How Real is Race? Dr. Nathan Cofnas on DarkHorse

Bret Weinstein speaks with philosopher of biology Nathan Cofnas on the subject of race realism and the implications of genetic differences among populations.

Find Nathan Cofnas on X at https://x.com/nathancofnas and on Substack at https://ncofnas.com. 

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Music: "Marble Machine" by Wintergatan
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Mentioned in this episode:

DEI Fraud and Cover-Up at Cambridge https://ncofnas.com/p/dei-fraud-and-cover-up-at-cambridge

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Tiemstamps:

00:00:00 The Rules of Engagement
00:03:46 Race Realist?
00:08:47 Lineage vs. Race
00:13:58 The Euphemism Treadmill
00:16:38 Is Morality Real?
00:24:51 Westermarck and the Kibbutz
00:35:34 The Incest Taboo Test
00:41:53 Where Moral Beliefs Come From
00:52:34 Wokeism as an Existential Threat
00:57:54 Darwinism Applied to Humans
01:02:21 Does Winter Make You Smarter?
01:07:53 Inuits and Ethiopians
01:10:46 Why Aren't We All Von Neumann?
01:18:10 What About West African Sprinters?
01:24:37 The Black Cats in the Dark
01:28:21 The Longest Childhood on Earth
01:35:07 Everything Is an IQ Test
01:40:59 What Slavery Broke
01:45:21 Ethiopia, Korea, Japan, China
01:49:32 The Second Mode of Inheritance
01:54:18 What We Actually Disagree About
01:57:47 The Arms Race Has No Ceiling

Transcript

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Hey folks, welcome to the DarkHorse podcast Inside Rail. It's going to be a fascinating one. I am sitting, well, it's this morning for me, it's this afternoon for him with Nathan Cofnas, who is a PhD in philosophy. His specialty is the philosophy of biology. And he has been much in the news of late as a result of his exposé article that he published in late July on Jason Arday. Jason Arday, of course, resigned from Cambridge and then committed suicide, making this an explosive story. Now, let me just say before I get to a framework for our discussion, welcome to DarkHorse. Thank you very much. And my new introduction is that I'm not here representing Kent University or in my capacity as an employee of Kent University. And is it fair for me to say that you have a postdoctoral position at Kent and that they have suspended you? I think that's public information. Is that correct? If that's public information, then so it is. Fair enough. I can imagine the constraints around your situation are significant. So let me say I don't do interviews. This isn't going to be an interview. I am a biologist. I have a deep interest in the philosophy of science. And you and I have a great deal of overlap in terms of the topics that we think about. I've spent a lot of time on human evolution and issues surrounding heredity. And there are a great many things about your perspective, even some very controversial things with which I agree. And then there's a place in your model of the universe in which you and I part ways. And I'm hoping that our conversation will actually center primarily around those issues because they have a profound implication for how it is we are to govern ourselves. In any case, for those watching or listening, I hope that they will treat this as a conversation between colleagues that disagree over the subject matter that they are deeply steeped in. And that's the standard by which you should judge it. Does that sound fair to you, Nathan? Sounds good. All right. So let's talk about your analytical perspective that has led you to the position with respect to Jason Arday that you found yourself in. I should probably actually before I do that, just say I've seen a number of interviews with you recently in which the purpose is basically to rake you over the coals by asking you to answer to which sounds morally suspect. And so I won't be doing that with you. Your analytical position and your moral position are distinct as far as I'm concerned. And we should be careful to distinguish in which way we're talking at any point in the conversation where these things come up. Can you describe, is it fair to say that you are a race realist? Yes. I describe myself as a race realist. And can you define race realism for those who don't quite know what it is? So the term is used in two ways. So in the philosophy of biology, race realism refers to the idea that racial categories or at least some racial categories have a basis in biological fact. So that there is some way of distinguishing groups that corresponds to the concept of race that's rooted in biology. The other way in which the term is used and the way in which I use it is that not only is racial classification a meaningful concept, but that there are meaningful, there are differences in socially relevant traits between the races. So race is something of real significance in the human species. Okay. I want to say a couple of things about that because it's certain to be central to our conversation. I find the term race realism, which you did not invent, to be a kind of sleight of hand. I as a biologist am in favor of understanding any pattern that's real. I believe race is a bit complicated and fraught, and I will tell you what my perspective is here in a second. But to take any position like the idea that there are important social components of race that are based in genes, for example, and to call it realism is to cheat. The answer is, well, by virtue of the scientific method rather than declaring it real as we proceed. Again, you didn't invent the term, but do you think that that's a fair criticism of it? No, from a philosophical perspective, I wouldn't agree with that criticism. For example, the term realism in philosophy is used just to refer to the hypothesis that the exists. So an ex-realist is somebody who believes in ex. A moral realist, for example, if to be a realist about objective morality is to believe that there are mind-independent facts about right and wrong that exists regardless of what humans believe about them. So that's moral realism. So I am against moral realism. I think moral realism is wrong, but it's called moral realism because it refers to the idea that the thing is real. I say it's not real. So I don't see that as a prejudicing or biased way of describing it. So suppose, and this is a fair representation of my position, suppose I'm a biologist that thinks any pattern that is measurable is fair game for study and that there should be no limits on what we are allowed to discuss and discover. The limits are whether or not something is proven out empirically. Am I a race realist? If you simply are open to investigation of possible of the reality of race or racial differences. Yeah. No, I'm open to investigation into whether Jesus rose from the dead. If you have a way to investigate that after three days, I don't think he did. You're free to investigate it. Yep. Fair enough. So this is why I think the term is cheating effectively is that to call yourselves the realists when someone else is open to that, which is empirically studyable and falsifiable is effectively to put your thumb on the scales of scientific validation. Maybe it doesn't bother me because in the philosophy of literature, it's common to refer to one's position as realist, meaning that one believes in the thing under discussion. And nobody, nobody thinks that you, you gain points in the argument simply by deeming it the realist position because the thing you're a realist, but you might be a realist about something that isn't real. So that's, that's my position. You could. Well, let me lay out my basic position here and you can place it on the map for us. My position is that race is actually a loaded and politically charged term for something that is very real. The term I would use is lineage and lineage extends backwards into time. If you were to look at the manifestation of a lineage at any point, you might call it a population. Those things are very real. They have a genetic reality to them. And the problem is that race is a politically fraught way of presenting these things that is overly, uh, discrete and therefore it has become a tool of power. So I'm not saying race isn't real. Many people have argued, you know, most famously Lewontin that race doesn't exist because the variance within exceeds the variance between a nonsense argument, um, a sleight of hand on his part. He was a very smart biologist who knew better, um, than to make such a claim. But nonetheless, that's not my position that race doesn't exist. My argument would be that race is the, um, degraded presentation of something that is real that can be discussed in responsible terms as population and lineage. Well, you and many other biologists and population genetics, um, routinely use the word population or ancestral population. Those aren't even controversial concepts. The concept of an ancestral population that just happens. And they say, and then the same people will say race is utter nonsense, but population and ancestral population are real. And then their definition of ancestral population is exactly the same as the definition of race. You use the term discrete to refer to races. And, uh, that's a very common word used to refer to race by people who are against the word race. You will not find any, uh, serious biologist post Darwin who has called races, discrete or implied anything like that. Darwin's big discovery is continuous variation, uh, that populations blend into each other, that there's no sharp line in contrast to the theory of special creation, which was the orthodoxy before him, which says that God created each species and race with a specific divine purpose. And there's, there's no reason for them to be, to have any overlap. And it was considered a very difficult question. Why would God create overlap between species? And Darwin said, no, the rule is variation and everything blending into other, every one population blends into another. And that has been the concept of race since Darwin. What people want to do is stigmatize the word race, which is just a way to shut down discussion and prevent people from talking about the political implications of so-called ancestral populations. Well, I want to warn you about something. I think you are in danger of hearing my scientific caution as a familiar argument that you've heard and you know is wrong. I'm not making that argument. I agree with you that no understands genetics, genomics, population genetics could make the argument that populations are discrete. So my point would be that when you use the term race, you are treading into a landscape in which people who are not professionally careful have damaged the term beyond recognition. So the one drop rule, for example, is not a responsible recognition of an empirical pattern. It's in fact probably a endogenous racism within the genes, writing a rule to prevent introgression. So I'm not making the argument that race isn't real in order to shut down some quadrant of investigation at all. I'm just saying if we stick to terms that are definable and not fraught with a history of abuse, then we don't get tangled around the axle over things like the one drop rule. So I understand that you look at race and you say it's a real phenomenon. And my point is sort of it's a real phenomenon when careful people just define it in particular that the public's unaware of, but you're now interacting in public. And if you restrict yourself to terms that don't have that history, then we can talk about the very things you want to talk about without causing massive confusion over what's being discussed. Well, I think there's a danger to allowing our usage of important words to be held hostage to the confusion of people with an IQ below 100. And if we somehow manage to replace the word race, which everyone kind of understands, even if there may be confusion among unsophisticated users of the term, if we persuade everyone to replace that with the word population, then population will acquire the same stigma as race. So for example, the word retarded, which was not really considered a bad word when I was 20 years ago, was replaced by mentally disabled. But now I've gotten in a lot of trouble because I referred to Jason Arday as being mentally disabled, something that very close to the description he made of himself as cognitively impaired. But because now people are treating euphemism as a slur, just like the original thing. So I running on this euphemism, what Steven Pinker called the euphemism treadmill, I don't think is the path forward. And yes, people are going to use words or concepts in unsophisticated ways. That's kind of unfortunate, but we still need to refer to the reality, which is that there are races, which is traditionally defined the same way as population. Okay. I agree with you about the treadmill. I don't agree. The problem is the term race in its tortured form predates our ability to even discuss the underlying genetics. And so it drags that in unnecessarily. So I would agree with you that we need to avoid the treadmill, and we should defend terms like population or more importantly lineage, which is my preferred term, that we have to defend those against illegitimate challenges and the attempt to tone police. But in the case of race, we're late to the party on that one. So anyway, I don't think we have to adjudicate that fully, but I do want to call attention to it. I think using the term race means that everybody in the audience thinks they know what you're talking about when in fact, almost none of them do. All right. You mentioned in there that you are not a realist. I think I have that correct. And you, by that I take to mean that you think that morals are effectively arbitrary, that they are features of a power dynamic rather than a reflection of inherent goods. Is that a correct representation of your view? Well, they're certainly not arbitrary with respect to human interests and evolutionary dynamics and that sort of thing, but there is no mind independent way to evaluate what is right or wrong, good or bad. It's a judgment that people make. Okay, you and I differ here and I'd like to figure out why. If I say that that which is morally good is essentially synonymous with that which is creating and stabilizing of the maximum amount of wealth that a lineage has dominion over. In other words, if I say that the rules that cause the size of the pie that my population to which the moral rule applies to be the largest, that's not arbitrary. In other words, we can talk about the productivity of crops and we can talk about, for example, the tradition of planting and harvesting on the full moon. Planting and harvesting on the full moon in Guatemala, where I take this example from, serves the purpose of delivering the crops at the same moment so that the pests cannot grow with each maturing field and become a larger hazard to the overall productivity of the population. That's non-arbitrary. Question is, how much will the crops produce? And we have a moral which is plant on the full moon so that your crops mature at the same time. Is that a fair example of a non-arbitrary, morally defensible rule that has an empirical reality? All moral judgments are non-arbitrary. They're all based on somebody's interests or on the evolutionary reality, on facts about competition between norms, which follows certain evolutionary principles. None of it is arbitrary, but it's non-arbitrary with respect to some standard. Like how many people we can feed? Like how many people we can feed. So it's non-arbitrary with respect to that standard. The question is, what's special about that standard? And why is that standard better than some other totally arbitrary standard? The standard is what's arbitrary. But I mean, it's not accidental that we settle on a standard like reducing conflict or increasing population size because that is the result of evolutionary principles. But it's arbitrary from there's no objective perspective. You could say that the best thing to happen is to destroy all life on Earth and hope for an asteroid to wipe everyone out. Or you could say that, I mean, even the principle that you suggested, that ethics, what is moral, is what causes the lineage to expand in the most productive way. So that could mean killing everybody who isn't productive, killing disabled people, killing people who are infertile, that would be the moral system demanded if one accepted your proposed standard, which would be inconsistent with what we usually think of as morality. But in a sense, it would be just as it wouldn't be on neither of those systems is on an objective, more objective foundation than the other. Well, you make two arguments, one of which I think is high quality and the other one, I think is sophistry. And I've made the same argument just for the purpose of demonstrating this. I don't think you can defend being alive as better than being dead in any absolute sense. It happens that living creatures prefer to stay alive, which is not surprising in light of their evolutionary history. Those that didn't prefer to stay alive aren't represented. And so you have an entire biota that behaves as if it's convinced that being alive is better, but there's no absolute sense in which we can defend that. On the other hand, you can't very well morally reason from there. You have to accept if we take being alive to be better than being dead, then we can derive moral rules that are not arbitrary and are universal. In other words, I do think populations do abide by rules that cause them to expand. And although I wouldn't defend a rule in which we, for example, genocide other populations in order for our population to have a larger slice of the pie, you certainly see defenses of that in moral tomes, like the Torah, for example, Moses's laws for war basically tell you that God wants you to take a different view of how to behave with respect to a particular enemy based on whether or not you intend to inhabit their land or leave. I find it morally objectionable, but the idea that it is framed in a moral context that overlaps the principle that I described is pretty clear. Well, there may have been pacifist societies in ancient times. And when they encountered populations with a more Old Testament morality, the result was just simply natural selection. Their moral norms were removed, and then conditions have changed, and now we've moved away from those kinds of moral norms. But I mean, that also is explained as the product of evolution and sociological trends, not as the result of us discovering some objective truth about what's right and wrong. All right. Let's go to an example that I know you have worked on. I don't know, maybe it's in your dissertation, but I've seen it referred to. I haven't read your original work on the Westermarck effect. So for those who are not familiar with it, the Westermarck effect is a well-demonstrated pattern in which children who are reared together find each other sexually repulsive so that they don't end up producing offspring. Right. You don't find your sister in the same way that you would find another woman who was similarly beautiful attractive. That pattern has been interpreted in evolutionary biology as because we can demonstrate that it is the product of genetic information, that is to say, it is inherited inadvertently without having and that it results in paradoxes. Like if you rear unrelated children together, the Westermarck effect will cause them not to find each other sexually attractive. And if you take siblings and you raise them apart, they do not have the effect kick in. So this has been interpreted in evolutionary biology as a genetic encoding of a rule to avoid incest. And the reason that incest should be avoided is because we all carry numerous single copies of deleterious recessive genes that would cause us to be deformed or never to have been born at all if you got two copies of them. And if those things are sufficiently rare in the population, then you can choose a mate and be very unlikely to have an offspring that gets two copies of a lethal deleterious recessive. But if you marry a sibling, because you will have inherited your genes from at least one shared parent, the likelihood of you getting two copies goes way up. So incest is bad because of a genetic organism that causes rare deleterious conditions to emerge. The Westermarck effect has been interpreted as a genetic encoding that avoids a large fraction of the incest that would otherwise occur and is therefore taken to be an example of a moral rule that we explicitly transmit don't mate with siblings as a genetic analog, though imperfect in our genomes. First of all, is there anything about my presentation of the facts that you disagree with? Sorry to be disagreeable, but I would have to refer to it as the myth. Pretty much that is what you would read, the story that you would hear if you opened an evolutionary psychology textbook. Essentially, everything about that story is incorrect. Okay, hold on. Just in my defense, I didn't present it as true. I presented. I'm not blaming you. I say you described the not that Bret. We agree on my presentation of what the field has reached as the story. So the story is this is an example of how there's a clear link from an evolutionary pressure. So a pressure against inbreeding. So it's bad, as you said, for siblings who are closely related to each other to produce offspring. Now, you have the selection pressure and you have an alleged biological mechanism, the anti-inbreeding avoidance mechanism, which uses the heuristic that I would feel sexual aversion to childhood co-residents. So if I grow up with somebody or grow up with them during a critical period of childhood, so for example, age zero to eight or whatever has been proposed as the critical period, then I flips a switch and I feel no sexual attraction to the opposite sex person who would otherwise be an acceptable partner. And because we have this feeling of a version toward our sibling, this gives us a moral intuition that incest is wrong. And so you get from natural selection pressure to some evolutionary adaptation to the moral intuition. So now what is the actual first, there's a problem with the empirical claim underlying the Westermarck effect. And then with the philosophical argument for how you get from the alleged incest avoidance mechanism to the moral norm, the incest taboo. Let's start with the empirical. Right. So the standard studies that are cited to support the Westermarck effect are by Wolf looking at arranged marriages in Taiwan. So there are two kinds of arranged marriages. In one case, the girl is adopted by the future husband's family in early childhood and they grow up together as siblings. In the other case, the marriage is arranged when they're adults. And the claim was that those who were raised as siblings, even though they were not genetically married, even though there was no taboo on them having sexual relations. In fact, they were supposed to get married and have children that in the arranged marriages, they grew up to feel sexual aversion to each other. And they had fewer children than those who were in arranged marriages where they met as adults. The other piece of evidence comes from the Israeli kibbutzim, where children are reared in same age peer groups and they spend more time with their unrelated children in the same age than they do with their actual biological parents and siblings. And for the kibbutz natural experiment, an important claim is that there was no taboo on sexual relations between children or between people who grew up in the same peer group. So there was no taboo and yet they felt sexual aversion to each other. Well, starting with the kibbutz evidence, there was a very careful article published in the American Journal of Sociology several years ago, where they went and interviewed the former kibbutzniks who had grown up in this way and they had no idea what they were talking about. Like, of course, we were attracted to each other. And there was a taboo on sex between them. This varied among kibbutzim and I'm leaving there all sorts of interesting details. But the basic idea is it was very common for them that everybody understood that their biological siblings were different from the same age peer group. They were attracted to each other. And in many cases, there was a taboo despite them being attracted to each other. In the case of the arranged marriages in Taiwan, there was maybe a reduction in attraction or there are other possible interpretations of that. The arranged marriages between children where they were raised together were less prestigious and that was kind of the last resort of people who didn't have finances for the other kind of marriage. So they grew up to have plenty of children. They just had like four children instead of five and a half children on average. So it's like they were not treating each other as siblings. And much of Wolf's evidence was really anecdotal. Now, the kind of the more philosophical problem is what's called this point was actually made by George Frazer, although it's usually attributed to the philosopher Bernard Williams. So it's called the representation problem. The claim of the the Westermarckians is that I feel sexual aversion to my sibling. Therefore, I conclude sex with the sibling is wrong. But really, I feel sexual aversion toward my childhood co-resident. But nobody thinks that sex with a childhood co-resident is wrong. So that's not the norm. The taboo doesn't concern that. The taboo concerns biological sibling who you might not have grown up with at all. So if your sibling was raised apart from you, the taboo still applies, even though the alleged Westermarck effect targets childhood co-residents. And then there's the moralization problem. So, okay, so I feel sexual aversion toward toward my childhood co-resident. But okay, let's say I represent my childhood co-resident as being a sibling. So I interpret my feeling of aversion as a feeling of aversion toward this person, qua sibling rather than qua childhood co-resident. Why should I maybe I think then my moral norm should be no one should have sex with my sibling, not their sibling. What difference does that make? So in my view, the Westermarck explanation is a mess from beginning to end. All right. Well, I will just say it's only an anecdote. But I find the idea of sex with my sister repulsive, and I don't even have a sister. No, I'm not saying that that therefore should show you that I'm saying that feeling comes from from somewhere else. Okay. All right. Now, let me take the most obvious criticism of the landscape as you've presented it. Whether or not there is a genetically encoded Westermarck effect, you will agree that there is an incest taboo and that the incest taboo, which does correctly delineate between sex with a sibling, whether or not you were raised with them is to be avoided. And sex with an opposite sex co-resident is not to be avoided even though you were housed together. So it would appear that that moral intuition, which is handed down culturally at least, and maybe has a genetic, a rough genetic analog, is totally non-arbitrary with respect to the value of not being deformed or dead as a result of deleterious recessive genes. So doesn't that independent of the Westermarck effect falsify your claim about the non-reality of moral realism? Well, it falsifies the idea that morality is arbitrary, but that's not my view. Morality is not arbitrary. The point is there's no independent standard. So how about not being deformed? So the very same thing that makes being alive better than being dead makes being properly formed better than being deformed. What is the very same thing? I mean, most people have an aversion to it. Some people don't. Some people have all sorts of feelings about what they think is good or bad. So someone would say it's good for people to be deformed. It's good for people to suffer. And most people say it's not. So now we, because we're in the majority, we can impose our values on the minority. But if they somehow became the majority, they would do the same. I mean, I find this shocking in light of what I take to be your other beliefs. I agree with you. There is no absolute sense in which we can defend being alive as being better than being dead or being properly formed as better than being deformed. But if we allow that we are in the category of living things for whom being alive is better than being dead, then being well formed is better than being malformed. Being intelligent is better than being stupid. So again, it's not an absolute in the universal sense, but from the living perspective, these things are quite real, easily defined, non-arbitrary, likely to be shared across all cultures. So you started saying if you allow that. That's right. If you allow that X, then there's a non-arbitrary standard because you've said the standard is X. The point is there's no objective basis for selecting X. No, no. But I would say, yes, from the point of view of the universe, the fact that humans exist or don't exist is immaterial. The fact that life exists or doesn't exist is immaterial. But you're a person making coherent sounds and who appears to exert a high over rigor. You could just make random noises and think nonsense. You're prioritizing this. And the point is you're already sort of accepting. All I'm saying is if it's universal to humans, that we all prefer coherence to incoherence. The cultures that don't prefer coherence don't exist. So we have accepted this standard. And yes, we could have a late night at the bar argument about the fact that the universe does not agree with us that being alive is better than being dead. But since all human cultures do, then the argument proceeds from that narrower category, I would say. Well, there are many people, perhaps a majority of people, would prefer that I made random noises and talk nonsense. No doubt. From their perspective, then the world would be a better place. I disagree with them. So I strive to say what I think is true and important. My point is, when you say that moral rules are, what is your phrase? They lack what characteristic? Mind independent reality. Mind independent reality. I think you're effectively saying something that is as true and impactful as saying whether there is no life, moral rules have no meaning, which is true, of course, but not interesting. Because within the context of life, we can very quickly specify what rules are meaningful and why they're meaningful and what relationship it has to our evolutionary nature, which is exactly what you're arguing against in your Westermarck argument. The Westermarck argument is just to address the question of the biological or sociobiological question of where moral norms come from. So we have a bunch of beliefs. We think that it's wrong to shoot random people in the back for fun. Okay, where does that come from? So maybe it's because we think that because we perceive the truth. So you say, what is the causal process that caused me to believe that there's a cup on my desk? Okay, so what's now, I explain, well, my delight hit this object and went to my retina, and there's some whole scientific story about that. And then there's a story about what about cups and so on. So now I have a belief that there's a cup on my desk. Now the belief is justified in light of the fact that the process by which I came to believe the cup on my desk actually tracks the truth about whether there's a thing on my desk or what is on my desk. So if there were not a cup on my desk, I wouldn't believe it, or I would be much less likely to believe it. So the belief is vindicated because it is the product of a truth respecting process, a process that respects the truth about the relevant thing. I agree about my belief that it's wrong to shoot random people in the back for fun. How did I form that belief? Well, you inherited that belief from people who figured it out by policing behaviors like randomly shooting people in the back. Those that did not police them well are not represented. So there's a way in which these people have proven out in an evolutionary test and have been encoded in a shorthand. Right? So that's true. So one of the reasons we hold certain beliefs is that they survive the test of natural selection. Yes. Any of our moral beliefs are like that, like shooting random people or killing random people, at least within the in-group. Yes, precisely. Not something that can survive. But natural selection is natural selection, truth tracking with respect to objective morality, if such a thing exists, is if I can attribute a moral belief to natural selection, does that pollute, does that show that the belief is not justified because natural selection doesn't care about morality? And I think I think I get you. Here's my answer. Ultimately, you are looking at the discovery of abstract truths by selection, not necessarily of genes. I would argue that culture is equally biological and adaptive as genes. These are two different places in which evolving information is housed in a different form. So selection discovers correct, sometimes obscure truths, which are then packaged into a contagious form that is easily handed on one generation to the next. So a moral truth may be hard won at first, and then it will be encoded into a story. Let's take, for example, the boy who cried wolf. It's not obvious to a child why crying wolf or its equivalent is a bad thing to do. It causes the adults to react in a way that may be pleasant to the child. The problem is it causes a problem they don't foresee, which is that when the wolf comes, nobody listens. And so it gets encoded in a story that causes this not to have to be rediscovered again and again. So the idea that immoral to cry wolf is resonant because it's true, but it's true for a game theoretically subtle reason. In this case, it's a reason that's apparent to adults but too subtle for a child. There are many other moral rules that are about game theory that even adults don't intuit, like collective action problems. So I would argue that much of what is encoded in religious texts is about preventing the collapse of a structure because of the failure of collective action. And that, again, I keep using the word arbitrary and it's throwing you because you have a different framework, and I can't remember how to phrase it in your language, but that these have a reality that transcends the individual encoding. In other words, game theory problems afflict all human cultures, and there are parallel structures in distinct cultures that have evolved independently to break the same tendency toward collapse. So you referred to these moral norms such as don't cry wolf as being true and that being something that we've discovered. But what do you add by calling it true that isn't already captured by the fact that it's useful, it survives the test of natural selection, it serves people's biologically determined interests? What are you adding with the word true? Well, I'm not adding, I'm just trying to... So the problem is I would be tempted to say these things are non-arbitrary and then you'll say, of course they are non-arbitrary, but when I say they are non-arbitrary, I'm trying to say that they are true in a particular sense. In other words, they track a value on which either all members of our culture will of course agree or all members of humanity will of course agree or any rational creature would of course agree. So I think we're having a language problem. You said any rational creature and here I would certainly not agree. A rational creature living under different conditions or who was underwent, was selected under, for completely different conditions and therefore has totally different intuitions about what is desirable or undesirable. Let's say that... Hold on, let me defend that. My point was not that all of the things that I think are moral are things that any creature would agree on, but there are things that I think any rational creature would agree on, which is that things that are painful should in general be avoided. Things that cause starvation are bad. Those sorts of things are universal well beyond the narrow clade that I happen to be in. These are universals and the whole point is we have a perceptual apparatus built based on the idea that when I feel starvation, it's something to be remedied. But you describe these norms as universal, but even in our world they're not universal. People think that other certain people's pain and other people's starvation is good. Generally, even when it comes to pain, there are people who think that there's something meritorious about pain. Well, there's a reason... ...about the ability to endure pain. There is something meritorious about delayed gratification, which is, I would argue, synonymous effectively with wisdom. I'm not arguing, you know, I do a lot of fasting. Obviously the feeling of starvation is not the worst thing in the world if I'm choosing that, but I'm choosing it for a reason. In other words, the sensation itself isn't good, but something that it allows is good. Certainly when it comes to other people's pain, people recognize that for them the pain is bad, but for me it's good because they're the outgroup or I don't like them. So that's not universal. It's something intrinsic to the sensation of pain and you have an aversion to it. That's just, I think, part of the definition of pain. That's what I'm saying. And the idea that I may regard somebody else's pain as different from mine is not a counterfactual. That's to be expected because there are conflicts of interest between individuals. But there are people who would say that somebody else's pain is per se a good thing because... Right, because I want them to suffer because they're bad for some reason. All right, here's my proposal. I think we've laid that out. I will accept that there is no absolute sense in the, you know, cold inanimate universe manner of thinking in which I can defend these things. But I would argue that once you step into the realm of life, your point about definable goods is incorrect. So, okay, let's leave that where it is though. People have heard the argument they can evaluate it for themselves. And let's get back to the question of race realism and the fact you and I would agree that wokeism and what it is doing to our civilization is extremely dangerous. I would argue it's an existential threat. Would you disagree? It's an existential threat? Nope, we're on the same page here. Okay, so wokeism is an existential threat. Wokeism, I've heard you say in another discussion that the values of diversity, equity, and inclusion sound good enough on their own, but that in practice they result in phenomena like Jason Arday. In practice, they don't mean what the words usually mean. DEI is a slogan to refer to something that is different from actual diversity, actual equality, and actual inclusion. Okay, good. We're on the same page there. So, the question then is, you believe that not only are there racial differences in capacity, but that these things should be allowed to play out. Is that a fair representation of your perspective? I prefer that we move more in the direction of meritocracy. I've said that that I'm open to measures to ensure representation of major demographic groups in certain high profile positions, but in general I favor meritocracy treating people as individuals. Okay, I would 100% agree that meritocracy is the only rational path and that it should be applied on an individual basis. You and I are aligned there. You've said something about what sounds like meritocracy is. What's your category? To back off of that standard in the case of, what was your category? Major demographic groups. Major demographic groups represented in what positions was it though? High profile positions. Certain high profile positions not but just in principle, I'm open to that concept. I consider that. I'm surprised to hear you say that, I'm not sure I am, but maybe you have an example that will make it clear to me why I should be. Well, okay, let's look at Harvard. Harvard's own study in 2013 determined that if admissions were based only on grades and test scores, the undergraduate population would be 0.7% black. So Harvard is, I keep using them as an example. They're not the only important institution, but basically the current levels of representation of certain groups are maintained by Harvard-like affirmative action. And if you got rid of that affirmative action, the current black representation is like 14%. So it would just be reduced by a very extreme amount. And I, for those kinds of positions, I feel that there would be some social benefit to having some, allowing everybody to feel that they're participating. I see that as, that's a value that conflicts with meritocracy. You can't have 100% meritocracy and you can't end 100% feeling of inclusion. So you have to find some balance, something like that. That's my view. All right, interesting. I will refrain from accusing you of being a bleeding heart. I'd probably be the first to accuse you of that, but I do hear, it's interesting to hear you make that caveat, but let's get to the reason that I think you are willing to entertain that exception. Let us talk about the pattern of, the pattern of intelligence and race, which is, I think, the thing that has you in hot water. Can you lay out your perspective on, for lack of better terms, IQ and race or population? So I'm the, in an abstract sense, it's just Darwinism applied to human populations. So the idea of Darwin is variation and selection. Groups that are separated from each other from an evolutionarily significant amount of time will diverge and become adapted to different conditions. That is the basic philosophical background that motivates hereditarianism. Now, IQ testing is the greatest success in the field of psychology. If you give people a battery of tests, testing their intelligence in different domains, the great discovery is that your performance on one kind of test is highly correlated with your performance on other kinds of cognitive tests. If you're good at rotating shapes, you're good at remembering digits and repeating them backwards, you're good at analogies and so on. And IQ is the one single number that best predicts your performance across a range of cognitive tests. It doesn't capture everything about intelligence. There are many things that are important besides that, but it is the single number with the most predictive value of anything in social science. And it's not just your ability to score on an IQ test, it's correlated with many, many important life outcomes related to socioeconomic status. And average IQ varies among racial groups or population representative groups of different races. In the United States, which there is a approximately 15 point IQ gap between African Americans and white Americans, it's been stable for decades. Despite what some people say, it has not changed, it's not closing. And this has significant implications. Okay, so let me tell you what I agree with. I agree that IQ is among the greatest successes of psychological science, which is a little like saying the tallest midget, but nonetheless, IQ is predictive of outcomes. And I agree with you that there are differences that are measurable between populations. What do you say? So it sounded to me like at the beginning of your explanation though, you argued that this was the result of populations being separated and selection. Is that fair? Selection, other evolutionary forces may sometimes play a role, but random forces drift and so on. But in general-- How would drift work here? Well, like if founder effects, there's a debate about the origin of Ashkenazi IQ and I'm just saying for the record, it's mainly selection, presumably selection for intelligent, different kinds of intelligence in different groups would be the primary explanation. Okay, IQ measures general intelligence. Where is the environment that does not select for greater general intelligence? Well, there's unique in each environment, there are a range of adaptive tasks that an individual has to perform in order to survive. And those tasks are different under different conditions. So if you have winter, for example, that may pose one set of selection pressures that do not exist for a population that doesn't have to face winter. So in that particular case, you have three month period where nothing grows. There's no way to get food or the normal sources of food are not sufficient. So you have to plan what to do during the winter. Okay, and that's very controversial. How much does winter explain race differences intelligence? But I'm just posing that as an example of a condition which poses a different set of adaptive tasks and may require more intelligence than tasks in somewhere else. All right, I think I hear in your presentation and what I've read of your work, a belief that when you say that selection favors different types of intelligence and that this is having an impact on IQ differing between populations, that your belief is that this is related to genes. In what way would you say it's related to genes? So they're just standard evolution. There's heritable variation in fitness. The fitness is in different environments, favors or is more or less related to general intelligence. So there are genetic variants that are associated with higher general intelligence. And in those environments where intelligence is more important, those variants are more likely to spread. What I don't get is I see some hand waving around the idea that there are environments that don't favor as much intelligence as you can muster. It seems to me every environment favors it. And even if an environment was somehow more tolerant at first, the natural progression of population growth would cause resource stress that would then cause intelligence to be valuable no matter what environment you set the experiment in motion. So you have yet to convince me that there is an environment in which being as smart as possible is not favored. You have species that through essentially lose their intelligence, they evolve from being an intelligent species to less intelligent one. Or you have species that in some part of their life cycle, they lose their brain because it's simply not necessary. The brain is absorbed. I imagine you're talking about humans. Well, I mean, because it sounded like you're raising this as a principle that intelligence is always adaptive, but I'm highlighting the fact that that's not true. And there are some environments where it's not useful. You've got me. What I should have said was in human beings, every environment selects for greater intelligence. But why would some environments not select more for other things? So the relative selection could be used for speed. You have to demonstrate the trade-off then. Well, there's... So here's what I think I hear from you, and you tell me if I'm mis-portraying it. That the cognitive capacity as produced and shaped by natural selection on genes should effectively mirror the distinction between populations with respect to athletic capability. In other words, the skew in the NBA towards blacks is presumably the result of the fact that habitats from which blacks came selected for characteristics that enable you more powerfully in basketball than, let's say, Norwegians. Okay, so that's actually a very good example. So running speed is always good. It's always possible that there might be some situation where I survive because I'm fast and perish because I'm slow. But you agree that there are population differences in running speed. Totally. Why is it that Jews are not as fast as Jamaicans? Great question. Yeah, let me address it. Let's take an extreme pair. Okay, let's talk about Inuits and Ethiopians. Inuits come from a very cold part of the world. In a cold part of the world, survival is tremendously affected by the effect of preserving heat. Preserving heat is better done in something with a low surface area, something closer to the shape of a sphere. In Ethiopia, you have exactly the inverse problem. Shedding heat is actually a key to survival. And so when shedding heat is valuable, the, you know, long and lanky, greater surface area to less volume is useful because if you're effectively a radiator. So you've got two different habitats selecting in opposite directions in body form. And so we don't see Inuits winning marathons because marathons favor exactly the same characteristics that you would find in an Ethiopian, and they just favor the characteristics of an Inuit. Anything there you disagree with? Nope. Okay, so then my point would be that with respect to sports, the trade-offs are obvious, right? If you're going to be, you know, tall, it's going to come at a cost to your being robust. And that we should expect, therefore, sports to favor different populations, as I would call them, races, as you might call them. And that's exactly what we see in sport. But cognition is different. The trade-offs that you would need to demonstrate in order to show why populations were not favored for high intelligence, you're going to have to provide those. My claim is that intelligence, even the way we measure it and describe it, general intelligence is general. It's favorable no matter what your habitat is, no matter what your body form is, no matter what your niche is. And that even, as I said before, even if you specify a habitat that's easier to get around in or get along in at first, populations grow to carrying capacity. As soon as a population has risen to carrying capacity, now you have a problem in which intelligence is going to be crucial, which is how do you out-compete other intelligent humans. So, according to that view, the most intelligent people should have the most children. Which is certainly not true in our society. Well, look, first of all, I think you're reducing... Let me make a different point. Yeah, yeah. Okay. So, let's say, would you agree that John von Neumann was more intelligent than the average person in part because of his genetic makeup? At least in part. No, I wouldn't agree with that. I would agree that he's more intelligent than the average person. And that's not related to his genes, nothing special about his genes, just... Well, you're asking a very specific question, and I'm answering it in a very specific way for a reason. So, let me just translate for the audience here. You're... Certainly, genes are involved in the intelligence of John von Neumann or Einstein or any of these people. Genes produce a mind that is capable of becoming highly intelligent. And so, I'm not arguing genes are not involved in intelligence. The differences between populations, in what way are they related to genetic differences, if not... I'm not talking about population. Just among Hungarian Jews, in the... Was John von Neumann more intelligent in part because he inherited a lot of genes that cause intelligence? Well, maybe you know something I don't, but I will absolutely agree he was more intelligent as to where your confidence comes from that the difference is owing to genes. Or Ramanujan, right? Okay, Ramanujan. He's born in poverty with very little education. He goes and teaches himself mathematics, makes all these... Basically, rediscovers have to feel by himself, makes a bunch of breakthroughs with no real guidance or any advantages. Is there... Do you think that Ramanujan was different from the average Tamil... Different? In part because of... That his intelligence was different because of genes, or it was just some environmental effect. I find it very unlikely that genes are playing an important role there. So, anybody could be Ramanujan or von Neumann, and they're the right circumstances. Not anybody. I would say anybody for whom all of the physical, cultural, and environmental conditions are favorable to the growth of that intelligence, which may include profound adversity. I'm not saying it doesn't. But the likelihood that these highly intelligent people are the beneficiaries of unique combinations of genes that create higher intelligence without going to fixation, I find unlikely. Well, that's the thing, right? So, if you would acknowledge that von Neumann or Ramanujan... I use Ramanujan as, in a way, a better example because he had no advantages at all. It just by himself figured everything out. If your view is that he's not born different than anyone else with respect to his mental talents, then I don't know. I guess you can't make the argument. But if you would accept that, that some people are just born to be more intelligent. Yes, of course, they need some environment in order for their intelligence, their talent, to be expressed. But if you acknowledge that, and you acknowledge that there are genes that are related to individual differences in intelligence, then they should have gone to fixation. We should all be born as von Neumann. Everyone should be like that, which is clearly not the case. But I think you just talked yourself in circles because my point... Let me just put my cards on the table. Heritable differences in cognitive capacity, and we're going to have to come back to the term heritable here because I know that that's where the bodies are buried. But if we take people's interpretation of what heritable means, that there's something written in the genes that gives you excess cognitive capacity, there will have been times in history and prehistory, presumably many of those times, at which those differences did exist between human populations. In those cases, higher intelligence would have been favored and would have gone to fixation, which means that with those genetic characteristics would have outcompeted those without them, and the entire population would therefore have them going forward. So in effect, what I'm arguing is that, yes, there will have been cognitive differences based in genetic modifications of our brains. That differed between populations in the past and then went to fixation, and we all benefit from them. In other words, the reason that human beings are so intelligent is that human ancestors that were more intelligent outcompeted human ancestors that were less intelligent. So that is certainly something that can be true. But when you talk about Ramanujan or John von Neumann or Einstein or any of the people that we all Darwin, people we agree were highly intelligent, you're making an assumption in a population in which you don't have barriers to mating about the relationship between intellectual capability and something importantly related to it written to the genes. And I believe that this is a leap in logic that is very comforting to some and very frightening to others, but for which the evidence is effectively non-existent. Well, your position is not mainstream science, that all of the genetic variants related to intelligence are the same among all people. I mean, it's really there's no behavioral geneticist believes that. But also, what would you say about, let's say, a population for which one running speed is particularly important? So they have a lot of top runners. Would you say that among West Africans, the genes for running speed have all gone to fixation or has there been some level of? I don't see any reason to believe that they will have for exactly the same reason that we've talked about a distinction between Inuits and Ethiopians, which is to say. But we're saying in this region, running speed is important. So running is always good. In this region, you still have a division of labor. You have nuances. You can say in this habitat, but you can keep scaling down and looking at distinctions within the habitat. So at the level of physical characteristics, we have a reason to expect tradeoffs to maintain polymorphisms that I don't believe we would see in cognitive space. What I would argue is that I'm effectively in favor of the null hypothesis here unless you find a positive reason to believe that somehow these genetic propensities for intelligence are being transmitted, but not going to fixation. I mean, it's fine to start with the null hypothesis, but I mean, how much would you make you give the null hypothesis up and just look around like some people are smarter than others. Here's where the rubber meets the road. You say, look around. You're talking about differences in intelligence between populations of adults. Not populations, individuals. So just look at one population. You can do it at either level. Forget about race. Just look at the common domains. People differ tremendously in intellectual capacity. Okay, for genetic reasons. Who said? Well, almost everyone. You know, look, you're watching the entire Academy drive itself mad over the idea that men can become women. So the fact that it's mainstream to believe that a man can become a woman by claiming that he is such and changing his pronouns is obviously ludicrous. I'm not saying it's mainstream. I'm saying it's accepted by virtually everyone in the mainstream and not the mainstream. The mainstream is in the look, the people who accept near universally are in the process of denying you a career. So I don't know why we're giving them credit. I have a lot of things to complain about. But again, this is something the principle that individuals are born with different cognitive aptitude is accepted by all geneticists on the left and the right. On the basis of what? On the basis of what? It's accepted by behavioral genetic studies. Which show what? Adoption studies, GWAS. It's accepted by everyone with more than two children. So, for example, there are studies that show that people with, that once you have a second child, your estimate for how heritable different traits are becomes very accurate. Interesting study. So anybody who has had at least two children, anybody who's looked at the science, at the genetics. But what is it in the genetics that's telling you this? I mean, I think you mentioned it. You said heritable. You said people's estimate of the heritability of these things goes up as they have more than one child. The accuracy of their estimate of the heritability goes up, yes. Well, the accuracy of their estimate of the heritability. So you're saying that parents' estimation of the heritability of these traits in their own children goes up. That having more than one. Well, their judgment about how heritable. I can't remember if that study included intelligence as one of their questions. But how heritable different personality traits are, they gave answers in line with what behavioral genetics has found. Right. But the problem is that they are also raising those children. So I'm not arguing that there is nothing heritable in the distinctions between people. There's lots that's heritable. For one thing, what we've talked about already in terms of the physical morphology of a child, a child who, you know, I've forgotten the name of the famous swimmer with the extremely long arms. Michael Phelps? Yeah, Phelps. That's the guy. So Phelps had long arms. I have no doubt that, you know, he gets in a pool. He finds that he swims faster than other people. He's rewarded for it. It results in him elaborating that capacity. So there's lots of things that will be heritable in the sense that people understand that term. But I think you want to leap from the obvious facts of things that are heritable in the sense that people understand the term to intelligence in adults. And the problem is you're making a giant logical leap. You say behavioral geneticists validate this. Effectively, what they're demonstrating is heritability, right? Yes. Okay. But heritability does not mean what people take it to mean. You want to define it? I mean, okay. Heritability doesn't mean fixed. It doesn't mean that... Specifically the inverse of facts. Okay. I mean, kind of teasing all that apart involves some labor. Well, this is exactly why I don't agree with the mainstream or the consensus or whatever it was that you were pointing to. So you agree that people differ in height for partly genetic reasons? Oh, yeah. The same objections to heritability would apply to height as to IQ. No. The fact is I'm not arguing that there are not heritable differences in IQ. What I'm arguing is that that doesn't mean what people think it means. I mean, what do people think it means? The whole concept is kind of complicated. Most people haven't put a lot of thought into it. So, yeah, that's probably true. Let me give an example so that people understand why I'm being a pain in the butt on this issue. Okay. As far as I know, having a nose, if you're a human being, is not heritable. Nose shape is highly heritable. If a population of noseless people evolves, then having a nose becomes highly heritable. That's a problem. It contravenes our understanding of heritable because when Darwin used the term or when people hear the term, what they think it means is that the genes encode the thing. Right? But that is not what it means at all. So let me give you an example. Let's say that we have an island somewhere in which you have people and you have house cats. And let's say that for whatever reason, the people on this island decide that the black house cats have to be kept in the dark for the first year of their life. Okay. So all black house cats are kept in the dark for the first year of their life, and then they're released. They will have profound deficits in their capability of visual perception. They won't be able to see. They'll be bumping into stuff. They will have no idea what the world around them means, and they will be thoroughly dependent on charity. If you measure their visual deficit, you will find it highly heritable. And you will think, oh, they've got bad genes for vision. No, they've got genes for a coat color that causes a developmental environment to be radically altered. That's what they have. That's why it shows up as heritable. And it is heritable. I'm not arguing that the measure isn't accurate. I'm arguing that the measure doesn't contain the information that people take it to contain. And so they extrapolate from it in ways that are unjustified. So for example, being a slave would at one point have been highly heritable. Yep. Because it's based on African ancestry that determines whether you're a slave. That doesn't mean that we can't. And you could say illiteracy would have been highly heritable by the same measure. Right. So if you want to explain how come other people aren't like von Neumann or Ramanujan, then just show there are two explanations. One is that, well, they just had a lot of special genes. The other explanation is that there's something analogous to the cat example where everyone else is locked in a room for the first few years of their life. And that's why they don't achieve their potential to be like John Neumann or Ramanujan. But then if you want to decide which one of those explanations is more plausible, I mean, just show what is the analogous thing to being locked in the dark for the first three years of your life. How has everyone else been deprived? What was how is all the other Tamil Brahmins were deprived compared to Ramanujan in what way? Just then you can then that would be plausible. Well, my point is we know that developmental environment has an implication for what cognitive skills develop. So your model in which getting lucky, a lucky collection of genes that contribute to cognitive capacity with no known relationship to a deficit, you know, without a trade off relationship. My point is absent the trade off relationship, I would expect all of those genes that you think John von Neumann possessed to go to fixation in the human population because they contribute no matter what role you play in the population. Unlike, let's say, extremely long arms, which are great if you're a swimmer and a hindrance if you're a carpenter. Well, I mean, your argument depends entirely on the denial of individual differences in intelligence based on that are related to genetics that are related to that. You're saying there's no that von Neumann is born. There's no reason to think that von Neumann is born with greater cognitive talent than anyone else. And so there's nothing special about his genes with respect to his brain. That's my argument. But I've already told you I accept the genetic differences that can give you elevated intelligence. I'm saying your argument that you're making assumes that Einstein, von Neumann, Ramanujan, they just had some developmental difference or something that we know they had developmental differences. Okay. Is in a different developmental habitat and is reinforced for different things. Sure. But you as far as I know, you haven't explained what was special about their developmental environment that caused them to have extraordinary abilities. It's not my responsibility to. It's not my responsibility to and nor what is it even conceivable. I don't know. I don't even know my own developmental environment. There are other features of it that I remember, but there are other features of it that I don't remember and can't can't surface to consciousness. So the point is why take this hypothesis seriously if you don't have any actual evidence for it because human beings have the longest developmental period of any creature that has ever evolved on Earth, at least. That's there for a reason. And it's there because our capabilities have been uniquely in humans offloaded to a mechanism of cultural transmission. What we are capable of. The fact that I am very capable in English and entirely feeble in French is all past outside of the genome. So I'm, you know, English, smart, French, stupid. So the point is, look, you've got a unique creature in which you've got a second modality of inheritance, which is not totally unique to humans, but is elaborated in humans beyond any other creature. And you have vast differences in the capabilities of people. Why is that guy so good at carpentry? Well, because he was mentored by somebody who was very good in carpentry. It's not genetic. So I'm not arguing. I've already granted you that it is possible to get genetic differences that do encode cognitive capability. They will tend to go to fixation. You have human populations that with very few exceptions are not isolated from each other. So the barrier to those genes going to fixation is non-existent. So if these characteristics without a trade off, if you had a trade off, if you could say, here's where the smarty pants genes cost you and therefore are selected against. If you had those trade offs, then we could say, well, OK, yeah, there are habitats in which this other value is favored at the expense, the inevitable unavoidable expense of intelligence. But you don't have that the way you do. It doesn't have to be selected against. It just doesn't have to be selected for the fish. Fish that live in a cave for a sufficient period of time will lose their eyesight or their eyesight will be significantly reduced. Even though eyesight might occasionally come in, come in, be used. It's selected against in that case. It's selected against because having eyes is costly and it creates a vulnerability that in those caves is not paid back. But I would point out that's even more true for the brain, which is the most metabolically expensive organ in the body. So you don't need extra brain, then it would be selected against. Right. If you don't need extra brain. So then what are you arguing? Where is the habitat that? So there's a so there is a cost to having more intelligence. Yes. And if you're if it's not useful in your niche, where is that condition? So that is performing the adaptive problems that exist in different environments. So in one environment that includes winters, it includes farming, it includes. Look, if you're a slave, if you're a slave surviving. Reinforces intelligence, figuring out how to communicate under the master's radar, figuring out what the actual rules of your particular plantation might be. These things favor intelligence. And that's my point is you don't have an environment with humans that doesn't favor intelligence. You do have environments for humans that don't favor heat retention. So we get sports differences. But the cognitive differences, I'm not again, I've told you, you can you can have genes that do encode differences in cognitive capacity. But my point is they will strongly tend to go to fixation in any population that isn't isolated. And all of the populations that we're talking about are not isolated from each other. So humans evolved in groups, populations in different parts of the world, which presented very different adaptive challenges. You would agree with that in principle, right? So different adaptive challenges are essentially real life IQ tests. Tracking an animal, building a bow and arrow, fishing in the ice in Alaska. There are IQ tests. They're all IQ tests, which is why we're talking about general intelligence. So they're all IQ tests, farming, planting seeds and reaping them and designing the tools. And it's all an IQ. It's all just different kinds of IQ tests. In principle, you don't need to be John von Neumann, or at least to have his intelligence that he had for whatever reason, leave that aside. You don't need to be John Neumann to poke a hole in the ground and put a seed in and cover it up. So that's an IQ test, right? So taking a hole in the ground, putting the seed in and covering it up is an IQ test that some people can't do. Some people would not be able to do that, but most people can. Fletching your arrow. That's an IQ test. Most people will be able to do that. Not every everyone can, but that's something that involves general intelligence. Some of these IQ tests will be harder than others. So building an igloo might be more difficult than sleeping on the ground, for example. Well, I think you're missing the ecological reality, which is there are no easy habitats, and there are no easy tasks because populations rise to carrying capacity, at which point the efficiency with which you do whatever it is that the environment asks of you is the difference between evolutionarily succeeding and evolutionarily failing. So, you know, you can say poking a hole in the ground is simple, and it is, but at the point that you're at carrying capacity and there's not enough food for more mouths, and somebody is going to starve, the efficiency with which you poke the holes in the ground is going to be the difference between life and death. It doesn't look like that kind of task, but it is. So human beings are hell-bent on discovering ways to make more of the calories that are at their disposal in every habitat all the time. Well, with one exception. At first, before a habitat is full up before the population reaches carrying capacity, that may not be the case, but then it produces more mouths until you're at carrying capacity, at which point all of these habitats are exerting the same pressure to figure out how to do what you're doing better. Well, at a certain point, you can only make the bow and arrow, you know, as well as you as follows as possible. You don't need to be John Neumann to John von Neumann to make a better bow and arrow. It's as good as it's going to get or a spear or track the antelope. John von Neumann might not be better at tracking the antelope than somebody who's just good at running or has better eyesight than he did. So there'll be subject to a different suite of selection pressures. Now, John von Neumann's intelligence might have been useful in a niche where you had a population that was selected for white-collar work, which is in fact where he came from. They came from such a population. So I disagree. I think the model you're putting forward is a cartoon in effect. Yes, it is true that you may have an optimal arrow tip, but the amount that you can know about the creatures that you're hunting and their likely behavior so that you are more effective at finding them, at tracking them, kill them quicker, make use of more parts of them. All of those things are IQ tests. So there's never a point at which you've slam dunked all the IQ tests and something else is a priority. Being smarter is better. You're right that the brain does have an energetic cost, which if a brain is not being used would push in the direction of shrinking it. But the habitat where the brain is not valuable is not obvious to me at least. I would also point out you've pointed to IQ differences between blacks and whites, presumably in the US. Is that right? Blacks, virtually all of which in the US are derived from a slave population, had the mechanism, their cultural transmission of culturally heritable information mechanism was disrupted and intentionally so. You had people who didn't speak the same language being put in the field right next to each other. You had children being forcibly removed from their parents. So the culture that would have been transmitted in their ancestral habitat was systematically disrupted. And now you're looking hundreds of years later at a difference and you're attributing it to genes. And my point is you've got a perfectly obvious mechanism that isn't so unlike denying cats access to light during their development. If the brain is not being disrupted, they shouldn't have the same problem. In fact, African Americans score higher on IQ tests than Africans in Africa. Okay. But how appropriate is the test? You've got a test that was developed based on the fact that it predicts performance in the West. So my point would be that test is inappropriate. You're putting it in a habitat. I mean, the fact is, you know, heritable attributes vary in their value based on habitat. You know that. I think you've written that. This test has a habitat in which it applies and you're applying it somewhere else and expecting it to work just as well. You know, it's a problem. Then the reason why they scored lower on the test isn't because the transmission of culture was disrupted because if that hadn't been disrupted, you agree they would score lower on the test. No, I don't have a reason for that. You say it's because it's a different environment, which is fine. But then your explanation can't be that that the transmission was disrupted because their IQs are higher than it would have been if it wasn't disrupted. Maybe I missed something, but what I would argue is that for all of the populations in the U.S. Save two, you have a similar story of how they became integrated. Right. If you talk about the Irish, if you talk about European Jews, doesn't matter. You've got a population. You get immigrants. Those immigrants exist in a kind of hobbled but cohesive form struggling against things like language barriers. Their children become native speakers and they basically have access to the collective culture. It gets taken in in a normal form because human beings are built to make such a transition. That's very different than having your native culture systematically disrupted and then effectively being expected to take in a foreign culture in some sort of systematic way. I don't know. The same patterns of differences exist all over the world again and again. If you have certain population, you have patterns of population differences, Sub-Saharan Africans, East Asians, Europeans. You see the same patterns of differences. Even in populations that have been subject to very different conditions, have very different histories. You have Ethiopia, which was never invaded by Mussolini in 1935 and liberated in 1941. Besides that was never colonized, has been largely left alone. Their outcomes are generally worse than those that have been colonized. You have East Asians all over the world exhibiting exactly the Korea, Japan, China. These places have very different cultures, different religions, different languages. Yet, you see the same patterns of behavior wherever they go all over the world. What is the parsimonious explanation? Well, it depends what pattern you're trying to explain. Obviously, these are not independent data points. You have interactions between cultures that are consistent for reasons. You can go back to Guns, Germs, and Steel. You can understand, I don't know how you feel about Guns, Germs, and Steel as an explanation. Jared Diamond believes in race differences. He says that Australian Aborigines are more intelligent than white people for genetic reasons. His evidence is that it seems that way to him. Well, first of all, if we're talking about Aborigines, you're talking about one of the few populations that does retain sufficient isolation for the genetic differences that I'm saying would otherwise go to fixation for that not to be the case. So, Guns, Germs, and Steel says that they're more intelligent than Europeans because first, I think the term that Jared Diamond uses, they strike him as being more intelligent. And he comes up with an evolutionary explanation, which is that they've been subject to more intense evolutionary pressures over the last several thousand years, and so they have maintained a high-level intelligence, whereas Europeans have lost some degree of intelligence. So, Jared Diamond believes in race differences. Well, so do I. I've already told you that. Innate race differences intelligence, but in this case, you're saying that it could be less intelligent. He's saying they're more intelligent. No, no, no. You're conflating something. I'm agreeing that there are racial differences in intelligence. You're then imposing innate. That's the place that we're hanging out. Now, with respect to—I don't know what to think about Jared Diamond's claim about aborigines, but the fact is existing in a habitat that demands something of you will refine those characteristics, but that is reflective of my point, not yours. A demanding environment is effectively one in which you have developmental training to solve certain problems. If you're watching or if you're playing video games— —the development, but also the fitness is determined by your ability to solve problems within that environment, and that ability can be associated with heritable traits. So there will be natural selection. All right, two points. One, see my earlier point about heritability. Two, I think you're underrating the degree to which human beings are special, and you have a second mode of inheritance that has everything to do with how intelligent you end up. Right? Culture evolved for a reason. A cultural mind that comes not totally unprogrammed, but comes amenable to having a program loaded into it after birth. That's a very special condition, and it has a lot to do with why human beings are so intelligent. It's not a secondary thing. It's not an arbitrary thing. It's the key to human success. So— Yeah, so there's—in each environment, there's a body of cultural knowledge that develops to solve some of the adaptive problems in that environment. Yes. Now, your ability to acquire that body of knowledge and act on that knowledge that is appropriate to your environment will itself depend on heritable traits. Now, wait a second. To be a farmer may require mastering a different—will require mastering a different set of cultural information than to be a hunter-gatherer. And which one is more cognitively challenging is not something that can be known a priori. Okay, so let's take maybe the one example we have where we can test your intuition from what you've just said. The utility of a given language is contingent on where on the Earth you're going to be. So speaking Italian, if you're going to be in China, is not very valuable. So what cultural toolkit you have dictates your capacity to function? What has never been demonstrated, as far as I know, is any propensity for any population to have any advantage in learning any human language. That is to say, this is entirely developmental. If you are Han Chinese and you're born in Manhattan, you will speak English with the same level of fluency or likely level of fluency as a Dutch immigrant or a American Indian or anyone else. There's no bias in your propensity to pick up any Earth language. Well, that's not quite true. People vary significantly in their ability to speak—they speak eloquently to reason with language. Individuals are very— Those are also part of speaking. Right. Oh, individuals vary tremendously. But there's no—it's not that you come from a particular population or race and therefore you have advantages in learning English. It's that there are individual differences in how well you learn, which again— Well, most people—I don't know if you know the levels—A1, A2, B1, B2, C1, C2—that measure fluency. But most people are at B2 or C1 in their native language. So there—you know, C2 is an educated speaker. Most people don't make it there. So it's certainly an open question whether there are no race differences in the capacity to achieve C1, C2 level in your native language. Wait, wait, wait, wait. I don't understand that. That again seems like a major leap to me. Yes, people vary tremendously in their capability of speaking fluently in their native tongue. No question about it. What I think I heard you say is that maybe those are racial differences with respect to what language you learn, which I don't understand. I don't have data on that, but you said that there are no differences and there's no reason to believe that. All right. Let me sum this up so that the audience knows what the hell we're disagreeing over. I am not arguing that differences in capability in a language don't exist at an individual level. They're profound. I'm not saying that intelligence doesn't differ between individuals. They are profound differences. What we disagree over is what the likely explanation is for how those differences came about. And my point would be we see profound distinctions in facility and language, for example, that are clearly the result of developmental differences. I mean, the most obvious of them is that you don't grow up in China and find yourself speaking Swedish. Your facility in Chinese has everything to do with the fact that Chinese is what's in the air around you. And my point is that we are underrating because we can measure genes and because they seem very powerful to us. We are underrating the largely still mysterious mechanisms of cultural evolution that shape the way we think, the way we communicate, the way we partner in thinking. All of those patterns are staring us in the face. They are profoundly important and likely explanatory of many of the differences that I hear you attributing to genes. And so that's where the question goes. What is the causal explanation for the distinctions you're pointing to, not whether the distinctions are real? Sure. But I would again highlight the fact that your argument depends on your view that somebody like John Neumann, John von Neumann, doesn't have any innate genetically based cognitive talent compared to Joe Schmo. And I think very few people would agree with that. Well, let me flush that out just slightly, just so it's on the table. The part that is hard for me to accept analytically is that you have cognitive advantages based in material differences in genetic sequences that provide significant advantages and don't go to fixation in populations that aren't isolated. That's the part that I struggle with. It is certainly true that defective genes will easily create distinctions in cognitive capacity that will show up in heritability measures. So in other words, the hard part to imagine is how you get extraordinary capacity out of genes that haven't gone to fixation. The easy part to understand is how you will get measurable differences in IQ that owe to genes as a result of bad code. Right. If you have a mutation and it results in a gene being dysfunctional, it will create heritable differences. But that's a far easier thing to understand on the negative side than on the positive side. But I don't understand then why shouldn't the genes for running speed in West Africans have gone to fixation too? Because of trade-offs. What is the trade-off? What is Usain Bolt's trade-off? He seems to be fine. Who's saying Bolt's trade-off? Usain Bolt. He's the fastest man ever. What is his disadvantage in the context of his ancestral environment? I mean, I can't specify what the disadvantage is, but we know that there's a difference between fast twitch muscle and endurance muscle. So there's a trade-off built in that I, you happen to have landed on an example where I can point to it. And the fact that I can't point to it in some other example doesn't matter. In physical space, you have trade-offs that will manifest. If you become better at, you know, if you're an agile flyer, it will come at the cost of efficiency. So in physical space, the trade-offs are inherent and they are unbeatable. You have to choose one direction or the other or compromise. In cognitive ability, smarter is always better. Now, you've come up with one trade-off, which is energetics, but the energetics only manifest in a case where you can, where brain capacity, cognitive capacity isn't being tested. And my claim is that habitat doesn't exist. I mean, my view is that once you have the sufficient intelligence to solve the problems, the adaptive problems in your environment, it's just more selection for intelligence. These genes aren't going to go to fixation. Well, here's the thing. I will go back to my PhD advisor's point, which is that at the point that human beings become the dominant arbiter of each other's success, that there is no limit to the value of increased cognitive capacity because you're effectively in an arms race with other people. So there's no point at which you've mastered the tasks of the environment. What you're looking at is an environment with a clever antagonist that you have to outwit. What do people, in fact, use intelligence for? To think deep thoughts? To do mathematics? I mean, this is often not something that increases fitness. No, no, I would interrupt you, but I think Buckminster Fuller nailed it. He described a process he called ephemeralization, the process by which we can do more and more with less and less until eventually we can do everything with nothing. Now, of course, that's a classic Fullerism in the sense that he takes it to the point of an absurd paradox. But that's the basic point. There's never until you can do everything with nothing. There's always more to be accomplished that rewards greater intelligence. I will rest my case with my claim that John von Neumann was born different from the average person and was destined to be more intelligent for genetic reasons. Okay, and I will argue that while technically possible, that is not a logically supported position based on an unlikely premise of genes for greater intelligence that have not gone to fixation. Well, we'll let the audience decide. All right, perfect. I will say, I don't know how many people followed this conversation. I really enjoyed it. I appreciate that you are dedicated to pursuing these things and that you're not cowed by the nasty things people say about you. I hope that your university gets over its spasm of cowardice and maybe we can tangle about other issues down the road. Thank you very much. All right. Thanks for joining us, everyone. Be well.