Speaker 1: Welcome to Creature future production of I Heart Radio. Today,
Speaker 1: on the show, we're talking pseudo science. Did you know
Speaker 1: that sometimes people claim things are scientific, but well they're not.
Speaker 1: We'll be looking at some scammers, some flim flammers, some
Speaker 1: people who claim things are scientific but maybe they're not.
Speaker 1: Not really so, science can sometimes be misused, especially evolutionary
Speaker 1: biology and psychology, which is often used as a way
Speaker 1: to justify certain moral or ideological stances. First, I would
Speaker 1: caution against using evolution as a moral compass. After all,
Speaker 1: if you listen to this podcast, you know that evolution
Speaker 1: is one twisted sister full of murder, baby eaten and cannibalism,
Speaker 1: body snatching and so on. Pop evolutionary psychology often make
Speaker 1: sperious claims like women like jewelry because we picked berries,
Speaker 1: and men like cars because of all those saber tooth
Speaker 1: cars back in caveman times or whatever. And here's the thing.
Speaker 1: Evolution is in a linear, simple process. It's full of
Speaker 1: weird twists and turns, bandrels, detours and pit stops that
Speaker 1: make tracing back the origins of behavioral tree It's extremely difficult.
Speaker 1: It's like trying to thread a needle through the roots
Speaker 1: of a tree, or if you'll allow another comparison, trying
Speaker 1: to thread a male duck's corkscrew weener through a female
Speaker 1: duck's labyrinthian vagina. The point is evolution is like a
Speaker 1: duck's puzzle genitalia, twisted, freaky and weirdly beautiful. But just
Speaker 1: because it's difficult to trace back human behavior to our
Speaker 1: evolutionary roots doesn't stop a lot of people from trying.
Speaker 1: And some of those people are well kind of bad
Speaker 1: at it. They cherry picked from the evolutionary tree to
Speaker 1: justify their cultural preferences, often with hateful consequences. Joining me
Speaker 1: to talk about some of the pseudo scientific flim flammery
Speaker 1: is Katie Stolen, Cody Johnston, hosts of the podcast Even
Speaker 1: More News, producers of Some More News, and also they've
Speaker 1: got some kind of new podcast. That's right. First you're
Speaker 1: ever here. We're with my Heart Radio and other hosts
Speaker 1: on their shows, Robert of Behind the Bastard's Fame. It
Speaker 1: will be premiering. Uh, it's going to be premiering before
Speaker 1: you hear this episode. Probably it's available now for you
Speaker 1: to download listen. Yeah, we're the hosts of Fan Favorites
Speaker 1: worst You're ever available now in the future, but not
Speaker 1: in the future when you hear this in our future,
Speaker 1: in our current future, low dude, your current past and
Speaker 1: your current future and your current cool. Yeah. So I
Speaker 1: chose this topic because I actually feel like we've you guys,
Speaker 1: like I've talked to you guys about my frustration with pseudoscience.
Speaker 1: I just wanted to take this opportunity to to bunk
Speaker 1: a lot of the evolutionary psychology and pseudoscience that seems
Speaker 1: to kind of plague or political discourse. Now I love it.
Speaker 1: I'm so excited. Um. First of all, uh, you know
Speaker 1: a guy named Jordan Peterson, familiar a favorite special boy,
Speaker 1: familiar with the Canadian gentleman. Yeah, he's a psychologist and
Speaker 1: he makes a lot of claims that aren't really you know,
Speaker 1: backed in fact. Kidding, Yeah, Jordan, Jordan Peterson. I thought
Speaker 1: it was for bad boy Peterson. Man Peterson. He has
Speaker 1: an appeal. I can get it because he kind of
Speaker 1: talks like a dad, and he tells you things like
Speaker 1: clean your room and stand up straight, and those are
Speaker 1: solid advice, and then he gets into like weird like
Speaker 1: gender and race sign He's got very specific views that
Speaker 1: go back to his like whole his whole world view
Speaker 1: is very interesting and where it comes from and his
Speaker 1: his upbringing, but like he really tries to push it
Speaker 1: based off of like random cherry pick fact. But you
Speaker 1: know when he talks about his all meat diet that
Speaker 1: I think we can accept as being based in science, right,
Speaker 1: that that's good for it even water for your depression,
Speaker 1: only if you're eating We actually talked about this on
Speaker 1: last podcast. You can only have an all meat diet
Speaker 1: if you like to eat raw meat and raw fish
Speaker 1: and uh, if you basically follow a very strict diet
Speaker 1: based on some Inuit cultures where you you got to
Speaker 1: eat like raw organs to get vitamin c um and
Speaker 1: they don't even eat it like the entire year there,
Speaker 1: it's like sixty percent of the year. Is the does
Speaker 1: seem like something he would be a proponent of though,
Speaker 1: back get back to like you kill the animals. It's
Speaker 1: just that can you imagine him killing the animal? There's
Speaker 1: no evidence to suggest this is healthier, just that we
Speaker 1: can do it. It's to do it, yeah, And I
Speaker 1: don't recommend it because, as I talked about last time,
Speaker 1: if you do it wrong, you can die of malnutrition, like,
Speaker 1: if you eat only rabbits, you can starve to death
Speaker 1: because rabbits do not contain enough nutrients to sustain you. So, uh,
Speaker 1: you can go very wrong. So his not a nutritionist
Speaker 1: daughter is wrong about this meat and water die. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm not sure if it's completely right that you should.
Speaker 1: I'm not familiar with what the meat and water diet is. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm not sure. I don't even think fishes included, do
Speaker 1: they are they supposed to cook the meat just beef,
Speaker 1: just beef and water, and I don't think that's Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm not I mean, look, I want a nutritionist, but
Speaker 1: I don't think he can or should. I think we
Speaker 1: can rule it out as as being not true. Um So,
Speaker 1: one thing I wanted to talk about, which I think
Speaker 1: is kind of his more one of his more viral
Speaker 1: moments is his opinion on lipstick in the workplace. What
Speaker 1: is it? So here's here's a quote. This is from
Speaker 1: an interview. So I've cut out some of the like
Speaker 1: back and forth like answer questions, but this is a
Speaker 1: this is what he says. He says, quote, here's a rule.
Speaker 1: How about no makeup in the workplace? Why should you
Speaker 1: wear makeup? In the workplace. Isn't that sexually provocative? Why
Speaker 1: why do you make your lips red? Here he gets
Speaker 1: very confrontational. He's like, why why do you make your
Speaker 1: lips red? Because they turn red during sexual arousal. That's
Speaker 1: why why do you put rouge on your cheeks? Same reason? Um,
Speaker 1: And he's in in the interview, they're discussing sexual harassment,
Speaker 1: and Jordan Peterson is saying, can men and women work together?
Speaker 1: I don't know. I don't know. I don't know if
Speaker 1: they can, doesn't know. We don't know the rules yet, right,
Speaker 1: we don't know the rules. In the same in that
Speaker 1: same conversation, he also complains about how one of the
Speaker 1: rules at his university was to have open door meetings
Speaker 1: with students and he will not abide by that rule. So, uh,
Speaker 1: we don't know the rules yet. But also we do
Speaker 1: and he doesn't like them. Unbelievable. Yeah, No, that that
Speaker 1: whole quote makes me so angry when I hear it. Also,
Speaker 1: he also thinks that a woman who wears makeup in
Speaker 1: the workplace who doesn't want to be sexually harassed is
Speaker 1: being hypocritical. Okay, cool, So obviously, uh, this is bad
Speaker 1: because of moral reasons, so you don't understand what you're
Speaker 1: really saying. Well, And it's funny because, like an interviewer
Speaker 1: asked him again, like she's wearing red lipstick, and she
Speaker 1: asked him what it means, and he said, you're enhancing
Speaker 1: signals of youth and fecundity, which is a very normal
Speaker 1: way to talk about things. Dislike that way. So, but
Speaker 1: I often hear the refrain reels before fields. Facts, don't
Speaker 1: care about your feelings, that kind of stuff. So let's
Speaker 1: let's look at the facts, you guys, let's look at those.
Speaker 1: I just like, what about like black lipstick? What about
Speaker 1: like colors that he's not referring to? What about saying
Speaker 1: you bring that up? Code? I may in fact have
Speaker 1: something about that in just a minute here if you
Speaker 1: just wait this Cody. Um. So, studies do indicate that
Speaker 1: women with redder lips are concern that are more attractive. Uh.
Speaker 1: It's been conjectured that this is due to sexual arousal
Speaker 1: and health. But there's an obvious problem with this conclusion.
Speaker 1: And when they do a study like this, it's like
Speaker 1: they say, oh, maybe it's because of this, They don't
Speaker 1: really know, they can't prove that. But One of the
Speaker 1: issues is that men and women's when we're you know,
Speaker 1: doing the sex, both of our lips get read. It's
Speaker 1: not like only women. Um, and their face also, their
Speaker 1: faces also get flushed. You know what else. People's faces
Speaker 1: get flushed when you're walking, when you're embarrassed, when you're
Speaker 1: excited about something. I have attractive embarrassed people. I like
Speaker 1: to humiliate people. It's very attractive when someone's really awkward
Speaker 1: social and going like a Jesus. Uh, yeah, I warn't
Speaker 1: make up because I want to look nervous, right. Um.
Speaker 1: And in fact, lipstick has been worn by men throughout history,
Speaker 1: So this idea that it is strictly a gender thing
Speaker 1: is uh not necessarily true. Eloys were dresses. That is true.
Speaker 1: But it also this idea that redness is associated with sex,
Speaker 1: that itself is not necessarily true. So there's a study
Speaker 1: that examined this and they explored the idea that red
Speaker 1: lips are associated with sexual arousal and uh red genitals,
Speaker 1: which is interestingly. One of the theories is that, oh,
Speaker 1: red lips are supposed to look like a red Volvo.
Speaker 1: I guess well, I'm always but yeah, I'm always putting
Speaker 1: lipstick on my vagina. Yeah yeah, I mean, you know,
Speaker 1: gotta gotta get that vagina on fleek. I guess. Um. So,
Speaker 1: they found that in heterosexual men, and I'm sorry, a
Speaker 1: lot of these studies are heteronormative, the redder vulvas were
Speaker 1: less attractive. Uh So, they had like these photoshopped images
Speaker 1: of women's volvas and they made them redder or less red,
Speaker 1: and the ones that were redder were deemed less attractive.
Speaker 1: I guess because they don't want, like Rudolph the rain
Speaker 1: your vaginas. I don't know. Um so, uh the study,
Speaker 1: so the researchers said, quote, we found in fact that
Speaker 1: men showed a strong aversion to red or female genitals.
Speaker 1: Is not a sentence I normally like to say. Anyways,
Speaker 1: the researchers continue, quote this, this study shows that the
Speaker 1: myth of red is a proxy for female genital color
Speaker 1: should be abandoned. This view must be replaced by careful
Speaker 1: examination of precisely what the color red in clothing, makeup,
Speaker 1: and other contexts is actually signaling to men. What it
Speaker 1: isn't signaling is female sexual arousal. Um So, you know
Speaker 1: that's not to say that it I don't necessarily think
Speaker 1: that that study proves and negative, like it doesn't mean
Speaker 1: that there can't be any context. So much red lips
Speaker 1: uh signal sexuality, but to just reduce it to it's like, oh,
Speaker 1: you know we see flushed bodies as more attractive because
Speaker 1: it's sexual. It's making that connection is very tenuous. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean you could say people wear that rugie lips
Speaker 1: or pink lips for a youthful blush something like that.
Speaker 1: But like you said earlier, like yeah, what about the
Speaker 1: blue lipstick the other things, Like it's about so much
Speaker 1: more than that, right, And so speaking of which, throughout history,
Speaker 1: both men and women have worn lipstick for a variety
Speaker 1: of cultural reasons. So ancient Sumerian men and women wore
Speaker 1: lipstick made of crushed gemstones, which sounds hard to that
Speaker 1: doesn't painful, but you know that's true. Um. Ancient Egyptians
Speaker 1: used red lipsticks to show status rather than gender demarcation.
Speaker 1: Red lips was traditional, but orange, magenta, and blue black
Speaker 1: were also popular colors to show your social status. There
Speaker 1: is more than one color exactly. During the Roman Empire,
Speaker 1: lipstick was also an indicator of social status and not gender.
Speaker 1: Purple lip color became popular amongst women. In addition to
Speaker 1: the kind of more traditional red. In Germany and Britain
Speaker 1: during the Dark Ages, orange lipstick was all the rage,
Speaker 1: so that was the most popular lip color. In England.
Speaker 1: During the Middle Ages, religion made red lipstick fall out
Speaker 1: of style as it was unnatural and going against God's plan. Instead,
Speaker 1: women would wear rose tints as that was associated with purity.
Speaker 1: And during Edward the Fourth Sign in England, both men
Speaker 1: and women of the court would wear lip color. And
Speaker 1: so as you can see throughout human history, first of all,
Speaker 1: it's not strictly associated with gender. It's also not just
Speaker 1: red lipstick. Yeah, there's so many variables. This is why
Speaker 1: he's he and people like him are so interesting to
Speaker 1: me because they skip everything. They take this this little
Speaker 1: bit that they assume about evolution, and they look at
Speaker 1: the modern day and what they don't like about it,
Speaker 1: and they skip all culture and all of history and
Speaker 1: make their conclusion because they trust that most people aren't
Speaker 1: going to go and look back at history and right,
Speaker 1: and even when you look at the Animal Kingdom and
Speaker 1: you look at they're both the use of makeup, which
Speaker 1: is very rare, but when it happens, it's quite funny uh,
Speaker 1: and just the presence of red lips. Uh. It's more
Speaker 1: complex than just being like a sexual indicator. So we've
Speaker 1: actually talked about this before, but I think it's a
Speaker 1: really important example. It's the uh snub nose monkey. Uh.
Speaker 1: Their old world love Old World monkeys who live in China.
Speaker 1: They're really weird looking because they lack nasal bones, so
Speaker 1: they kind of have a no nose look. And then
Speaker 1: they have really juicy lips uh. And the males are
Speaker 1: the ones that have the jiciest lips. That what they're uh,
Speaker 1: they live at really high alstitudes, so that's why they
Speaker 1: don't have a nose because their nose would get frost
Speaker 1: bite otherwise, like they're just like, well we don't need
Speaker 1: a nose then, so they're plump red lips maybe a
Speaker 1: sexual selection thing to show uh, sexual availability. But the
Speaker 1: older the male, the redder the lips. So first of all,
Speaker 1: it's not youth, it's not showing youth and virility. It
Speaker 1: is thought to also be a dominance signal, so like
Speaker 1: I'm older, I'm more dominant, and so that right exactly right,
Speaker 1: And again like these are we're not these aren't are
Speaker 1: like direct ancestors. So any conclusions you draw from these
Speaker 1: monkeys is specific to these monkeys. You can't necessarily apply
Speaker 1: to human So many things from just like they pick
Speaker 1: any animals like that about that animal, this suits whatever
Speaker 1: I want to say, right, you know? And I mean, like,
Speaker 1: so take an animal that's very distant from us, like birds.
Speaker 1: So bearded vultures will use iron rich soil to give
Speaker 1: them a blush basically a reddish hue. And we talked
Speaker 1: about this the last time I was on here. I think, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that makes sense. It'll enhance the red hue, and the older,
Speaker 1: the older the vulture. As you may remember, like the
Speaker 1: more reddit is. And so it's not just to attract mates,
Speaker 1: although that's part of it. It's also to signal their dominance,
Speaker 1: so their social status, which I think is interesting because
Speaker 1: throughout human history it's been a signal of social status. Obviously,
Speaker 1: we didn't evolve from vultures, we didn't evolve from birds.
Speaker 1: But would you say that the desire, the instinct to
Speaker 1: paint yourself, uh, to decorate yourself in certain ways as
Speaker 1: a form of attraction, is a form of like expression
Speaker 1: is very natural amongst many species. It could be I mean,
Speaker 1: it's something that obviously doesn't occur in a lot of species,
Speaker 1: like most animals don't necessarily decorate themselves. But you can
Speaker 1: also make the argument that birds who are attractive, which
Speaker 1: are typically the males, the females are typically more drab,
Speaker 1: a little browner, and blend in with their environment more
Speaker 1: so that they don't stick out, and it's a protective technique.
Speaker 1: But the males are really beautiful and vibrate many different colors,
Speaker 1: and the idea there's this more it used to be like, oh,
Speaker 1: this is just an honest indicator of their fitness, but um,
Speaker 1: more recently the ideas that like, maybe it's just the
Speaker 1: females thought it was pretty and liked it, and it's this, Um,
Speaker 1: it's a sexual selection that's for esthetic preference and not
Speaker 1: just fitness. So it's not just an honest indicator of fitness,
Speaker 1: but it's also they are stimulated by those colors and
Speaker 1: they like them, and then they select them, and that's
Speaker 1: how you get these crazy birds that in fact, their
Speaker 1: plumage can sometimes be have a negative effect on their
Speaker 1: overall fitness. So I think this is I mean, this
Speaker 1: is one of the problems with looking to evolution for answers,
Speaker 1: it's so complicated and you have so many different reasons
Speaker 1: for you can have parallel evolution, like a bird putting
Speaker 1: blush on, right, or a decorator clab crab decorating itself,
Speaker 1: but the decorator crab is doing it to be camouflage.
Speaker 1: Like it it'll pick up a little bits from its
Speaker 1: environment and put it on. It'll like wear jewelry. If
Speaker 1: you give it a pearl necklace, it'll put it on
Speaker 1: because it's it just thinks it's part of its environment exactly.
Speaker 1: So another problem with looking to evolution for answers is
Speaker 1: that culture is a huge influence and it's really difficult
Speaker 1: to separate like what's biological and what's cultural evolution, even
Speaker 1: in animals. So we've seen this in primates. So savannah
Speaker 1: baboons in Kenya are often aggressive bullies. Dominant males will
Speaker 1: at tax subordinate males and they'll bully females basically to
Speaker 1: get their white way. They'll bully them into submission. And
Speaker 1: I think it's often thought that this is like an
Speaker 1: innate behavior, it's an instinctive thing that the baboons do,
Speaker 1: but there's some evidence to contradict this. So a troop
Speaker 1: of Savannah baboon's found themselves suddenly rid of their most
Speaker 1: aggressive males. The dominant males had been aggressive enough to
Speaker 1: fight their way into a garbage dump and eat all
Speaker 1: the spoils, and in a karmic twist, this gave them
Speaker 1: bovine tubercular want want did you get? Just the bullies
Speaker 1: because they were the only ones that were able to
Speaker 1: like fight their way to the garbage dump. Uh, So
Speaker 1: they died off. Uh, And now the troop was populated
Speaker 1: by females and subordinate males, and they became more peaceful
Speaker 1: and pro social. So when they wanted things from each other,
Speaker 1: instead of like smacking each other, they would groom each
Speaker 1: other and like display affection and kind of just it's
Speaker 1: a lot nicer, a lot more more peaceful. And then
Speaker 1: this new pacifist culture has lasted over two decades. So
Speaker 1: even after most of the original males have died off
Speaker 1: and been replaced by new males. Uh, the newcomers are
Speaker 1: being taught the pacifist lifestyle by the female. So these uh,
Speaker 1: like a lot of animals, these, even though the males
Speaker 1: will display like the aggressive males will sort of dominate
Speaker 1: maybe um, the females form the core of the troop
Speaker 1: because they don't migrate away from their natal homes, and
Speaker 1: it's the males that will disperse and migrate around, so
Speaker 1: they kind of have the core of the culture. So
Speaker 1: so if they enforced this idea of being peaceful and
Speaker 1: then new males come even when all the original males
Speaker 1: die off and new males are coming around, the females
Speaker 1: are creating this culture of being nice, just being chilled,
Speaker 1: right exactly. And this even happens in interspecies interactions. So
Speaker 1: captive Reese's monkeys, who are typically kind of aggressive, were
Speaker 1: raised with peaceful sump tailed monkeys, and they learned to
Speaker 1: be more gentle and they, according to the researchers, they
Speaker 1: engaged in hip hugging as a form where they like
Speaker 1: touch each other's hips and they're like, like, I like you.
Speaker 1: That's so intimit and sweet, it's very cute, and other
Speaker 1: things not just aggressiveness, but just other kind of cultural things,
Speaker 1: like certain groups of chimpanzees learned to like tickle themselves. Uh.
Speaker 1: Last time on the podcast, we talked about potato dipping
Speaker 1: monkeys monkeys UH in Japan who would dip potatoes in saltwater,
Speaker 1: or these were maccaques, and they copied a female macaque
Speaker 1: that would dip potatoes and saltwater and eat it. And
Speaker 1: then that propagated throughout their whole whole thing. And now
Speaker 1: even though all the original monkeys are dead, they still
Speaker 1: do that. Um And different groups of primates who use
Speaker 1: tools will use different kinds of tools, and it doesn't
Speaker 1: really seem to track with like their environment necessarily. It's
Speaker 1: just like a preference of some of them will you say,
Speaker 1: they're cracking open nuts, some of them will use rocks.
Speaker 1: Some of them you will use like sticks and stuff,
Speaker 1: And it seems to just depend. It's like learned culturally.
Speaker 1: So I think it's we when we think about animals,
Speaker 1: we think about their behavior as being the static, unchanging
Speaker 1: thing determined by their biology, which is it can be
Speaker 1: the fact. It's often the fact that animals are born
Speaker 1: with some kind of instinct. But I think in them,
Speaker 1: especially the more intelligent animals, you see that influence of uh,
Speaker 1: if not culture, at least learning certain habits from their cohort. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: shared behavior transferring over there. There's also like there's a
Speaker 1: thing I think that it also happens where It's it's
Speaker 1: assumption that anything that has come about from evolution means
Speaker 1: it's automatically good, as opposed to just well that's how
Speaker 1: it happened, right exactly, Because I mean, you know, if
Speaker 1: you I hope that the people who listen to this
Speaker 1: regularly have this sense of like, how screwed up because
Speaker 1: you know, just eating babies, uh, you know, killing each other, cannibalism.
Speaker 1: Nothing that would track to like morality, right, unless you
Speaker 1: think that stepfathers should kill all the existing children like
Speaker 1: lions do. I don't know about that. I'll have to
Speaker 1: think about it, but I gotta gotta think about it.
Speaker 1: I mean, that sounds dicey to me, but it's it's questionable,
Speaker 1: you know. I mean, but it's like you said, it
Speaker 1: really is kind of a It's not a moral compass evolution.
Speaker 1: It is what it is. And one of the great
Speaker 1: things about being humans is we kind of get to
Speaker 1: rise above just like we can change our behavior, can
Speaker 1: make value judgments and things like that. That's why I like,
Speaker 1: even despite all of this stuff, when I hear that
Speaker 1: Peterson argument about lipstick, my reaction is, so what right
Speaker 1: even if even if it was true, which like I
Speaker 1: explained is probably not true. Yes, there's no, there's not
Speaker 1: any definitive evidence that it's true. There's always a chance
Speaker 1: that there there could find something feeling that he wants
Speaker 1: to be true. But right, even if it is, like, so,
Speaker 1: what we can we get to change, like we've seen
Speaker 1: throughout history how lipstick use has changed, you know, from
Speaker 1: orange to purple, uh to like mean different things we
Speaker 1: get to do that. That's it's just there's a there's
Speaker 1: a lot of reasons, there's not just one. And we
Speaker 1: are evolved people that know how to control our impulses.
Speaker 1: People were lipstick literally everywhere. So yeah, that's true. That's
Speaker 1: very well stated. Also, like even if that's like, so
Speaker 1: if you want to ban lipstick from workplaces, do you
Speaker 1: want to ban like shoulder pads and like stuff that,
Speaker 1: Like I do actually because of the the kind of
Speaker 1: door situations where you're trying to brush past someone in
Speaker 1: their their shoulder pad smacks you in the face. I
Speaker 1: think that's specific to like your height range, our height
Speaker 1: range for people. But yeah, yeah, you can take our lipstick,
Speaker 1: but you don't get to wear your shoulder pads. That's
Speaker 1: a good compromise. It seems that testosterone pills are flooding
Speaker 1: the market. These promised to prevent you from becoming a
Speaker 1: quote soy boy, a term for someone with low testosterone
Speaker 1: based on the erroneous, unscientific idea that eating soy lowers
Speaker 1: your testosterone. The idea is that high testosterone will make
Speaker 1: you more manly and attractive, but is this actually true.
Speaker 1: Researchers at the biology department of the College of William
Speaker 1: and Mary and Williamsburg at least found this not to
Speaker 1: be true for heterosexual women. They showed women images of
Speaker 1: men's faces that were digitally altered to mimic the variation
Speaker 1: of facial differences due to testosterone levels. They found that
Speaker 1: while women did perceive the high test doosterone individuals to
Speaker 1: be more quote dominant, this had no effect on their
Speaker 1: perceived attractiveness. Another study, conducted at the University of Aberte
Speaker 1: Dundee in Scotland, took pictures of men and measured their
Speaker 1: testosterone levels. Then they had women ripe the men's faces.
Speaker 1: They found that there was no link between actual testosterone
Speaker 1: levels and perceived attractiveness, masculinity, or health. So maybe you
Speaker 1: shouldn't be taking testosterone supplements to try to look more
Speaker 1: manly as it could lead the heartbreak. Literally, the FDA
Speaker 1: warns that testosterone supplements can cause heart attacks and infertility. God,
Speaker 1: so you know, maybe those a is Alex Jones still
Speaker 1: talking those codes. Oh yeah, he's got it all. Oh
Speaker 1: my god. And the grill on mindset. Yeah yeah, it's uh,
Speaker 1: you know. And actually, guys, if you want to be
Speaker 1: a girl alike, you're going to have very small genital
Speaker 1: Sometimes pseudoscience can have dire consequences. The Bell Curve is
Speaker 1: a book that was written by psychologist Richard J. Hernstein
Speaker 1: and political scientists Charles Murray. It makes a variety of
Speaker 1: claims that have received criticism, such as intelligence being more
Speaker 1: heritable than determined by socioeconomic status, and that race is
Speaker 1: different intelligence. It's often used in a racist social Darwinist
Speaker 1: context to justify inequality by claiming that there are inherent, static,
Speaker 1: biologically determined differences and intelligence which determines our quote ranking
Speaker 1: in society. Often when a controversial claim such as this
Speaker 1: is criticized, critics are accused of putting feelings before facts.
Speaker 1: But hey, guys, let's take a look at those facts.
Speaker 1: I would love to very exciting. So um, I think
Speaker 1: this is one of those uh flashpoint things where it's
Speaker 1: like this book has been often used as like, oh,
Speaker 1: political correctness gone mad on college campuses because students don't
Speaker 1: like for him to come speak and they they there's
Speaker 1: a lot of criticism of this book, and it's kind
Speaker 1: of held aloft as like oh, well, science should be controversial,
Speaker 1: and the problem with this example shouldn't be anything right exactly.
Speaker 1: Science should just be uh, you know, scientific. Um. So,
Speaker 1: the book has been criticized by scientists for various methodological
Speaker 1: issues as well as for their erroneous interpretations of the data.
Speaker 1: So Stephen Jay Gould, who was a Harvard evolutionary biologist
Speaker 1: and major contributor to the field of evolutionary biology, had
Speaker 1: some pretty harsh critique of the book. Uh. He said
Speaker 1: that the main argument of the book was based on
Speaker 1: four false, unproven assumptions. So first, it's that intelligence must
Speaker 1: be reducible to a single number. So like, um that
Speaker 1: i Q is the absolute determinant of intelligence. He likens
Speaker 1: it to like soil, like the phlevel and soil, or
Speaker 1: like the quality of soil or something doesn't. Yeah, it
Speaker 1: was like you look at soil and like, oh, that's twelve. Yeah,
Speaker 1: well I do, I like, I like my men, like
Speaker 1: I like my soil A number. Um. The second assumption
Speaker 1: is that intelligence must be capable of rank ordering people
Speaker 1: in a linear order. So like, you know, it's just
Speaker 1: like this, the more the higher your number, the more
Speaker 1: intelligent you are. And there's no like, if you're smarter
Speaker 1: than a person, you're just absolutely smarter than them, not
Speaker 1: that like, hey, you may be better at math, but
Speaker 1: they're better at not getting run over by cars um
Speaker 1: or you know, like they're better at looking at like
Speaker 1: someone's feeling and going what if I look that up right?
Speaker 1: Or even like if you're good at math, you could
Speaker 1: be bad at evolutionary biology. So it's not just like
Speaker 1: arts for the sciences. It's just various intelligence and very
Speaker 1: it's it's a multifaceted thing. Intelligence is not just one thing.
Speaker 1: The other assumption is that intelligence must be primarily genetically based,
Speaker 1: and then also that intelligence must be essentially immutable, so
Speaker 1: it doesn't change. You're born with it, you you die
Speaker 1: with it. Basically, as we'll discuss, these assumptions are not
Speaker 1: only unproven, but there's actually a scientific evidence that contradicts them. So, uh,
Speaker 1: let's see first of all, One of the problems is
Speaker 1: that it's so they make the assumption that racial and
Speaker 1: gender differences in test scores must be due to genetics
Speaker 1: rather than social influences. Um. They claim that when compared
Speaker 1: to the influences of socioeconomic status, the biological influence is greater,
Speaker 1: but the way they reach this conclusion is extremely flawed. Uh.
Speaker 1: First of all, it's almost impossible to control for cultural
Speaker 1: influence on is on i Q unless you like, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, go with Elon Musk's wet dream and drop
Speaker 1: some people off at Mars as babies and then just
Speaker 1: have them like grown up in a sterile environment. But
Speaker 1: even then they would develop their own culture. And because
Speaker 1: we're humans and it's just like so like the culture
Speaker 1: that brought them there, right exactly, So you can't. It's
Speaker 1: one of the biggest problems with evolutionary psychology is it's
Speaker 1: so hard to separate culture as a conflicting variable. So
Speaker 1: here's an example of that in action. There's a known
Speaker 1: phenomenon in psychology called stereotype threat. It's where your test
Speaker 1: score is affected by just being reminded of your gender
Speaker 1: or your race. And an example of study found that
Speaker 1: students who were women or black or Latino Latina did
Speaker 1: significantly worse on tests just by being reminded about who
Speaker 1: they were being reminded that of their gender or their race,
Speaker 1: as opposed to the same demographic of students who weren't
Speaker 1: given that. Um. This has been reproduced a few times
Speaker 1: and sometimes it's even like, if you remind boys and
Speaker 1: girls of the difference in uh their performances in math,
Speaker 1: like reinforces that makes right make sense to me, and
Speaker 1: it bums me out. Another problem with this book, which
Speaker 1: has got a lot of it's it's it's it's a
Speaker 1: book of problems. Yeah that's the Yeah, that's the thing
Speaker 1: with this book, where like you just gotta you have
Speaker 1: to delve into every single bit, right, and I'm not
Speaker 1: gonna I'm really not going to be able to. I
Speaker 1: don't have time to literally don't have the studio time
Speaker 1: to debunk this entire book. But there are a lot
Speaker 1: of problems. But one of them is that the Bell
Speaker 1: curve our authors pointedly don't control for education levels. Um.
Speaker 1: They make the assumption that education is a result of
Speaker 1: i Q and therefore is not an independent variable at
Speaker 1: so maddening our school funding on the wealth of the
Speaker 1: people that live there. Did they mention that in the book?
Speaker 1: I think there was like two footnotes about it. So
Speaker 1: at the same time, this doesn't stop them from studying
Speaker 1: socie economic factors, but then they exclude education. So I
Speaker 1: think the problem with this is kind of evident. This
Speaker 1: essentially has a minimizing effect on the power of wealth
Speaker 1: by like excluding education as a factor. Uh, and the
Speaker 1: ability to pour more resources into education because someone who
Speaker 1: goes to it's this idea that someone who goes to
Speaker 1: a fancy school goes there because they have a higher
Speaker 1: i Q and they have it a higher i Q
Speaker 1: because they're born with it, rather than maybe um, their
Speaker 1: education from a very young age has been better and
Speaker 1: they're going to these better schools and as they get
Speaker 1: older and older, like, yeah, maybe their i Q is
Speaker 1: going up because they're getting better education, so they wind
Speaker 1: up at these you know, right, And I mean the
Speaker 1: brain is the most malleable very early on, and like
Speaker 1: if you're if you're a baby, what happens to you
Speaker 1: in the first three or four years off your life
Speaker 1: is going to greatly affect that. And yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: it's you see that very markedly with say, um children
Speaker 1: who are in some ways either severely neglected or somehow
Speaker 1: accidentally excluded from society. So like children who are just
Speaker 1: grow up in the woods, very rare cases, but they
Speaker 1: cannot learn language. If you don't acquire language as basically
Speaker 1: a baby and toddler and you're not around other people
Speaker 1: and you don't pick up language, you can't really learn it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: maybe you can learn one or two words, but it
Speaker 1: really you have this crystallization period as a very young person.
Speaker 1: So and the fact that we pick up on so
Speaker 1: much in terms of culture and uh, language and all
Speaker 1: these things from a very young age were just little
Speaker 1: sponges that soak up everything around us. To try to
Speaker 1: separate that out from the effects later in life is
Speaker 1: it's very difficult. It's very tricky. So uh, even just
Speaker 1: like the nuts and bolts of their statistical methodology has
Speaker 1: been called into question. They concluded that the haritability of
Speaker 1: intelligence is around but Carnegie Melons statisticians, that's cool, But
Speaker 1: Carnegie Melon statisticians used the same studies um that we're
Speaker 1: in the Bell curve and subjected them to a new
Speaker 1: meta analysis and found that only around thirty heritability, which
Speaker 1: is a pretty massive difference. UM which suggests that their
Speaker 1: findings would suggest that intelligence is primarily not inherited, which
Speaker 1: also makes sense, right, Um, but I mean it's not
Speaker 1: I don't even know if this study is definitive because
Speaker 1: they they're just studying these studies that are in the
Speaker 1: Bell curve. So it's it's essentially saying that, you know,
Speaker 1: the the statistics that the authors in the Bell Curve
Speaker 1: came up with may not be right. So you have,
Speaker 1: like the data they have the day they have might
Speaker 1: not be reliable, but also the way they interpreted the
Speaker 1: data was not necessarily correct, right, I mean at every
Speaker 1: step basically, like the data collection may not have been reliable,
Speaker 1: the statistics that they ran on the data may not
Speaker 1: have been good, and then the conclusions they draw from
Speaker 1: it have a lot of assumptions. This sounds like an
Speaker 1: irresponsible book a little bit that it's mainly just this
Speaker 1: book and then a bunch of other people saying the
Speaker 1: book is wrong, as opposed to more and more people
Speaker 1: writing books like that. Yeah, I mean that is a
Speaker 1: little bit interesting. Although I mean if you believe that,
Speaker 1: then you believe in climate change, and that the like
Speaker 1: handful of sciences who are saying it's not a big deal.
Speaker 1: Are like not not true? Is that? That is what
Speaker 1: that would if the thing? If a thing is against
Speaker 1: the scientific sense, is that means that thing is right?
Speaker 1: Because Um, I don't know if you've heard, because at
Speaker 1: one point we thought that the earth was actually the
Speaker 1: center of the university, the sourcism and everything revolved around
Speaker 1: the earth, and someone was like, and they were right. Therefore,
Speaker 1: anything that's controversial it means that, um, it's right because
Speaker 1: that thing that example I gave was actually before the
Speaker 1: scientific method was developed. Tell me, was that before after
Speaker 1: we were wiping our butt holes with our like thumbs.
Speaker 1: It's it's undetermined around the current, around the time. Um,
Speaker 1: we're not supposed to do that. That's just I hear that,
Speaker 1: So okay, I don't want to hear about it. Here's
Speaker 1: another issue with the book, and also just with this
Speaker 1: kind of ideology in general, is that research has found
Speaker 1: um repeatedly that genetically speaking, between group differences like between
Speaker 1: different races or regions, are on average less than between
Speaker 1: individual difference. So the difference between me and you, like
Speaker 1: you butt scraping people, it's probably greater than me and
Speaker 1: some random person in another country. Hopefully um. In fact,
Speaker 1: differentiating between races based on genome is not really straightforward.
Speaker 1: We're a really young species, were like a hundred thousand
Speaker 1: years old, so a lot of the differentiations that we
Speaker 1: see between different races and ethnicities are skin deep, like literally.
Speaker 1: Dr Jade Craig Venter, head of the Solero Genomics Corporation
Speaker 1: in Rockville, Maryland, says that quote, race is a social concept,
Speaker 1: not a scientific one. We all evolved in the last
Speaker 1: hundred thousand years from the same number of small the
Speaker 1: same small number of tribes that migrated out of Africa
Speaker 1: and colonize the world. Um. The number of genes and
Speaker 1: alleles that control external experience appearance like skin color are
Speaker 1: very few and have like really drastic effects. So those
Speaker 1: kinds of genes that you know can like change the
Speaker 1: pigment of your skin, it's like it's a lot more.
Speaker 1: Just a few genes can have a much more drastic
Speaker 1: effect in terms of your appearance versus the many many
Speaker 1: genes that are thought to control intelligence, which are it's
Speaker 1: we don't even really understand that, and they also interact
Speaker 1: with each other your environment, right, right, It's much more complex.
Speaker 1: So it's like the idea that intelligence would somehow be
Speaker 1: just as easily mutable as like skin color is kind
Speaker 1: of ridiculous. And a study published in two thousand and
Speaker 1: seven in the journal Genetics by Witherspoon and all I
Speaker 1: didn't know reest was this, Yeah, you know, she's really
Speaker 1: all trade. She gets a reverse Google. So um. They
Speaker 1: found that random individuals within a population are far more
Speaker 1: genetically dissimilar than the average difference between two groups. So,
Speaker 1: I mean, that's kind of what I said earlier, the
Speaker 1: chance that you're just more it's like, you take two
Speaker 1: random people in a population, they're going to be more
Speaker 1: dissimilar than the kind of group differences between like an
Speaker 1: entire population. Um. But they also found often like a
Speaker 1: random individual from one population will be more similar to
Speaker 1: a random individual in another population than within their own regions.
Speaker 1: So it's basically just kind of confirming the previous finding that, like,
Speaker 1: you know, I have a good chance of being more
Speaker 1: similar to someone like in Australia than I am. Take God, no,
Speaker 1: so uh now is the part of the show that
Speaker 1: I really kind of don't want to talk about, but
Speaker 1: it's eugenic. Yeah, it's the Nazi stuff kind of have
Speaker 1: to talk about it even though it's very upsetting. It's
Speaker 1: a viciously racist and bigoted ideology. It's the same kind
Speaker 1: of genocidal rhetoric used to justify the Holocaust and the
Speaker 1: justification for this hate. It's like the hatred of Jewish
Speaker 1: people predated the Holocaust, and they just kind of used
Speaker 1: that as a way to justify it. My Jewish side
Speaker 1: of the family was ousted from Russia or just because
Speaker 1: they didn't like Jewish people. Uh, and then like later
Speaker 1: there there's all this like pseudoscience, like, oh well it's
Speaker 1: because of this so um, not only is eugenics morally
Speaker 1: terrible and indefensible, it's also just wrong. So the presence
Speaker 1: of recessive genes and alleles and also spontaneous mutations mean
Speaker 1: that you can't like do a gattica like you can't
Speaker 1: get a gatica situation. You can't effectively get rid of
Speaker 1: certain traits because they will basically kind of we have
Speaker 1: like a genetic library, and we can kind of we
Speaker 1: can have variations within that genetic library, but without like
Speaker 1: evolving over millions of years, we can't drastically alter that
Speaker 1: library to exclude certain traits. So even back in nineteen fifteen,
Speaker 1: that had already been discovered, so we really had no excuse. Um,
Speaker 1: there was a study that found that red eyed fruit
Speaker 1: flies without a history of any white eyes uh blue
Speaker 1: dragon uh or it's a Yugo card game joke. Very yeah. Um,
Speaker 1: so they were able to give birth to white eyed
Speaker 1: fruit flies despite the fact that they didn't have previously
Speaker 1: these red eyed jens just due to spontaneous mutation over
Speaker 1: millions of years. You can have an accumulation of mutations
Speaker 1: that change your genetic library, but you can't like eliminate.
Speaker 1: You can't because it's like a it's kind of a memory,
Speaker 1: right like right, So like an example is, um, what
Speaker 1: you're kind of thinking of, I think is atavistic traits
Speaker 1: where you can have an evolutionary throwback sort of spontaneously
Speaker 1: pop up again, like having supernumery nipples, which used to
Speaker 1: be thought to supernumery, like an extra nipple, yeah, which
Speaker 1: used to be thought to be a trait of witches,
Speaker 1: that they had these extra nipples to feed their familiar,
Speaker 1: which were demonic animals. But it really is because like
Speaker 1: when we were more simple mammals, we had a lot
Speaker 1: we had scaz and nipples, lots of nipples and now
Speaker 1: we don't nipples and this disappeared hundreds of thousands of
Speaker 1: years ago, but still up. Sometimes a nipple just pops up,
Speaker 1: like Chandler Being had an extra nipple. That's true. There
Speaker 1: you go. Treated I knew that. I keep track of
Speaker 1: all these celebrities that have extra nipples. Um, like Crusty
Speaker 1: the Clown. Yes, like Crusty exactly. Um. Also, tail stuff
Speaker 1: can sometimes happen where it's like you're it's just like
Speaker 1: an overgrowth of your spinal cord into like the the
Speaker 1: caudle region, like the tail region, and it, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: just like pops up sometimes and it's like we haven't
Speaker 1: had that for if you if you quote got rid
Speaker 1: of it, it would still be there. Yeah, exactly. Interestingly,
Speaker 1: atavistic traits has been used by racist social Darwinists who
Speaker 1: claim that certain races are inferior, despite the fact that
Speaker 1: it just like disproves that whole idea. It proves you
Speaker 1: can't like selectively quote unquote breed out entire swatches of
Speaker 1: d n A because like every you know, every human
Speaker 1: has the capacity to have a child who has supernumery nipples.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry to break it to you, but it is true.
Speaker 1: And you know, it's like these attavistic traits also pop
Speaker 1: up in animals, which is kind of fun. So snakes
Speaker 1: sometimes grow legs just like what we got legs again not,
Speaker 1: are they like little legs? Yeah, they're just little leg
Speaker 1: leggies kind of like just like dragging across as they
Speaker 1: slither around. Your legs have feet? Yeah, well feet, we'll
Speaker 1: use have toes, sure, yeah, why not? What's so gross
Speaker 1: about it? It's just like a long, long, long, long lizard. Yes,
Speaker 1: that's exactly correct. Sometimes horses grow extra toes. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: just like an extra It looks like a little miniature
Speaker 1: hoove growing on the other and so it's like on
Speaker 1: the on the other hoof, well know, so like at
Speaker 1: the back of their hoofs, you know, because like some
Speaker 1: like some ungulates like animals that are hooved to animals
Speaker 1: will have like not just the one big toe like
Speaker 1: the that horses have, they have like more, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: Researchers have even used genetic modification to grow teeth and
Speaker 1: embryonic birds bringing back in dinosaur times, like the universe
Speaker 1: already decided that the dinosaurs lost the bird to losers,
Speaker 1: why do we have to bring them back? Teeth. Well,
Speaker 1: I mean, why not give birds teeth? Look, I'm not
Speaker 1: saying I'm on this side of the bird. I'm not
Speaker 1: saying I'm biased in favor of birds, or that I
Speaker 1: have an entire Twitter account devoted to making birds the
Speaker 1: supreme rulers of the planet. I'm just saying that I
Speaker 1: funded this research. I may have funded this reason. It's
Speaker 1: like it's Katie funded research, and I think birds should
Speaker 1: have teeth just for reasons. I don't worry about it.
Speaker 1: Don't don't worry about it. Don't worry about it. It
Speaker 1: scares me, Katie. I got to be honest. So, as
Speaker 1: you may know, lack of genetic diversity and humans and
Speaker 1: animals can cause problems. Which is yeah, so um, recessive
Speaker 1: genes stick around because they're overshadowed by dominant genes. Um,
Speaker 1: so they're not expressed an offspring who have inherited the
Speaker 1: dominant genes. And right exactly, in recessive genes aren't always bad.
Speaker 1: Like I've got red hair and blue eyes doesn't make
Speaker 1: me well, it does mean it doesn't mean I don't
Speaker 1: have a soul. Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly with my
Speaker 1: mini extra nipples with which I use to feed my
Speaker 1: toothed birds. Oh how they bite and pinch? But uh so,
Speaker 1: but sometimes recessive genes are like diseases that that heart
Speaker 1: harm us. But um, lack of diversity means that recessive
Speaker 1: genes are more likely to double up. And if the
Speaker 1: recessive genes happens to be harmful such a disease, we
Speaker 1: have less protection against that. Uh. And also look, determining
Speaker 1: which genes are good and bad is beyond our humble capabilities.
Speaker 1: So pliotropy is when one gene affects multiple traits. So
Speaker 1: like if you get rid of a gene that you
Speaker 1: think is bad, it could have had a bunch of
Speaker 1: positive benefits that you've accidentally and eliminated, and like vice versa.
Speaker 1: You could think, oh, this is a gene for being
Speaker 1: good and strong, and then it turns out it makes
Speaker 1: interacts with other stuffen exactly yeah, and in certain environments
Speaker 1: it will express itself and so exactly yeah. And and
Speaker 1: gene expression is a big thing where it's like it's
Speaker 1: not just you know, you've got certain genes and that's it.
Speaker 1: Like gene expression is very mutable and react yea, and
Speaker 1: so even uh in the womb, like you can have
Speaker 1: like development that affects certain traits that become tied to
Speaker 1: each other. So have you noticed that like all domesticated
Speaker 1: animals have floppy ears and they usually have spotted coats,
Speaker 1: So floppy ears are associated with calmer demeanors and domesticated animals.
Speaker 1: So a wolf rigid acuiote and a wild boar versus
Speaker 1: accuate at all. Peggy, um, So this is actually potentially
Speaker 1: do Recent research suggests uh. The neural crest cells, which
Speaker 1: are a type of stem cell that is an embryonic
Speaker 1: development and the ideas that in domesticated animals these cells
Speaker 1: are suppressed during development. And these neural cells are stem
Speaker 1: cells that control brain and head and other parts of
Speaker 1: the body development. And having fewer or suppressed neural crest
Speaker 1: cells leads to a less developed adrenal medulla adrenal medulla.
Speaker 1: It's a wonderful um. Having a less developed adrenal medulla
Speaker 1: means a friendlier, more social dog or other domesticated animal.
Speaker 1: And the neural crust cells also control things like your
Speaker 1: cartilage and for for coloration. So that's why when you
Speaker 1: take a wild fox and you try to this was
Speaker 1: an experiment where they tried to breed more calm, domesticated behaviors.
Speaker 1: In these wild foxes, they get floppy ears and spotted
Speaker 1: coats to despite the fact that they're not like the
Speaker 1: closest relatives to dogs. Yeah, it's just yeah, and a
Speaker 1: side side effect. Yeah, it's fascinating, It really is. And
Speaker 1: I think it's kind of interesting that, you know, you
Speaker 1: would if you were using sort of like the pseudoscience perspective,
Speaker 1: You're you're like, oh, they have more repressed medullas or
Speaker 1: adrenal medulas. That means they're not as intelligent or or
Speaker 1: you know, but actually, in that case, it means they're
Speaker 1: more socially, you know, Like you look at the ears
Speaker 1: and you'd like to be like, oh, well, the actually
Speaker 1: the floppiest of the ears actually indicates, like I don't know,
Speaker 1: some bullshit to write, like them from being able to
Speaker 1: vote or whatever, like like, let's let's pretend to be
Speaker 1: sort of a pop evolutionary psychologists just sort of trying
Speaker 1: to spin a yarn where you're like, Okay, they have
Speaker 1: floppy ears because they look cuter and we selected the
Speaker 1: cuter dogs, uh, you know, or like they don't need
Speaker 1: their ears to perk up anymore because we're protecting them
Speaker 1: so they don't need to be so like, you can
Speaker 1: come up with all these stories, um like fearful of sounds,
Speaker 1: so they're like trying to mask themselves or whatever. Right,
Speaker 1: So it's like you can come up with all these stories,
Speaker 1: but it's actually really difficult. Sometimes these are just a spandrel,
Speaker 1: which in evolutionary terms means like a physical change that
Speaker 1: doesn't really have any function. It's just the result of
Speaker 1: other constructions, sort of like in a building, a spandrel
Speaker 1: is the space between like two archways, and it's just
Speaker 1: it's not there for any real architectural purpose. It's just
Speaker 1: there because it has to be there for the Yeah,
Speaker 1: exactly like a corel. I don't think that's where it
Speaker 1: was going. Oh that's great. Sometimes pseudoscience not only threatens people,
Speaker 1: but animals as well. Industries can use their political wealth
Speaker 1: and power to pervert the course of scientific research to
Speaker 1: the detriment of animals. Take, for instance, the humble salmon
Speaker 1: and the early two thousands of fishery biologists working for
Speaker 1: the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration blew the whistle, and
Speaker 1: the fact that he was being pressured to change the
Speaker 1: conclusions of his research to downplay the negative effect that
Speaker 1: hatchery has had on the salmon population, and now currently
Speaker 1: under Trump, the Energy Department's International Climate Office received instructions
Speaker 1: to not use the term quote climate change, emissions reductions,
Speaker 1: or Paris agreement in their memos. Attacking real science to
Speaker 1: fit a political ideology is often referred to as licendiism.
Speaker 1: It's a Russian word lysand Coism, which was coined from
Speaker 1: the term used to describe the Stalinist policy of quashing
Speaker 1: any science that went against the theory of trothen Lysenko,
Speaker 1: who did not believe in natural selection. The fact that
Speaker 1: even killed some of these scientists who believed in natural
Speaker 1: selection and who were against this theory troughen Lysenko thought
Speaker 1: that the genetics of crops could be changed by exposing
Speaker 1: wheat seeds to humidity such that the crop yields would
Speaker 1: be higher. Well, this wasn't true, and it's screwed over
Speaker 1: a lot of people who needed the crops to you know, eat.
Speaker 1: This feels especially relevant now as climate science deniers and
Speaker 1: the current administration tries to downplay the seriousness of climate
Speaker 1: change as it could mess up the planet which we
Speaker 1: need to you know, live on. So when we return,
Speaker 1: will discuss even more science quests. And I don't mean
Speaker 1: adorable ducks were scientists. I'm sorry, but if you have
Speaker 1: a picture of a duck in a nab coat, send
Speaker 1: it to me. We'll be right back. Throughout history, science
Speaker 1: has had a few growing pains, but for some reason,
Speaker 1: even as we prove certain theories wrong, they just keep
Speaker 1: popping up in modern society. Even today, there are flat earther's,
Speaker 1: anti vaxer's, evolution deniers, and so called race realists who
Speaker 1: try to lend credence to their ideologies by using suit
Speaker 1: of scientific explanations that may have the veneer of truthiness,
Speaker 1: but when you actually think about it, they make no sense.
Speaker 1: The lack of science behind these truth the ideas are
Speaker 1: even more clear when you look throughout history. Unfortunately, some
Speaker 1: of these ideas are weirdly making a comeback. Like rhrenology. Okay,
Speaker 1: let's talk about phrenology and get your caliber clowder. Such
Speaker 1: a creepy thing like so connected with the Nazis, just
Speaker 1: like let's nest so the little background, uh s. Phrenology
Speaker 1: is an old discredited pseudoscience claiming that skull shape determines
Speaker 1: personality and intelligence because when they're like distinct parts of
Speaker 1: the brain that like, this is your intelligence, this is
Speaker 1: your ability to cook, this is your And when they're bigger,
Speaker 1: they make bumps in the skull, and each bump correlates
Speaker 1: to a personality trait, so you can feel someone's skull.
Speaker 1: And phrenology has taken many shapes and forms, but like, um,
Speaker 1: that was that's sort of the main thing that that
Speaker 1: popped up in the eighteen hundreds, and there's kind of
Speaker 1: been a resurgence of people talking about skull shape where
Speaker 1: they point to it as an indicator of a difference
Speaker 1: in intelligence between like different groups of people, like based
Speaker 1: on sex or race, which is a problem because it's
Speaker 1: just there's no science to indicate that it's true. Here's
Speaker 1: one big problem that it's kind of off es. So
Speaker 1: Neanderthals had much bigger skulls and much bigger brains, and
Speaker 1: they lacked the I mean, it's always hard to compare intelligence,
Speaker 1: but if you're like looking at it at the metric
Speaker 1: of human intelligence, they weren't as smart as us in
Speaker 1: that kind of aspect, like humans were able to develop
Speaker 1: complex kind of second and third order tools where it's
Speaker 1: like you use a tool to make another tool to
Speaker 1: make another tool, which Neanderthals, it's thought that that's like
Speaker 1: one reason they didn't advance socially as much as we did.
Speaker 1: And obviously so Neanderthals were around a lot longer than
Speaker 1: we've ever been around, and we've like just kind of
Speaker 1: exponentially developed in terms of our civilization, for better or
Speaker 1: for worse. But you know, obviously, in nature, there's not
Speaker 1: strong evidence to indicate that brain size and intelligence are
Speaker 1: always directly correlated. It's not that brain size and shape
Speaker 1: and stuff doesn't necessarily like have an effect on on
Speaker 1: how that brain functions. But it's just it's not like
Speaker 1: as simple as a bigger brain or a smaller brain
Speaker 1: are less or more intelligence, right exactly. Like it's really,
Speaker 1: first of all, it's hard to measure animal intelligence, as
Speaker 1: kind of a disclaimer, but if you use sort of
Speaker 1: human metrics of what intelligence is, you're good at being
Speaker 1: a smart human, right right exactly. So, for example, an
Speaker 1: African parrot's head and brain is very tiny, but it's
Speaker 1: considered one of the smartest birds, capable of outperforming for
Speaker 1: your old human children on simple physics test. Really. Yeah, so,
Speaker 1: like you know, the whole thing where you give a
Speaker 1: child like a liquid volume liquids and they're like, here,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna pour this liquid into a taller glass. And
Speaker 1: then they're like, I want the taller glass because it's
Speaker 1: taller and that's more orange juice that I want more juice.
Speaker 1: You can't fool an African gray parrot with that. Each other, Like, no, dude,
Speaker 1: trying to scammy. I've seen the scam. I invented this scam.
Speaker 1: Of course. The sometimes the argument is that it's brain
Speaker 1: to body ratio. So African grain parrots are more intelligent
Speaker 1: because they have a high brain to body ratio. So
Speaker 1: research has been just like kind of basic facts about
Speaker 1: animals doesn't really seem to indicate this is true. So
Speaker 1: here's here's kind of an example of why this is
Speaker 1: a problem. Humans have a brain to body ratio of
Speaker 1: on average about one to forty. Tree shrews have a
Speaker 1: one to twenty brain body ratio, dolphins have a one
Speaker 1: to seventy eight brained body ratio, and dogs have one
Speaker 1: to one and ants have one to seven. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: according to this, ants are the most smart. Uh. Tree
Speaker 1: shoes are also very very smart. A lot of people
Speaker 1: are saying this, yes and uh, that humans are not
Speaker 1: as smart as the tree shoes, um, which obviously is
Speaker 1: you know it's true. I mean, have you seen the
Speaker 1: tree shows either they don't even know to treat shoe
Speaker 1: is well, see that's the thing. They're so secret, They've
Speaker 1: got their entire secret society. So tree shoes are so
Speaker 1: smart that they know what treaties are. But the point
Speaker 1: is that the idea of like brained body ratio meaning
Speaker 1: like more intelligent less intelligent, it's not to say that like, Okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: if you have a brain that's like two neurons, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's going to be more simple than a brain that
Speaker 1: has like hundreds of thousands of neurons. But it's you
Speaker 1: can't just like look at an animal and be like, okay,
Speaker 1: that bird is small and that whale shark is big,
Speaker 1: therefore bird dumb, whale sharts. So you can't take like,
Speaker 1: i mean size and density or different things, right, and
Speaker 1: density in terms of brain is like you know, one
Speaker 1: of the things is like brain folds can be an
Speaker 1: indicator of it, Like smoother brains are considered like maybe
Speaker 1: not having as much neurological activity. But you know, even
Speaker 1: then it's like you can't know measuring these things doesn't
Speaker 1: necessarily like the difference between gray matter and white matter,
Speaker 1: like we don't really know how that translates to intelligence,
Speaker 1: Like that's often pointed to in gender differences, is like
Speaker 1: an indicator that like, oh, well there's a difference, but
Speaker 1: we don't actually see that reflected in like you know, say,
Speaker 1: like you know, women and men who take like get
Speaker 1: the same scores on like Ravens tests, which is a
Speaker 1: type of UM. It's another kind of type of i
Speaker 1: Q test that tries to eliminate a lot of cultural factors.
Speaker 1: Of course you can't. Um, there's no test that is
Speaker 1: going to eliminate cultural influence. Yes, it's yeah, it's trying
Speaker 1: UM and you know, the gender scores are basically identical,
Speaker 1: and so it's you know, it's one of these things
Speaker 1: where we don't we just don't understand the brain well
Speaker 1: enough to be able to like point out like, ha,
Speaker 1: that brain is a lot a lot more you know,
Speaker 1: fat than that one, so it's better. So much of
Speaker 1: this just seem it's just a lot of grasping it strong,
Speaker 1: like knowing like I really want this to be a thing, right,
Speaker 1: and and speaking about it definitively when you just can't
Speaker 1: write exactly. Um. I've seen like several conversations between like
Speaker 1: Jordan Peterson and like Stephan Mall and you, who speaks
Speaker 1: so definitively about these things, and it's like, well a
Speaker 1: lot of times they're just wrong or they're just it's
Speaker 1: not decided and it there's so much nuance to it
Speaker 1: that to speak diffinitively about it makes me question what
Speaker 1: your intentions? So frustrating We know that you don't know
Speaker 1: this answer. People don't know. The brain is hard to study,
Speaker 1: like and that's the thing, and I think that's an
Speaker 1: important distinction, is what is their motivation for doing this?
Speaker 1: Because obviously evolutionary biology and psychology are both fields that
Speaker 1: are plagued by um just it's really difficult to study.
Speaker 1: And that doesn't mean that it's not they aren't worthy
Speaker 1: disciplines or that you know, obviously, I think they're extremely
Speaker 1: worthy disciplines. And I think that you know, trying to
Speaker 1: find out why behaviors came across and stuff, that's not
Speaker 1: it's not it's not all garbage science. It's just that
Speaker 1: it's so hard to figure these things out. It requires
Speaker 1: such detailed analysis and studies to parse out all of
Speaker 1: the um conflicting variables and that you know, we will
Speaker 1: try things sometimes and then like genuinely good natured studies
Speaker 1: that are really intellectually honest will sometimes be proven wrong
Speaker 1: later on. So it's like, what is your So that
Speaker 1: motivation is actually very important because if you're doing a
Speaker 1: study where it's like, well, I think this beetle maybe
Speaker 1: uses its um chills rae in like sexual selection, and
Speaker 1: I'm just curious about this, and I'm proposing this thing,
Speaker 1: and I'm doing the study you're doing that, it's like
Speaker 1: your your whole motivation is you're curious about this thing.
Speaker 1: You want to find out the truth. When you're like,
Speaker 1: you know, maybe chicks can't just do can't do math,
Speaker 1: and maybe it's okay to that they you know, are
Speaker 1: pressed in society or something, right, David blatant motive for
Speaker 1: why they're trying to extrapolate this specific conclusion from something
Speaker 1: that doesn't have a conclusion, And usually the motivation, in
Speaker 1: my opinion, is to justify social inequalities, so like to
Speaker 1: say that if certain like if if a gender or
Speaker 1: race is not doesn't have as many resources or rights
Speaker 1: as another one that's okay because they're in fear. That's
Speaker 1: how it is. Yeah, that's just how. And I'm it's
Speaker 1: like any time, like the burden of proof for that
Speaker 1: kind of claim. It's not only high morally but just scientifically.
Speaker 1: It's like, I feel like you should just be very
Speaker 1: skeptical of anyone who makes a sweeping claim about human behavior, uh,
Speaker 1: in any capacity, especially though if it's in that vein
Speaker 1: where it's like everything's don't don't rock the boat, stop
Speaker 1: trying to Yeah, it's yeah, you see it a lot again.
Speaker 1: I keep coming back to Jordan Peterson, but like his
Speaker 1: like his lobster thing, it's very much like no hierarcharies
Speaker 1: is good, don't rock the boat because the way lobsters operated,
Speaker 1: therefore society works the way it's as if. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean that's so funny to me because of all the
Speaker 1: animals that you could have picked, like a lobster is
Speaker 1: maybe one of the furthest it isn't the furthest, but
Speaker 1: so far back on the evolutionary tree, like uh, sea bugs,
Speaker 1: like what are you doing man? And and like just
Speaker 1: the idea that because it's also although they are remembering
Speaker 1: little merdmaid like wasn't that Sebastian, Oh it was a crab,
Speaker 1: So maybe we should be looking to crabs, right, that's
Speaker 1: actually a Disney propaganda for some feminisms bat or something. Um,
Speaker 1: but these also these It's always interesting because as we've
Speaker 1: sort of you've been talking about this whole time, uh,
Speaker 1: making a claim like that from evolutionary biological standpoint without
Speaker 1: like saying like have you have you talked to an
Speaker 1: anthropologist about this and historian about this, and people who
Speaker 1: are aware of these kinds of things that are like, oh,
Speaker 1: actually that's related to this, or like that wasn't always true,
Speaker 1: and uh, they don't seem to be open to all
Speaker 1: of the variables and the nuance that is required. I
Speaker 1: wonder why. I wonder what we'll also, I mean, like
Speaker 1: Peterson doesn't want ethics panels for science, so he has
Speaker 1: a specific agenda. He has this he wants he basically
Speaker 1: wants like the fifties again, where women are in their place.
Speaker 1: You have sort of like you know, uh, white people
Speaker 1: have all the privilege and you know, and science was
Speaker 1: king dips into like low i Q people not participating
Speaker 1: in society and eugenics, yes, eugenic yes, he does well
Speaker 1: speaking of all this, I wanna in the show with
Speaker 1: something that is very funny. Well it's terrible, but funny.
Speaker 1: So physiognomy. Physiognomy, which is a Nazi Furries wet dream. Look,
Speaker 1: I'm not by the way, I'm not slandering all Furries.
Speaker 1: Good job, good job on kicking Polo Annapolis out of
Speaker 1: that convention. So they're really taking a stance against the Nazis.
Speaker 1: Nazi Furries are right, very vigilant about keeping fascist Nazis
Speaker 1: out of there. That's great. Yeah. The So physiognomy is
Speaker 1: the idea that someone's outer appearance, such as facial structure,
Speaker 1: is an indicator of personality and intelligence. So this was
Speaker 1: popular during ancient times like uh in in ancient Greece,
Speaker 1: uh and in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Um. One
Speaker 1: of the claims is that animal like features indicated a
Speaker 1: personality similar to that animal. So like a lion like
Speaker 1: face meant that the person was going to be more
Speaker 1: bold and brutish, and like a dog like face is
Speaker 1: going to be more like submissive. Um. Actually, let me
Speaker 1: show you some of these because it's extremely funny. Here's
Speaker 1: a here's a science for you face face looks more
Speaker 1: like lyon, therefore person more like lyon. Uh. It's so
Speaker 1: fascinating well because also like there's an element of like
Speaker 1: people might treat you differently if you look like a lion,
Speaker 1: and that might affect your personality behavior. But it's not
Speaker 1: because of that, but also just it's also they weren't
Speaker 1: like doing studies ums like the same, same, same, same.
Speaker 1: Like here's one see he looked like dog. They're funny.
Speaker 1: Maybe he's like a dog. Dog therefore is right And
Speaker 1: this uh sounds like something that would just like how
Speaker 1: it would just be dismissed um before the eighteen hundreds.
Speaker 1: But so this almost derailed the course of evolutionary biology research.
Speaker 1: So Charles Darwin was almost barred from sailing on the
Speaker 1: the Beagle because the captain was a fan of physi agnomy,
Speaker 1: so he didn't like the shape of Darwin's nose. So
Speaker 1: Darwin wrote, quote, this captain was an ardent disciple of Lavador,
Speaker 1: who I guess as a physiognomist, and he was convinced
Speaker 1: that he could judge a man's character by the outline
Speaker 1: of his features. And he doubted whether anyone with my
Speaker 1: nose could possess sufficient energy and determination for the voyage.
Speaker 1: But I think he was afterwards well satisfied that my
Speaker 1: nose had spoken falsely drag him Darwin. Ye oh, my gosh.
Speaker 1: It's so it's just I mean, it's silly, it's funny,
Speaker 1: but I think it's kind of like it's fun to
Speaker 1: laugh at it. But I think it's a really good
Speaker 1: reminder that, like, just be alert for these kinds of things.
Speaker 1: Anyone telling you something that kind of seems like snake oil, Like, hey,
Speaker 1: if he's got a face that looks like a bird,
Speaker 1: maybe he's bird like, Like that doesn't make any sense,
Speaker 1: but you know, I mean I've seen just kind of
Speaker 1: anecdotally like this a sort of more of these kinds
Speaker 1: of things of like well maybe you know, like skull
Speaker 1: shape or like face shape or whatever, you know, has
Speaker 1: some kind of thing to do with personality, and it's
Speaker 1: just just be alert to that and like being legitimized
Speaker 1: by people who have the air of and there's so
Speaker 1: many grifters that have a platform and being elevated that
Speaker 1: you know, things are happening today across the board that
Speaker 1: you wouldn't have been able, you wouldn't expect it happened.
Speaker 1: So yeah, it's a very good warning to be on
Speaker 1: guard for this kind of ship. Yeah. Yeah, it's uh.
Speaker 1: I don't know if you're familiar with the Prigger You website,
Speaker 1: but yeah, we're familiar the website that says not an
Speaker 1: accredited universe, but that's the one. It is weird how
Speaker 1: because they do get like they will get professors on
Speaker 1: there and such. So it's like it's not that it's
Speaker 1: all just like Ben Shapiro, you know, whining about pronouns
Speaker 1: or whatever. But oh Benjamin talking about how comedy is
Speaker 1: dying running into a Nazi whoops. Um. But yeah, so
Speaker 1: it's like it's kind of trying to legitimize a lot
Speaker 1: of these these things, and is he looking at it
Speaker 1: as a whole, like, I mean, even have a video
Speaker 1: about how the Civil War was actually about slavery. It's
Speaker 1: good job. Oh they do have Oh I see, Okay,
Speaker 1: that's confusing to me because typically yeah, um, but again
Speaker 1: that's like they try, they try to make it legitimate.
Speaker 1: But then they'll have one on They had one where
Speaker 1: it was like it was by Praeger himself, Dennis Trager,
Speaker 1: where he was talking about the power of the visual.
Speaker 1: I don't know if you guys saw this one. But
Speaker 1: it was like saying that men are just hard wired
Speaker 1: to be more attracted to visual stimuli, and they were
Speaker 1: aroused by visuals, whereas women won't aren't and they can't
Speaker 1: understand it and so um and and he's like, that's
Speaker 1: this is not to justify sexual assault, like whoa buddy,
Speaker 1: what this? Um? Yeah, they know they know that that's
Speaker 1: but it's basically saying women or men are attracted by
Speaker 1: visual stimuli like hot ladies. Of course, it's it's right exactly,
Speaker 1: it's all heteronormative, of course, like it's always been attracted.
Speaker 1: Although he does mention like, oh, well, you know, women
Speaker 1: don't look at pornography, but game in look at pornography
Speaker 1: or whatever. I don't even know why speaking of citations needed.
Speaker 1: A study found that even though women when they were
Speaker 1: sort of surveyed they may report less being like visually stimulated,
Speaker 1: when they actually measured their brain responses brain activity identical
Speaker 1: to men when they were shown um, you know, like
Speaker 1: sexual image. Yeah it was so you know, it's like,
Speaker 1: I mean, it's it's one of these things where you
Speaker 1: can have Again, it's so hard to separate culture from biology,
Speaker 1: right exactly, so I mean, for example, obviously different cultures,
Speaker 1: different clothing styles, different things are considered attractive. We used
Speaker 1: to get hard about ankles, you know. So it's I
Speaker 1: just if you take one thing away from this whole
Speaker 1: fun journey through pseudoscience is if something sounds like a
Speaker 1: big claim, it might be and just check out the CITA,
Speaker 1: like read the studies it's based on. Oftentimes those studies
Speaker 1: will you know, maybe not actually say what the person
Speaker 1: is saying. They're saying right and there, and it's not
Speaker 1: like all It's not like studies are always perfect. Like
Speaker 1: there could be a study that makes a claim like
Speaker 1: or they do something and then in the discussion section
Speaker 1: they're like, we think maybe this, but they don't. That's
Speaker 1: just an assumption right there. They're Oftentimes studies like that
Speaker 1: are used to say that the thing is true when
Speaker 1: studies like, yeah, they're speculating right exactly. So, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: and studies can be flawed too. I mean that's not
Speaker 1: I don't think people you know, don't not trust the
Speaker 1: larger body of scientific research, but just you know, I
Speaker 1: think being having a sort of critical eye for things
Speaker 1: is really important, especially if someone is trying to trying
Speaker 1: to tell you button up your shirt, keep your shoulders straight,
Speaker 1: and don't have women in the workplace. Yeah, if it's
Speaker 1: like if there's like a political or social agenda that's clear,
Speaker 1: or like a conclusion that's being made and it's based
Speaker 1: off of this kind of stuff. Question that right? Uh,
Speaker 1: it's yeah, it's really misused a lot and again more
Speaker 1: and more and more by publications and figures. That's fun.
Speaker 1: That is cool? How fun? What fun we've had? What
Speaker 1: fun we've had? I feel like if I if you
Speaker 1: did physiognomy on my face, I'm trying to think what
Speaker 1: I would look like. I feel like human being, human being.
Speaker 1: That's a good one. Yeah, I think I think a
Speaker 1: human being, right, I think definitely being You know, you
Speaker 1: look like human being, an act like a human being,
Speaker 1: you might be being human being. Also like the idea
Speaker 1: that like all like one species of animal has like
Speaker 1: a personality. It's also weird, like I mean, look at
Speaker 1: any dog. Probably not true. Also the lion like face.
Speaker 1: I might post this online, but like the lion like face,
Speaker 1: it was also their mustache and beard hair like the
Speaker 1: hair style Cody, you have a beard, so clearly you're
Speaker 1: like a lion. You eat babies. But if I were
Speaker 1: to shave, if I personality would change with you would
Speaker 1: stop eating babies, which I mean, maybe you should shave.
Speaker 1: No you haven't. I mean I've been trying to say
Speaker 1: it for a while now. It's very distracting, the eating
Speaker 1: the babies. Yeah, I mean, and then he doesn't finish them.
Speaker 1: So we've got like that. But like we get ants.
Speaker 1: And one time we came back to the office and there,
Speaker 1: which is a room full of lies, was that the
Speaker 1: baby though it might have been my coffee. Well, this
Speaker 1: has been a delight. So do you guys want to
Speaker 1: talk a little bit about all the things that you do,
Speaker 1: because you do a lot of things, a lot of sure. Um,
Speaker 1: we have our own podcast called even More News. Our
Speaker 1: YouTube show is called some More News, and you can
Speaker 1: check us out on patreon dot com slash some More
Speaker 1: News if you'd like to support us. Hear all that
Speaker 1: kind of stuff. Social media is all some More News,
Speaker 1: and then our news show with Robert Evans is called
Speaker 1: Worst Year Ever. It will be released releasing when you
Speaker 1: hear this, um social media first year pod. Yeah, I'm
Speaker 1: so looking forward to that. It's gonna be fun and
Speaker 1: all basically we're yeah, we're doing everything. Uh, you know,
Speaker 1: for the rest of this year, we're gonna be going
Speaker 1: in depth on candidates and talking about different issues and
Speaker 1: things like that. In the next year news sources. Um.
Speaker 1: Next year we're gonna start traveling around going to contention.
Speaker 1: Now you not thank you for taking that weight upon
Speaker 1: your shoulders. It was exciting. It still is, but now
Speaker 1: it's like, oh God, there that's happening. And you can
Speaker 1: find us on the internet Creature feature Pod dot Com,
Speaker 1: Creature Feature Pod on Instagram, Creature feak Pod on Twitter,
Speaker 1: at t tee that is a um and you can
Speaker 1: find me at Katie Golden and at pro bird Rites
Speaker 1: where I say we give teeth to birds. And thanks
Speaker 1: to the Space Costics for their awesome song Exo Lumina.
Speaker 1: Cre 's Your Feature is a production of I Heart
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