Controversies in Evolutionary Psychology
2025-06-03 12:00:00.000 +00:00

We're David Pinsov and David Petrozki. This is Evolutionary Psychology, the podcast Actual Evolutionary Psychology by Actual Evolutionary Psychologists. David, good to see you. Good to see you too, my friend. We are on episode three. We are Evolutionary Psychology the Podcast. Third time is The Charm. This episode, we neither interview Dave or David, but we start getting into what is evolutionary psychology and where we end up in this episode is largely talking about the bad of evolutionary psychology and the ways that it's been misused and abused and also um really kind of together really uh you know stumble into some of the problematic areas and misunderstandings of our discipline. Yes. Um this one uh goes into controversial territory.

I think we try to get to the bottom of why evolutionary psychology has gotten under people's skin, why it has uh evoked such a backlash historically, uh we get into topics such as, you know, uh feminism and sexism. Um we we go into some uh dangerous waters. Yeah, and I and I appreciate one thing we do in this, David, is that um I I genuinely think that we are um trying to do this in a way that is respects what should be respected in this debate and and doesn't, you know, we're not gonna suffer foolish, cynical well cynical is the wrong word, but um people who are sort of being um parasitic or trolling. But I think, you know, this is a an honest and sincere discussion about some of these issues.

Um and uh and I think, you know, I think we did okay. Um it's not the last word, but I think, you know, it was a open, honest discussion. We disagreed um at some points, but I feel like um uh I feel good about the discussion. Yeah, no, me too. I think it will be uh enlightening for people to uh get into this area and to and to sort of have some perspective about where the controversy is coming from and and how we might move past it. All right, we're going. So uh so David, um good to see you. Good to see you too, my friend. Uh today we're going to talk about evolutionary psychology. Yes. What it what it is, um, and uh maybe why people, um, to what extent people do and don't understand it. Um, and uh all things sort of around evolutionary psychology or what it

means to you. Yeah, what it means to us, why it matters, why you should care. Or not. Yeah, maybe you don't care. But if you're listening, probably you care at least a little bit. Good. Um, so to start out, um, what what what is evolutionary psychology? How do you how do you think about it or or here? Let me let me change the let me break that up into two questions. One is what do you think is sort of the the generally accepted idea of what it is? And then number two, how do you think about it? Yes. So th there's a big difference between those two things. And I think that's part of why we wanted to do this podcast was to better get at the difference between those two things and sort of give you the legit version of of Ev Psych

as distinguishable from the uh popular version of it. We are as j I think George Carlin once said, uh you know, something about he was in this is why I'm not a professional comedian. He said something about, you know, I am a professional comedian, unlike the comedians you usually encounter in your day-to-day, you know, life. So we are professional evolutionary psychologists. Yes. Yes. We are professionals. We we publish in peer-reviewed journals. Um so what is evolutionary psych? Well, let's start with the popular conception of it. Um, here is my understanding of the popular conception of it. Um, it's basically like uh you hear the David Attenborough voiceover on the on the Planet Earth episode, or you're watching National Geographic or Discovery Channel and you

hear some person talking about how the male is performing a courtship display to attract a female, uh or you know, the uh the animal is trying to uh escape the the predator, or you know. These kinds of sex and death related animalistic uh ideas and basically applying that to humans. So human men perform courtship displays uh to try to attract a mate. Um, and you know, humans are hardwired to escape the predator, to flee from the tiger or the lion. And a lot of the times this is sort of mixed in with a Fred Flintstone uh version of human history where we're dumb cavemen with clubs. And so a lot of pop F Psyche is like, oh, uh we make these mistakes because we have these dumb cavemen intuitions that, you know,

might have made sense when we were cavemen, but now they're they're stupid and we need to rise above that stupidity. That's that's another side of the of the popular version of it. Do you think that's about right? Do you anything else you want to add? Yeah, no, I think that I think that's good. Yeah. I I also think even in Morse, and I think to be f to say, I thought I think that you also encounter that in uh professional uh research circles, not just sort of what you what you might find on YouTube. I think there are other things, and we may or may not talk get into this, which is um there's the uh there's the sort of are you a behavioral scientist? Is that your job? And do you do you understand or use evolutionary psychology?

And then there's also sort of, do you are you uh an interested um outsider? Um, and uh and how do you use it? And I think in both there's sort of a continuum of sort of cynical use, idealized use, understands it, doesn't understand it, um, almost maybe as a two by two. Um, so I think uh so I think there's a lot of possible things to talk about, but I think what you just described is a good um is a good description of uh of sort of the general idea. I remember when I came first came across evolutionary psychology, this was when I was an undergrad. Um I I didn't like it at first because I understood it as basically just assigning things to instincts. So I didn't know anything about it, but my reaction was very negative.

And it was just, and I think I even at the time, uh Steve Pinker's language instinct book was just out. Um and I um I was like, oh, well, this is just silly because it's just labeling something we already know about, but calling it an instinct. Um that was my first reaction. And so I actually have a very warm spot in my heart for anybody who hates evolutionary psychology and they don't know anything about it. Whenever I hear that, I'm like, that's awesome. Tell me more. I want to hear more about it. Um, when I was at the Mox Planck um in Berlin, um, uh uh, a good friend of mine who turned out to be a good friend of mine when I first moved there. Um, the first thing he said to me was like, Oh, really nice to meet you is very warm in a

personal. He's like, I hate evolutionary psychology. And I sat down tonight next to him. I was like genuinely happy. I was like, Great, tell me about why you hate it. And you know, after about an hour of conversation, we realized we didn't disagree at all. Um, he didn't he hadn't misunderstood it reasonably enough based on what he had experienced. Um and yeah, I think that is part of why we're doing this and part of why um I uh I do have a soft spot in in my heart for people who who think they might hate it. And maybe they do, and maybe they don't actually. Yeah. I mean, I too hate the mangled popular version of it. So at least we hate I you know we have that in common with with our critics. Yeah.

You know, their their caricatured version of it is, you know, is pretty dumb and awful. Yeah. Um, there's a lot of layers here, and it's almost overwhelming um to sort of unpack things. Um, but but how do you think of what do you think it actually is? Hmm. Um I think of it as a simple combination between uh Darwin's theory of evolution, um perhaps combined with the Neo-Darwinian synthesis, um, pioneered by Richard Dawkins and uh William Hamilton and John Maynard Smith, which sort of popularize this Gene Zi view view of evolution. So it's basically just you know evolutionary logic, evolutionary thinking, um combined with the computational theory of mind. Or in other words, you know, cognitive science.

The mind is an information processing device. It takes information as input, it processes it, and it uses it to regulate behavior in complicated ways. It's a machine, a mechanical device. We can talk more about our folk engineering systems. That's those are you know that they are part of the mind. I think we ought to understand the mind in the way that we understand tools and machines. I think that is the most useful way of understanding the mind. So yeah, it's just combining the fact that minds are physical computational systems uh with the idea that they are products of the evolutionary process. So that's very different than what people misunderstand about it. And I think we can unpack sort of the modern synthesis, the genes I view.

And I know that there, you know, the genes I view has sort of been treated lately as sort of an outdated. There's this like idea of like the disco ball problem, which is sort of you read sort of really up-to-date um arguments in um in the evolutionary social sciences about you know this genes I view maybe being somewhat out of date. And I have thoughts about that and I'm interested to hear what you think about that. But before and also then the computational theory mine, these are all sort of minefields. Yes. And and in fact I think it's no accident that there's still um controversy and misunderstanding surrounding evolutionary psychology because it's sort of this combination of many things that are misunderstood or not generally

part of curricula in training for psychologists or anthropologists, and also certainly not part of accepted sort of common common sense knowledge outside of the public, right? Or in the in the public. So I don't think it's any accident. The cartoonish version, the Fred Funstone version. I also like calling it Annie Wirtz and I sometimes call it the diorama model, where you go to like a natural history museum and there's sort of a diorama, you know, of like, you know, two people and they're hunting, you know, and uh what is in our evolutionary history like, you know, it's this very simplified sort of cartoonish view, right? Um like like it's a diorama. Um that diorama model, um, the the relationship between that and sort of uh when we go to our conference, like Human

Behavior and Evolution Conference, or there's other conferences like in uh EB, um, or there's like anthropology conferences, there's or there's regional conferences. When you actually talk to people who are doing evolutionary psychology on a day-to-day basis and who are professionals in it, and we're a part of that crowd of people? Do you um what is your thought on sort of their their relationship to this misunderstanding, um, this sort of diorama model misunderstanding? So, how how widespread is the Fred Flintstone version of it, even among professional evolutionary psychologists? I mean, that's one way of interpreting the question, or another one is sort of uh, you know, do you think that the the popular outside understanding is something that uh

is it, you know, understood and known and are people annoyed by that um in your experience? Or is it something where people generally feel like, oh, you know, people kind of understand what we're doing? Or um yeah, just like for people who don't know, who don't go to the conferences, like what um what is the how would you like kind of judge the the temperature on the street in terms of like if you're an evolutionary psychologist and you're like, oh yeah, no, what do pe what do people mostly think about what we do? Um do you think people understand it? Absolutely not. Yeah, I I don't think I can't remember a single interaction I've had with a lay person where I mentioned evolutionary psychology or said that I do evolutionary psychology and had

them instantly get what I was talking about in a way without flaws or or caricatures or or anything like that. And that's because like it's objectively hard to wrap your head around. Like these are cut like the genes I view of evolution, the computational theory of mind, these are not simple ideas. These are nuanced, complicated topics that require a lot of elaboration and explanation. And it's not easy for a lay person to just get them automatically. It takes a lot of time and thought to really wrap your head around this way of thinking. And so we resort to the things that are easier to understand. So like sex and death are easy to understand. And ironically, I think we're so interested in sex and death because of our evolutionary

history. And we can, you know, talk about our information acquisition adaptations and how they're sensitive to things like sex and death. Um, but a lot of people think of Evpsy as, oh, it's everything is about sex or everything is about survival. Uh, and we can explain anything we do in the modern world by telling some story about cavemen having sex or killing each other. Uh, and and that's how to understand it. And and along with that, there there are these uh political uh undertones as well that you that you see that you that a lot of people see it as a way of of rationalizing conservative traditional gender roles. That's that's a thing I hear a lot. That it's it's a it's a way of saying, oh, you know, uh men and women were different uh

when when we were cavemen, therefore um you know women shouldn't be allowed to uh hold positions of power. Um that's another popular uh misunderstanding I see a lot. Um so the complexity and nuance of the field is sort of filtered through number one, what we find titillating, which is sex and death, uh and number two are political preconceptions and and where the uh the the battle lines are drawn in in the existing culture wars. And so when uh Ev Psyche, the complexity of it is filtered through you know through those two prisms, uh you get a very distorted understanding of of what it's all about. What what what do you think that's really um nice, a nice summary from that I also would would agree with that assessment um from my perspective um in my in my own experience.

Um when people have this idea about sort of the David uh the the Attenborough um um I almost said Richard Attenborough, David Attenborough. Uh um uh when people have that idea, that's sort of the approach to people. Um I know people, it's not just a misunderstanding, and the politics point gets to this, which is there's also an emotional reaction to the idea. Um, and I wonder what you what you think that emotional reaction typically is. Like, I mean, obviously, superficially, there's sort of I even remember feeling it, right? I remember feeling sort of like annoyed at this idea. It's hard to sort of unpack what I was experiencing when I when I misunderstood it. But yeah, I think there's there's a lot of sort of there's the psychology of

not of not understanding evolutionary psychology. And there's the psychology of sort of why we would be designed to have adaptations that would find these ideas, particularly as they're misunderstood, particularly as the initial representations that haven't been trained to sort of correct for this natural way of thinking. That initial state, I'm curious, sort of how you think about or how you would unpack that. That, you know, why is it easy to think that it rationalizes gender roles, or why why is it that some people are attracted to it who don't understand it, or people disagree with it who don't understand it. Um, and uh and but it plays out in certain ways. Like what do you think that that is?

Yeah. Well, I think um the best way to understand it is probably in terms of uh Dance Berber's cultural attractor theory. Um so Dance Berber is a very cool evolutionary psychologist slash cultural anthropologist who's interested in in understanding uh cultural dynamics from an evolutionary perspective. Um and he has this idea that um when we pass information uh on to another person, the processes involved in uh transmitting that information uh uh faithfully to the other person are actually extraordinarily complicated, and we cannot take them for granted. Um so it's easy to see how complicated this is when you play a game of telephone, and what you whisper into someone's ear uh ends up getting lost in translation or mangled.

And by the time it gets to the end of the chain, what you initially whispered into the person's ear is completely different and distorted. Um and that just goes to show how hard this problem is of getting a piece of information or a representation from my head into your head, right? There are plenty of things that can go wrong uh in that process. And we have evolved adaptations um for, in many ways, triangulating on on what the other person's intentions are, what they likely meant, what the most plausible way of interpreting what they said was. And and um we have lots of mechanisms that are at play when we uh transmit an idea to one another and and we have to understand those mechanisms if we want to understand culture.

And so he has this idea of of a cultural attractor. So when you play a game of telephone, um, or you tell a story to someone, let's say you tell, you know, a fairy tale, um, and uh as that fairy tale gets passed on from person to person, it's likely to change and evolve in various ways. Um so maybe when you originally told the story, uh the protagonist wasn't a particularly good person, but as it passes from person to person, the protagonist becomes sort of a morally exemplary and virtuous and innocent person. So that would be an attractor of the innocent, virtuous protagonist. Maybe when I first told you the story, it didn't really have a happy ending. It kind of ended with a question mark or with, you know, uh people being sad and

disappointed. Um and maybe in you know progressive tra uh transmissions of the story, uh the ending got happier and happier. And then it it sort of migrated toward this story of a virtuous protagonist with a happy ending. And so these are things that that Sperber would call cultural attractors. That as we pass ideas from head to head, certain ideas are just going to be more stable, uh, are going to be more likely to pop up because of what we're innately interested in, what we're more likely to remember, what we find more intuitive or less intuitive. Uh, and this perspective is a really helpful way of understanding culture and why certain ideas are sticky and others aren't. So I think that um evolutionary psychology is a a part of culture.

It is a set of ideas, a set of representations. And there are cultural attractors surrounding the idea of evolutionary psychology, just as there are cultural attractors surrounding any idea Uh and I think those attractors revolve around things we innately find interesting, like sex and death. Um they revolve around uh things like politics and you know what side of the culture war you're on. We find those things innately interesting. Um it often gets oversimplified into things that are uh intuitive um and easy to grasp. So uh oh, we're just monkeys. Okay, that's what that's what it means. Or um we don't really have free will, we're just we're just these robots. Uh that's another uh uh simplifying way of of understanding it.

So we we carve the world into you know plants and animals and and tools. Uh and oh evolutionary psychology says we're tools, and that means we don't have free will. Um so it it it not only filters through um what we innately find interesting and it filters through our politics, but it also filters through what we find uh intuitive and sort of these simplistic dichotomies of you know learned versus uh biological, uh freely chosen versus determined, or uh nature versus nurture. And so that's another way that um evolutionary psychology gets uh distorted. Would you buy all that? Yeah, no, for sure. And I mean I think that there's um I think for me, the reason why I really like evolutionary psychology to sort of hop around a little bit is

that um it's a way to uh answer engineering questions about social things. Um right. So um what a what a system is for is really helpful for reverse engineering it, right? Like if if aliens, like classically, if you took like aliens and they had never seen a car before and you and they were just given a car, um, they wouldn't know what parts of the car were for, or they really wouldn't be know how to carve up the car, right? Um and you could imagine sort of a science of the car in our aliens world where you know it's just sort of in a showroom and what um what's important about the car is not clear. Um so you can imagine there's like they have a science of like how to, if you hit it with this, what kind of sound is made, you know, and you could just all the parts, right?

Um there's an infinite ways, uh infinite number of ways to car sort of carve up the car. Um we have a theory of the red red cars do this and the blue cars do this, and you know, you get distracted by irrelevant features. Exactly. Everything, sort everything by is it bigger than a toaster, smaller than a toaster, right? Like is it magnetic or not? There's a million ways to carve something up that have nothing to do with like reverse engineering how it works. But of course if you know what a car is for, if you understand like well, what here's what roughly a person is, the person needs to sit. The function of it is like terrestrial motion with like inputs from the driver. Well what is a driver like?

Well they have hands and feet and you know you have a rough idea about like what terrestrial locomotion requires all of a sudden you kind of understand well maybe you know the tires are touching the ground and there's something for driving the thing forward and for taking driver inputs in. And then all of a sudden those functions uh color your perception of that thing and what counts as important and not. And all of a sudden colors or maybe if it's magnetic or not doesn't matter. It might, if it is, like for example, it might be matter that the brake caliper um is magnetic because it's what holds the like friction um the the the pad to like you know the somewhere in the in the brake pad, right?

Whatever. But I'm not gonna nerd out on car hydraulics. But point is that, you know, um what features are important um are are determined by the function, not just sort of random intuition. Um and in areas of psychology that have been successful, function has sort of been intuitive, like vision. So the the function of vision is sort of uh determining what is where. Um, and it wasn't always like that. For a long time, vision was actually um sort of a grab bag of here's weird things your visual system does, like here's an illusion. Um, but once vision became this idea of like what it's for, um the a lot of progress was made. For me, I'm interested in like things like social groups or social emotions, right?

And it's really hard to think about well, how do you think about, well, why do we have why do we join groups in the first place? You can say something well, like, well, maybe people are just like joining groups feels good and we're motivated to feel to join groups. Um it's like, okay, well um well why and how, right? So if what kinds of groups? What is a group? Yeah, well, and and why does it feel good to join a group? And what does what do what what does that predict and what kind of groups exactly? And so um and so if you don't have an evolutionary approach, and I remember having this even as an undergrad, it was sort of terrifying because I'd be like, Well, I don't know. And so somebody must know.

And so you sort of look for ideas or theories, and usually it's something like a construct, and it's you know, a construct like self esteem, and maybe there's like a thing you can measure, like maybe social class, or like people feeling like secure or insecure, or um uh you know, something that's measurable and sort of a construct that varies along continuum. And then you see, like, is there a relationship between these two things? And you're just like, I don't know, this is the way to proceed. I, you know, maybe this is the way to study groups. Um, but if you if you ask the question, it was like, well, let's unpack why are people motivated to join groups? What does that even mean? And you have this idea that under underlying that sort of what I would argue is sort of a

vanilla statement of like joining a group feels good, is you have this idea of like, well, below all of that is we're organisms that have to make a living. And you know, organisms need social support, there's resources, uh, individuals can like gang up on you, there's differences in loyalty. Some people will take your side when it matters, some people won't. Um, and if you just sort of think about like just very simple but really important things about human existence or an organism's existence, all of a sudden the idea of well, what counts as a group, there's it gets filled, it gets populated with much more interesting things, like things about who do I trust? Who do I believe will come to my aid?

Um, what is my security? What's my power? What's my status? Am I being threatened? Do I have enough stuff? Is there somebody coercion exerting coercion over me? It's a very rich um way to think. And it gives you ideas immediately beyond this like very vanilla thing of like people are motivated to join groups. I was at a conference in Geneva last December with international human rights lawyers. A really interesting conversation. We'll talk about that maybe another time. But one of the people there studied armed groups. And what he found was that the time when armed groups are most likely to break up is when they succeed. Um, which is not a prediction that you would make if you just had this idea of like, you

know, join groups that make you feel good, right? But if the idea is sort of once a group has succeeded in their goals, then there's this issue of sort of you have the stuff that you've been working for, and then all of a sudden the uh you don't need to be unified, you know, because the in fact un unification could actually be counterproductive. As we know, the revolution devours its children. And once you achieve the goal that the group set out to achieve, uh, you're now faced with a different problem, which is how to divide the spoils of war or how to distribute the power that was seized. And that and the solution to that problem is often not unifying, but dividing. Exactly. Yes, exactly. Or at least uh left unchecked or unacknowledged.

It it it definitely is. And so that's right. And that's exactly what he finds. So um, but that's an example of from the perspective of it's not just this bland statement of like the person is motivated to like groups. It's it's this, there is this really rich um real life consequence infused dynamic that's causing Psychological relationships. The I like groups, or like I feel good when I join a group, it's very much couched in this sort of folk psychological language and what I really find invaluable from an evolutionary perspective. And for me, what I what I think an evolutionary approach is, is it's constantly taking Folk psychological descriptions, including my own experience. I'm not saying like other people are folk psychological, I'm not, but like going around and

just being like, you know, I love my son to death. I am, you know, I'm nervous in this situation. Um uh it really would feel good right now to like post this on social media or like, look, this person is doing this thing, um, or people are saying like this group exists. it's taking all of those things that humans do all the time and translating it into what software would have been selected for, given these real-world dynamics that we can be confident are reliably occurring. Like not like esoteric things, like simple, basic, everyday things. Given a world in which an organism needs software to deal with these kinds of things. How can we think about this phenomenon as being produced by that software?

And how does that give us purchase into sort of seeing that software beyond behind this phenomenon? So for me, what I love about it is it's really a way to think almost like we're squishy robots, and you can think about the software. And the in the for me, the benefit of thinking about the software is exactly the opposite of what we talked about. The misunderstanding was the point of the software and the point of software in general, or any sort of contingency rule, is that it enables flexibility. It is, if you look at anywhere in the world, there are certain laws or rules that enable flexibility, that enable things to be complicated and not random or entropic. And I think the great insight of evolutionary psychology is that

relationships in the world, this idea of differential reproductive success, which is the Darwinian notion of variation in gene frequencies yoked to variation in the design that is reliably developing by virtue of those genes, how those designs do in the environment, do they differentially reproduce or not? Changes those gene frequencies such that the designs that fit well and that do well in uh in an environment that differentially re uh are differentially successful, differential reproductive success, that's the kind of software we're allowed to expect, that it's well designed and and dovetailed to these features of the environment. And so um that idea then is that um it's not that we there's part of us that's sort of the evolved part and the other part that

isn't the monkey or the caveman inside us. That's right. The part of me I can't control. The idea is that all of you is an evolved thing, and everything, even the aspirational parts, even the parts of me that say no, I don't agree that that's just all there is to me. There's another part of me, and I have autonomy, I can have goals, I can think about things. The argument is that's all evolved software too, and in fact, what you would expect for for an evolved system. And I think this is the this is almost where the the misunderstanding happens often is people want to put a boundary around the evolved part of you, which is makes sense. I mean, you know, there's a sense in which, you know, like I'm not hunting and gathering,

right? Um, my life is different than a hunter-gatherer life. And so unless you have this idea about I am my software, and my software was designed by evolution, that's a weird way to think. And even what it means, the full entailment of that take a while to understand. Um, without that, it's really hard to connect up your own personal experience with an evolutionary approach. And I think that that's one of the reasons why it's it's so it's so difficult. Yeah, absolutely. Um another aspect of this confusion I think comes from viewing fitness as a dichotomy. So you're either alive or dead. And our adaptations are uh designed to keep us from dying. And so you you see this in some simplistic theories of group psychology, for example, like

we we want to avoid getting killed by a rival group. And surely, you know, that that was a selection pressure for us, no doubt. Um, but if you think in terms of fitness increments, something that couldn't increase your fitness probabilistically, um, there's a whole continuum that uh natural selection can move you uh along. So it's not merely alive or dead. It's well, how healthy are you? How much social support do you have? Do you have people who are ready to take your side in conflicts? Do you have people who are ready to help you out if you get sick or injured? Um, do you have uh a network of of friends who will who will you know give you important information? Um, are you uh formidable? Are you likely to prevail in uh uh again against other people in conflicts?

Um, is your group formidable? Is your group cohesive and well coordinated? Do you have uh skills that others value? Uh and are you irreplaceable uh to other members of your group, such that if you were sick or injured, they would have a reason to keep you alive, uh independent of any favors you might give for them? Um, what about uh your uh attractiveness on the mating market? What about your kin? Your brothers and sisters, your parents, your children? How healthy are they? How well supported are they? How uh valued are they? Are they, you know, learning skills that will make them irreplaceable to the group? These are a whole array of rich and subtle questions, uh, the answer to which would would make a huge difference uh in in your uh biological fitness,

right? So it's not merely that like a single gene will keep you from dying. That's that's the wrong way to think about it. It's that a a single gene might nudge you a little bit uh further along this this fitness promoting continuum, that it might make you a little bit more likely uh to choose an ally who will uh choose you in return. It might make you a little bit uh less likely to be ganged up on by a rival group. Uh and these are just tiny probabilistic changes uh that are that are being selected for that add up over time and create a complex adaptation and a complex group psychology and psychology of loyalty and backstabbing and you know conspiratorial thinking and all all this stuff comes into existence gradually piece by piece.

But we have to understand it as coming into existence piece by piece and not, you know, I'm gonna die and I have this adaptation that's gonna keep me from dying. It's not that simple. And evolution is is rarely that simple uh because uh genes have tiny effects. This is something we've known in genetics for a really long time. Um, there's not gonna be a single gene that uh keeps you uh from from dying. Uh it's just going to change the way you think and the way you feel uh in subtle ways. And over time, those subtle changes can add up and uh create something like a complex emotional system or a complex motivational system or a a a complex set of intuitions about groups and group membership and whose whose side you're on, uh etc.

Yeah, that's right. And thinking about genes across bodies um and time too. So thinking and even about design, it's sort of what design would would uh designs extend across bodies. A good example of that is, I mean, there's there's more additional sophisticated ideas about what causes senescence, but a really simple and apparently still correct idea is that prior to reproductive age, if something uh if there's some attribute that causes death, that's going to be a really strong selection pressure because if you die before you reproduce, then you know, David, both you and I have ancestors stretching back since the dawn of time, since the dawn of life, um, who have successfully survived and reproduced up and through um reproductive age.

That's we're we're very lucky um where we wouldn't be here. Um and uh so if there's something that causes death prior to reaching reproductive age, that's a very strong selection pressure. If that exists, that'll just be selected out. But if there are things that accumulate after reproductive age, um, and in particular, if there's a trade-off between the two where something keeps you alive prior to reproductive age, but it might cause problems like post-reproductive age, um, those things are going to be less strongly selected. In other words, from the perspective of natural selection, um, the less so after you've successfully reproduced, if your investment in the next generation is less and less, uh then natural selection doesn't sort of see you and

doesn't care about you or keep you, it doesn't maintain you. Um because uh, you know, reproduction can be exponential, and reproduction is always cares more about the next generation than the than the past one if it's going to choose between the two. Um And uh and so the idea is that the reason why we wear out and the reason why we um uh why we die is because there's a massive drop-off in the selection pressures to keep us around um after our sort of actuarial contribution to reproduction in the next generation. And so um so that's that's a nice example of uh the the engineering attention to keeping you alive differs dramatically prior to reproductive age and post-reproductive age and reproductive age

because parenting for a highly investing species like humans. But but that's it's this is the other thing I really like about an evolutionary approach is that things that just sort of seem seem like an act of God or just the way things necessarily are, that you that sort of take for granted. Um uh you can sort of ask a deeper why question. Um, for example, like why do we die? Yeah. Yeah. Why do why do we age? Yeah. Uh from a naive uh Darwinian perspective, it might seem puzzling. You know, why why wouldn't we evolve to live forever? Yeah. Wouldn't that be even better? It would be super adaptive, yeah. Or would it be a good idea? Yeah, super adaptive. Yeah. Totally. But um, you know, once you move past the naive Darwinian thinking and get into the

nitty-gritty of how evolution works from the genes I view, um these age-old mysteries begin to dissolve. Um when uh when we talked about people use it to rationalize political stuff um or people not liking it, what I mean, what do you think is going on with that? Oh, I mean, I I have a whole paper on uh political beliefs as rationalizations for coalitional interests. Um yeah, I mean, I think we have political conflicts uh uh surrounding feminism. It's a hot button culture war issue. Um and one of the tactics that um feminists have used to advance their cause is to argue for uh social constructionism, that that men and women aren't really different, that if they are different, then they're socialized to be different.

And any differences we see um are a result of patriarchal socialization, therefore they're unjust, and we should fight uh against them and fight for gender equality. And so there's a whole uh slew of beliefs that I think are well designed to mobilizing support for the feminist cause and opposition uh to their political opponents. Um and we can debate whether those beliefs are correct or not, and how correct they are and where they might be right and where they might might be wrong. But I ultimately think that is uh the purpose of those beliefs, is that they are uh tactics for mobilizing support uh for one side of a conflict. And the problem is that a lot of evolutionary psychology runs right into that culture

war conflict. It starts to uh present some ideas that, hey, maybe men and women are different uh for evolutionary reasons, and maybe not everything about them is socially constructed. Um, maybe there are some explanations for gender differences um that don't involve patriarchal socialization, but involve our evolutionary heritage. Um, and once evolutionary psychology starts to interject with those kinds of ideas, well, we're we're primed to see the world as uh you're either with us or you're against us. And if you don't share our ideas, and if you don't share our uh uh political uh mobilization tactics, well, that's a cue that we use that you're not with us, that you're an enemy, you're on the other side.

Uh and I don't think that evolutionary psychologists intended to elicit this inference. I think most evolutionary psychologists that I know are strong feminists. But because their ideas sort of activated these Q-based inference systems of are you on my side or are you not, they sort of got inadvertently categorized as being on the other side because they were uh challenging some of the prevailing ideas uh coming out of feminism. And if you're and if you disagree with our ideas and with our political mobilization tactics, that's a sign that you're on the other side and you're against us and you're our political enemy and we must destroy you. That's sort of how I understand it. Do you buy that?

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I and I want to uh have a follow-up. So in the converse, then do you think the converse is true? And I mean, so this idea that sort of people who are um who are conservative in the US sense of the word, um, which is different than sort of a historical or international view of conservatism. But um uh and uh and maybe people who are interested in preserving patriarchy um seem attracted to this idea. Do you think that that's fair? Uh in in some ways, yes. So they they are an art. They're attracted to it uh insofar as it justifies the traditional gender hierarchy that that they're advocating for. Uh But the problem is that you need to believe in evolution and and and cold Darwinian

thinking to get there. And they're often opposed to Darwinian thinking and evolutionary thinking for religious reasons. So yes and no, they're partly on board with it and partly not. They like it for the traditional gender role reasons, but don't like it for the evolutionary reasons. Aaron Powell So for the part that they do get on board, and so what we're so the argument is that um, you know, and again, you know, there's the professional understanding, but we're not talking about that yet. Um, people who are interested who argue, you know, look, women until very recently had very few rights. The bargaining power socially has been low. Um, I mean, it's ridiculous. Like, you know, the the the recency with which if you if you watch um

um videos in the sixties or seventies or eighties or nineties right um you know it's the the sexism the ambient sexism and the laws are are are insane right um uh the arguments for equal treatment being taken seriously like that's the history of that is very clear there's a long clear history of people um with with not not doing well in the um the competition for status and power or being granted even an equal seat at the table. Um those people and the people who want that to continue, right, are both accepting sort of a premise. It sounds like that this idea that there's an evolved psychology um generally and then specifically um that there's sort of um uh sex based design differences in human psychology is

consistent with sort of one side versus the other. Um number one, and and this is a big question, number one, like why do you think that is? Um like why do people think that that's true? And then number two, if it isn't true, why isn't it true? Yeah. So I don't think this is unique to feminism. I think any time there is an intergroup conflict over status or resources or power or something like that, um, the group that has more status or resources or power will invariably try to justify uh that advantage in terms of in uh superiority. Um so the reason we have more power and status and resources because we're just innately superior. We're smarter, we're wiser, um, we're more virtuous, whatever.

And the uh it's God's will, it's the divine right of kings. There's always some kind of of uh justifying narrative uh behind it. Um and naturally the people who have less power and status and resources will uh try to challenge that narrative. And so uh where the power ends up lying is going to depend in large part on how plausible uh each disputant finds the narrative, right? Because the narrative is a is a kind of coordination device. If we all agree that we're innately superior to them, um, then there's no reason to oppose the social hierarchy. There's no reason to expect other people to oppose the social hierarchy. There's no reason to expect other people to expect other people to oppose the social

hierarchy. We we need to coordinate and create common knowledge for collective action. And one of the ways that we do that is by creating a shared narrative. And so a big part of politics is just a battle over narratives. What narrative are we going to collectively share? And what kinds of social arrangements is that narrative going to justify? So these narratives are hugely politically important. different groups rise or fall uh in direct proportion to how many people buy the narrative. So that is the context in which um evolutionary psychology enters the picture. And because with us or against us is a dichotomy, um, and we're looking for any reason at all to suspect you of of being the enemy or or of being

against us because of this kind of uh smoke alarm principle where you know we're biased to uh make the less costly error. Like it's much much less costly for us to assume someone is an enemy even when they aren't, than to miss a real enemy when they're really there. So we're biased to sort of see the world in conspiratorial ways and uh uh overperceive uh people being out to get us. And so uh any deviation from the narrative, even if it's a mild one, even if it's a relatively subtle deviation from the narrative, um gets filtered through our coalitional psychology as this person's against us. If they don't cross every uh T and dot every I on our political narrative, then they're an enemy. Um it's not, oh, they agree with us 90%, or they agree with us on most of these things, or

they have this subtle objection to this particular detail. If they don't accept the whole narrative, then they're not with us. And I think that uh explains why evolutionary psychology um got categorized as being on one side of this political conflict. Um it's not because uh like uh yeah, I I I think, you know, certain evolutionary ideas do challenge certain parts of feminism. But I don't think that uh it is incompatible with feminism. And I think that the the things that it challenges about feminism are relatively subtle and require a lot of uh uh debate and discussion to really, you know, nail down the details. Uh but because it's any kind of deviation at all from the shared narrative, it elicits this

reaction of you're not with us. In in yeah, that's great. And I appreciate that that subtle point. And I mean I'm happy to unpack this with you, but I'm just wondering like what is that if you take all that and accept that, it leaves us with the question as, Well, what are those things that are apparently incompatible or maybe not? Um, why do people think they are? Both sides think they are. What are those things? Well, um let's let's wade into the minefield then. Yeah. Um so there's this issue of, you know, women in positions of power. Um men tend to be overrepresented among CEOs, for example. Um one way to explain this is this is because of discrimination against women, that they're uh uh expected to do poorly, or they're expected to be irrational, or or we praise men more

than we praise women, or or something like that. Another explanation is that um men are uh more motivated to seek status and resources than women because uh status and resources is a greater ticket to mating success uh uh among men than it is among women. And there's plenty of evidence to suggest that that is true, that women tend to prioritize uh status and power and resources among men more than women do so sorry, more than men do among women. Um if uh status competition uh throughout our evolutionary history resulted in differential reproductive success among high status men relative to low status men, which seems pretty clear that it likely was, then uh men would have a a pretty powerful status psychology.

This isn't to say that women don't have a status psychology, but it's going to be slightly different. Um and this could uh explain the overrepresentation uh of men among uh, you know, say CEOs, or maybe it it explains their overrepresentation among sort of riskier uh jobs. Um there there's a whole other literature on greater uh risk risk-seeking among men because there's uh more variation in reproductive success among men, so they've evolved to pursue riskier strategies on the off-chance that they might hit the jackpot. Um, it explains uh why men are more aggressive and more violent in competing for uh status and resources. Um maybe this could explain uh that phenomenon. And if that's true, then all of a sudden it's no longer an injustice that we need to

rectify, it's just how the world works. Or take the gap among women in STEM. So there are very large empirical differences between men and women in terms of their interest in people versus things. And this is related to stuff like where you are on the autism spectrum, but roughly men tend to be more interested in mechanical systems than women, and women tend to be more interested in people and their inner lives and thoughts and feelings than men are. It's a pretty large gender difference. I think it's like a standard deviation difference. And that could explain why men are overrepresented in STEM. That they're just they just find this stuff more uh innately interesting. They're more interested in mechanical systems than women.

Um and and it's just a a a basic outcome of different uh uh temperaments, different predispositions between men and women, and it's not an injustice we need to rectify. Uh it's just the way things are. And so the truth or falsehood of these stories, and I I'm not taking a stand on on these stories. I'm just saying, you know, uh these these are possibilities that we need to uh evaluate and and look at the evidence for them and look at the arguments and and and try to you know get as close as we can to the truth. But these narratives matter, and that whether we accept either narrative as as true is going to determine whether we push for, you know, getting more women into STEM or policies that uh um prevent discrimination against women, say.

Um these have real tangible political implications. Um Yeah. Yeah. What do you think? Did I step on a mine there? Yeah, no, you did, but that's okay. Um because we're gonna we're gonna keep unpacking this. I mean, one of the things you said, and I appreciate what you're saying, and I think that that's you know a genuine um um you know honest assessment of it. Um one thing, you know, in a lot of these discussions, um, especially when there's sort of been a group of people who have been in power and other people who haven't, and that's you know, throughout history, and and there's a clear recent history of that for many groups of uh people. There's a tension between sort of and and be well, I don't want

to form too complex a sentence, but basically, there's a tension between um accepting the values of the dominant group and wanting to meet that and rise to those values as opposed to rejecting those values. And in some sense, that those things are the valued things is a consequence of the the nature or the characteristics of the group that has been dominant. And this is a tension, this was a very explicit tension in the civil rights movement. This is a very explicit tension in the women's rights movement. Um, throughout history, um, there's sort of the idea, you know, boiled down to the group that has been dominant over us. Do we want to accept the premise that all the things that they think are good are do we

want to agree with that? Right? Is that is that is that true? Yeah. Um, and for some things, uh, maybe yes, because you know, like having like healthy food and safe homes and protected kids, you know, that's pretty universal. Um, but sort of, you know, other attributes are sort of um are sort of spin-offs of sort of the the problem in the first place, right? Like that what counts as a high status, high power position means that you don't think about your family, right? And because, you know, historically, if that's men, um it's not variability in men's motivation to care for children is higher than women's. Um assume let's assume that. And so yeah, um, so sort of the idea that what a workplace looks like and what an

acceptable workplace looks like is one that doesn't have kids in it or that doesn't have parenting in it. Um that that is that's not just a concept, that's not an act of God. That's a consequence of who, which group was in power. Um, right. Um, and so I think that relates then. That's my preface to this this thing you said, which is um, and I think it this does speak to what people often think, and I do want to challenge it a little bit. I'm not saying you think this, I want to we're we're exploring this together. I want to be clear. Um, is this idea that um so if there's more women there's more men than women in positions of power um uh or if um or or women's representation in stem for example because of interest in mechanical

versus social things then and in this this expression that it's not an injustice that's just sort of how the world works I think that that's I think that that's what people think, and I think that's the inference they draw. But I do worry that that runs this risk of it there's a set of inferences there that I think are not spoken. And I and I'm I would push back on it and challenge it a little bit. And it relates to this thing that I just said about the the sort of standards. So for example, STEM The idea that men versus women, their representation in STEM is different because interest in mechanical versus social things. Um, let's let's accept that that's true. Like let's not, you know, uh things can be factually correct and in in it,

let's let's assume that that's true. Um, on average, there's still the issue of um there's ways to be a really good scientist that engages and appeals to being interested in social things. Uh and there's there's a way to be a scientist that engages an interest in mechanical things. And you know, you and I know people who um from all walks of life, just the individual differences, they really like different things like that. And yet, and I think for me, I love thinking about social things from a mechanical perspective. Like actually marrying those two is really weird. And I actually think that that's what I love about evolutionary psychology. But that's also why, you know, I think there's a lot of people who like marrying

those two things together. Um, and and so, but I but I would say that if there's more men than women in in in science, um the question then is is that science is that is that a consequence of um is that an objective feature of sort of what who makes the best scientist for that topic versus um That's a consequence of the evolved psychological differences in the human beings that have been granted status to do that science and generate the research questions and talk about what exists. Are those is that bias in that organism evolves psychology first, and then consequently, the science itself is a reflection of those differences. Um, and so I I do think there's an argument that um it might be an

injustice, and it's not how the world works, because it it it it assumes that the current distribution Is a consequence of the of the best way to do science as opposed to um saying, well, how would if you had a science that uh anybody could do, uh anybody could anybody could do it no matter what their social class was or what they look like or their social bargaining power in an ideal world, how different would the content of the science be um For um compared to what it is now. And let me give you an example of this that I think is true. That is the flip side of this, which is that academia is deeply classist. There's not a lot of people that come from working class backgrounds in academia. you know and I think some of that is uh that's not always true but um

uh but it's in historically it was less true I think but that's very few people who don't you know have parents who are college graduates or have graduate degrees or or you know that's right the first yeah yeah that's right. And so one question to ask is sort of um The ways in which class issues or social justice issues or anything gets framed, is that a consequence? Like, how would that be different if more human brains that experienced deprivation social class based? I mean, I'm not saying, you know, obviously there's lots of people interested in, you know, uh women's rights or black rights or you know multinational conflict or or things who have experienced these horrible things. I'm not suggesting right that, but um but it's an example of there might be a

biased perspective in the science that's a consequence of sort of the li the life the life experiences of uh of the scientists. And I think um so that's I that I want to just put that idea out that um that it may not it may be an injustice in the sense of um uh running the experiment to see is this distribution what we would expect to see for people who are interested in uh pursuing what they find interesting. Yeah, no, totally. I I I I fully agree that there is a case to be made there. Um, but I think that case is different from the case that has conventionally been made. Uh and because of that difference, um, it it's hard to convince people that, you know, evolutionary psychology is on the side of feminism or is compatible with with

feminism. So it took you a long time to spell out that argument. Um and often uh people don't have the patience to sit there and hear those uh alternative arguments for feminism. Um instead, they have the conventional argument for feminism, which is men and women are equal, any difference is a result of discrimination, therefore we see differences, therefore, that's um an injustice. That's the conventional way of understanding the political situation. And insofar as you depart from that conventional understanding, uh you're going to get uh uh rightly or wrongly categorized as being on the other side. And it could be that you don't take that that conventional understanding and you have a different argument for feminism.

And there are different arguments you could make, and and many of them are likely valid and plausible. Uh but insofar as you are making a different argument from the conventional argument, you run this risk of of being uh categorized as being on the other side. Interesting. Yeah, I wonder, I do wonder the assumption that sort of people People have to be equal or the same. Um, and if it's not, I I do I know people say people say that it would be interesting to sort of look at that and and sort of poke on that empirically. Maybe we can find somebody who who does this professionally and and see what they think about that. Um the the people who use Ev PSYC to sort of further these ideas, and there are, if you look on YouTube, I mean, I think

one of the reasons why for me I started, I wanted to do this podcast was, you know, I was talking to lots of colleagues in Ev Psyche. Um, and and a lot of people were saying, you know, if you really look on YouTube or podcasts, it's really horrible what's out there. And I was like, well, how bad can it be? And so I looked one day, and the very first thing that came up was, and I'm not gonna mention um whose podcast this was, but you people can look it up if they want. But uh the title of the type of the episode was Kamala Harris is a lobotomized communist. Um, and that was one of the first uh um uh podcasts that came up and and so this came up after searching for evolutionary psychologists. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Oh wow. Whatever. Yeah, that was one of the yeah, exactly. And I mean, and I actually listened to it because I was like, well, I find this really offensive, but like, you know, I'm an evolutionary psychologist about my finding something offensive. And I I am a student of of the David Pinsoff et al. argument, which is that um my own political opinions and my own sort of like feeling like something is morally reprehensible. I mean, there are, of course, there's you know, real morally reprehensible things, but um in clear lines, but sort of something like that. I was like, oh, that's horrible. But like, let's see, what's the argument, right? And I mean, it was basically something like um uh the idea was uh

groceries are expensive, people sort of feel taken advantage of. And if you um and so Kamala Harris was interested in sort of um some policies that would address that concern, and the perspective of the person was sort of like, well, that runs counter to all of human nature. Uh, because you know, people by nature are sort of uh competitive, they don't want equal outcomes. And so if you force people uh to sort of um equal outcomes, then you're gonna have um, you know, uh Lenin style um disorder and chaos, and you're running completely contrary to to human nature, um, was sort of the the idea. Um And uh and I found that historically, but also just evolutionary psychologically super reductive and pretty lazy,

frankly. Um and I think for me, what I'm always struck with is um is how one-dimensional a lot of these narratives are. Where it's the sort of thing of, you know, if men, men are more interested in sexual variety than women, you know, um, if that's uh just given differences in selection pressures. Um and so part of the mating psychology is that. And then and then it's sort of dot dot dot. Therefore, you know, we can excuse or justify or explain or understand why there's nothing to be done about these other the these outcomes in life right that that people take issue with um reasonably enough or not depending on what what it is um but but again that that's sort of it's really unidimensional be and it comes back to this diorama model I think which is looking at this

outcome you're saying well look over evolutionary time I think this was like a recurring dynamic right um For example, let's assume that over evolutionary time there was domestic abuse, right? I mean, chimps actually do a lot of this. Um, it's not something people like to talk about because there's concerns about, you know, protecting chimps. And if people find out there's a lot of domestic abuse among chimps in natural environments, people might not like that reasonably enough, but um, but it's true. Um it does happen. And so um, this idea, this naturalistic fallacy, that sort of this idea that something happens, therefore it's inevitable, again, I think it's sort of this this unidimensional

thing. And it's because you're not thinking about the software. Yeah. So so let's say, for example, that um let's stipulate that uh the value of sexual variety as a representation is higher in men than it is in women. I think there's good empirical evidence for that. If you take that, if you take that claim and somebody says, well, look, at the level of the software, that representation is there. That's a claim about the software. It's not a claim about the inevitability. It's not of any outcome or any even any behavior. And it's it's framed in a way where, in the way you and I naturally think, but I think in the way many people, especially who are not trained in this approach, they don't think, is

that there's hundreds of thousands, if not millions, if not trillions. I mean, what my iPhone does in a second is like a trillion things at once to take a photo. So we don't have to worry about like how many process processes there are. There can be any number as many as we need. There's a lot. There's a lot of stuff going on. There's a lot of representations. So even in a romantic relationship, um maybe sexual variety is a higher is valued higher in men than women, but there's all kinds of other things going on. There's also um am I what kind of relationship there's just what kind of relationship am I in with this person? Um what uh do they trust me? What do I get out of this relationship? What are they counting on me for?

Am I trying to exploit them or not? Um There's there's counter-detection of exploitation in the partner. There's a lot of um what are the things that we need to do? Is this going to be a betrayal of the relationship? Um uh there's just a ton of things that are all evolved things that all have selection pressures for them that are really important for fitness and that would be part of our software. And if you just sort of take one representation out of context and say, on average, just this sort of representation is here, you can kind of see how people, if they're not thinking about all the other software and all the other reasons, all the other countervailing software, Um it it if you just talk about um

if you just talk about the one bit of software, it sort of essentializes it or it almost metonymizes to to pull a word, you know, metonymy uh the part for the whole. Right. Um it sort of it sort of it does that to and it it in it it is essentially it's overly reductive or essentialistic. It's the same, the same thing, and I'll I'll shut up in a second, but the same thing with the podcast, which is this idea that um, you know, communism, quote unquote, and usually, I mean, that's a that's a there's been a lot of um uh propaganda related to the idea of communism um over over time. And I mean, I'm not a communist. And I was living in Berlin and I understand what a communist regime, not personally, but

you know, I saw a lot of the consequences of that. But this idea that sort of caring about social well-being among other people, or that intrinsic um that people only are interested in exploiting one another, um, or any any sense of sort of a dynamic of equality or checking exploitation runs counter to human nature. That idea was implicit in why Kamala Harris is a lobotomized communist, right? Um but but actually if you look, and one of the people we should have on here is Chris von Ruthen, um who studies egalitarian societies, there's a lot of complicated software in people. And what even um um Alan Fiske s finds is that there's all there's different kinds of um uh sort of um reciprocal relationships or status relationships that are sort of stable and

modes of representing relationships. So sort of things where there's a market or or there's a quality. These are sort of all different kinds of representations and they hold under different circumstances for different reasons. And there's costs and benefits to each. or even for like the women being, you know, pursuing power thing. I think all these things sort of they they talk about a narrow representation in the evolved system. And then there's a long, often implicit logical chain leading to, well, therefore, there's nothing to be done about this thing. And for me at least, that's where I would push back. And I think it's an overly reductionistic um approach, which is um looking at any outcome in the world and seeing it as

inevitable. And things are pretty complicated. And I mean, even looking, and one of the benefits of an evolutionary approach too is I think looking across cultures, because I, you know, I mentioned one of the first episodes that, you know, I grew up in a very religious fundamentalist um upbringing, and discovering that there were things that were very similar to what I experienced in hunter gather groups, where there was like possession, um, and you know, basically the hunter gatherer equivalent of like speaking in tongues. Um, you know, that was really compelling for me because I thought, oh, well, that this is like more of a human universal thing, right? But there's also differences. Like there's there's um there's evidence of like people being gay or transgender

in the um um um anthropological literature and people don't react immediately with violence against those people. You know, they're people they know and they're just like, you know, that's different, uh, interesting, and they um in many cases they don't care. And so I think seeing cultural variation is sort of baked into the um evolutionary social sciences in this way of uh it's with this political, a political class that's interested in divisive issues and is looking for a market of ideas that are divisive. Without that, there are just certain outcomes that that aren't uh that don't have the same energy that that they have for us. And so um actually I don't know what my point was. I mean I've been rambling.

I'll shut up. Let me say what I think your point was. Okay, good. Uh I think your point was that if you focus on any particular adaptation while blacking out everything else, um, and use that spotlight understanding of one particular part of us to uh form moral and political arguments, you're inevitably going to have bad moral and political arguments because humans are complicated. We have many different interacting parts. Um and if you focus on one part and isolate it and ignore all the other stuff, uh, you're gonna have an impoverished understanding of what humans are like and and what the best ways are to arrange humans in political systems. The mistake would sort of be like zooming in on the bladder and saying we evolved to empty

our bladders, therefore we shouldn't have toilets because we need to empty our bladders and we should just walk around with adult diapers. Obviously, that argument is fallacious because we have, you know, lots of competing motivations. The urge to empty our bladder is one of many motivations that uh filters up the processing hierarchy into our brain. It makes it into consciousness. And we can weigh that motivation against other motivations, like uh whether there's a clean bathroom around us, you know, how far away we are from home, um, et cetera, et cetera. So uh focusing on one adaptation uh while ignoring all the other ones is is is bad. We need to understand the fact that um adaptations don't uh exist in a vacuum.

They often evolve in tandem alongside other adaptations, and they evolve to fit well with uh other adaptations. Um and the other uh flaw in that line of reasoning is that it's sort of this puppeteer model of uh human behavior, where there's sort of uh a one-to-one mapping between gene and behavior or gene and outcome, where the genes just directly pull the strings of your behavior. They directly make you do something, and there's no intervening layer between the gene and the outcome, right? Um this is sort of the mistake that um early sociobiologists made is that they they uh they focused on behaviors and genes for behaviors, uh, as if there was no intervening layer between the gene and the behavior.

Um this was uh the insight that Leda Cosmodies and John Tubies had John Tubi had when they uh uh developed evolutionary psychology, is that we need to focus on the intervening layer. There's all this stuff that happens in between the gene and the behavior that is extraordinarily complicated. And that is the stuff that we need to understand. You can have a gene that increases a motivation by a small amount. You can have a gene that uh increases uh the likelihood uh that you might form a particular conclusion about um a set of facts, but the genes are not pulling the strings of your behavior directly. What they're doing is they're shaping your motivations and predispositions and intuitions in a way that might tilt you toward behaving uh in some ways in some contexts.

Um, but it's not a one-to-one deterministic mapping. There's this whole uh layer of intervening stuff, And a lot of that, I think, is what consciousness is for. So we have tons of different systems in our head, different uh motives that are competing uh to guide our behavior at any moment in time. And we need some way of adjudicating between all of them. You know, do I uh go home to go to the bathroom or do I hold it? Um, do I say the thing that I want to say, or do I uh suppress it and say the nice sounding thing instead? Um I think this is what consciousness is for. This is why we have consciousness. So the the one of the most popular theories of consciousness is called the global workspace

model, where we have all of these different um systems in the head that evolve to serve different purposes. We have different motivations, different urges and long-term desires, different plans and expectations and intuitions. And all of this stuff just sort of dumps into this global workspace. And the global workspace is the part of the mind where everything dumps into, and we need to figure out what to actually do. We only have one body, right? We can only do one thing at a time. We can only pursue one course of action at a time. How do we figure out what to do next? Um, and so that I think is probably is is is the best theory of consciousness that I've heard so far. Um, and once we understand that our minds work this way, that we have this uh this global

workspace that everything dumps into. Uh you get away from this idea that there's a one-to-one mapping between, oh, men uh want to have sex with lots of women, therefore they're inevitably going to have sex with lots of women. Well, no, that's not the only adaptation in men's head. They have all sorts of other motivations and agendas and priorities and considerations that are uh duking it out uh in the in the theater of their conscious awareness. Uh and we need to understand how all that stuff works. We can't focus on one part tiny part of it in isolation and expect to have uh a coherent uh uh uh moral understanding uh uh to emerge from it. Yeah that's right. Um very good. And I think um and I would add to that that there's this additional thing in addition to

misunderstanding and isolating. Thank you for articulating my point. Um is there's also then this additional idea beyond this essentializing or unitizing the adaptations, which again are not just motivation settings, but also making motivations possible, decision making possible, etc. Is that um there's also the thing of beyond psychology, there is this thing of well, what is the structure of these social institutions? It comes back to the spurber idea of what are the representations in people's heads. What does psychology look like? What does science look like as a consequence of a historical process of evolved organisms in a status game, in a status competition? I'm sure you and I, and any psychologist or anybody in any status scheme has a

criticism of the current state of it and thinks it would be better in a different form for various reasons. I certainly do. I I think you do too. Um, and uh and but but that's the third point I would make too, which is that when people look at the status quo, they're arguing that the current form of what a science looks like, um, what uh what the power distribution in society looks like, the expectation of what a scientist is, how I interact with the scientist, the kinds of questions that are rational, the kinds of concerns that are the right concerns, the right concerns that we're allowed to talk about that we're not allowed to talk about, that matter or don't matter, those things are not an act of God.

Those are a consequence of the particular status schemes. And so the argument would be that the leaving aside the misunderstanding of evolutionary psychology, the argument is that no single adaptation or structure of an adaptation is a complete story of why the status scheme has produced a science that looks like it does, or a society that looks the way it does. It's a complicated answer to even if you knew everything about the individual psychologies, there's a dynamic of how they interact. And that's why anthropology and sociology just doesn't reduce to psychology. Even if we knew everything about the software and the mind, we would still have these other systems or these other sciences to study these things.

And so I think the analog or the analogy for me would be something like um women in men's proportions are different in clothing, generally speaking. If you have a history where all the clothing has been designed for men And uh and then you women start trying on clothing and they're like, well, it doesn't fit you, right? There's two choices. You can say, well, women shouldn't wear clothing, right? Or, well, there's men differences between men and women, and um we should design, we shouldn't assume clothing is what men's clothing is. We should assume that you know clothing is different for men and women and and make it differently. And I think that's that is the argument for something like, well, women in leadership or women in science, right?

Which is uh there hasn't in this signal detection perspective or this error management perspective, there might be a world where the ideal distribution of different kinds of people isn't equal in these different fields or in these different careers. That might very well be the case, but the idea is that uh we're nowhere near letting that experiment be run, given the uh recent history and ongoing history with uh with restricting um people and keeping um uh valid and important perspectives from in these evolved psychologies that that are that have different social bargaining power come from different um walks of life um you know the I think that's the argument is that um that there's um that uh the uh the distribution based on these status schemes is

is coloring um what the science is and that's not inevitable Um, yeah. Totally. Yeah, no, I I I buy all of that. Um so I mean, we already talked about the political implications of evolutionary psychology and how they're often distorted and oversimplified and used by both sides, uh, sometimes uh dishonestly. Uh certainly we have some people abusing uh evolutionary psychology on YouTube and drawing uh bad uh implications from it and making bad arguments uh from it. Um why else should evolutionary psychology matter beyond you know how it might inform our political debates and and color the way we talk about political issues? Um why else should should people care? Yeah, that's a good question. I mean I think one of the things and and I don't, you know I think it's

inconvenient for almost everybody that people are complicated. Um and I think, you know, if you look at the history of of even an individual person growing up, myself or watching my son, or um, or if you watch the history of social interaction, It's it's very easy to be aware of our own concerns and what we want and care about. Um, but it's uh it would be easier and it's sometimes a a challenge to sort of grant all the rights that we want to other people, you know. And uh, and I think um and I think that that very natural feeling of wanting other people to be simpler than us in in an effort to sort of um move through the world in a in a in as way in a way that is as beneficial to us as possible.

Um That's not a mature way to go through the world. And that's not, you know, the Rawlsian way in this sense of what's moral is to sort of say the rules or you know, the golden rule of sort of what applies for me should apply to you, and I should hold myself to the same standards as I hold you. And I think why we should care about evolutionary psychology is in that effort to sort of treat people with the full dignity and complexity that they embody. And even ourselves. Um, you know, there are things about our nature that are intrinsic. We we are evolved organisms that uh intrinsically value certain things, that need certain things, that like and prefer certain things over other things. And I think in in the sort of like very honest self

discovery that every person goes through as they grow up, or as every sort of institution or culture goes through as they figure out, you know, what have we done that's been good or bad or ignored for now? Um, or every relationship. An honest assessment of sort of what do we need? How can we exist well in life? Um if there is a human nature and you ignore that about yourself, about a somebody else that you're in a relationship with, about people at a social level, then you're gonna make mistakes. Um acknowledging how people are and what they need and what um you know, we bought guinea pigs for my son just recently. And you know, honestly, like the best descriptions of like how to care for a pet is a

description of what its natural environment is, you know, like what is its natural ecology, what is its software built around? Yeah. Um, and you know, as far as a user guide guide to yourself as a person, yourself as a human being, um, you know, understanding that the things that I worry about or the things that I think about sometimes are genuine mistakes in the sense of I understand them for what they are and I see them from an evolutionary perspective. And I'm like, oh wow, that's my that's human nature in its terrible form, right? Like vilifying an outgroup that doesn't really exist, being um a hypocrite, you know, holding myself to a different standard than other people. But you can still under identify and understand that and understand why it would evolve and

not feel like, oh, there's something wrong with me that I think that way. And I'm glad that I have these other adaptations for representing that that's possible and maybe correcting that. Um, and then there are other things that are just sort of like, you know, um, I I really like walking around and being in nature and like I'm annoyed when I have to drive everywhere. And there's nothing wrong with me that I feel that way. that's just part of like the way I'm built, right? Um and and understanding that too, and sort of and sort of saying, well, look, maybe it's that we shouldn't have social planning or or um physical planning of infrastructure that's like built around what people like. I mean, there's other considerations too, like people like to not exert calories um and

sweat and bike or like get hit by cars. So you know, there's all kinds of things. But um, but I for me, that's I think beyond the benefit, the scientific benefits of having a theory of function or the underlying software. For me, the thing that I find most um fundamentally important about an evolutionary approach is it's an entire window into the fact that people are complicated and it's a way to populate that with ideas. And some of them might be wrong, some might be over reductive. I'm sure everything I think about how I work from a software level perspective is too simple and wrong. But it's less simple and wrong than the stuff that came before me. Um and and I think uh for me, that's the humility and the benefit of an evolutionary approach is you the

I describe this one one time to people. And I just there's like this metaphor of sort of you imagine this room full of people who are not saying anything. And they're just quiet and they're sort of waiting there for somebody to like ask them a question. And then this like really loud group of people comes in and they're all like shouting and yelling or whatever, and they're arguing with each other. And I kind of think that quite group of people are our adaptations, and the loud yelling group of people are scientists. And we have these adaptations that exist in us, that have existed in us since 60,000 years ago or however long. We're just now starting to do a science of psychology. And people often have very strong opinions about how we work.

And you know, B.F. Skinner, James Watson, Franz Bentano, David Hume, uh, Aristotle, Plato, they all had an evolved psychology. They had all the adaptations that you and I have. And those adaptations are just sitting in there quietly. And our students, two or three generations from now, have all these adaptations, they're just sitting there quietly. Our job is to like shut up and start asking them questions, right? Is to like not play a status game as much as possible. It's not, you know, but just but to just sort of be humble and say, look, we're complicated organisms. How do we work? But adaptation, let me start talking to you and asking you how you work. And for me, that is like sort of the overriding metaphor of what evolutionary psychology

is. It's a it's a humility about how complicated we are, that we don't understand a lot about who we are. And the a lot of the unnecessary pain and discomfort of life sometimes is inevitable. People have conflicts of interest, certainly, but if you don't understand um how people work, it's gonna you're gonna be more likely to to make these mistakes. And so that's that's for me why you should care about it. But I'll shut up now. What do you think? Um I totally buy all that. I mean what I'm hearing from you is that it uh is is useful for two reasons. Uh one is creating a sense of humility, uh, not only about your own flaws and limitations, but about how complicated humans are and how uh poorly equipped we

are to truly understand them in all in all their richness and complexity. Um that's part of it. And the other part of it is that evolutionary psychology gives us a better understanding of what our needs are, of what is actually most important to us. Um and that isn't always apparent. Uh we often lack a lot of insight into what's going on uh downstairs in the basement of unconsciousness. Um and bringing some of that to light can be helpful. Um, you know, that you you made, you know, the smaller point of we have this desire to be around nature and to be around beautiful things. Um, you know, that's that's one small part of the story that we can tell about what our needs are as animals. Um but there are other parts uh that that come to light as well.

Um I think you know, people are people talk about the the loneliness epidemic. I'm not sure how much of that is empirically substantiated or not. Uh, but I do think that uh human beings have a need to form meaningful relationships with one another. Um, and not just shallow or superficial relationships. We I think we have an evolved psychology for differentiating between the shallow uh and the meaningful, uh, between the fair weather friend and the deep friend who truly cares about you, because those distinctions were of critical importance uh for our ancestors' survival and and reproduction. Um being able to tell the difference between someone who's going to be really there for you and have your back and take care of you and someone uh who is not and who's going to stab

you in the back or betray you or abandon you. Um these are hugely important distinctions that the mind evolved to process and think about and obsess about in certain ways. And I think in many ways the modern environment that we live in, our our wild, weird world, deprives us of these needs because our society is built on shallow, superficial, contingent relationships. The modern economy is built out of trade, out of trading X for Y on a contingent basis. Uh and a trading or reciprocity relationship is very different from the kind of deep, meaningful relationship that we evolved to crave as social animals. Someone who is only going to help me if I can give them something in return is going to be

uh much worse for my fitness than someone who truly cares about me and will help me regardless of whether I can reciprocate. And we evolved to be uh much more motivated to seek the latter kind of social partner than the former kind of social partner. And when we are embedded in a society of those kinds of shallow contingent exchange relationships, these quid pro quos, and that's all we see throughout our day-to-day life. Most of what we do, you know, we we we we go to work and we engage in explicit quid pro quos with our employer. Um everything that we get to enjoy, our wonderful standard standard of living, the cars we drive, the food we eat, the clothes we wear, has all been brought to us via shallow

contingent exchange relationships. And so in many ways, we are living in a shallow, meaningless social environment. And I think part of our minds know this and they crave for something better, for something deeper. Um, I uh many, many times uh these instincts and motives will lead people to join cults because there are many people out there who take advantage of this part of our psychology and use it uh for self aggrandizing purposes. Um Sometimes they form religious groups, sometimes they, you know, channel it into political activism. Um, we need these kinds of deep, meaningful relationships where we're intrinsically valuable to one another and irreplaceable to one another. Uh and the modern environment is just not fulfilling that need right now.

It is it is failing to serve us there. Um, and I think taking an evolutionary perspective helps us to see that. And it helps us to think about how we can design our societies to better fulfill those needs of ours and what the consequences might be for people when those needs are being chronically unsatisfied. So, yeah, that's the needs part. The humility part is also huge. Uh, and I see it as a huge corrective um in the social sciences. I feel like the social sciences have taken a bad turn in terms of viewing humans as stupid and irrational. That, you know, if you look at psychology textbooks, it's it's a collection of biases and errors. Uh, you know, these are all the ways that we're dumb. These are all the ways that we're oversimplifying the world and making ourselves miserable

and not serving ourselves. Um, here are a bunch of tips and tricks to, you know, live a better life or find happiness or whatever. And here are all the ways uh that we're gullible and biased in the political sphere. Here are all the ways in which we're vulnerable to misinformation uh and in group uh superiority bias and motivated reasoning. Uh and and usually these are often framed as everyone else uh is vulnerable to these biases, but not me. Um but if you take an evolutionary approach, you start to realize that people aren't stupid and people aren't gullible either. There's a there's a wonderful uh recent book by uh Hugo Mercier called Not Born Yesterday, where he bas he systematically debunks this myth that humans are gullible dupes.

And he actually provides a lot of striking evidence for the opposite: that we're quite vigilant and skeptical and distrustful of people when we uh don't think that they're on our side or they have our best interests at heart. Uh and that explains a whole uh wealth of uh behavioral phenomena. Um And you only would have arrived at that insight if you took an evolutionary perspective. If you started thinking through the basic game theoretic logic of how does communication evolve? Well, it evolves when it's mutually beneficial to both communicators, when it uh increases both of their fitness. And communication cannot be beneficial if I'm being lied to or deceived or manipulated or exploited. You would expect a very strong selection pressure for people to be vigilant and skeptical

and distrustful of people. And you would expect an aversion to being deceived and manipulated and exploited. And you would expect the psychology to be sensitive about a whole host of factors. Like how how loyal is this person? Are they on my side or the other side? Do they have my best interests at heart? Is this information going to be useful to me? Is it going to be useful in mobilizing our group? Is it going to signal that I uh uh am on the right side of this issue? Is it going to signal that I'm a good person to other people? All of these considerations are at play when we consume information and transmit information. And uh without taking an evolutionary perspective, you'd be vulnerable to this myth that

humans are gullible dupes and social scientists are are smart and not gullible. Uh and uh therefore um psychologists are superior to the masses. Um I think humans are much smarter than we make them out to be. The mere fact that we exist, that all of our ancestors successfully survived and reproduced, suggests that we have a kind of deep rationality within us, the kind of rationality that it took to survive and reproduce in harsh environments again and again. So our default assumption when approaching the human mind and approaching uh the the complexity that uh you know behind our eyes is to ask ourselves, what what are the functions? What are the purposes? How is this smart and strategic? Not how is this stupid and broken?

And I think once we ask the question of how is this a strategic, well designed adaptation? How is this serving the interest of the person or the genes that constructed it, we have a much better and more productive set of questions to ask and a much more productive research program when we begin with that question than when we begin with a smug, dismissive people are stupid, people are gullible, I'm smarter than them attitude. Yeah, and you can, I mean, uh one sees that in the history of sort of intellectual um thinking. Um so Edward Bernay's early 20th century um you know started the era the the field of propaganda um which turned into um um which turned into um public relations um and very important public

intellectuals like Walter Lippmann, who was also the person who started the um the concept of stereotyping. Um he coined that term as well. He was a um very important, influential person. If you read Bernays or Walter Lippmann, I mean it is very explicitly we're the smart ones, and uh the masses are stupid, and we have to make the decisions for them. And there is a vein of very deep paternalism throughout the 20th century and into the 21st century, social sciences. And and that's right. And I think that this idea of thinking, well, how are people, even ourselves, how is what's coming up into in us not simple but complicated? And how is it smart? It doesn't necessarily mean that it's the right thing.

Even like what I experience, right? Of like, you know, oh man, I really want to click on the social media post, but I know I'm feeding the algorithm that's going to produce an outcome that is bad. You know, like I'm selecting this and I don't want to do that. But it's not treating me as myself as like, oh, I'm bad or simple or stupid. It's that there's a there's a there's a smartness to this and there's a complexity to this, and you have to respect that. Um and no, I think that's exactly right. Um, and I do think that um I also think there's this thing of you know, the it comes back to this idea that if it evolved, Um, or if it's a part of our evolved, this this isolated thing, like um it's it's bad.

I do think is also uh I don't think it's a universal thing, right? I also think it there's a historical social um context to that too. And I think, you know, especially in the US, which is very um overrepresented for historical reasons um in science, especially behavioral sciences. Um, and there's an interesting history about that too. Thank you, Nazis, for running for lots of things, including uh the integration of uh of the ethologists. So the ethologists were doing quite well um in in Europe. And then um uh you know the the Third Reich took over and knocked, you know, um sort of took over and ate a lot of scientific progress in the behavioral sciences. Um but uh but this idea that sort of like evolved things are bad or part

of human nature is bad, I mean, I think has very like, you know, a lot of roots in sort of puritanical and Calvinist thinking that this country was founded on. Um, and I also I do think that that still colors some of this narrative too. I do think that it's not an act of God, per uh pardon the pun, but um, and that uh and this comes back to sort of like it's it's okay If there's an evolved part of you that needs something, right? It's not okay if it like involves, well, I need to like, you know, dominate myself over people or like, you know, exploit people. Well, that's not okay. I mean, or it's okay in the sense of you can acknowledge why it's there, but then um, you know, use the fact that there are other adaptations with other logics to sort of check it

um or understand why it would exist. But I think this um, but having this narrative of like, well, we are all moral hypocrites, right? That we all have this tendency to sort of um uh um essentialize and outgroup or exploit people, um, you know, it's complicated, it's not stupid, but it's still not ideal, right? I think, I think that's right. I think it comes back to what we talked about, which is this idea that if we're simple, and this idea that um you know and even well intended ideas that you know I if your vocabulary is I want things to be equal and I see inequality and I don't think that's good in my experience if you actually unpack and you talk to people who say that that is that's a consequence of a lack of vocabulary.

It's not a typical thing to sort of like differentiate between like social level outcomes and individual psychological outcomes, let alone that there's lots of adaptations in our heads that are a consequence of lots of different calculations, right? And so I I this is where I think having a richer vocabulary of we are composed of lots of complicated adaptations. Just because they are evolved doesn't mean that they're morally suspect or that we should ignore that part of us. And it doesn't mean that they're stupid or smart. I mean, they're not stupid in the sense of they're not stupid in the sense of they're so dumb they wouldn't work. They're not so stupid that other people need to make the decisions for me.

And I think that's what you were saying before is that this sort of the that people are stupid and need to be herded and we're gonna do the hurting. You know, I think that that does not um do justice to the dignity and autonomy of people and it doesn't respect them. Um and and that's right. And I think that that is one of the the things that gets lost um in this both sides back and forth sort of culture wars that we started with. Yeah. Well, we have a few minutes left. Yeah. One question I'm curious about from you is how bullish are you on evolutionary psychology? I mean, there there's a whole continuum here. You know, on one end of the not very bullish continuum is just, oh, it's just a useful

perspective to have. Um, I think, you know, it's helpful to for people to take an evolutionary perspective from time to time. Um, it can help you ask the right questions. And on the other end of the continuum is the social sciences need to be evolutionary. This needs to be at the heart of everything we do that has to do with the study of human behavior. We need to f couch every debate in terms of evolutionary logic. It needs to be the meta-theory that subsumes psychology, anthropology, sociology, political science, culture, even philosophy. Where are you on the bullishness continuum? That's a good question because for me, um Here's here's my short answer. Um I think evolutionary psychology and I've heard other people say this.

I think evolutionary psychology in an ideal world puts itself out of a job. Because what evolutionary psychology is, in essence, is saying is taking a an approach in a existing approach to humans that had historically been lacking an evolutionary lens. And to take that evolutionary lens requires all the things we talked about earlier, which is understanding human behavior is a result of design. Design is different than behavior. Design is different than an individual. It's the continuity across generations. What counts as design is a meshing of software and invariant features of the environment and the dynamics of what counts as a good outcome or good as differential reproductive success. That all sounds like jargon, but it's really crucial for understanding.

There's like a bunch of little systems in us that are designed around what would lead to the survival and reproduction of that software in a natural environment. That idea that humans are composed of lots of software that's for solving real-world problems according to the logic of natural selection and not some other logic of just feeling good or just being duped into what everybody says around you or any other infinite number of things. I think that philosophy, psychology, anthropology, all the behavioral human behavioral sciences, thinking about humans in general, I think it's really hard to argue that anybody who hasn't gone through that way of thinking. That was a negative. So let me let me rephrase that.

I think anybody who has gone through that way of thinking comes out the other end and is a better and more sophisticated consumer of any human thought than any human has. I believe that an organizing principle of all sciences, including like, you know, physics, where we're like, well, why was a certain level of physics intuitive for people and then all of a sudden it became unintuitive, right? Um, and new why did Newtonian forces, why were those sort of weird and didn't make sense? And why is quantum physics and relativity like super strange to the point where nobody actually like intuitively understands that? Um why uh um why that is is a consequence of the fact that we evolved a folk physics and we evolved a physics for a

certain scale and range of things. And so I think even all sciences, let alone all sort of human thinking, benefits from this particular approach and is organized by it. So I think as a um as a addition to and part of our collective cultural knowledge, I am very bullish about evolutionary psychology in the sense of I do believe that many issues that have seemed like mysteries resolve if you understand that everything humans are doing is an output of evolved software that's designed for ancestral environments. And I think it's revolutionary. And I think that the percentage of that revolution that is underway is still under 1%. There's much more to do. So in that respect, I'm extremely bullish.

The alternative answer, though, or the another way to answer it is um day to day, do I think that everybody should take an evolutionary approach and that it's the only right way to do things? Um, I don't think that that's true. Um, because um, I do think that there's, for example, certain areas of psychology where the function, the intuitive function, you don't really need thinking about selection pressures to do that. I still think design mindedness is helpful, but I don't think you need design mindedness from an evolution perspective. Although we could have a whole argument about whether or not you can really be design minded if you don't take an evolutionary approach. But I think for things like motor control or vision, and I mean, I'm not even sure I agree

with this, but I think there's an argument for you don't need to take an evolutionary approach because you can sort of be design minded without that. There's also an argument you don't need to be design-minded either, right? There's people who, you know, it's important to do science collectively without that. So science is a large uh inter enterprise with lots of different people all doing different roles. And so in that respect, I don't think everybody should be taking an evolutionary approach. And I think there should be a plurality of them in any case, because who knows? And I'm sure we're all wrong for sure. Um uh and I look forward to you know hearing the next the next better things, but um but in terms of like can we do without it from a

uh cultural institutional perspective, can the conceptual insights be jettisoned? I don't think so. I think in that respect it's invaluable. Yeah. Um, well, I agree with you. I'm about as bullish as you are. Um, I think that it ought to be the meta theory of social science in general. Um, given that humans are animals and products of the Darwinian process, um, I see no way in which we could actually understand humans and human nature without thinking about evolution, without thinking about the actual process that produced us. That it seems uh wacky on its face that we could develop a complete understanding of who we are while completely ignoring the actual process that produced us. I think evolutionary thinking should be part and parcel of all of our investigations into

human psychology and behavior and culture. Um and insofar as it is not a part of those questions, we are invariably going to stray down blind alleys and go in wrong directions. I think evolutionary thinking is crucial for evaluating the plausibility of hypotheses and theories before we even begin the process of testing them. When you think about humanity, there are an infinite number of hypotheses and theories you could generate. And the vast majority of them are going to be wrong-headed. What evolutionary thinking helps you do is it helps you assess, well, which of these ideas is actually plausible? Which of these questions is actually a good productive question? Which of these theories about human mental life are worth investigating?

Which of these functions make sense from a Darwinian perspective? It helps you ask the right questions and develop the right theories, and that's invaluable in a field where there are an infinite number of theories you could potentially dream up. So I agree with you that we should be bullish about it. I think also it uh should subsume much of philosophy. I mean, you've written about um the the interplay between evolutionary psychology and philosophy, you know, the question of free will. Ultimately, the whole free will debate is an output of our psychological adaptations, of our intuitions about how to uh carve the world into people and inanimate objects and mechanical systems. Um, and we cannot understand the free will debate and the conflicting intuitions that are

at play without doing good evolutionary psychology. I think the same is true with philosophical debates about morality, what the nature of morality is, the same is true with debates about consciousness, how consciousness arises from mere brain activity. all of these philosophical debates ultimately derive from evolved psychological systems that produce conflicting intuitions in us. And we need to understand where those intuitions come from and how they work before we can even begin to answer the question of which intuitions we should rely on and which intuitions are correct. We need to learn about where those intuitions come from and how they work before we can begin to make real philosophical progress.

So I think that evolutionary thinking is indispensable not only for social science, but also for philosophy. I'm very bullish on the importance of evolutionary thinking. I'm not so bullish on the type of evolutionary thinking. We could have debates about whether we want to be, you know, cultural evolutionists or biological evolutionists, or whether we want to be Sperber-style cultural evolutionists or Heinrich-style cultural evolutionists, or whether how modular we want to be, whether modularity makes sense, whether how adaptationist we want to be, you know, how how just how good of an engineering system is natural selection. We can have these debates and I'm I'm happy to have them. But they need to be uh under the umbrella of evolutionary thinking itself.

Um and that to me is the only way to gain r real progress and make real insight into how humans work and the the human condition itself. And I think our shared bullishness on this topic is the reason why we're here. It's the reason we're having this conversation. It's the reason we wanted to start this podcast. And I think that's about as good as end good as good as an ending to this episode as we could possibly ask for. What do you think? Sounds good. Yeah. We should just talk to the adaptations silently awaiting us in the party that were uh running around screaming uh not talking to them. We should just talk to them and talk to people who haven't been listened to. All right, we've finished another episode of Evolutionary Psychology the Podcast.

Thank you for listening. If you like what you're hearing, please subscribe, uh, leave a good comment, or feel free to support us on Patreon if you can. If you can't, no problem. And David, we're we're gonna keep doing this, yeah? yeah every week you'll get one of these podcasts so please subscribe amazing um so david we'll we'll see you you know a couple days yeah yeah sounds good okay see you next week until next time bye