is a good thing because it can prevent penile cancer and HIV AIDS. But there's no evidence that babies get any of those things from having their penis intact.
And there's also a lot of controversy about the studies that suggest that actually circumcision prevents HIV AIDS. A lot of flaws in those studies, and people say they're not accurate.
That's the misinterpretation of the data.
And so my argument is that it's an ethical issue.
There's no reason to do harm to the body of a child for no medical reason.
There's no real medical reason.
And even for a religious reason, I think the child should have a choice about it, because there's so many side effects from having A circumcised penis from being pain-reactive, pain-sensitive, to being pretty much having your sex life kind of wrecked in a way, because it doesn't match up with what females prefer, typically.
And over age, things get worse.
You can read more about those things at the blog post, because it's pretty sad.
And unfortunately, a lot of doctors are ignorant about this.
They're ignorant about all sorts of baby care issues as well.
And they promote the wrong thing, and we have a post on how doctors often damage the penis, making it necessary to have circumcision later.
So you want to be careful about how you care for the penis because of the washing you don't want to really put in soap.
You know, there's stuff on the blog post about that.
So be careful, and if you think circumcision is important, let the boy decide when he's in his teens, for example.
Preferably after age 21 or maybe 25 after the frontal cortex is finished, pretty much.
Yeah, I don't know too many men in their 20s who, if you say, hey, you know, without anesthetic, let's remove half the skin of your penis, who would say, yeah, I'm down for that.
That sounds like a good plan for a Saturday.
Well, listen, obviously, you know, I really appreciate the information.
It's great chatting with you.
And I also really wanted to express my appreciation as a layperson For the work that you do to translate the studies into accessible, digestible text for people like me.
It's hugely appreciated.
I mean, trying to wade through some of these technical journals can start to make little hieroglyphics dance in front of your eyeballs.
So I really appreciate the work that you do to downshift it somewhat to The reasonably intelligent layperson.
Of course, we're going to put links to your books and links to your blog and all that kind of great stuff.
And I'd love to have you back on again.
I mean, as a philosopher, ethical theories are kind of my thing.
So I'd love to have you back on if you have time, another time.
But I really wanted to thank you so much, Dasha, for your time today.
It was really, really enjoyable.
Well, thank you so much. It was a pleasure talking with you, Stefan.
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