Iconoclast

Name: Iconoclast | Ideas That Have Shaped The Culture Wars
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Ideas That Have Shaped The Culture Wars

Mark Halloran(Author)

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Iconoclast: Ideas That Have Shaped The Culture Wars
Edited by Mark Halloran Ph.D.
Iconoclast: Ideas That Have Shaped The Culture Wars
Edited by Mark Halloran Ph.D.
Academica PressWashington~London
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Halloran, Mark (author)
Title: Iconoclast : ideas that have shaped the culture wars | Halloran, Mark.
Description: Washington : Academica Press, 2022. | Includes references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022939776 | ISBN 9781680532661 (hardcover) | 9781680532678 (paperback) | 9781680532685 (e-book)
Iconoclasm:A Very Brief History of the Culture Wars vii
References xix
Mark Halloran
On COVID19 and Times of Plague 27
References 49
Based on an interview with Nicholas Christakis
Postmodernism and the Failure of Moral Triage 55
References 73
Based on an interview with Peter Boghossian
Me, She, He, They: Reality vs. Identity in the 21st Century 77
References 93
Heather Heying
On Free Speech Absolutismand the Deontological Pursuit of Truth 97
References 119
Based on an interview with Gad Saad
Let Us Prey: On Islamic Immigrationin Europe and Women's Rights 125
References 141
Based on an interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali
On DarkHorse, Ivermectin and Vaccine Hesitancy 143
References 158
Based on an interview with Eric Topol
Black Politicized Lives Matter 163
References 176
Heather Mac Donald
Making Evolutionary Sense of Sex and Gender 179
References 195
Jennifer A. Marshall Graves
Stories and Data: Reflections on Race, Riots, and Police 199
References 205
Coleman Hughes
In Defense of Free Speech 209
References 226
Based on an interview with James Flynn
Acknowledgments 229
Iconoclasm: A Very Brief History of the Culture Wars
References
'Culture war' - even the term itself has historically been contentious and divisive. In America, it originated and gained popular usage in the 1920s, to describe the conflict between urban and rural America
between those who possessed liberal, progressive values and those who held to traditional, conservative beliefs.1 In the 1990s, the term was reintroduced into the cultural zeitgeist by University of Virginia sociologist James Davison Hunter, with the publication of Culture Wars: The Struggle
~
This book contains many of the ideas that have shaped the culture wars of the last two decades. Iconoclast, as a title, may seem somewhat hyperbolic. I know that the term had been used in reference to the New Atheist writer
the late Christopher Hitchens,5 but perhaps it is best reserved for historical figures of the magnitude of Galileo. Regardless, this is a book about ideas and the conflicts that come with expressing those ideas. It is also a very brief history. So let us now examine, fleetin
~
In October 2015, sociologist and physician Nicholas Christakis and his wife Erica Christakis, who is a lecturer in early childhood studies, apologised for the hurt they had caused students and resigned from their positions as Co-Masters of Silliman College, Yale. This occurred due to student protests instigated by an email that Erica had sent to all Silliman students in regards to Halloween costumes. Erica's email was in response to an earlier email by Yale's Intercultural Affairs Committee whic
In the aftermath, Nicholas Christakis decided to engage the students in a civil discussion. This resulted in 2-hour long debate where Christakis was surrounded by an angry crowd of protesting students, which was filmed from multiple angles, and subsequently became viral on social media.7 Christakis discussed the events on an episode of the then Waking Up podcast with Sam Harris titled Facing the Crowd.8 Harris commended Christakis for his patience and calmness in the face of truculence of the st
students in favour of the values of classical liberalism and human universality.
In Iconoclast I discuss with Christakis the importance of free enquiry to the mission of the university and his book Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live.9 We discuss the evidence for the lab leak hypothesis, the issues surrounding the racialization of the American healthcare system, and his idea that the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests were not only a direct result of the murder of George Floyd and a history of racialized police violence in Americ
~
Evergreen State College is a public liberal arts and sciences college in Olympia, Washington which drew national attention in 2017. Evergreen had a tradition - the annual Day of Absence, which was based on the idea from a 1965 play of the same name by Douglas Ward Turner, whereby minority students and faculty would spend the day off campus to discuss campus issues and to highlight their contribution via their absence.10 Following the election of Donald Trump, Evergreen decided to reconceptualise
There is a huge difference between a group or coalition deciding to voluntarily absent themselves from a shared space in order to highlight their vital and under-appreciated roles ... and a group or coalition encouraging another group to go away. The first is a forceful call to consciousness, which is, of course, crippling to the logic of oppression. The second is a show of force, and an act of oppression in itself.
Protest activists stated that students were angered by Weinstein's emails but this was not what triggered the protests.11 In May 2017 police apprehended two black students from their dorms at midnight due to a non-physical altercation in the cafeteria that day - the white student was not taken in for questioning. The protesters claim Weinstein came out of his classroom and confronted the students who were protesting this, agitating them, and when the police arrived they believed that Weinstein h
Weinstein and his wife, the evolutionary biologist Heather Heying, tell a different version of events.13,14 They tell the story of the new college president George Bridges, who, on taking the position, significantly increased administration and fostered an environment of radical political ideology. Bridge's consistent acquiescence to the extreme demands of student protestors created an environment where the protestors were embolden to take control of the campus. Film of Bridges essentially being
In Iconoclast Heying writes about non-binary identity and the reality of the pronoun 'they' in an essay that came about in response to an article written by Anne Fadiman for Harper's Magazine titled "All My Pronouns."16 Heying argues for the distinction between biological and sociological categories and that linguistic terms have to be tethered to the reality of humans being a sexually dimorphic species.
~
On March 2, 2017, Charles Murray, a social scientist and fellow at the American Enterprise Institute was scheduled to give a talk at Middlebury college. Murray was the co-author, with the late Richard J. Hernstein, of the controversial New York Times bestseller The Bell Curve which was released in 1994
17 a book about the stratification of American society based on intelligence, which contained a chapter on race and IQ. A crowd of 400 protestors, predominantly students, filled the Wilson Hall in
Middlebury had become the latest flashpoint in the intensifying culture wars on college campuses. Major news outlets such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal condemned the actions of the protestors, and schools such as Middlebury gained a reputation as being intolerant of liberal values and essentially anti-intellectual safe spaces which were hostile to conservative thought.19 In the aftermath, Murray appeared on an episode of Sam Harris's podcast titled Forbidden Knowledge, where
Harris then entered into an email exchange and debate with Vox journalist Ezra Klein who, validly, criticised Harris for not having an in depth knowledge of intelligence research, and also accused him of engaging in a kind of 'anti-woke' identity politics in relation to his collusion with Murray during their interview.23 In debating Harris, Klein drew on the work of the late intelligence researcher James Flynn, whose work focussed on the environmental causes for racial differences in IQ.24 In my
~
Ayaan Hirsi Ali rose to prominence after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the US. Hirsi Ali had started working as a researcher for a think tank for the Dutch Labour Party, and the attacks served as the catalyst for her public criticisms and disavowal of her old faith. Two years later, Hirsi Ali was elected to the Dutch parliament for the centre-right party The People's Party for Freedom and Democracy.26 Then, on November 2, 2004 Hirsi Ali's friend and collaborator, the film maker The
Hirsi Ali has faced cancellation multiple times. In 2014 Brandeis University cancelled its plans to give her an honorary degree due to her criticisms of Islam,28 and in 2017 she cancelled a speaking tour of Australia and New Zealand with Think Inc. due to security concerns and 'a succession of organizational lapses' by the event organiser.29 She has been listed by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a well-respected entity known for its advocacy against discrimination and its classification of hate
~
University of Toronto psychology professor and clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson was first catapulted into the stratosphere of the cultural zeitgeist in October 2016, due to film of him interacting with student protestors and arguing with them about his refusal to use new gender pronouns, which subsequently went viral.33 Peterson then went on to be interviewed by Cathy Newman from Channel 4 News, to discuss his book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote for Chaos, where, in a fiery exchange, they d
Peterson and Gad Saad, a Lebanese-born Canadian Professor of Marketing at the John Molson School of Business at Concordia University, appeared before the Canadian Senate in 2017, to debate the introduction of Bill C-16, a piece of legislation which sought to include gender identity and expression within federal human rights protections.36,37 Peterson argued that the concept of gender identity and expression were too broad and that the legislation to make people use gender-neutral pronouns would
In a wide-ranging conversation for Iconoclast, I discuss with Gad his book The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas are Killing Common Sense.40 We discuss his work within the field of evolutionary psychology and his commitment to free speech absolutism, as well his adherence to deontological principles. We also discuss how adherence to these principles became a point of contention which caused the rift with Sam Harris, who in Gad's view, with his support of Trump's removal from Twitter, violated
~
The Grievance Studies Affair (or Sokal Squared) was an academic hoax orchestrated by the philosopher Peter Boghossian, James A. Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose - to illustrate the corruption and bias occurring within 'grievance studies' fields in universities. Conducted over 2017 to 2018 the project involved submitting 20 hoax papers to academic journals in race, queer, cultural, gender, sexuality and fat studies fields to see if they would pass through peer review and be accepted for publication.43
In Iconoclast, I am in conversation with Peter Boghossian, where we discuss some of the philosophical underpinnings of postmodernism, why speech isn't violence and the problem with the idea of cultural appropriation. According to Boghossian the far left's current focus on controlling language within institutions, based on ideas from poststructuralism, is intended to manufacture different outcomes. He says that terms such as 'anti-racism' and 'diversity, inclusion and equity' simply don't mean wh
~
On May 25, 2020, George Floyd, a 46 year old black man, was murdered by Derek Chauvin, a 44 year old white man who was a 19-year veteran of the Minneapolis police department. Chauvin, after apprehending Floyd on the suspicion of possessing a counterfeit $20 bill, had knelt on his neck for over 9 minutes, while Floyd was lying face down and handcuffed in the street - in spite of Floyd's repeated protests that he couldn't breathe.51-54 The incident had been filmed by bystanders and caught on secu
In 2016, Heather Mac Donald, the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute,59 gave a talk at Hilldale College in regards to her book The War On Cops.60 In this speech she stated that black on black crime was a far greater threat to black Americans than police violence. She stated that: 'There is no government agency more dedicated to the proposition that black lives matter than the police,' and that 'We have been talking obsessively about alleged police racism over the last 20 years in o
In her essay for Iconoclast Mac Donald once again explores these themes in relation to the politics of BLM, and the hyper focus on the small number of police killings of unarmed black men. This seems to come about due to a confluence of factors: protestor and political advocacy, institutional support, the media focus which causes an availability heuristic about the prevalence of these killings,65 and a general social unwillingness to confront difficult truths about the crime rate in some black c
~
In early June 2021, Bret Weinstein began making claims about the anti-parasitic drug ivermectin, stating it was a highly effective prophylaxis and treatment for COVID19. On his DarkHorse Podcast he hosted Dr Pierre Kory (M.D) from the Front Line COVID19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCA),69 in an episode titled COVID, Ivermectin, and the Crime of the Century, where Weinstein and his guest stated that ivermectin was '99% effective' in treating COVID19, and that if the drug were distributed widely it
Weinstein also interviewed Steve Kirsch and Dr Robert Malone, who was touted as being the inventor of mRNA vaccine technology, in an episode of The DarkHorse Podcast titled How to Save the World in Three Easy Steps.75 In this episode Weinstein's guests made a series of claims about the safety of the vaccines, including that the spike protein produced by the vaccines was cytotoxic and that the transmembrane domain, which is supposed to anchor the spike protein to a localised site, fails, and the
Sam Harris, a friend of Weinstein, interviewed Eric Topol, who is a professor of molecular medicine at The Scripps Research Institute, on an episode of his podcast titled A Contagion of Bad Ideas, where Topol characterised Weinstein's position on mRNA vaccines as 'Totally irresponsible. It's reckless. It's sick. It casts unnecessary doubt... It's taking people who want to believe in a conspiracy, or who don't know what to believe, and making vaccines look like they are intended to harm. With no
In a conversation conducted on October 14, 2021 for Iconoclast, I spoke with Eric Topol and we discussed the research on ivermectin, the Delta variant, and the claims made on the episode of The DarkHorse Podcast featuring Dr Robert Malone. In regards to ivermectin we discussed issues in relation to power and experimental design, as well as the fraudulent studies that had to be excluded from the meta-analysis. Topol also restated his belief that the views expressed on The DarkHorse Podcast consti
~
This book contains some of the most important ideas that have shaped the current culture wars. It is not, however, a story about left versus right, or 'anti-woke' versus 'woke.' It is a book about the cultural transmission of ideas, and how we converse with one another. Eric Weinstein coined the term Intellectuals of the Dark Web (IDW)85 to describe an informal group of ideologically and politically disparate thinkers that now include Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson, Bret Weinstein, Ben Shapiro, Dou
We live in the age of social media, the advent of which has led to the mass democratization of opinion, which makes it increasingly difficult for many to discern truth from error.88 On social media, people seem divided
civility is low, and everything is hyperpartisan. The old gatekeepers
the traditional media, with their inherent flaws and biases, are receding into the distance and are almost gone - trust in institutions is low. The voice of one may now be broadcast and influence countless oth
Mark Halloran
Ph.D
February 2, 2022
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69. ?Bret Weinstein | DarkHorse Podcast: COVID, Ivermectin, and the Crime of the Century: DarkHorse Podcast with Pierre Kory & Bret Weinstein on Apple Podcasts. Apple Podcasts. Accessed December 14, 2021. https://podcasts. apple.com/us/podcast/covid-ivermectin-and-the-crime-of-the/id1471581521 ?i=1000523859023
70. #1671 - Bret Weinstein & Dr. Pierre Kory.
2021. Accessed December 14, 2021. https://open.spotify.com/episode/7uVXKgE6eLJKMXkETwcw0D
71. Piper K. The dubious rise of ivermectin as a Covid-19 treatment, explained. Vox. Published September 17, 2021. Accessed January 20, 2022. https:// www.vox.com / future - perfect / 22663127 / ivermectin-covid - treatments-vaccines-evidence
72. CDC. Cases, Data, and Surveillance. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Published February 11, 2020. Accessed January 17, 2022. https:// www.cdc.gov / coronavirus /2019-ncov/covid-data/investigations-discovery/ hospitalization-death-by-race-ethnicity.html
73. August 6, 2021: Early Treatment of COVID-19 with Repurposed Therapies: The TOGETHER Adaptive Platform Trial (Edward Mills, PhD, FRCP). Rethinking Clinical Trials. Published August 11, 2021. Accessed February 1, 2022. https:// rethinkingclinicaltrials.org / news / august - 6 - 2021 - early-treatment-of-covid-19-with-repurposed-therapies-the-together-adaptive-platform-trial-edward-mills-phd-frcp/
74. ?Bret Weinstein | DarkHorse Podcast: How to save the world, in three easy steps. on Apple Podcasts. Apple Podcasts. Accessed December 14, 2021. https://podcasts.apple.com/si/podcast/how-to-save-the-world-in-three-easy-steps/id1471581521?i=1000525032595
75. COVID-19 medical misinformation policy - YouTube Help. Accessed February 1, 2022. https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9891785?hl= en
76. Looking for COVID-19 'Miracle Drugs?' We Already Have Them. They're Called Vaccines. Quillette. Published July 6, 2021. Accessed December 14, 2021. https://quillette.com/2021/07/06/looking-for-covid-19-miracle-drugs-we-already-have-them-theyre-called-vaccines/
77. ?Bret Weinstein | DarkHorse Podcast: #87: We Must Drive this Virus to Extinction (Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying DarkHorse Livestream) on Apple Podcasts. Apple Podcasts. Accessed February 1, 2022. https:// podcasts.apple.com / au / podcast/87-we-must-drive-this-virus-to-extinction-bret-weinstein/id1471581521?i=1000528685411
78. Claire Lehmann. You may dislike the style and tone of the article we published, but that does not change the simple fact that what @HeatherEHeying and @BretWeinstein have been saying regarding vaccines & COVID is both faulty & irresponsible https://t.co/FGESXXfyrr. @clairlemon. Published July 8, 2021. Accessed February 1, 2022. https://twitter.com/clairlemon/status/1413021640250707968
79. Claire Lehmann. @BretWeinstein @colwight You are *not* qualified to contradict the published research via podcast. If you are so sure of your expertise and the veracity of your claims then follow the normal scientific process. Write your hypotheses down, test them, & share your method with the world. @clairlemon. Published July 4, 2021. Accessed February 1, 2022. https://twitter.com/clairlemon/status/1411539943285944328
80. Claire Lehmann. @BretWeinstein @HistoryBound @mtaibbi Don't patronise me. Your rhetoric is fuelling vaccine hesitancy, and you know it. You need to fix what you are creating. @clairlemon. Published July 3, 2021. Accessed February 1, 2022. https://twitter.com/clairlemon/status/141122954 6968350722
81. Claire Lehmann. @BretWeinstein Have you told your legion of followers that the ivermectin hype was based on fraud yet? @clairlemon. Published November 9, 2021. Accessed January 29, 2022. https://twitter.com/ clairlemon/status/1458165606960664577
82. Sam Harris. A Contagion of Bad Ideas: A Conversation with Eric Topol (Episode #256).
2021. Accessed January 20, 2022. https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=7jQfNzk_CFk
83. Merlan A. The Ivermectin Advocates' War Has Just Begun. Vice. Published July 1, 2021. Accessed January 20, 2022. https://www.vice.com/en/article /y3d5gv/ivermectin-covid-treatment-advocates-rogan-weinstein-hecker
84. Weiss B, Winter D. Opinion | Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/08/opinion /intellectual-dark-web.html. Published May 8, 2018. Accessed January 20, 2022.
85. Critical Thoughts. Sam Harris Cancels His Membership To The Intellectual Dark Web.
2021. Accessed February 1, 2022. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=vPc7r9LRxBE
86. Freedom Pact. Why Did Sam Harris Leave The Intellectual Dark Web? | Bret Weinstein & Dave Rubin Respond.
2021. Accessed February 1, 2022. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4SagZ06ecc
87. Olaniran B, Williams I. Social Media Effects: Hijacking Democracy and Civility in Civic Engagement. Platf Protests Chall Networked Democr. Published online February 27, 2020:77-94. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-36525-7_5
On COVID19 and Times of Plague
References
Based on an interview with Nicholas A. Christakis
Your arrow for my tears - Homer, The Iliad
Mark Halloran: I want to focus on your book Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live,1 but I did want to speak to you first about the culture of Yale. I know that you've been prominent in the free speech debates, both at Harvard and Yale, and you were involved in a fairly notorious incident a few years ago, in relation to Halloween costumes.2 And recently, there was a speech given at Yale by a visiting psychiatrist which was about 'The Psychopathic Probl
Nicholas Christakis: First of all, I would say that elite universities in rich democracies, like the United States, are, in some ways, a hallmark of our civilization. They are remarkable institutions that are worth protecting and worth preserving. And their mission, in my view, is the preservation, production and dissemination of knowledge. That's the mission of the university
that's what it's supposed to do. That's not the mission of courts. That's not the mission of the legislature. That's no
Therefore, we want a set of circumstances that optimizes the furtherance of that mission. And that requires, in my view, a deep commitment to classic liberalism, which involves a set of principles that, among other things, address the importance of free and open expression. And it's not just about protecting individuals from the actions of the institution or protecting citizens from the actions of the government, as the first amendment does in the United States. It's about the affirmative effort
If you're so confident in the truth of your ideas: engage with your opponents and win the battle of ideas. Don't silence them. And this, of course, goes back to the classic J.S. Mill, statement: 'He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.' How can you actually be sure in your beliefs if you do not engage with people who oppose your beliefs? In fact, your opponents are providing you a service. This is why, for example, in the martial arts, you bow to your opponents before yo
The fundamental commitment, in my view, at any serious university - and in fact, my belief is that this commitment is also wise and helpful for our broader society - is to free and open expression. This is crucial to the production of knowledge. Universities do basic research for generations. The fact that we have mRNA vaccines that are available to us right now to face the COVID19 pandemic, which has depended on 30 years of basic research that came before it, is an illustration of this. It is n
So those commitments to free expression are crucial to our ability to be rich and powerful, to produce knowledge that ultimately drives our ability to be wealthy and strong. So, these are deep and fundamental and important commitments to free and open expression that we should have in our institutions and in our broader society. Incidentally, I discussed the reasons and ways we evolved to learn from each other, precisely to derive such benefits, in my book Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of
Therefore, with respect to the specific example you gave of this visiting professor who was invited to campus at Yale, and I think the title of her talk, was this something like 'the psychopathic tendency of the white mind?'
The Psychopathic Problem of the White Mind.
Yes, I myself would not have invited her to come to give a talk. I would regard that title, and the description of the talk, as ideological. But I would not prohibit anyone else on campus from inviting such a person to give such a talk, nor, if such a person were invited, would I oppose her speaking. I would not say she should be disinvited either, after having been invited in the first place. However, I would push back powerfully at her ideas, which I reject as racist and as incoherent. And I w
Universities during the McCarthy era had the problem of conservatism and also almost criminalizing left-wing thought. There was a right-wing suppression of free speech, but the issue for you is that you're trying to create a dialogue. It's been described in lots of different ways in terms of postmodernist thought, identity politics etc. Really, when I watched you in the video with the students, where you're trying to communicate with them, it occurred to me that you're trying to create a dialogu
Yes, well, I generally do not discuss the events of 2015,5 because they are so in the past now. My commitment to liberalism is very long standing, and goes back decades. But I'm politically on the left. Of course, not that that matters. But I think of myself as a classical liberal.
But then you look at the danger of this illiberalism in society because you brought it up in your book Apollo's Arrow. You talked about hospital administrations and bureaucracies trying to silence healthcare workers. I once spoke with the late intelligence researcher, James Flynn, and I said to him, I wonder if the university has ever stably been a place of free expression and thought?
Like all institutions, some institutions fail to honor their fundamental commitments. For example, the judiciary is supposed to be an impartial arbiter of justice. But we know that sometimes judges are corrupt. It's less common in our society than in some others, but even in our society, this happens. So, we have the fundamental commitment of equal justice under law. But any institution is capable of failing to honor its commitments. And so, you're absolutely right that universities do, from tim
It relates back to your work in terms of being quite optimistic in terms of human nature. Where you discuss the qualities of compassion, love, collaboration you state that these are fundamental human qualities. But I always feel as though they're tied to their opposites: cruelty, hate, xenophobia.
Yes, but here's the thing: the benefits of a connected life must have outweighed the costs. Otherwise, we would have evolved to live as isolated individuals. So, you're absolutely right. When I come near you, I expose myself to the risk of violence, cruelty, and mendacity. And that's true. But equally when I come near you, I expose myself to the benefits of being connected. I can learn from you, you can teach me, we can work together and cooperate to achieve greater objectives.
The way I discuss this in Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society is similar to what Steven Pinker is saying. In the last 200 years, driven by technological advances in Europe (such as the steam engine) that were in turn built upon scientific discoveries related to physics and chemistry, and coupled with a shift in ideological commitments (such as those advanced by the Enlightenment philosophers on the equality of human beings and on the importance of democratic principles - which
But my argument is that we do not necessarily need to rely on historical and technological forces to provide an account of a good life and why human beings are capable of living in peace with each other. What I'm arguing is that more powerful, more ancient, deeper forces are at work propelling a good society. And in fact, the arc of our evolutionary history is long, but it bends towards goodness.
So, what I look at is our history over the last 300,000 years, not just the last 300 years. How has evolution shaped us and endowed us with these wonderful qualities? For example, the capacity for friendship. Like other animals, we mate with each other. But we also befriend each other: we form long-term, non-reproductive unions with other members of our species who are unrelated to us. This is exceedingly rare in the animal kingdom. We do it. Certain other primates do it
elephants do it
and ce
We tend to focus on the Enlightenment as though the Enlightenment is the only wellspring of those ideas. You can find universality of human experience within African philosophy and you can find some of the tenets of the Enlightenment within the Islamic Golden Age. But I would say that the problem is the tendency for humans to form in-groups and out-groups, and we're very good at collaborating within an in-group, but our tendency is to vilify and to see the out-group as the Other. And this tenden
Yes, but I discuss these ideas, again, in Blueprint at length. There's a fundamental question about whether animosity towards the out-group was actually required for the emergence of cooperation in the in-group. In other words, must we be warlike without in order to be peaceful within? And there's a lot of debate about this. It's unclear. Many evolutionary models seem to suggest that 'Well, no, what's required at a minimum is indifference to the out-group, not hatred.' It's one thing to say 'Our
Now I should hasten to add I am not a genetic determinist
nothing I'm saying should suggest that culture and history don't also play a role in shaping us to be good. But we are social animals and we have been for many hundreds of thousands of years.
I think we will move on to Apollo's Arrow. I spoke to Nobel Laureate Peter Doherty,6 and we talked about COVID emerging through zoonotic transfer. Essentially, in bats, probably to pangolins, or some other sort of intermediate host. Now, the theory which seems to be taken much more seriously, even Dr. Fauci7 has talked about it, is the lab leak hypothesis. And I wondered what you thought of that?
In Apollo's Arrow, I said that, most likely, it was a zoonotic leap, but that we could not exclude the lab leak hypothesis. The consensus among expert geneticists is that this is not an engineered pathogen, nor was it a modified pathogen (though some disagree). The latter possibility is a little harder to be certain about, but it seems very unlikely. Nobody thinks it was a deliberate lab leak, either, by the way. Thus, the competing hypotheses are: did it come from an animal and jump to humans?
If I had to bet, I still think zoonotic leap is more likely. Why? Well because SARS 1, in 2003, was a zoonotic leap, and so we have a nice precedent there. We also know many others zoonoses, from HIV to Zika virus. We know that influenza viruses do this - this is very common. And bats are often an origin of zoonotic diseases. So, I still think that a zoonotic leap is more likely, but we cannot exclude the lab leak hypothesis. There has been some evidence for the lab leak theory, too. There's bee
I suspect our intelligence agencies know a lot more than we do. And the Chinese have not acted in a transparent way to dispel the lab leak theory. If it was not a lab leak, what do they have to hide? Why wouldn't they share more information so we could dispense with that theory? So that is a little suspicious. On the other hand, this has been so politicized and no doubt there is sensitive research being done in this institute, and they no more would like foreigners snooping through their elite r
I know that when COVID first emerged that the 'Bat Woman' of Wuhan, Shi Zhengli, ran the genome on all of the coronaviruses in her lab and was relieved to find that none of them matched.10 Though since then they haven't been able to detect SARS-CoV-2 to in any bats in the area or any intermediate species. In Apollo's Arrow you cited a paper by Andersen, which was about the proximal origins of SARS-CoV-2.11 You stated 'Well, it's unlikely to be a recombinant construct
a genetically modified cons
No, I don't think so. Not yet. I mean from what's publicly available, I still think that, more likely than not, it was a zoonotic leap. And I have colleagues who have been to Wuhan and vouch for the care shown there. But it's impossible at present to exclude the lab leak hypothesis. And there are some leaks of intelligence information that are relevant, as I noted earlier.
My own lab has used some data we have on mobility in China, based on cell phone tracking, to trace back when we thought patient zero first would have occurred.13 We put the earliest date of patient zero in early October. So, who knows how that fits in with the other information that's publicly available? If these people were sick in the Wuhan lab in mid-November, then maybe they got it from somewhere else? I don't know. Now, it's exceedingly unlikely that the people working in a virology lab wer
Is it part of the issue of silencing that we talked about earlier? Because it was originally written off. I know Bret Weinstein spent a lot of time on it,14 but originally it was written off as sort of just a conspiracy theory.
I don't know who wrote it off as a conspiracy theory. I thought the idea that it was an engineered virus that was deliberately leaked struck me as extremely unlikely from the beginning, for obvious reasons. The Chinese couldn't control it. And it would be a really stupid virus to engineer if you were going to engineer a weapon
you would prefer that it kill young people, not the elderly. So, there was a whole host of reasons that that struck me as nuts. But the lab leak theory didn't strike me a
The mechanism that I could think of was taking a coronavirus, and passaging it through human cell lines. That might optimize a virus to us.
It's quite likely that the Chinese were doing such gain-of-function research in Wuhan, as do we. Every rich nation that has a bioweapons program is doing such research. Or forget bioweapons
people do that kind of work even for non-weapons type research. I think it is likely they were doing such work.
There was a US Senate inquiry recently with Dr. Fauci. The Obama administration had actually ceased gain-of-function research with coronavirus in 2014.15 And Fauci had written in a paper in the American Scientific Institute stating that we need to do this research.16 Even though it's dangerous, it could possibly trigger a pandemic - the research benefits outweigh the potential costs.17 And then he re-instigated this research in 2017.
First of all, in that recent testimony, by Fauci, I think he was very careful to talk about NIH (National Institutes of Health). You think that the American military is not doing gain-of-function research? I'm sure that cannot be true. I don't know for a fact, but I seriously doubt that. Second, the fact that we were giving money to scientists in Wuhan is totally normal and correct. In fact, it is precisely because that act was politicized, and t
That particular scientist who the Trump administration demonized, who had actually gone to these caves in China and had really good bilateral relations with Chinese scientists,18 he was exactly the sort of person we need in our current situation, trying to figure out the origin of the virus. I myself have many Chinese colleagues who are terrific scientists and who I have good relationships with. We want those kinds of connections. In fact, during the peak of the Cold War, even though America and
I don't know if we were funding gain-of-function research in an actual bioweapons lab in Wuhan. I think that's a misrepresentation. I'm not sure about this, but my understanding is that we were supporting some research, and that also, elsewhere in that same Institute, they were doing gain-of-function work.
200 researchers at the Cambridge Working Group came out against this type of gain-of-function research in 2014.19,20 Obviously, we probably shouldn't be doing gain-of-function research with coronaviruses?
Why coronaviruses? What about Ebola? Or other pathogens? There are many deadly viruses.
So, any of those viruses? Should we be doing that type of research or doing it under very, very specific conditions?
This is not my area of virology, this level of detail. Although, for what it's worth, when I was 20, I worked in a virology lab in Paris, under Jorge Peries, and we studied coronaviruses and other enzootic viruses. On one hand, I generally would be against restricting research. I would not proscribe any particular topic. In fact, if anything, that goes against my liberal principles. I don't want rules that prohibit scientific inquiry. On the other hand, we can discuss certain limits. So yes, if
There was concern when the Wuhan Institute of Virology was built
there was a paper, I think, in the journal Science or Nature that expressed concern that this Biosafety Level 4 (BSL-4) laboratory in China was not, in fact, up to international standards of safety.21 There were some scientists, years ago, who were concerned about this. Of course, you can easily imagine that the Chinese would, in their own national interest, want to build these labs just like the Iranians want to build nuclear wea
I think that once you're funding particular types of gain-of-function research ...
Hold on
we have not established that. I seriously doubt that American money was being used to fund gain-of-function research in Wuhan. Do you have an article you could show me where it says that?
That was the allegation in the senate inquiry.22
That was a deceptive allegation, if I've understood it correctly. I think what he was saying is: 'This institute is doing gain-of-function research,' and distinctly 'You are funding the collection of bat species.' But those are different topics, right? I doubt we are sending American dollars to foreign adversaries to fund the development of weapons. I can't imagine that was being done.
Is gain-of-function research with viruses about weaponization? Gain-of-function research doesn't have to be about the development of a weapon. It can be just about understanding the virus can't it? You create different constructs to try and get a better understanding of the virus.
Yes, and the particular senator who was interacting with Fauci is not particularly reliable on many of these topics. I think he is extraordinarily politicized when he discusses such matters.23 I do not believe he was seeking the truth in that setting. I think he was trying to make political points. And I have very low regard for that - either on the right or on the left. For example, the same senators voted down a proposal to have a commission to investigate the truth of the insurrection on Janu
In Apollo's Arrow you were talking about delays in action when coronavirus migrated into the US.
Yes, we were very slow in responding as a nation, and here I do think a lot of responsibility falls at the White House. Of course, many Democratic governors were incompetent as well, including Governor Cuomo in New York. I, along with a number of other epidemiologists, were releasing public statements to abort the St. Patrick's Day parade in March of 2020, for instance. They were having a parade in New York City in March! And the mayor of New York is a Democrat, and so is the governor.
So, I think there was a lot of incompetence in leaders and a lot of denial, both in leaders and in the citizenry. I discussed this in Apollo Arrow, because this is not new. Denial is a feature of plagues and has been for thousands of years. But here's the thing: I expect more from our government. The fact is that the White House was engaged in willful mendacity, which we now know, because we know the National Security Agency was briefing the President from back in November of 2019 about this.24
I think that, from the moment the virus was loose in our species and arrived on our shores, and I said this in 2020, we were going to lose a couple of hundred thousand lives. But, through our incompetence, we have lost many more hundreds of thousands of lives than we needed to lose. We did not need to be so incompetent. And some people say, 'Well, other leaders in other countries were equally bad.' Okay, fine. I'm not particularly jingoistic, but I think the United States of America should be be
Your prediction was, which is sort of coming to fruition, somewhere between 500,000 and a million deaths. I wonder whether this is the consequence of a post-truth President to some extent?
Yes. I made that prediction when I finished writing Apollo's Arrow in August of 2020, when there were still only something like 120,000 deaths. I think some of the excess deaths, beyond the minimum (that is, several hundred thousand deaths), can rightly be blamed on the incompetence of the previous administration. I think that's true. But I don't just think it's just the far-right that has these kind of post-truth commitments. It's the far-left as well, and this goes back to the point you were m
My primary devotion is to the truth. Of course, I also am a political person
I vote, I donate to causes, I have political beliefs. But when it comes to questions about the world, I try, insofar as I possibly can, to see the truth, not to come to it with an ideological commitment - to the extent that I can. And this is also why I like to argue with people about scientific topics, because that brings you closer to the truth, in my view.
We started this conversation about the woman on the far-left discussing "the problem of the psychopathic white mind." And now there are the coronavirus denialists, on the far-right. These people, all of them, are not dealing with the reality. They're just not.
In terms of reality, if you look at China, 1.4 billion people, and the last report that I saw, it was just over 4000 deaths from COVID19. They've basically come out and said, 'Well, this is the strength of the Communist government.' We're enacting Maoist principles to keep people safe.
Look at the propaganda victory we've handed them! New Zealand did well
some of the other island nations did well
South Korea did well
Australia has done well.
But there are only 5 million people in New Zealand. You have to take into account the population size as well, in terms of how you analyze this.
Of course. These are rich island nations
and other similar nations, like Iceland and England, did not do well. I think New Zealand acted swiftly and got lucky. I think Australia has done really well too. And I think a lot will now be down to how rapidly the Aussies and the Kiwis can vaccinate their populations
if they bring the same commitment and tenacity to vaccination and achieve very high levels of vaccination, then, when the history of this pandemic is written, Australia and New Zealand w
Now, in China, their vaccines are not as good. But I fear that the Chinese are going to win some propaganda victories. And this may be why, if it was a lab leak, why they're fighting so hard to avoid that coming out. Because, if it was a lab leak, it would subvert any claims to how great the Chinese system is with respect to coping with the epidemic.
You mentioned the St. Patrick's Day Parade before, and I know in Apollo's Arrow you wrote about the Black Lives Matter protests, which were sparked by the murder of George Floyd. You used the history of plagues to say that the protests were also due to the anxiety around the pandemic itself
the lockdowns, the unemployment rate, a sense of hopelessness. That drives human behavior. Is it impossible, regardless of how just the cause may be, to justify a protest during a pandemic?
I went on record during the protests in the summer of 2020 as saying that I thought it was irresponsible to assemble large groups of people when there was a serious contagion afoot.27 Now, since then, my laboratory has done some research looking at, for example, the voting behavior during the primaries that took place in the spring.28 And we found, surprisingly to me, that, in those elections, turning out to vote did not seem to change the trajectory of the epidemic locally, for a period of a fe
Still, when the BLM protests were taking place, I and a few other epidemiologists expressed a concern that it was irresponsible to encourage them. Yet still other epidemiologists took a different view.29 And I found their position to be intellectually inconsistent. Two months earlier, they had opposed the right-wing protests, for example, in the Wisconsin State Legislature. And they had opposed Orthodox Jewish weddings that had large numbers of people in New York assembling. They had opposed sma
Now, I think that it's important to return to a different part of your question, which relates to what was going on with the January 6, right-wing insurrection at the nation's capital where we had people storming the Capitol.30 Several people died. As I discussed in the book, plagues are a time when people search for meaning. And it's not hard to imagine why. When death is afoot, when a deadly contagion is circulating, when people are cooped up at home, it gives them time to reflect: what's the
And this search for meaning has been reflected in many phenomena during times of plague for thousands of years. For example, a rise in religiosity is very typical
people become more religious during times of plague.31 And that happened in the United States during this plague, as various surveys showed. Also, plagues change people's occupational preferences. We've seen a boom in applications to medical school, and nursing school during this during this period.32 It also changes people's attitude
My argument about the BLM protests in the summer of 2020 is that they were driven not just by the history of racialized police violence in our country, nor just by the economic hardship that the pandemic imposed, as you mentioned, nor just by the fact that people were at home and idle, but also by a search for meaning. People were trying to say 'I care about a just society.' Now fast forward to the right-wing insurrection on January 6, and we see something similar. What struck me about the storm
You touch on the idea that people will view the other side as evil but each side views itself as good.
I don't view any side here as perforce evil. Some people have that belief. I think what we need is healthy political parties, and a spirit of compromise. So, I think we need healthy, fact-based political parties that are engaged in a kind of rough-and-tumble political interaction in our legislatures, and, right now, I see threats, both from the far-left and the far-right, to that kind of political life in our country. And that concerns me.
In terms of the racialization of the health care system - I was really interested in this because it seems like a wicked problem to me. Because you're citing the research in terms of who's going to be more susceptible, and you were talking about American hospitals where they got to the point where they're overwhelmed. They're in a position of approaching battlefield triage. And so certain people based on their demographic are more susceptible and you use the example of men and women. That women
No, you don't need to perforce take into account race or gender when assigning scarce treatments. And, thankfully, we avoided battlefield triage in this country. To my knowledge, there was no situation in which someone was taken off a ventilator and someone else was put on it. There were cases in Italy where this happened, I think
there was a case of an elderly priest who insisted that he be taken off a ventilator and that the ventilator be given to a younger person (and I think he died),34 whe
And some people were outraged by this possibility of triage, but I thought that outrage partly reflected an inability in the United States to imagine that resources were not limitless. We're so used to being such a rich country and have deluded ourselves into thinking that there is never any scarcity or allocation.
On the race thing, it's unclear, and this is a challenging statistical issue. If you take into account the risk of chronic disease and obesity, and income and poverty, after accounting for those features, you will typically find that black people are be no more likely to die than white people.
Actually, I have to go further back. There are two distinct issues
there's the probability of becoming infected, and then, conditional on being infected, the probability of dying. So, there was no doubt that race played a role in the probability of acquiring the virus. For example, because of differences in occupation, on average, across racial and ethnic groups, white people may have been more able to work at home than black people, on average. Therefore, black people were out and about and mo
The second step is, given that you're infected, are you or are you not more or less likely to die compared to other infected people of a dissimilar ethnic background? There, the question becomes 'Well, does that relate intrinsically somehow to your race or ethnicity?38 Or does that instead relate to your body size, or your other illnesses and so on?'39,40
This, in turn, goes into an even more deep and complicated question, which is how you see the potentially causal role of race and ethnicity with respect to health. Because, let's say that, after accounting for whether someone is obese and has diabetes, being black does not affect whether they die from COVID. Someone else might say, 'Well, no, but that's how being black causes you to die from COVID!. It is because you're black that you're more likely to be mistreated or be in a situation in which
I'm interested in that because I think, like I said, it's a wicked problem. I understand models that control for extraneous variables. But the issue would be, and critical race theorists would say, that the higher death rate is evidence of a racialized health care system, because if black people or Hispanic people or immigrants are at higher risk of diabetes, obesity or cardiovascular disease, that is due to an intergenerational issue in terms of oppression or stigma and discriminat
Yes, but I think you'll have to unpack each step of that reasoning. For example, it's quite possible that, in the coming months, we may find that being a Republican or being a white evangelical is a risk factor for dying from COVID. In fact, we're already seeing that, because vaccine uptake is so low in those groups. We made a big push to make sure that we did not exclude minorities and poor people in our society, which was correct in my view. We rightly made a push in our society to make sure t
I care about all my fellow citizens
I don't just care about my fellow citizens who share my political views. I care about all human beings and their lives. And I feel so sad for the people who think that the vaccine is a kind of conspiracy of Bill Gates to put in a nano chip that monitors you
those people are deluded, and we need to reach them, and help them to see that it's in their interest to be vaccinated. And incidentally, in this case, we all benefit when more people are vaccinated. It's
In Apollo's Arrow you talked about Russian and Chinese bots on social media. You were talking about these governments essentially enflaming racial division in America in relation to the pandemic. But I wonder if it went beyond that, I wonder if a lot of the issues that you see in terms of the culture wars may be also enflamed by this espionage.
We know the Russian government has been engaged in in all kinds of shenanigans in our society, one of which has been to support gun rights, for instance. The Russians have been very eager for there to be widespread availability of weapons. We know that they were connected with the National Rifle Association (NRA).43 Apparently, for quite a long time, they've been interested in this because they would want us, of course, to be at each other's throats in a lethal way. So absolutely, our enemies ar
Now, nation states have been doing this forever. I wish we were not that way. I would love for us to live in peace among ourselves and with everyone in the world. But I'm not surprised that this type of intervention and misinformation occurs. I think I read that the Chinese were engaged in some kind of misinformation campaign about the Pfizer vaccine.44 I think Russia also tried to do that in Africa during the HIV epidemic, to suggest that it was an American weapons program that started HIV. I s
It seems as though when variants emerge in different populations, like the Indian variant, it produces slightly different symptoms. And I wondered whether it's an interaction between the virus and the lineage of the people that it's infecting?
I've seen no evidence of that whatsoever. For example, with respect to the so-called UK variant, India variant, Brazil variant, South Africa variant, and some variants in the United States that have emerged: to my knowledge, these are not related in any material way to the nature of the populations. I think it's idiosyncratic. What we also see around the world is that, when it comes to certain types of mutations that are advantageous to the virus, the virus rediscovers them repeatedly. There's o
As you have more variants, and it's a fairly stable virus, it's supposed to become less lethal, isn't it?
In general, the theory is that, with time, pathogens tend to become less lethal, because, from a Darwinian perspective, they don't 'want' to kill us. From the point of view of the virus, if it infects you, sickens you rapidly, and kills you rapidly, then those variants of the virus that do that don't have as much chance to spread.
That was the issue with SARS1 and MERS
that it was too fatal.
That was one of their qualities, as I discussed in Apollo's Arrow, but there were some other interesting biological differences between these various coronaviruses. For example, SARS1 did not have much of a capacity for asymptomatic spread, which was a huge difference with SARS2.47 In the case of SARS1, you could see who was sick and isolate them
but with SARS2 now, people who aren't manifestly sick are out and about spreading it. In theory, viruses that are too rapidly fatal are bad, like Ebol
Now, first of all, it's important to note that this is a theory. Second, in the short term, the virus can do any damn thing it wants. And right now, what we're seeing, in the short term, is the emergence of variants, such as Delta, that are in fact more lethal, about 30% deadlier, and also more infectious, about 30 or 40% more so.48 There is a higher R-0, going from about 3 to 4. So, yes, these variants are concerning. But others may soon emerge which are milder. And the thing that I would be mo
You must be very surprised by the fast emergence of the vaccines, because in Apollo's Arrow you're talking about the Ebola vaccine taking five years.
When I wrote the book, in the spring and summer of 2020, there were already 120 vaccine candidates under evaluation and several phase 3 trials. And I discussed all that in the book. I said that, even if the vaccine were to emerge in the first quarter of 2021, it wouldn't change the course of the epidemic very much. And I explain why in the book, for reasons having to do with herd immunity and so on. The vaccine miraculously did emerge in the last quarter of 2020, about two months earlier than I
So, it's great that we have the vaccines, and on an individual level, it's very great. At the population level, I don't know how many lives will have been spared because of the vaccine
it's probably a very large number, but it's not like it stopped the epidemic cold or modified its temporal course, in terms of phases of the pandemic, too much.
In Apollo's Arrow you talked about the rapid development of vaccines. Obviously, they usually go through a long period of development and safety trials. Are there still, for you, any concern about not having that longitudinal data in terms of safety?
Not really, no. I think about the annual influenza vaccines that we release without randomized controlled trials (RCT) - which is done under a certain provision where we know enough about the biology that we're not worried that each season's influenza vaccines did not have a full scale, randomized controlled trial. And with respect to the COVID19 vaccines, we did do phase 3 RCTs. But, perhaps more important, we now know, after the administration of the vaccine to hundreds of millions of people,
What we don't know is whether, after five or ten years, the vaccines would still be seen as so safe. But there's no way to know that at all, except to wait five or ten years. But, in the meantime, we can rely on basic biology and be confident about safety over the long-term. So, we have no reason to suspect that they would cause problems, we have seen no evidence of material risks in the short term. Therefore, I think one's risk of death from COVID is much higher than the possible risk of death
So, I think these vaccines are very safe. And I use the development of the vaccines, the fact that we humans banded together to make vaccines, as an illustration of our goodness in the book. We human beings have banded together to create this knowledge over decades. And then, acutely over just a few months, thousands of people volunteered for trials, thousands of scientists and doctors from countries all over the world shared information. And I see much evidence that human beings have been actin
As you may know about me, I'm optimistic in my personality, and I'm also optimistic about human beings. And so, if you'll let me, I'll take the liberty to quote from Albert Camus The Plague. He writes this book in the 1940s and sets it then in a town in North Africa called Oran that is afflicted by a plague. We think that he had based this on a cholera outbreak in similar towns 100 years earlier, or on the bubonic plague in prior centuries (the book mentions what are called 'rat falls' which are
Dr. Rieux, resolved to compile this chronicle, so that some memorial of the injustice and outrage done them might endure. And to state quite simply, what we learn in time of pestilence, that there are more things to admire in men and women than to despise.
And that's very much how I see the world: there are more things to admire in us than to despise.
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582(7812):389-394. doi:10.1038/s41586-020-2284-y The analysis of patient 0 is reported in the afterword to the paperback version of Apollo's Arrow.
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18. Subbaraman N. 'Heinous!': Coronavirus researcher shut down for Wuhan-lab link slams new funding restrictions. Nature. Published online August 21, 2020. doi:10.1038/d41586-020-02473-4
19. Burki T. Ban on gain-of-function studies ends. Lancet Infect Dis. 2018
18(2):148-149. doi:10.1016/S1473-3099(18)30006-9
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21. Cyranoski D. Inside the Chinese lab poised to study world's most dangerous pathogens. Nature. 2017
542(7642):399-400. doi:10.1038/nature.2017.214 87
22. C-SPAN. Complete Exchange between Sen. Rand Paul and Dr. Anthony Fauci.
2021. Accessed January 16, 2022. https://www.youtube.com/watch ?v=JBqXYpO1QpE
23. Dance A. The shifting sands of 'gain-of-function' research. Nature. 2021
598(7882):554-557. doi:10.1038/d41586-021-02903-x
24. News ABC. Intelligence report warned of coronavirus crisis as early as November: Sources. ABC News. Accessed January 16, 2022. https:// abcnews.go.com / Politics / intelligence-report-warned-coronavirus-crisis-early-november-sources/story?id=70031273
25. All of the times President Trump said Covid-19 will disappear. Accessed December 30, 2021. https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2020/10/politics/ covid-disappearing-trump-comment-tracker/
26. Coronavirus: Outcry after Trump suggests injecting disinfectant as treatment. BBC News. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52407177. Published April 24, 2020. Accessed January 16, 2022.
27. Nicholas A. Christakis. Essay by @JuliaLMarcus & @gregggonsalves re "hypocrisy" re COVID19 & protests is a bit loose in couple of spots, IMHO, but I think it's thoughtful. I agree with most of it. But a key issue is that protesters impose risks on others, not just themselves. https://theatlantic. com/ideas/archive/2020/06/public-health-experts-are-not-hypocrites/612853 /45/. @NAChristakis. Published June 12, 2020. Accessed January 17, 2022. https://twitter.com/NAChristakis/status/1271556624
28. Feltham EM, Forastiere L, Alexander M, Christakis NA. No increase in COVID-19 mortality after the 2020 primary elections in the USA. ArXiv201002896 Stat. Published online October 8, 2020. Accessed January 16, 2022. http://arxiv.org/abs/2010.02896
29. CNN MS. Over 1,000 health professionals sign a letter saying, Don't shut down protests using coronavirus concerns as an excuse. CNN. Accessed January 17, 2022. https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/05/health/health-care-open-letter-protests-coronavirus-trnd/index.html
30. Capitol riots timeline: What happened on 6 Jan one year ago? BBC News. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-56004916. Published January 6, 2022. Accessed January 18, 2022.
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32. Medical school applicants and enrollments hit record highs
underrepresented minorities lead the surge. AAMC. Accessed January 17, 2022. https://www. aamc.org / news-insights / medical-school-applicants-and-enrollments-hit-record-highs-underrepresented-minorities-lead-surge
33. Newson L, Manyonda I, Lewis R, Preissner R, Preissner S, Seeland U. Sensitive to Infection but Strong in Defense-Female Sex and the Power of Oestradiol in the COVID-19 Pandemic. Front Glob Womens Health. 2021
2:651752. doi:10.3389/fgwh.2021.651752
34. 'Fake news' aside, friend says priest dead of coronavirus was still a 'special person.' Crux. Accessed January 17, 2022. https://cruxnow.com/covid-19/2020/03/fake-news-aside-friend-says-priest-dead-of-coronavirus-was-still-a-special-person
35. Cereda D, Manica M, Tirani M, et al. The early phase of the COVID-19 epidemic in Lombardy, Italy. Epidemics. 2021
37:100528. doi:10.1016/j. epidem.2021.100528
36. Goldman N, Pebley AR, Lee K, Andrasfay T, Pratt B. Racial and ethnic differentials in COVID-19-related job exposures by occupational standing in the US. PLOS ONE. 2021
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37. Asfaw A. Racial Disparity in Potential Occupational Exposure to COVID-19. J Racial Ethn Health Disparities. Published online August 5, 2021. doi:10.1007/s40615-021-01110-8
38. CDC. Cases, Data, and Surveillance. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Published February 11, 2020. Accessed January 17, 2022. https:// www.cdc.gov / coronavirus / 2019-ncov/covid-data/investigations-discovery /hospitalization-death-by-race-ethnicity.html
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42. The Red/Blue Divide in COVID-19 Vaccination Rates. KFF. Published September 14, 2021. Accessed January 17, 2022. https://www.kff.org/policy-watch/the-red-blue-divide-in-covid-19-vaccination-rates/
43. Stone P. NRA in crisis: how the gun group became ensnared in the Russia inquiry. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/mar/ 01/nra-russia-investigations-gun-lobby. Published March 1, 2019. Accessed January 17, 2022.
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~
Nicholas A. Christakis, MD, PhD, MPH, is the Sterling Professor of Social and Natural Science at Yale University. His work is in the fields of network science, biosocial science, and behavior genetics. He directs the Human Nature Lab and is the Co-Director of the Yale Institute for Network Science. He was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2006
the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2010
and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2017.
Postmodernism and the Failure of Moral Triage
References
Based on an interview with Peter Boghossian
Mark Halloran: I wanted to start off with the Grievance Studies Affair and discuss some of the criticisms. And I think that in discussing the criticisms, I feel like we can talk about some of the ideas that don't really get explored. And I'd be interested to see what you think the heart of the problem is.
Peter Boghossian: This is the way I think about it: The Grievance Studies Affair exposed the problem, and Cynical Theories explains the problem. So, it was point to the problem, corrupt scholarship,1 explain the problem, and now each of us are doing something different. Helen is engaging with people who have been damaged by woke ideology. James Lindsay is more on the front lines, fighting - and he has a nonprofit, New Discourses.2 I'm fully immersed in the culture war in an attempt to change the
I wanted to talk about the criticisms. The first one: journals with higher impact factors were more likely to reject the papers, and secondly the chances were better if the manuscripts were allegedly based on empirical data.3 They're two of the most significant ones. The idea, I think, is that there is an issue with peer review across academia. So, there's a replication crisis in psychology and a similar crisis also occurs within biological sciences. So, I wonder how you respond to that?
I think Helen Pluckrose said it best, if you have rats in your house, and
you're saying, 'I have a problem, there's rats in my house,' and someone else comes along and says, 'Well, wait a second, the neighbor's house has cockroaches,' that's totally irrelevant to the fact that you have rats in your house. So, there is a problem in these disciplines. People have known that there's been a problem in these disciplines for a long time. And to make the criticism that 'Well, all disciplines have problems so why should we attempt to either intrude upon the academic freedom o
I think there's a deeper problem in relation to this. Because there's often the quotation that comes up: 'The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House.'
That's from Audry Lorde's 1984 piece. I think that's the best way to explain the problem to people.
So, if you reject the ideas of science, and you say that these ideas are simply the ideas of white males and therefore they're problematic, then you have to reject all the ideas that come from that. You have to reject falsification and you have to reject the idea of avoiding tautologies. How do you conduct research?
One of the things that folks want to do, it's called Research Justice, is to forward certain citations. So, Research Justice involves the forwarding of the citations of non-white men. Black trans females, for example, would be forwarded, whereas white male citations would not. And the problem with that? Or do I actually have to explain that that's the most insane, fucking deranged idea? But among the problems with that, are that you cut off knowledge and you cut off avenues of potential research
I'd read about postmodernism and social constructionism back in my undergraduate degree, and so I started to read Foucault and I found one place where we really agreed, which is where he says that the methods of the natural sciences such as physics, biology, and chemistry, translate imperfectly to disciplines like the humanities, sociology, and psychology. And so, what has happened with these academic disciplines is they've hothouse themselves, they've argued amongst themselves with these ideas,
They call it action research, which is a fancy way of saying that this doesn't universalize
it's not generalizable, it's hyper-localized. But I think that the key in understanding these disciplines is that they promote moral ideas, and that it's what Sokal calls fashionable nonsense.4 They are morally fashionable ideas. And if you want to publish a paper in a journal that goes against the zeitgeist, it's almost impossible. And so, what we have is, and this is funny that this is actually a postm
So, what we have in these fields is morally fashionable nonsense. It's idea laundering.6 And they're not only informing public policies. When you look at society and the madness we see now, it's because entire generations of people
probably a full generation and a half, depending on how you want to parse it, have been taught by ideologues. They've been taught that certain moral impulses these ideologues have are true. They're tested on articles and journal materials, and then they get out of co
When you've talked about this, you've talked about it developing from critical theory and postmodernism. The thing that stood out for me from a philosophical perspective was that postmodernism embeds its causal reality within language and culture.
That's one of the reasons why you see-primarily on the left-the idea that if you change the institutions you can change the outcomes. It's very structuralist, you see that in Saussure. It's complicated, because there are many variables that go into play. But one of those is with this new phenomenon now. And you mentioned that in the Grievance Studies content, you see a kind of biological denialism. Eric Weinstein posed a fantastic question: 'When there's a conflict between gender studies and bio
If you can't root something in biology, or you can't root it in theology, then what are you rooting it in? Well, you can't root it in anything because that's postmodernism, right? It's an incredulity toward meta-narratives. It's a skepticism of a God's eye view. So, what are you rooting it in? Well, you're rooting it in power-knowledge, as Foucault calls it, and you're rooting it in the language people use. And they've been incredibly successful with the terms they've used: diversity, equity, in
When I first encountered the idea, it took me a lot of thinking to get out of the solipsism of language. That the only reason that you refer to an object as the thing that it is, is because that's what your culture and your language has taught you. But of course, if you moved across time into a different episteme or different zeitgeist, it would be completely unfettered, and so that it's all utterly relative.
That's interesting because when I read Feyerabend Farewell to Reason. It's a play on words: 'Farewell, fare well to reason.' French postmodernists tell me these ideas translate better in the French, I don't read French so I'll take their word for it. But there is unquestionably some truth in the consequences of having captured the meanings of words. I'm very interested in the practical aspect of how we solve this problem. That's one of the things that FAIR (Foundation Against Intolerance and Rac
I had a friend who is a teacher at a very expensive private school tell me that a student said to him that genitalia is a social construct. And I think it is a social construct - in the same way that cyclones are.
Right. And that's one of the reasons that we did The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct.8 If you think in terms of everything being a social construct, then where does that leave you? Well, that leads to the position of the Brazilian educator, Paul Freire who stated that the purpose of education is to develop a critical consciousness, or conscientização, and to eliminate oppression. And when you think in those terms, and there's no grounding again, there's no grand explanatory mechanism like
Foucault has been acknowledged as having really taken the philosophical idea of power, and extending it: to the institutional, political, personal, diffuse, structured, non-structured. It's everywhere, it's in the criminal justice system, it's in every personal interaction.
He's saying that power differential
it's not that there is no objective truth, which is a common mistake, it's just that it's all mediated, and you can't really get there to external reality because you use language. And then you're dealing in a kind of anti-Socratic idea.9 When you wed your personal identity, particularly in terms of identity politics, to your ability to access the truth, not only is that limiting, but it makes any kind of liberation, particularly social liberation, impossible
Henry Giroux writes about that again, building off the work of Paulo Freire. These are notions now that you see institutionalised. Not only institutionalised, actually, I'm going to go beyond that. You see them as the North Star of almost every college and university in United States right now. This is within a very short period time - we're talking literally five years. The president of Portland State just sent out an email saying, and he said it twice: 'Racial justice is his highest priority.'
That's the power of language, though, isn't it? This is the problem I think you face, is that racial justice sounds like a good thing?
Well, it is a good thing. Racial justice. It's that you'd have to modify the word justice with anything, right? Why would you have to modify it with anything?
You mean there is just justice? Well, there are different elements of justice. I would say that there's the lowercase social justice, there's natural justice.
That's a more philosophical conversation. Broadly, Socrates would say that justice is anything that participates in the good. I love The Republic, it is one of my favorite, if not my favorite book of all time, but that topic, which Dan Dennett calls the topic of abiding significance is really wrestling with what justice means.11 And it's an anathema to even think in those terms, to talk about the immutable trait someone has and say
'Well, you're a man, you can't have access to that.' What are y
I feel like often the simple kind of narrative that comes up about this, is that all of the ideas of science, and even philosophical ideas like individualism and universality, come from the Enlightenment. And then when this is critiqued by postmodernists, or Marxist feminists, they say, 'It's white male ideas.' However, all of those values can be found in Islamic culture during the Arabic transmission, it can be found in African philosophy etc.
Well, of course, it's even more of a problem
it's a derangement syndrome. Let's say that we're not going to put a ridiculous restriction on this conversation, and then someone says something ridiculous, and we want to engage it, to borrow a phrase from Christians 'in good faith.' Okay, what's the problem with that? It all came from white guys. So what? No, I mean, I actually am asking a sincere question. So why is that a problem?
I don't think it's necessarily a problem. But if you allow that to be problematized in terms of the history and the history is wrong ...
First of all, that's the whole idea
it is to problematize everything and find grievances in everything. But that assumes that their identity was responsible for falsification, as opposed to falsification being a fundamental guiding principle of scientific inquiry. So, one would have to make an argument why that would be the case, and there's nothing you could do, because there's no reasonable argument that you could make. You're not talking about the culture or the philosophy they develop. You'
I thought that where we would have disagreement is in relation to the idea that gets spoken about a lot now, which is speech is violence. You have said, 'Well, speech is violence is a category error.' And I'm not sure I think that's true. I think speech can be violent.
I think I said it's a category mistake, that's a term that comes from the philosopher Gilbert Ryle. It confuses categories, like three is not in the tactile field. So, Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff wrote a wonderful piece in The Atlantic about it, and they actually perfectly captured my views.13 Why do you think speech is violence?
If I make a threat to kill, and the other person believed it, and I never acted upon that, that's not to say the other person wasn't traumatized by that threat. So, I think the problem is what people would call concept creep, or what I would call extrapolation.
So microaggressions, the claim could be, are a kind of speech violence. So it goes: 'I'm going to punch you in the face you four-eyed bastard' to 'I hate you,' to 'We should be colorblind.' The threshold for violence is continuously lowered. But in every case, the answer is always more resilience. I guess in the highest case, the answer is a gun and Brazilian jujitsu! But barring that, the answer is always 'Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me.' I just read a tweet
So, resilience has to be a value. Again, back to 'Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me.' Think about this: when you say 'Sticks and stones will break my bones,' you're saying that physical violence can get me for sure. You can smash my head with a rock, but names will never hurt me. So, it's a value you're taking upon yourself, as opposed to 'I'm offended' when you want someone else to stop. You are ceding power to everybody around you with that switch from the old
This is sort of a personal question, but you live in Portland. And it seems as though this is the epicenter for woke ideology. What's happened in Portland that this has really taken hold? And what are your experiences? Because you've obviously decided to come out against this, because you've recognized that it's stifling.
It's totally worse than stifling. So why Portland? That's a very complicated question. I think it has to do with intellectual homogeneity. It's really a political monoculture here. It has to do with the university continuously cranking out utter madness and stamping it with an academic imprimatur. And they have been for years and all of the University of Oregon system as well, it's beholden to some pretty vicious ideologies. It was a fertile ground for breeding bad ideas. And when you cull intel
Again, along with the theme of this conversation, one becomes more brittle and more fragile, instead of developing the cognitive and emotional capacity to deal with arguments they don't like and the intellectual capacity to argue against those ideas. And there are some monstrously bad ideas floating around. And the most important thing is that we have to retain our ability to call them out. And once we lose that, we've lost everything.
There's the kernel of truth inside each idea that you've talked about. For instance, if you take an idea, like victim blaming, this has come from a time when women could be blamed for their own sexual assault.
Still today, if you look at India, Pakistan, South Africa.
And the same thing can be said with cultural appropriation, you can simply see that as cultural theft. So, I'm taking indigenous art from indigenous people and not paying them and not recognizing them for it.
That's not what people mean when they use the term cultural appropriation.
No, but that is probably where it started and if the idea isn't clear then it creeps.
Or people just problematize things and their taught to find grievances in everything. There's a place here in Portland where white business owners had a taco stand, and then some people went crazy, because the owners culturally appropriated Mexican food. That's a derangement.
How would you have fusion in culture?
How do you have anything? You literally couldn't exist! You couldn't speak English, because that's an appropriation, you couldn't wear clothes, because you've appropriated that from another time. You couldn't cut your hair, you couldn't fill your cavities
there's literally nothing you could do. You couldn't even be in a mud hut, because mud huts are appropriated! So, there's literally nothing you could do, you would be dead, the whole society would be extinguished.
If you took Foucault and the idea of power and a cultural narrative, for instance British colonial ideas around the criminalization of homosexuality. So, if he says, 'Well, you've got to really be a little bit suspicious about a culture that criminalizes homosexuality and what's considered a cultural norm.'
So, even that is, to borrow a turn of phrase, 'problematic.' I was just reading about the laws against homosexuality, I don't know if you want to call it the Palestinian territories, Gaza maybe is the most neutral, and these laws are draconian. And when was the last time you heard any of the wokester's criticize that? Just a few years ago, and we know this, not only was this not a secret, people were screaming out about it from the rooftops. And we have unequivocal testimony of Yazidi women who
Isn't the narrative of postcolonial studies basically: 'If ISIS or Taliban soldiers are enslaving women, that's only because the West created it?'
It's just intellectually exhausting to me to try to make a better argument for the unhinged ideas of people who are uneducated and uninformed. I would circumvent all of that and say it's a grotesque failure to morally triage. What would be the gold standards of bad? The gold standard of bad would have to be genocide. One right down from that, but not very far down, would be institutionalized slavery. And so, you can formulate a kind of a hierarchy: not paying your parking ticket is low down, ste
The problem here is that some of the ideas have infiltrated from people like the Foucault, Gayle Reubin or Judith Butler. I don't really know how many gay, bisexual or trans people would actually know where these ideas come from?
It's not like with queer theory, that there's a small group of activists, and then they talk among themselves. It's that there's been a cultural shift. And these ideas which weren't heard of are normative now. And the Overton window has shifted.16 So, the whole idea about how we think about these things has changed, and many of those ways are very, very good. But some are certainly not good.
Homosexuality was first decriminalized in the United States in the 1960s. However, up until 2003, there were still some American states, Texas was one, where homosexuality was still criminalized. And so, you can see that these ideologies might be driven by anger about real injustice.
The idea is, of course, there have been injustices historically, and some of those injustices persist. And those injustices have to be dealt with, and they have to be dealt with honestly. If you believe that moral values are rationally drivable, then certain things follow from that
certain pedagogical methods,17 certain dialectical methods ... You want conversation,18 you want debate, you want to talk - let the best ideas win, sunlight is the best disinfectant, etc. But if you d
I wanted to talk about where the ideas go wrong. For instance, Foucault's idea around questioning the criminalization of homosexuality. Good idea. But then if you extrapolate that and you say: 'If a society is oppressive, and they've criminalized homosexuality, they've also criminalized pedophilia. So is pedophilia just another oppressed identity?'
That gets back to the rationally derived value again, and so there are rules you can use to rationally ascertain that pedophilia is bad - you can rationally derive that. There are a metrics that you can operationalize in psychology, for example. But even beyond that, I think that there's another key thing that may be worth exploring, which is whether or not a lot of this ideology and the manifestations of the ideology come because people do not at their core believe in the emancipatory power of
I suppose that there are norms that are developed that are good norms, because you can tell from consequences.
That's called instrumental rationality, when you use rationality as an instrument to achieve some end. And I don't think anybody is at the point of denying consequences. I think that what they think is that they weigh the consequences of different actions and different institutions differently - different structural advantages is a term you'll hear frequently.
If you go back to postmodernism, and the idea that things are embedded in language. So, I can create two narratives which are: I step off the Empire State Building, and I'll plummet to my death, or I'll step off the Empire State Building and I'll fly. So, they're both narratives developed through language, but they have very different consequences.
In that case, that's such an extreme example. People who make those arguments wouldn't make that claim because one narrative is demonstrably false. And the idea behind this project is that there's a kind of egalitarianism of narratives. Foucault talks about power-knowledge, and that's why in Fat Studies for example, they don't like the word obesity as they think it's a medical narrative. They prefer the word fat. So, there are these competing narratives, but they would never use a narrative like
Often narratives are more complex, but they still lead to different consequences. Example: Lysenko's genetics, which ends up killing millions of people because it's based on Stalinist ideology. They crushed Mendelian genetics, which is the true narrative. So, you can develop truth and objective reality through speech, which undermines the whole project.
Yes. In those cases, the question is again: how are you making the judgement that one of those is true? How you adjudicating that? And you need some ultimate arbiter adjudicating - in that case it would be science. Which is again, a grand narrative, which is a contradiction, which is what Habermas's critique of Derrida and Foucault was
it's a performative contradiction. It just doesn't hold up. I said to one of my best friends, Matt Thornton,22 'You know this is just really sophisticated nonsen
I wonder whether identity politics, tribalism, is sort of the norm that people can revert back to easily? Like it's evolutionary.
You are not the first person who has said that - that idea has been floating around for a while. It has a long pedigree. Before it was easy to determine who was part of your tribe because you could see people on the basis of some characteristic like skin color. My mentor grew up in Nazi Germany, he was interred at Buchenwald, and he had black curly hair, and he would straighten it. This was during Kristallnacht. But the idea is, before, in tribalism, you could see differences with people. But no
There's a quote by Crenshaw that for African Americans, other people of color, gays, lesbians. Identity politics has been a source of strength, community and intellectual development. You'd probably disagree with that?
I don't disagree with that. I'm sure that that's true. There's a lot of community support, particularly if one is marginalized, and getting together with other people who are marginalized, and if nothing else, commiserating about what bastards your oppressors are. There's a lot of truth to that. That doesn't mean it should be an ought, right? We need to create conditions so that people don't have to do that.
Does social justice activism just mean missionary now?
I don't know. I think there is a kind of a zealous, somewhat of a proselytizing nature in activism. That's what makes it activism. And I also think that there's a certainty embedded in the whole concept of activism. The question is: is this certainty warranted by the evidence? Epistemology must come before anything else. And that should always be one's first priority. And if we can figure out that then we can figure out if one's activism is justified.
I've read that the only two disciplines that took up postmodernism and social constructionism in the early 80s, were education and social psychology. It was the only places it took root in the university.
One of the reasons we're in this catastrophe right now is because of colleges of education, and to have this conversation without mentioning colleges of education, you're doing your readers a disservice. Because the primary way that this propagates is through college of education. Let's talk about that very briefly. To get a teaching certificate, I can't just walk into a classroom - even with all my teaching experience and publications - I can't just walk in and teach. You need to have a teachin
I think political correctness in the 90s was kind of like SARS-CoV-1. It seems like it's really strong, but not very virulent. And then you move on to about 2015. And you've got a complex series of things that go on with the uptake of social media and so woke is SARS-CoV-2 - it's highly infectious.
It's hard to say because it was creeping and then there was an explosion. It's also hard to say because I'm in the belly of the beast at Portland State. I saw the transformation around 2015. I saw it at the same time in the sceptic and atheist movement, which were canaries in the coal mine with Social Justice. I was just at a conference in Bozeman, Montana, and Wilford Reilly who I find to be an utterly fascinating, fearless thinker, and he said, 'Woke is a mind virus of the lower upper class.'
And I think concurrent with that, there were changes in the culture, and there was the weaponization of certain offices of diversity, equity and inclusion, that made sure people stayed in line. There's no due process there. The university system has, again as Jonathan Haidt says, abandoned its telos of truth and turned into an instrument of social change.
1. Academic Grievance Studies and the Corruption of Scholarship. Areo. Published October 3, 2018. Accessed January 3, 2022. https://areomagazine. com / 2018 / 10 / 02 / academic-grievance-studies-and-the-corruption-of-scholarship/
2. New Discourses. New Discourses. Accessed January 3, 2022. https://new discourses.com/
3. Lagerspetz M. "The Grievance Studies Affair" Project: Reconstructing and Assessing the Experimental Design. Sci Technol Hum Values. 2021
46(2): 402-424. doi:10.1177/0162243920923087
4. Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity. Accessed December 10, 2021. https://physics.nyu.edu/ faculty/sokal/transgress_v2/transgress_v2_singlefile.html
5. Boghossian P, Lindsay J. Deluded Departments. Philos Mag. 2019
(87):14-17. doi:10.5840/tpm20198781
6. 'Idea Laundering' in Academia - WSJ. Accessed February 6, 2022. https://www.wsj.com/articles/idea-laundering-in-academia-11574634492
7. FAIR - Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism. Accessed February 6, 2022. https://www.fairforall.org
8. Lindsay J, Boghossian P. The conceptual penis as a social construct. Cogent Soc Sci. 2017
3. doi:10.1080/23311886.2017.1330439
9. Boghossian P. Socratic Pedagogy, Race, and Power. Educ Policy Anal Arch. 2002
10(3).
10. Peter Boghossian, forthcoming lecture, March 19, 2022, University of Antwerp.
11. Boghossian P, Lindsay J. Chmess, Abiding Significance, and Rabbit Holes: The Problem of Philosophical Progress. In: Philosophy's Future: The Problem of Philosophical Progress.
2017:61-74. doi:10.1002/9781119210 115.ch5
12. Faisal Saeed Al Mutar at Portland State University, "Are Western Values Worth Defending?" The AHA Foundation. Published November 8, 2017. Accessed December 6, 2021. https://www.theahafoundation.org/faisal-saeed- al - mutar - at - portland - state-university-are-western-values-worth-defending/
13. Lukianoff JH Greg. It's a Really Bad Idea to Tell Students Words Are Violence. The Atlantic. Published July 18, 2017. Accessed December 6, 2021. https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/07/why-its-a-bad -idea-to-tell-students-words-are-violence/533970/
14. Nussbaum MC. The Professor of Parody. New Repub. Published online February 22, 1999. Accessed February 6, 2022. https://newrepublic.com /article/150687/professor-parody
15. Otten C. Slaves of Isis: the long walk of the Yazidi women. The Guardian. https:// www.theguardian.com / world / 2017 / jul/25/slaves-of-isis-the-long-walk-of-the-yazidi-women. Published July 25, 2017. Accessed December 6, 2021.
16. Boghossian P, Lindsay J. Is the Unthinkable the New Acceptable? | Free Inquiry. Published March 30, 2017. Accessed January 3, 2022. https://secular humanism.org/2017/03/cont-is-the-unthinkable-the-new-acceptable/
17. Boghossian P, Lindsay J. The Socratic method, defeasibility, and doxastic responsibility. Educ Philos Theory. 2018
50(3):244-253. doi:10.1080/00131 857.2017.1343111
18. Boghossian P, Lindsay J. How to Have Impossible Conversations: A Very Practical Guide. Hachette Books
2019.
19. Guesmi H. Reckoning with Foucault's alleged sexual abuse of boys in Tunisia. Accessed December 10, 2021. https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions /2021/4/16/reckoning-with-foucaults-sexual-abuse-of-boys-in-tunisia
20. Hobbes M. Everything You Know About Obesity Is Wrong. The Huffington Post. Accessed December 10, 2021. https://highline.huffingtonpost.com/ articles/en/everything-you-know-about-obesity-is-wrong/
21. The philosophical society. Accessed January 5, 2022. https://www.philo sophicalsociety.com/Archives/The%20Performative%20Contradiction.htm
22. The Gift of Violence. Thornton, M. | Independent Publishers Group. Accessed February 6, 2022. https://www.ipgbook.com/the-gift-of-violence-products-9781634312301.php
23. How Ed Schools Became a Menace. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Published April 8, 2018. Accessed February 6, 2022. https://www.chronicle .com/article/how-ed-schools-became-a-menace/
24. Look Who's Talking About Educational Equity. Quillette. Published August 12, 2020. Accessed February 6, 2022. https://quillette.com/2020/08/12/look-whos-talking-about-educational-equity/
~
Dr. Peter Boghossian is a Founding Faculty member at the University of Austin, Texas. Peter has a teaching pedigree spanning more than 25 years and 30 thousand students. He focuses on bringing the tools of professional philosophers to people in a wide variety of contexts and helping others think through what seem to be intractable problems. His articles can be found in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Philosophers' Magazine, Scientific American, Time Magazine, Skeptic, National R
Me, She, He, They: Reality vs. Identity in the 21st Century
Look At Me!
References
By Heather Heying
A few years ago, I had a curious exchange with a friend's young child. We were admiring his pet from a distance, and I asked him "Is your cat male or female?" He considered this for a moment, then replied, "I don't know. Maybe both?"
"Can't be." I told him. "Cats aren't like that."
At which, with no hesitation, the young boy declared, "you're a liar!"
It seems unlikely that a child of the 20th century-or the 19th, or 18th-would have been convinced that a cat could be both male and female. There are occasional, very rare developmental mix-ups-on which, more below-but no mammal species makes a go of it by being a hermaphrodite.1 Even very casual observers of cats (and humans) easily conclude that there are two functional types, male and female, and that they do not show up in the same individual.
Some other animals do things differently, of course. Banana slugs are simultaneous hermaphrodites, meaning that single individuals have both male and female reproductive parts at the same time, like the child's fictional cat. Many reef fish are sequential hermaphrodites, having the capacity to switch from one sex to the other, although there are limits, in terms of both direction and frequency. It is the rare fish, for instance, that can switch sex from male to female, while individuals in many
Sex is real, and ubiquitous. Sex, in this usage, is shorthand for "sexual reproduction," which is the raison d'être for there being distinct sexes. In our lineage, sexual reproduction has an uninterrupted history of at least 500 million years
it may well be closer to two billion years.2 Furthermore, sex is binary, at least among all plants and animals.
Sex is not, at its most fundamental, about chromosomes or hormones, about breasts or facial hair, about behavior or fashion. Sex, at its most fundamental, is about DNA from multiple individuals being brought together to create a zygote. But DNA isn't sufficient for a new life-you also need cellular machinery like mitochondria and ribosomes.
Without this cellular machinery-the cytoplasm-no zygote will be formed. Cellular machinery is big, though, compared to DNA. Someone's got to bring it if sex is going to work. So, some sex cells-gametes-are big because they contain the requisite cellular machinery. Those big gametes are eggs.
That's one of the two large problems posed by reproducing sexually: from whence to source the cellular machinery. The other is how to find a partner. Trade-offs being what they are, big cells are slower than small cells. Eggs being big (for cells), they therefore also tend to be slow or entirely sessile. So, it falls to the other type of gamete to move around its environment, looking for eggs. This other type of gamete is largely devoid of cellular machinery. It's called pollen in plants, sperm
In much of life on Earth, in nearly all plants and animals, and in absolutely all mammals, which includes humans, sex is real and ubiquitous. In his masterful compilation and analysis of the anthropological literature, Donald Brown writes that all cultures "have a sex terminology that is fundamentally dualistic, even when it comprises three or four categories.6 When there are three, one is a combination of the two basic sexes (e.g., a hermaphrodite), or one is a crossover sex (e.g., a man acting
Brown's "crossover sex" is now referred to as the umbrella term "trans." Trans has emerged in many cultures, but it has never been common-not nearly so common as homosexuality, for instance. And Brown's "hermaphrodites" have more recently been called intersex, who are now often referred to as having a Disorder of Sexual Development (DSD), although here we begin to run into problems. The distinction between people with DSDs and trans people is sometimes hard to parse, the boundaries between them
In a few places, Western science has discovered a mechanism which explains a relatively high rate of unusual sexual presentation. In the village of Las Salinas in the Dominican Republic, for instance, some number of people are understood to be machihembras -intersex, in fact, but presenting as female through childhood until puberty transforms them into decidedly more male in appearance. The molecular explanation for this particular DSD is, in part, that mutations in the 5a-reductase type 2 gene
We should all be grateful for the scientists who are driven to discover molecular pathways like the one above, but for most of us, the human side of the story is more compelling. In Las Salinas, Felicita was a little girl who enjoyed going to birthday parties with her sister until, as she approached puberty, she came to prefer playing with boys. During adolescence, as her sister's body became rounded and fuller, Felicita's shoulders broadened, and she grew strong and tall. Like most children wit
Las Salinas is not the only place on Earth in which a DSD has come to be explained by scientists, a DSD which explains, in retrospect, the relatively high number of people in those communities who transition from female to male during puberty. Las Salinas is not unique, but it, like DSDs and transness more generally, is very rare.
Those individuals who can or will or have or might make eggs are female. Those individuals who can or will or have or might make sperm (or pollen) are male. This is a true binary, which DSDs make more difficult to parse, but DSDs are the extreme exception. They are, indeed, disorders.9
Sex is not assigned at birth. Sex is observed at birth. A baby born with ambiguous genitalia or an undiagnosed DSD may be observed to be the sex that they are not, and that observation is therefore in error. Development is complicated, but the fact of anisogamy-two different types of gametes, not three or five or thirteen, but two, which come together to create a new life-is true.
Furthermore, development being complicated means that sometimes, some of the manifestations of your sex will be out of sync with your actual sex: hence the idea of being "born in the wrong body." Again, sex is not, at its most fundamental, about chromosomes or hormones, about breasts or facial hair, about behavior or fashion. But if your sex chromosomes determined your sex accurately with regard to gamete type and primary sex characteristics, but ran into some hiccups as your brain was being for
Let me be clear: We are dealing with the interface between long standing products of evolution, subtle matters of humanity which have blurry borders, and a brave new world of technological modifications that has yet to stand any test of time. That leaves all of us, even those who are thoroughly versed in the facts and logic of sex and sexuality grappling with new and genuinely difficult questions. No one has yet worked out the solutions that best resolve all of the tensions.
~
Sex is real and ubiquitous. Trans is real, but extremely rare. In the 21st century WEIRD world (those countries that are Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic)11,12 however, both of those points are increasingly taken as hostile to individual autonomy. To simultaneously observe that sex is real and everywhere, and that trans is real and rare, seems to guarantee running afoul of someone's ideology. Some will insist that anybody who says they are trans is trans. Others that sex i
As Libby Emmons so cogently points out,13 modern instantiations of transgenderism, like transhumanism, imagines a split between body and mind. "Transgender practice," writes Emmons, "is the ultimate biohack. The claim that one has been born into the 'wrong' body is a total rejection of mind-body unification, and a statement that mind and body can be so disparate that the body must be thoroughly altered to match the mind's perception of how it ought to be." There is something in this line of thin
To a degree, believing that you are the master of your own fate is empowering. It can open doors that might not even be recognized as doors had you not insisted on something that others find hard to believe. But sex isn't like that.
We do not change underlying reality by thinking about it differently, nor does it fail to apply to us if we are unaware of it. Ignorance of the physical laws of the universe does not make them go away, unlike what you may have inferred from the Road Runner cartoons. Gravity is not the product of our minds-or of the minds of animated coyotes. Gravity is a product of the universe. Sex is not a product of our minds either. Rather, sex is the product of our entire evolved beings. We are fully embodi
This concept of a fundamental duality within each of us, between body and mind, in which they are independent of one another, both struggling for primacy-it's wrong. And it's reductionist. Somehow it manages to fall prey both to the postmodern notion of reality as a social construct, and to the reductionist model currently imposed on so many modern institutions, including much of science, medicine, and nutrition. Too often, those who apply reductionist thinking imagine that if you come upon a co
Reductionism is at odds with emergence, though. Complex systems are emergent: in complex systems, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
~
Childhood is a time of exploration. It is a time to learn rules, to break rules, and to make new rules. Humans have the longest childhoods of any organism on the planet, and we are born with more potential than we will use.14 Our potential fades with time-note for instance the ability to pick up a new language in childhood, and the increased difficulty when the same attempt is made even in young adulthood. So, childhood is a time of exploration and of practice, of assessing the world and testing
The 21st century WEIRD world has left many bereft of choice, lacking in passion or insight to contribute in a way that feels meaningful. Coming of age can be filled with angst, but this historical moment goes well beyond what is common. The blame for the widespread failure to find meaning in existence can be placed in several additional courts: Currently fashionable parenting styles "protect" children from risk and experience. Screens are replacing social engagement in real life. Schools are eve
Enter into this minefield the expectation that everyone is their own brand, and should be, at all moments, declaring themselves as that brand. How to distinguish yourself, if you don't know what you're good at, can't seem to care about anything, and wouldn't know how to find out? If you have grown or are growing into the body of an adult but still have the mind of a child, and have emerged into a world seemingly bent on incoherence, what is there to do?
Some will lash out at the system
this is a time-honored response to feeling disenfranchised from the status quo, although its modern manifestations have a different character from those of the past. Others strive for what they already know, seeking comfortable lives in which past markers of success-a stable family, job, and home-are the totality of their goals. Those who would make their mark on the world - as scientists, or artists, explorers, or healers - are more adrift than ever, unless the
Within the last decade, an additional route to social belonging, to feeling like you have a place in an incoherent, unforgiving, and uncaring world, has been to declare yourself trans.
Jazz Jennings "came out" as trans at five years old, was encouraged to transition by a family that has been described as "supportive" in some quarters, began doing media appearances at the age of 6, and catapulted into a life of fame in 2013, at the age of 11, when interviewed on 20/20 by Barbara Walters.18 Jazz is hardly the only person who has found fame in being trans. But out of the limelight, many thousands of other young people are transitioning, often to the celebration of their immediate
Over the last several years, the number of people declaring themselves trans has increased by a factor of twenty (see data from the U.K.20 and the Netherlands,21 and find more at statsforgender.org22). Furthermore, historically, the very low number of trans people has been biased towards MtF (Male to Female): young men transitioning into transwomen. But that has recently reversed.23 In one year alone in the U.S.-from 2016 to 2017-the percentage increase in FtM "gender confirmation" surgeries, in
One additional deeply unfortunate possibility, which might partially explain the rise in trans-identification, is that our hyper-novel world is indeed driving an increase in DSDs. For instance, atrazine, a widely used herbicide and known endocrine disrupter, is detectable in rainfall even in regions where it is not actively applied. Frogs that are exposed to atrazine in lab experiments, even in low doses, do not develop normally. Furthermore, exposure to other endocrine disrupters is known to ha
Frogs may be more susceptible to environmental chemicals than are humans, in part because they breathe through their skin, easily taking in toxins through that massive organ. But imagining that we are immune to the effects of known endocrine disrupters is naïve at best. An increase in endocrine disrupters in the environment may be contributing to the uptick in declarations of transness among the young.27
Even if this is true, however-even if the chemicals that we are practically bathing in now have effects on people that are similar to the effects they are known to have on frogs-this is no justification for wilting in the face of declarations from children. We owe Jazz Jennings and the many thousands of less famous children futures that are as full of potential as possible.
Most of the young people who are now declaring themselves trans are not trans. But declaring yourself something you are not can help a person feel, if nothing else, very much alive, at least during that period of time when everyone around them is celebrating their bravery for "coming out" as something that they are not. It will be a fleeting high, and unsustainable, but as with the rush that comes with many illicit drugs, the costs are not easy to see in the moment.
~
Into this landscape arrive those who would defend the use of new pronouns in children in order to be "inclusive" or "kind." We do not try to be inclusive or kind to an anorexic who insists that, at 5'8" and 82 pounds, she is fat. We do not try to be inclusive or kind to a schizophrenic who insists that he is working with the King of Siam to save the world from the lizard people.
Nor should we try to be inclusive or kind to a child who wakes up Tuesday and declares himself Spiderman, come Wednesday he's a T. rex, and on Thursday he's a princess. Given that we don't embrace the child's fantasy on Tuesday or Wednesday, what makes Thursday different? "Kind," in this case, is a euphemism for: accede and cater to the fantasy. And this kindness is no kindness at all.
Children are in the act of figuring out what the world is. They check their experience against what the trusted adults say, a sibling's interpretation against that of a friend, today's experience against last week's. Childhood is when we learn how to be, and discover what we can be. Free and wide-ranging exploration will include ideas that are out of this world. Adults should allow children their fantasies, within reason, but not allow them to believe that fantasies are real as they approach adu
Affirming the delusions of a dangerously thin girl who thinks she's fat is not kind. Affirming the delusions of a girl who believes that her interest in "boy stuff" makes her a boy is also not kind. We owe people who are stuck in a fantasyland of reality-denial a correction. We owe them compassion and truth. We don't owe them a celebration of their confusion and naivete. In fact, such celebrations actually do harm.
We have all seen pronouns in profiles and email signatures. Most of us will have been asked to announce our pronouns in meetings or zoom calls or classrooms. We are told that this is simply about respect. I don't buy it, and neither should you.
~
The newest kid on this block is "non-binary." Announcing yourself as non-binary literally requires nothing on the part of the person "coming out," but now they may well get accolades for doing so. Google "non-binary in Hollywood" and be regaled with assurances from the famous and almost famous that because they don't entirely feel like a woman (or a man) all the time, they are therefore non-binary.
The concepts of "man" and "woman" are as ancient as humans. Remember the universality of "sex terminology that is fundamentally dualistic" in human cultures.6 The fact that every human culture to ever exist correctly recognizes that there are two sexes, should not be surprising, given that-again-male and female go back several hundred million years in our lineage alone, perhaps two billion years.
Gender is the software of sex. Gender norms flow from the sexual binary, but they are far more fluid, their boundaries less rigid, their expressions infinite. Remember the sex-switching reef fish? Not only do they switch sex, they switch gender, too. Female bluehead wrasse produce eggs (sex) and are docile, neither defending territories nor approaching conspecifics (gender)
once switched into males, however, the same individuals now produce sperm, and are both active and aggressive in inspectin
Gender follows from sex, but it is far more labile. Gender is not a binary. Because of what sex is and how it manifests in humans, men have traditionally been more likely to have power-at least, overt, outward facing, society-level power. And women have been more likely to use covert means to achieve their goals, working behind the scenes, using social rather than physical means to diffuse tension.29
Is it possible to move beyond those gender norms now, in the WEIRD world? I believe that we can. But observe that the very manifestation of so much of trans-ideology hinges on those very gender norms. Here is the (devout Christian) mother of a boy describing how she "knew" that what she actually had was a daughter, "I tried so hard to force her into wearing clothes with camouflage and superhero patterns, and I even gave her severe, flat-top haircut."30 But the child was having none of it. So ins
In Harper's Magazine in 2020, Anne Fadiman,32 Writer in Residence at Yale, argued in favor of the singular they for people who view themselves as outside of the binary. It may at first seem that we owe such people this much at least. No, we do not. What we owe people is resistance to foolishness. This foolishness is not the next civil rights battle. It's a battle for fantasy over reality, for a fragmented and fractured human experience over an integrated one, for a reductionist understanding of
From my scientific perspective, it looks very much like this scheme-prescriptivists vs. descriptivists-is an incomplete solution set. At least one category is missing from the analysis. In all the discussion among linguists about pronoun usage in English, I have never seen an analysis that asks: "what is actually true?"
What is actually true is that we have two sexes. Gender is somewhat more complicated, but male and female, man and woman-these refer to biological realities that do not change no matter what we say about them.
One year after Fadiman's piece, writer Michael Waters33 made a similar argument in The Atlantic Monthly: "Today's gender-neutral English-language pronouns make space not just for two genders, but for many more, serving as a way for people who fall outside the binary of 'man' and 'woman' to describe themselves."
And in the New York Times, linguist John McWhorter,34 who has written brilliantly on adjacent topics, fell prey to the same incomplete logic in September of 2021. Arguing, again, on behalf of the singular "they," he imagines that he understands the complaints: "Why does language have to change all the time, with all we have to think about?" This, I contend, is not the objection that most of us have. The next example that he gives is the shift, in English, from a preponderance of double, and even
I have always called adults by the pronouns that they wish to be called by. Never in my experience as a college professor was I asked to use brand-new pronouns. I did have trans students, and their cross-sex pronoun preferences posed no problems in our classrooms. But children's flights of fancy, their fantasies that could be their greatest strength as they imagine all of the ways to be human, should never be cemented into permanence. That risks turning their greatest strength into their greates
One of the oddities of this moment, and of these ideologies, is that they
simultaneously complexify what is simple (e.g., the binary of sex), and simplify what is complex. The former is surprising for its utter lack of connection to reality, both easily observable reality and deep historical reality. The latter-the simplification of the complex-is, unfortunately, such a banal instinct that it is very common through human history. We simplify the complexity of the world in order to feel in control, in order to feel like gods. Left to our most banal devices, we are, aga
Suffer from tonsilitis? Rip them out! Feeling anxious? Take a pill! Wishing for freedom from restrictive gender norms? Declare yourself a man! Or better yet: declare yourself non-binary!
Trans people are real but rare, but nonbinary people? This is just a fiction, a sign of a society that has forgotten to check its beliefs with reality, a society so wealthy, insulated, and comfortable that it has, too often, forgotten that reference to an objective reality is actually a necessary precursor to making things happen in the world. At the end of her essay in Harper's, Fadiman argues that there are five reasons to use the singular they, "from most conservative to the most revolutionar
As I was writing this essay, I saw a young woman wearing a sweatshirt that said "anti-gender roles club." Yes to that. Yes to freeing ourselves of the now unnecessary baggage that has been entrenched by social norms. Let us free ourselves from that part of our expectations that we can free ourselves from, without pretending that we, men and women, are the same.
But as I was writing this essay, I also saw a piece in a Science magazine headlined "Why I came out as non-binary to my PhD lab."35 We are not told what kind of science the author is allegedly learning how to engage in. What we are told is that "I knew that if I wanted to survive graduate school, I needed to be open with my lab mates" about the use of "gender-neutral/non-binary pronouns."
I'll match that anecdote with one of my own: When I was in graduate school (as it happens, at the very same institution, but many years earlier), becoming a credentialed scientist, it never occurred to me that my peers or advisor needed to know the inner workings of my psychology in order for me to survive. Nor was it in fact the case. In fact, in order to do my research-which entailed, among other things, contending with aggressive lemurs and errant spice boats and cyclones, while living in a t
The "non-binary" category seems to be evidence of either deep mental confusion, or deep narcissism, or perhaps both. The author of the "Science Careers" piece continues that, in the six months since informing said lab mates, "The word 'she' has slipped out in conversations more times than I can count, and every time, it feels like a knife is being stabbed into my stomach."
We all have preferences about what we want to be called. Perhaps a nickname from childhood has stuck around past its use-by date. Perhaps you prefer your middle name to your first. When I was a college professor, I was happy to have students call me by my first name, but a few preferred to use a title, in which case "Dr. Heying" was fine too. But occasionally a student would call me "Mrs. Heying." As I told them-gently, privately-that wasn't fine by me, because while it was true that I was marri
Some "first-world problems" are real challenges which would nevertheless not rate on a list of complaints had the complainant want of food, shelter, or clean water to drink. Spending hours navigating an automated customer service system to get to a real person, or facing the newest round of software updates that have broken a once functional system-these are legitimate first world problems. Other first world problems, though? They are fabricated. Out of confusion. Or for attention. As the inimit
~
We need science, and we need scientists. One of the things that will get in the way of both things is allowing the institution of science to fall prey to ideology that patently makes no sense. When one of the two most influential science journals in the world publishes a self-indulgent piece on the visceral pain experienced by a "non-binary" grad student upon being misgendered, while truly important scientific issues remain uninvestigated or patently botched, it all seems a lost cause.
Add to this that medical schools are now falling down the rabbit hole as well: a professor apologizes for referring to pregnant women (because men can apparently get pregnant
or so tomorrow's doctors are being taught)
another one insists that biological sex is a "social construct
" while others get lambasted for referring to breastfeeding instead of "chestfeeding."37 So too is the American Medical Association. In their guide to "Advancing Health Equity: A Guide to Language, Narrative and Conce
And yet. Consider this: A smart and capable young person approached me with this true story. A natal female who had transitioned to male, Ronny (a pseudonym) grew alarmed at having doors close as womanhood receded in the rear-view mirror. Realizing that "passing" as female was no longer possible, Ronny settled on non-binary as a result. Ronny does not seem confused to me. Ronny is not in denial of reality. Ronny does seem sad, and almost resigned. And Ronny arrived here, in part, because of a ma
I grew up with Ms. Magazine, and Title IX, and Mary Tyler Moore throwing her hat into the air on a Minneapolis street, beamed into my living room every week without fail. Mary Tyler Moore's hat throw was an expression of such unbridled freedom and possibility that it filled me, as a little girl, with joy every time that I saw it. I did not view it this way then-and it was apparently not the intention-but her joyous hat throw could be seen as an homage to the trope of the bride throwing her bouqu
Sex is real and ubiquitous and fixed. DSDs are real and very rare. Transsexual people do not exist, but transgender people do. But feeling out of step with gender norms does not make you trans. Also, feeling out of step with gender norms is neither wicked, nor should it be noteworthy. Feeling out of step with gender norms certainly should not warrant the creation of fictional new categories, like non-binary, unless the point is to keep the rest of us on our toes.
To that little boy who would have us believe that his cat might be both male and female-and to the legions of people who would have us believe that their sex is a matter of choice-I say this: Your beliefs are not merely wrong, they are acutely disempowering. This marks a step backwards for all of us individuals who are gender non-conforming: the girls who like to play in the mud and with numbers, and the boys who like to save injured birds and discuss their feelings. It therefore marks a step ba
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9. Witchel SF. DISORDERS OF SEX DEVELOPMENT. Best Pract Res Clin Obstet Gynaecol. 2018
48:90-102. doi:10.1016/j.bpobgyn.2017.11.005
10. Ristori J, Steensma TD. Gender dysphoria in childhood. Int Rev Psychiatry Abingdon Engl. 2016
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11. Henrich J, Heine SJ, Norenzayan A. The weirdest people in the world? Behav Brain Sci. 2010
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12. The Weirdest People in the World by Joseph Henrich. Accessed January 22, 2022. https://www.penguin.com.au/books/the-weirdest-people-in-the-world-9780141976211
13. The Transhumanism Revolution: Oppression Disguised as Liberation. Quillette. Published July 11, 2018. Accessed December 11, 2021. https:// quillette.com / 2018 / 07 / 11 / the-transhumanism-revolution-oppression-disguised-as-liberation/
14. A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide To The 21st Century. A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century. Accessed January 1, 2022. https://huntergatherersguide. com/
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16. Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America eBook : Whitaker, Robert: Amazon.com.au: Kindle Store. Accessed December 31, 2021. https://www .amazon.com.au/Anatomy-Epidemic-Bullets-Psychiatric-Astonishing-ebook /dp/B0036S4EGE
17. Gray P. Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life. Basic Books/Hachette Book Group
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18. 20/20 Interview of Jazz Jennings by Barbara Walters in 2013: https://youtu.be/bJw3s85EcxM - Google Search. Accessed December 31, 2021. https:// www.google.com / search?q=20%2F20 + Interview+of+Jazz+ Jennings+by+Barbara+Walters+in+2013%3A+https%3A%2F%2Fyoutu.be%2FbJw3s85EcxM&rlz=1C5CHFA_enAU881AU881&sxsrf=AOaemvLAULkoTEzNy7ETqA0nvQihban-5Q%3A1640930053648&ei=BZvOYY-cJ4 KdseMPscaWgAQ&ved=0ahUKEwjPssvnrI31AhWCTmwGHTGjBUAQ4dUDCA8&uact=5&oq=20%2F20+Interview+of+Jazz+Jennings+by+Barbara+Walters+i
19. Digital Catalog - Irreversible Damage. Accessed December 31, 2021. https://catalog.simonandschuster.com/TitleDetails/TitleDetails.aspx?cid=29984&pn=1&isbn=9781684512287&FilterBy=3&FilterVal=Regnery+Publishing&FilterByName=Imprint&ob=0&ed=&showcart=N&camefrom=&find=&a=mkcndtsfxa
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31. 4thwavenow. Gender-affirmative therapist: Baby who hates barrettes = trans boy
questioning sterilization of 11-year olds same as denying cancer treatment. 4thWaveNow. Published September 29, 2016. Accessed December 31, 2021. https: //4thwavenow.com / 2016 / 09 / 29/gender-affirmative- therapist - baby - who - hates - barrettes-trans - boy-questioning-sterilization-of-11-year-olds-same-as-denying-cancer-treatment/
32. Fadiman A. All My Pronouns: How I learned to live with the singular they. Harpers Mag. 2020
August 2020. Accessed December 31, 2021. https://harpers.org/archive/2020/08/all-my-pronouns-the-singular-they/
33. Waters M. Where Gender-Neutral Pronouns Come From. The Atlantic. Published June 4, 2021. Accessed December 31, 2021. https://www.the atlantic.com/culture/archive/2021/06/gender-neutral-pronouns-arent-new/61 9092/
34. McWhorter J. Opinion | Gender Pronouns Are Changing. It's Exhilarating. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/21/opinion/gender-pronouns-they.html. Published September 21, 2021. Accessed December 31, 2021.
35. Roldan B. Coming out. Science. 2020
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36. Vacuous liberal 'wokeness' is now beyond parody. Accessed December 31, 2021. https:// www.telegraph.co.uk / news / 2019 / 09 / 16 / vacuous-liberal-wokeness-now-beyond-parody/
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~
Heather Heying is a scientist, educator, and author. An evolutionary biologist who has conducted research on the evolution of social systems and sexual selection, from frogs to humans, she earned her PhD in Biology from the University of Michigan, where she earned the university's top honour for her dissertation. She has a B.A. in Anthropology.
Heather has been a visiting Fellow at Princeton University, and before that, was a tenured professor at The Evergreen State College. She resigned in 2017 in the wake of violent campus protests. She architected curriculum that prioritized the scientific method, and exploration of both ecosystems and ideas
and has since been invited to speak about higher ed, the evolution of sex and consciousness, and the culture wars, in venues including the U.S. Department of Justice, the Krishnamurti Institute
Her first book, Antipode, is based on her life in Madagascar while studying the sex lives of poison frogs. Her second book, co-authored with husband Bret Weinstein, is A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century. A New York Times best-seller, the book provides an evolutionary toolkit for living a good and honourable life as a modern ape. She also writes Natural Selections on Substack, and co-hosts with Bret a popular weekly livestream on the DarkHorse Podcast.
On Free Speech Absolutism and the Deontological Pursuit of Truth
References
Based on an Interview with Gad Saad
Mark Halloran: You've described yourself as a free speech absolutist. The only other absolutist I've spoken to was the late intelligence researcher James Flynn.1 I've always been interested in what the limits of free speech are beyond just incitation to violence. So, I wonder what you consider to be the limits of free speech?
Gad Saad: I think the best way to answer this question is via a concrete and tangible example. If I were to think of the absolute most offensive thing that someone could utter, especially to someone who is Lebanese Jewish, such as myself, someone who has escaped severe persecution in Lebanon - the worst thing that you could say is the Holocaust never happened. Obviously, I wasn't personally affected by the Holocaust, but given that it was Jewish people who were affected, I could argue that that
The issue seems to be that there's a blurry line in relation to the incitation to violence. But I think about Karl Popper's criterion of the tolerant society needing to be intolerant of intolerance. And so, there are conversations and symbols of things that are sort of not worth having - like with Holocaust deniers. And I wonder what you thought of that?
Let the free market of ideas decide. When I was a doctoral student at Cornell University, there was one person, the name of the gentleman escapes me, who argued under the guise of 'Let's just have a debate,' and who wanted to come on campus, to discuss whether the Holocaust happened or not. And the reality is that most people were not interested in what he had to say, and I can't remember his name today, because in the battle of ideas - it's a form of evolutionary epistemology
good ideas eventu
John Stuart Mill's marketplace of ideas. I wonder whether you end up on a slippery slope either way? I talked about this with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who was quoting Popper in relation to her latest book 'Prey' about the issues with Islamic immigration in Europe. If you allow too much tolerance, people aren't rational actors and you run the risk of the society being overtaken by authoritarians. It's a double-edged sword.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not arguing that all ideas can be allowed to flourish. If an idea is inherently built on the subjugation, the eradication or the extinguishing of another group, then we can discuss whether those ideas should be allowed to flourish in a free society. One can argue that there are some religious beliefs that don't fall under the proviso of religious freedom, because they are seditious, they are literally contrary to freedom, and so that would fit under the not tolerating the
The argument that is made in relation to that is that some of his language is warlike language, for example, 'going into battle,' whilst his lawyers defended him by saying that he'd asked for the people to march peacefully.4 The issue that you've faced is an extension of the idea of incitement to violence to epistemic violence.
By epistemic violence you mean? I want to make sure I understand what you mean, because for example, I use the term in describing postmodernism, I call it intellectual terrorism. Not that I literally mean that there is violence, but that it akin to the way that the 9/11 hijackers flew planes into buildings. I argue that postmodernism flies planes of bullshit into our edifices of reason. It's a metaphor. So maybe you could explain to me what you mean by epistemic violence?
I took the term from Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay's book, Cynical Theories. I wonder whether people really do believe in free speech? I know you've found a division with people like Sam Harris in relation to Trump's ability to exhibit free speech on Twitter. I wonder whether even people who present themselves as perfectly rational actors truly believe in free speech?
That's the reason why we had a fallout because I am someone who lives by a strict code. If you read The Parasitic Mind- How Infectious Ideas are Killing Common Sense5 in chapter one, I talk about the two ideals that drive my life: truth and freedom. I live according to an exacting level of purity, to the extent where it's a punishing code of personal conduct, a pathological code of conduct, whereby to me, I would be tossing and turning in turmoil, if I were not always consistent in my foundation
Let me give you an example of a deontological approach to this issue. In 1961, I believe, the Mossad was in Argentina trying to find Adolf Eichmann.7 Adolf Eichmann might be considered a slightly nastier guy than Brett Kavanaugh. And yet their deontological position was, 'We can either put a bullet in his head right now, because we've identified him and end this story and ensure that we are safe, or we don't do it this way, he needs to have his day in court at great personal cost, and to ensure
I think you quoted Hume, in your book from memory, talking about how rationality is driven to some extent by emotion and desire. So, we're all vulnerable to that, aren't we? We're all vulnerable to confirmation bias?
Here's what I argue in that chapter
the one where I quote Hume - it's not that we are just cognitive animals
thinking animals, or just emotional animals - I don't think that these two systems should be pitted against one another. We're both. The struggle is to know when to invoke which system. When I am walking down an alley, and I'm taking a shortcut to get home, and I see four young men, loitering, that look suspicious, and my heart starts racing, my blood pressure goes up, I might get a bit
There is an expression in Arabic: 'To get drunk simply by smelling the cork of the wine bottle,' meaning that I don't need to actually go through the heavy lifting of drinking the wine to get drunk, I can simply take a whiff and I'll get drunk.8 What are we conveying here? When people say 'I despise Trump
he disgusts me. He's going to cause a nuclear holocaust. The economy is going to tank. He's going to institute martial law.' Those were literal things that were said by guys like Sam Harris an
It seems as though you've got to be vigilant against that. If you wanted to make an assessment of Trump it may be in relation to something like COVID-19. For instance, early on in the pandemic, Trump simply saying 'It will go away' - that was unhelpful, and damaging, and potentially led to greater loss of life.10 And then you may look at the Trump administration and say: 'Perhaps the Abraham Accords were a success.'11-14 However, if I made some sort of ad hominem attack about you, and then I wen
Of course. But again, you would think that people whose business it is to be nuanced thinkers, to not be black and white, to be rational, to be well reasoned would be able to do this. In The Parasitic Mind, I explained that all of the idea pathogens that I'm discussing in this book originate from academia. It's not as though if you are highly educated with a PhD from a fancy university this inoculates you against bad ideas - you are the progenitor of those bad ideas. Now, that doesn't mean that
It's as though we pick a soccer team, but we don't pick them based on their athletic abilities. It turns out that all the soccer players are babbling, obese people who can't kick a soccer ball, and that's what you end up having in universities. That's why I oftentimes, in a jocular way, I'm righteously indignant at some of my colleagues because of their faux intellectualism. Their posing really upsets me, because I am authentic to a fault. For example, I'm not a Democrat nor a Republican, notwit
Everyone can have a moral tribe can't they?
We do. And it's tough to extricate yourself from that penchant. We are a coalitional creature. The ability to view the world as us versus them
to view the world as blue team versus red team, is one that is hardwired into the architecture of our minds. I get that. But we're able to sometimes overcome these Darwinian realities. I have an evolved penchant to eat fatty foods, because I've evolved to solve the problem of caloric scarcity and caloric uncertainty
that doesn't mean that I am doomed be
I felt like that was the heart of it. When I was reading The Parasitic Mind, it reminded me of the conformity experiments of Solomon Asch.15 So, I wonder how much of it is simply that people can get indoctrinated into an idea, any idea, through the pressure of the group?
It's interesting that you mentioned Solomon Asch's experiments. It's one of the classic examples that I give in any behavioral science or psychology course, whether it be consumer psychology, or psychology of decision making, or evolutionary psychology. The fact that a single person - never mind the actual conformity rates that we see - would succumb to the group pressure to conform for such an unambiguous set of stimuli shows us that in the real world, where the stimuli are not as clear as thre
I always tell people don't be a fence sitter. If you're able to articulate a good defense for your positions, be a honey badger. Because the honey badger is an animal that is extraordinarily fierce, despite the fact that it is the size of a small dog. So be ideologically fierce, and stand tall in your commitment to defend your deontological foundational principles. But most people, I hate to say it, and I don't want to sound misanthropic - most people are just abject cowards. If you go 'boo!' th
The reality is, certainly in academia, we almost by design choose people who are just intellectual cowards, rather than having Navy Seals as academics - these are intellectual warriors, right? Not frivolously combative: you and I have different positions - let's have a respectful disagreement. Let's see what happens. Instead, people want to play nice. At departmental meetings it's unbelievable the number of niceties that people say to each other, because they don't want to come across as though
It seems you admire not being too high on agreeableness, even though that probably has an evolutionary benefit in terms of the in-group. James Flynn said to me that in the 30 or 40 years that the left has gained ascendancy within the university, anything that they'd done, and he was critical of it, did not even begin to approach the totalitarian regime that the right ran under regimes like McCarthyism. How would you respond to that?
I don't know what he went through, I can only respond to the current reality. Short of having studied the history of the type of squashing of free speech that might have happened in different eras, I can tell you that the last 40 or 50 years that I'm aware, all of the nonsense comes from the left. As a matter of fact, I can't think of an industry within intelligentsia that is not overwhelmingly dominated by one political aisle
the left. McCarthyism was a unique short point in history. But let's
When it comes to us discussing in an economics course and a political science course - is the death penalty right or wrong? Are abortion rights right or wrong? What is the optimal fiscal policy? What is the optimal foreign policy? Well, there are very, very compelling arguments on any side for those issues. Now, I may fall on one side ideologically or not. But there are truly very valuable arguments on both sides. So, I can really listen to someone who thinks that the death penalty is a terrible
I think to some extent you've come out as a warrior in this culture war because your discipline
the merger of evolutionary psychology and consumption, is at the epicenter. If there is going to be a discipline that is the flashpoint for ideas of social constructionism then it is going to be that, isn't it? And that is why you are coming out in such strong defense I imagine?
The first hints of the insane departure from reason and reality that I saw in academia, is precisely how you describe it, which was in the pursuit of my scientific work. It was kind of a precursor to the eventual broader culture wars. But idiotic ideas begin in the lab, just like the COVID virus, as far as we know, it starts off in the lab, but then it escapes. These parasitic and moronic ideas begin in some esoteric place in the halls of the ivory tower, but eventually those ideas escape and th
So, 'Oh, you want to use evolution to explain the evolution of opposable thumbs? - I'm with you. You want to explain the evolutionary mechanisms that explain why our kidneys operate the way they do? Okay, I'm still with you. But you want to explain the human mind using the evolutionary framework? What are you some kind of Jewish Nazi?' So that's the kind of idiocy that you'd get. Listen, I've interacted with editors of top journals in psychology, where they said, 'Well, come on, evolutionary psy
Evolutionists don't deny the importance of the environment. But there needs to still be an ultimate explanation for the causal mechanisms that result in that socialization process. Otherwise, you're saying nothing. Still today, I encounter endless babbling buffoons who say, 'Come on. This is not serious science.' So, in chapter seven of The Parasitic Mind, I discuss an unbelievably powerful epistemological tool called Nomological Networks of Cumulative Evidence.21-24 If people take nothing away
Nomological networks of cumulative evidence is not a literature review. It's not a meta-analysis. It's much more than that. Because what it's basically saying is I have to provide distinct lines of evidence in support of an argument. Let's say I want to prove to you that there is a sex specificity of toy preferences
boys prefer certain toys, girls prefer other toys. Or I want to make an argument that men's preference for the hourglass figure is an adaptation.21 How would I go about proving that
I thought it is interesting in terms of sex differences, because now, with the replication crisis in psychology,25 that seems to be undermining this research to some extent .
In a sense, a nomological network protects you against the replication crisis. There are two types of replications. When you talk about replication, there is what's called a direct replication. Let's say that you have published a paper on facial symmetry. So, now I want to replicate your finding in a direct way, meaning I want to use your exact stimuli, your exact instructions, so I do a direct replication of what you did. A conceptual replication is broader. Let's say you found that beauty is c
It has to be because you've got the danger when you're trying to construct an evolutionary theory, that when you extrapolate backwards, you increase
the error rate. If that makes sense?
It does. And that's why you build those nomological networks. That's why when people say, 'Well, it's unfalsifiable just-so storytelling,' it really pisses me off, because it is actually doing the exact opposite. When I want to try to prove to you that the hourglass figure is an adaptation, what do I do? I can get you data from radically different cultures. I can go to the Yanomami tribe in the Amazon and show you that they prefer an hourglass figure.26 So already that is way higher in terms of
It's an invalidation, I suppose. I want to get back to that, because I think there's a point that I'm really interested in, in relation to this. I think what you and other people like Jordan Peterson have struggled with, is that if social constructionism embeds all causation in culture and language, it becomes a form of solipsism, which is maddening to argue against.
You're right. True. I'll just build on what you just said. When I was laying out all of the idea pathogens in The Parasitic Mind, I wanted to try to come up with some universal mechanism that explains why these varied idea pathogens arise. While different cancers behave very differently, what they all have in common is the unchecked division of cells. At least we can agree that that's a commonality across all cancers. I wanted to look at what is common to all these idea pathogens. I think what t
And Margaret Mead.
Margaret, his eventual student, who was desperate to extricate the human condition from any biological imperatives, because there are all kinds of cretinous people who misused evolutionary theory. They start off with a noble goal, which is let's create a worldview where these kinds of ugly realities will no longer happen. And in the service of that noble goal, if we erect 100 years of edifices of bullshit, so be it. They are consequentialist, whereas I am, when it comes to the truth, I am pathol
You've mentioned deontological ethics quite a few times. It always strikes me as much harder to achieve than what it sounds. Deontological ethics is like the 10 commandments: 'Thou shalt, thou shalt not,' but even the 10 commandments are not purely deontological. 'Thou shall not kill?' Well, unless I'm at war with the Philistines and then I'm going to kill. Deontological ethics is very difficult to achieve, I think...
Well, how about presumption of innocence? Is that a deontological principle that we should always follow?
Yes, I think it's a good principle. But I don't think that it's impervious to change
I think that societies can change it, and then we'll face the consequences for that, whatever they may be .
I'm thinking of writing an article where I analogize the current crisis of irrationality in the West with the Fine-Tuning Argument
30 that all of nature's laws have to be exactly set at a particular place for life to be amenable on Earth. Well, I argue that for a civil, free, and enlightened society to function in the way that it has requires that a set of foundational values be adhered to (the levers of liberty, so to speak). It's akin to a cosmological Fine-Tuning Argument and that you need t
Particularly with the law. The law is not necessarily about justice. It's about being as polemical as possible and being an advocate. So, there is a deontological principle of innocence until proven guilty. However often, even in recent times, that has occurred, I couldn't say.
You mean that we adhere to that principle?
Let's move away from presumption of innocence. I know you've used the example of O.J. Simpson's trial in the past
31 a trial that is confounded to some extent by social influences.
Although I would say in the O.J. Simpson case there wasn't, I don't believe, a violation of a deontological principle. Rather, human beings that are part of that system are flawed, and therefore they succumb to their cognitive and emotional biases. The deontological violation would have come whereby we would have said, 'There is so much astounding evidence to support the fact that O.J. Simpson is guilty, let's not waste time with taxpayer money, let's take him out the back and put a bullet in hi
Interestingly, from the social constructionist perspective, I was thinking about your writings on gender differences. I thought, 'Well, these are biological but are they immutable to change?' So, I would think about gender differences possibly like the genes for height, meaning that if you put enough selective environmental pressures on them, you can change height. Whereas the gene for limb development is impermeable
it takes a very acute toxicity like thalidomide to affect it. And I wondered w
You can create so much selection pressure - let's say through quotas. You can see it in different societies such as India which now has 34% of its IT population female.37 So, you can see that cultures and selective deliberate pressure could change things that may even be biological.
Well, yes and no. It depends what you're saying. For example, if you're saying, with the Peshmerga, how many female fighters there are - that's just an outcome-based reality. We can change the cultural tradition so that a particular role that women were not allowed to engage in, they now can, but that's not really where the selection pressures that I talked about in my research on sex differences come from. Here's one preference that will be impervious to change, unless you had many years of sel
On the other hand, there are some human traits that evolve very quickly in the order of several hundred years, if not thousands of years. For example, the fact that some societies have individuals with a greater propensity for lactose intolerance, that happens very, very quickly. Cultures that have pastoral living as a cultural tradition, end up having lower rates of lactose intolerance, those cultures that don't have traditional pastoral living have higher rates, that doesn't take long, it take
Absolutely. I was thinking of an example, I can't remember the name of the village or the small region, but there's a place in China where it is a purely matriarchal society.40 Women own everything, run everything, and they're all the heads of families. So, you have a situation where women who have no choice but to be attracted to men who aren't ambitious.
I don't know about that particular context - I'd have to look into it. But that example, by the way, actually proves an important evolutionary point, which comes from behavioral ecology. And it's as follows: there are some things where the human universals are really quite ubiquitous, but the reality is that for many phenomena, we've evolved adaptability as an adaptation. Now, that's actually a really profound point that people might miss so let me just expand on it. The immune system has evolve
Therefore, while most cultures practice polygyny
meaning one man with multiple women - about 85% of documented cultures at least allow for the possibility of polygyny,41 all other cultures are monogamous, and there are exceedingly rare cases of polyandrous societies. Polyandrous societies, the most famous of which is Tibetan polyandry, is where one woman is shared by multiple men. Now, an imbecile, who doesn't understand evolutionary theory says 'Aha! well now that invalidates evolutionary theo
I know that you developed a nomological network of evidence to show the link between Islam and the propensity to commit terrorism. I suppose when I thought about the principles of scientific philosophy, I had always considered Islam to be a necessary but not sufficient condition in extremism. If you said it was a necessary and sufficient condition that would mean that every Muslim on the planet would be an extremist. It's about multiple causation. It seems to be a combination of factors - potent
Yes. In the most basic sense, that's an obvious statement. This is what I made fun of in the book: this is due to paleo, organic, social, cultural, bio, anthropogenic. So, you can concatenate a bunch of bullshit terms, so that the more you can concatenate, then you move away from what seems to be the very clear causal link. This apparently makes you a nuanced thinker. It's due to many causes. Well, everything is due to many causes. So that says pretty much nothing. But what we do know is that if
They don't recognize it, I think. I spoke to a Palestinian refugee who had been in the camps in Lebanon, and their family and their friends had faced persecution from Gemayel's Christian militia. Some people had been murdered. Most Christians wouldn't recognize that as Christianity.
Yes. I addressed this in the book, you may or may not remember. When a Muslim commits 37,000 plus terror attacks in the name of Islam since 9/11 alone, and when he says, in taping a video, before he commits that act, 'I am doing it because of these four Quranic quotes,' it becomes very difficult to argue that it's because of solar panels, or because of lack of art exposure, or that it is due to beard bullying, or that Christians also do bad things, which is a form of whataboutism. Because I am f
Well possibly 500 years ago...
Well, as I said, there is no monopoly of evil from one ideology. No one is saying that Islam contains the only set of religious doctrines that can result in horrific things. You can find things in the Torah and the Old Testament that has all kinds of horrible things, for instance
'Take your insolent children to the gates of the city, and stone them to death.' But here's a small detail. We don't have too many ultra-orthodox Jews today taking their insolent children and stoning them to death at t
And I completely recognize what you said. As a matter of fact, I have more Muslim friends than most people will ever meet in their lives by virtue of me being from Lebanon. So, I don't need to be convinced of that argument that most Muslims are peaceful. But is Islam a set of ideas where gay life flourishes? Where black dogs flourish? Where Jews flourish? Where irreverent non-Muslims' flourish? No. And there's about 1400 years that supports that idea. Here's another one that we hear: 'But Profes
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3. News ABC. A visual timeline on how the attack on Capitol Hill unfolded. ABC News. Accessed December 30, 2021. https://abcnews.go.com/US/ visual-timeline-attack-capitol-hill-unfolded/story?id=75112066
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6. Sam Harris. Kavanaugh's defenders appear to believe either (1) Ford is lying to keep him off the court and willing to destroy her life in the process. (What's more, she's been preparing the ground for this accusation for years.) or. @SamHarrisOrg. Published September 27, 2018. Accessed December 30, 2021. https://twitter.com/SamHarrisOrg/status/1045451022515064832
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2020. Accessed December 30, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-HiS4r4MV4
9. Times TNY. Paul Krugman: The Economic Fallout. The New York Times. paul-krugman-the-economic-fallout. Published November 9, 2016. Accessed December 30, 2021.
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11. Why the Abraham Accords didn't resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - Vox. Accessed December 30, 2021. https://www.vox.com/2021/5/13/2243 4142/israel-gaza-hamas-war-trump-biden-abraham-accords
12. Green L. Trump's Peace review: dysfunction and accord in US Israel policy. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/dec/20/trumps-peace- review - barak - ravid - israel - netanyahu-kushner-uae-iran. Published December 20, 2021. Accessed December 30, 2021.
13. The Abraham Accords. United States Department of State. Accessed December 30, 2021. https://www.state.gov/the-abraham-accords/
14. Biden, the Abraham Accords and carrying forward Trump's legacy. Accessed December 30, 2021. https://www.trtworld.com/opinion/biden-the-abraham-accords-and-carrying-forward-trump-s-legacy-49998
15. Asch SE. Studies of independence and conformity: I. A minority of one against a unanimous majority. Psychol Monogr Gen Appl. 1956
70(9):1-70. doi:10.1037/h0093718
16. Table 2 . Political identification of college professors by field (%). ResearchGate. Accessed December 30, 2021. https://www.researchgate.net/ figure/Political-identification-of-college-professors-by-field_tbl1_40823273
17. Saad G. Evolutionary Psychology in the Business Sciences. Springer Science & Business Media
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18. Saad G. The consuming instinct. What Darwinian consumption reveals about human nature. Polit Life Sci J Assoc Polit Life Sci. 2013
32(1):58-72. doi:10.2990/32_1_58
19. Gad Saad. Human reticence effect: evolutionary principle is used to explain mating behaviour of salamander. Good work professor. Same principle /2. @GadSaad. Published April 23, 2015. Accessed December 30, 2021. https:// twitter.com/GadSaad/status/591317253041291264
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21. Saad G. The Epistemology of Evolutionary Psychology Offers a Rapprochement to Cultural Psychology. Front Psychol. 2020
11:579578. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2020.579578
22. Schmitt DP, Pilcher JJ. Evaluating evidence of psychological adaptation: how do we know one when we see one? Psychol Sci. 2004
15(10):643-649. doi:10.1111/j.0956-7976.2004.00734.x
23. Saad G. (2020). Building a global database of nomological networks of cumulative evidence. - PsycNET. Accessed December 30, 2021. https://doi. apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Febs0000223
24. Saad G. On the Method of Evolutionary Psychology and Its Applicability to Consumer Research. J Mark Res. 2017
54(3):464-477. doi:10.1509/jmr .14. 0645
25. Replication Crisis | Psychology Today Australia. Accessed December 30, 2021. https://www.psychologytoday.com/au/basics/replication-crisis
26. Saad G. Beauty: Culture-Specific or Universally Defined? | Psychology Today Australia. Accessed December 30, 2021. https://www. psychology today.com/au /blog /homo-consumericus/201004/beauty-culture-specific-or-universally-defined
27. Hudson MJ, Aoyama M. Waist-to-hip ratios of Jomon figurines. Antiquity. 2007
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28. Saad G. Advertised Waist-to-Hip Ratios of Online Female Escorts. Int J E-Collab. 2010
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30. Landsman K. The Fine-Tuning Argument: Exploring the Improbability of Our Existence. In: Landsman K, van Wolde E, eds. The Challenge of Chance: A Multidisciplinary Approach from Science and the Humanities. The Frontiers Collection. Springer International Publishing
2016:111-129. doi: 10.1007/978-3-319-26300-7_6
31. Gad Saad. Let us hope that OJ Simpson & Noble Victim @JussieSmollett join their efforts in finding the common culprit across their 2 tragedies: Killer in the OJ case is also the racist homophobe who attacked Noble Jussie. There was a citing of him at the corner of Unicornia & Munchausen. @GadSaad. Published March 26, 2019. Accessed January 22, 2022. https://twitter.com/ GadSaad/status/1110620106420297729
32. Five Things That Suggest O.J. Simpson Killed His Ex-Wife And Ron Goldman. NewsOne. Published June 12, 2019. Accessed December 31, 2021. https://newsone.com/1334425/five-reasons-why-we-know-o-j-did-it/
33. Why the Civil Case Against O.J. Simpson Would Never Be Enough | Vanity Fair. Accessed December 31, 2021. https://www.vanityfair.com/magazine /1997/04/dunne199704
34. Tickle C, Towers M. Sonic Hedgehog Signaling in Limb Development. Front Cell Dev Biol. 2017
5. Accessed January 22, 2022. https://www.frontiersin. org/article/10.3389/fcell.2017.00014
35. Wilgenburg WV, Fumerton M. Kurdistan's Political Armies: The Challenge of Unifying the Peshmerga Forces. :10.
36. Jessica Trisko : Women at War | troublemag. Accessed December 31, 2021. https://www.troublemag.com/jessica-trisko-women-at-war/
37. IANS. India Far Ahead Of US, Europe In Women's Tech Equity
Female IT Employees Form 34 Per Cent Of Total Indian Workforce. Swarajyamag. Accessed December 31, 2021. https://swarajyamag.com/insta/india-far-ahead-of-us-europe-in-womens-tech - equity-female-it-employees-form-34-per-cent-of-total-indian-workforce
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39. Moya C, Henrich J. Culture-gene coevolutionary psychology: cultural learning, language, and ethnic psychology. Curr Opin Psychol. 2016
8:112-118. doi:10.1016/j.copsyc.2015.10.001
40. Booth H. The kingdom of women: the society where a man is never the boss. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/apr/01/the-kingdom - of - women - the - tibetan - tribe - where - a-man-is-never-the-boss. Published April 1, 2017. Accessed December 31, 2021.
41. Henrich J, Boyd R, Richerson PJ. The puzzle of monogamous marriage. Philos Trans R Soc B Biol Sci. 2012
367(1589):657-669. doi:10.1098/rstb. 2011.0290
42. SearchTruth. 10. The Book of Transactions (Kitab Al-Buyu`) - Sahih Muslim - 0 - 3813. SearchTruth.com. Accessed January 23, 2022. https://www.search truth.com/book_display.php?book=10&translator=2&start=0&number=3813
43. "Dogs in the Islamic Tradition and Nature" (Article Included). Scholar of the House. Accessed January 23, 2022. http://scholarofthehouse.stores.yahoo .net/dinistrandna.html
44. Gómez-Rivas C. Law and the Islamization of Morocco under the Almoravids: The Fatwas of Ibn Rushd al-Jadd to the Far Maghrib. BRILL
2014.
~
Dr. Gad Saad is Professor of Marketing at Concordia University (Montreal, Canada), and former holder of the Concordia University Research Chair in Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences and Darwinian Consumption (2008-2018). He is the co-recipient of the 2015 President's Media Outreach Award: Research Communicator of the Year (International), which goes to the Concordia University professor whose research receives the greatest amount of global media coverage.
Professor Saad has pioneered the use of evolutionary psychology in marketing and consumer behaviour. His works include The Consuming Instinct: What Juicy Burgers, Ferraris, Pornography, and Gift Giving Reveal About Human Nature
The Evolutionary Bases of Consumption and Evolutionary Psychology in the Business Sciences, along with 75+ scientific papers. His Psychology Today blog and YouTube channel have garnered 6.9+ million and 24+ million views respectively. His podcast The Saad Truth with Dr.
In addition to his scientific work, Dr. Saad writes and speaks about idea pathogens that destroy logic, science, reason, and common sense. His fourth book The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense was released in October 2020 and is an international bestseller.
Let Us Prey: On Islamic Immigration in Europe and Women's Rights
References
Based on an interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Mark Halloran: I have the impression that you've lived in three worlds: you've lived in tribal Islam, and you converted to political Islam, through the Muslim Brotherhood and sister Aziza. And then when you escaped an arranged marriage and went to Europe, you essentially converted to classical liberalism, and atheism. It seemed like a large ideological change for someone to make over a lifetime. And I wondered how you related to the past versions of yourself?
Ayaan Hirsi Ali: {Laughs} That's a great question, and especially the way you put it. It may seem as if it happened all of a sudden
that I had a sudden awakening. A lot of people have asked me about that. I think it wasn't a sudden awakening. I think it was a gradual evolution. If I start with the tribal Islam of my grandmother and my mother's attitude towards the faith of Islam, it was a mix of the tribal and the old fashioned, superstitious notions. I was born into it. So, I imbibed with it f
This condemnation, on my part, was obviously done without any questioning at all. But then, in 1995, when I'm in the Netherlands, I take up political science courses in the University of Leiden. The reason why I say my change was gradual was because it was in those years at Leiden, where the emphasis lay on how to think and how to ask questions - maybe that's where classical liberalism was introduced in a more formal way
not as a set of beliefs that you adopt, but as one approach among others.
So, you could empathize with them, to some extent?
I don't know if you would call it empathy. But I could see the logic of their thinking. If you're a young man, and you're being asked to destroy the infidels who had invaded Muslim lands, if it is a requirement of your faith, you believe God is the Creator, and you have only to answer to God, and that you risk going to hell in the afterlife, unless you obey Him. One of the big reasons that Bin Laden was pushing this narrative at the time was that the American infidels were allowed into Saudi Ara
I do want to speak about your book, Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women's Rights1 - because that's the reason for this conversation. In Prey, the premise is that the fifth wave of immigration occurred where 3.5 million people
immigrants and asylum seekers, crossed into the European union,2 three quarters occurring in 2015, after events like the Syrian Civil War. The premise of your book seems to be that these were predominantly young men who came from Muslim dominant cultures, an
I think when I was writing the book, and working on the question: 'Is there an increase in sexual violence against women? Is it possible to link this with the increase in immigration, and an influx of young unaccompanied men? And if Islam is relevant at all, then in what way is it relevant?' So, some of these questions, obviously, are very difficult to answer without solid data. And I described in the book, that exercise of data gathering was frustrated by the way the European leaders fear that
The doctrines of modesty.
Yes, the doctrines of modesty. So, with that in place, the men when they do engage in sexual misconduct, the first question that is posed, unlike the West, is not: 'Is the man the perpetrator? And he ought to be punished for that.' Rather, the first question that arises is: 'Did the woman in question break this modesty doctrine or not?' And, 'What was she wearing?' or 'What was the context?' And that context almost always favors man. If it is the puritanical Islam and this was to go to a court o
Again, the burden of proof still lies on her. So, when men shaped by that and with those attitudes come to Europe, which is a radically different context, and they see white European women as women who live outside of the modesty doctrine, then they consider them immodest and therefore bad. I spoke to one Egyptian man Hamed Abdel-Samad, and I asked him to explain to me how their attitudes towards European women developed. And he said, for those men who have dysfunctional views of women in the We
So, the prejudice, if you will, is that it's justified to attack these women because they are actually somehow looking for it. This indicates little respect for women in general, you could say it is ingrained for the men in question. And the only type of woman they respect is the one that they can't reach
someone who is covered up and protected by her clanmates and is locked up, and all other women are fair game. And that is where the book title Prey came from.
In the book you said on average, over the last 10 years, 67% of first-time asylum seekers were men and over 80% of these men were under the age of 35 years. And in Germany's 2015 immigration wave, male asylum seekers outnumbered women at a 2.81:1 ratio. When this is discussed from a criminological perspective, what people say is that in any community where the sex ratio suddenly become extremely imbalanced, then you have an increase in the number of sexual assaults against women. The other thing
I say that in the book, it is obviously all three factors
the cultural factors that we just talked about now, but also the sex ratios. And here, I think a woman called Valerie Hudson has done some very good work on that - she shows that where these sex ratios are skewed to that extent, you do get spikes in sexual misconduct, but also aggression in general.3 So, you have a youth bulge, and you have a large number of men. And there aren't enough women for these men. She says that's a very, very i
And then there is the issue of broken societies. When I was a translator, I saw this with my own eyes in the Netherlands - young men whose tribal society had broken down. The tribal code didn't apply to them. The authoritarian government of Mohammed Siad Barre in Somalia had broken down. So, they weren't even familiar with institutions like the police or the military or any other order keeping institutions. They were born in an anarchical, very unstable, structurally unpredictable environment. A
There was one Eritrean man, I think it was again in Scandinavia, in Norway, where he was very open and honest about it when he was asked, 'Would you treat women in your country that way?' And he said, 'Yes, we do that all the time.' So, I don't think that these young men, if they've ever been interviewed, are actually really dishonest about what their motivations are. It's the social workers, the politicians, sometimes members of law enforcement, the media, academia, who are trying to make excus
The problem seems to be that any call to integration, and especially assimilation, would be instantly branded racist. And that seems to be where the conversation has completely broken down.
In many parts of Europe, that is the case. In a country like Sweden, which I think is the country that's facing the worst problems, that's what happens the minute you start talking about assimilation, the conversation is shut down, although I should say there are now signs that mainstream Swedish political figures are at least beginning to reconsider some of their premises. Now in Denmark, the conversation has continued, and they have developed integration or assimilation programs that are promi
I know you use the example of the Red Army in Germany, in terms of their violence against German women, so it made me think about war and trauma, and how unique the problem was. Is it essentially the same problem, just with a different group at a different time?
I think that is partly true
different group, different time. But the Red Army was still European, and so, the cultural barrier was not as high as it is in this case. Also, there was a mindset from many Russian troops that brutal revenge for the German invasion of Russia was somehow justified: in that sense, German women were easy targets and could not do much, if anything, to stay safe from those attackers. Soviet military domination made any real accountability afterwards impossible.
What we're running up against here is this postmodernist type of cultural relativism that is used to shut down debate and to explain away bad behavior - if that bad behavior is perpetrated by men of color. But that doesn't do anything to help the victims. So those women who have fallen victim to this, get no justice, and other women are at risk. And so that is now the predicament of some of these European countries today. They have let down their women - they had already let down immigrant women
Let's talk about the psychology of it at a national level. I think about postmodernism and your views on Western feminism and ideas such as decolonization. I also thought about the psychology of the German people, especially the generation who grew up during World War II
the Kriegskinder, and perhaps their real aversion to anything that even remotely looked like some sort of ethnic or religious profiling, which you could totally understand. It took me to the idea that you could criticize the po
I think the way to deal with it is to look and see if the strategy of pretending that there is no problem actually helps far-right groups or hinders them. If you look at countries with very strong far-right movements, those are the countries that bungled the immigration policies, and have no integration or assimilation programs to speak of - it's where the problems are at their worst. If you look at the countries with weak or non-existent far-right movements, they're the ones who have actually t
Now, with regard to these postmodernist narratives about decolonizing. And trying to somehow atone for what happened in the past, atone for them today, by sacrificing women and children, or the working-class groups. I don't think that makes any sense at all. Are we simply going to sacrifice our women and risk a very strong, far-right movement? But they're also risking something else. They're risking that voters lose faith in existing institutions, and then start doing things for themselves. For
I wonder if they're able to do that, politicians or journalists, because most of the problems that you talk about in your book affect neighborhoods which are entry points for asylum seekers, which are low socio-economic neighborhoods. So really, to some extent, who cares what happens to poor women?
Exactly. That is exactly where the decolonization narrative, just. It goes bonkers, really, because it is working-class women, and the working class groups in general, that were the people that the left was supposedly protecting. They're the ones that are sacrificed to this mismanagement of immigration and the negative, unintended consequences of immigration. And now you have a development, like Biden's sudden withdrawal from Afghanistan. That's going to trigger a lot more immigration, not just
Your book came out during the pandemic, and that would have radically changed border control and immigration policies. That may reverse now, once we adapt to a COVID normal.
I just got back from Italy. And Heathrow was full as it always was. I was standing there the day before yesterday. Yes, people were wearing masks, but in terms of crowd numbers, it didn't feel at all like there was some kind of major lockdown. It was all very frustrating. There's a lot more bureaucracy and forms that one needs to fill out, but in terms of just masses of people . The number of immigrants now trying to cross from France into the UK - that's spiking, and the ones that are coming th
I remember your critique of Western feminism
you said that it was focused on its own self-actualization. And you alluded to it before, that ideas in relation to critical race theory and decolonization are actually hurting asylum seeker women, and that these ideas have gone too far. But it seems as though they can always make the argument that US foreign policy, for instance, has led to the victimization of people in places like Afghanistan, where the US helping to radicalize the Mujahideen to f
It does make sense. And I think maybe the most charitable thing I can say about the feminists who regard themselves as woke is they're doing nothing for the working class. It's all about them, and their intersectional problems. And if you look at some of this gender fluid stuff that's coming at us, they seem also to be okay with 'woman' being removed from the lexicon. So now we're not women anymore. We are 'chest feeders' and 'people who birth' and 'persons who menstruate' and so on. So even on
It is often communities, not even of working class people, but of generational poverty. People who are essentially invisible, and I think that's probably where the problems really may lie because those communities don't really have a voice and don't engage in activism. And I think that's where it gets lost. I read an article in The New York Times by Jill Filipovic.7 She talked about you rolling out old colonial tropes about virtuous white women being at risk from dark-skinned men. It seems like
That is a typical millennial woke feminist who is completely out of touch. And just spewing this nonsensical jargon, but really not a word of empathy for the victims described in the book. So, you have to wonder if she actually read the book? And because of the way it was difficult to come by official data, I do use testimonies of women who have fallen victim to this, and that is pretty gruesome, and she doesn't even spend a word on any of that, and just dismisses it with this nonsense. She has
Her criticism of you was that under your own ideas around integration and assimilation, when you were younger, and you were a supporter of the Fatwa against Salman Rushdie, would you have made it as an asylum seeker or refugee?
Oh, no. But I, at that time, wasn't interested in seeking asylum. I was completely full of my own fanaticism, and basking in the warmth, as we - myself and my fellow 18 and 19 year old students - happily burnt Salman Rushdie's book. We weren't seeking asylum.
I think you also said you shouldn't have been accepted at that point.
Yes. Because I would not have come with good intentions anyway. If you believe that the society that's hosting you is infidel and it deserves to be destroyed.Then I think it would be very foolish of that society to welcome you and accept you.
Let's get to some of the important ideas within Islam itself. So, I think you'd agree that Quranic verses such as the Surah An Nisa 4:34, which seems to condone a husband perpetrating domestic violence against his wife, as a means of disciplining her, and seems to say that quite explicitly, that that would be the heart of the cultural problem.
So, what I have said in the past, and I still stand by it, is those texts are in the Quran. And yes, there are people who are fanatical and puritanical enough, who want to use these Quranic texts, the way we use the GPS, when the book says, 'Hit your wife, if she disobeys you,' then I do it, because the book says that and so you get into this circular reasoning. Again, with things like this, I just believe in accepting looking at reality as it is
there are male Imams, shouting this from the pul
I spoke about this particular verse with an Islamic scholar once. And his interpretation was, in terms of from the Arabic, that it's not a verse about domestic violence. It's a verse about divorce and that it means 'strike out.' He was also talking about Mohammed in the Hadith, who explicitly states that domestic violence is not to be perpetrated.8 I then thought about when you heard Osama Bin Laden, and you thought that what he offered was a very plausible version of Islam. I think you may disa
I actually don't disagree with it. And the main point I make in my book Heretic, is that it is for the people who are saying Islam can be reformed - it should be reformed. I just make the case for a reformation
for change, for a modification. I talk about these three groups of Muslims: the Mecca Muslims, the Medina Muslims, and reformers who are the modifiers. Now the Medina Muslims are very clear in their fanaticism. They're saying 'No, we want to live by the laws of the Quran and the Hadith,
It's an attempt at Islam finding its modernity. I thought in terms of your call for reformation, you said that there would be a need for Muslims to be able to think critically and criticize the Prophet Mohammed. I wondered whether that was very likely? Sort of like Christians criticizing Christ.
The historian Daniel Pipes has written quite a bit on it and has studied Muslims in America.9 He says Muslims start asking these questions of Mohammed as a moral guide, 'Yes or no?' And many of them come to the conclusion that they don't want Mohammed as their moral guide, and quietly leave the religion. He says it's the most interesting, untold story of our time, just the sheer number of Muslims who are secularizing, who are leaving Islam, and maybe either going to other religions or living as
It possibly creates too much cognitive dissonance. So, I wanted to talk to you about your solutions. I think you've talked about addressing the 'push' factors, like using military intervention, and civilian forces to build institutions and rule of law in countries that may be to some extent, failed states. However that hasn't seemed to be very successful in the past. I mean, we've just come out of 20 years in Afghanistan ...
No, I didn't put it that way at all. So, I'm definitely not proposing that European countries start mounting invasions in these countries. Absolutely not. I'm just saying it is better if European countries would get involved. And this is on a diplomatic level, on an economic level. Sometimes America does that, and I think France does the same thing, too. When some of these countries are challenged, for instance, with terrorist attacks, and these homegrown militias seem to come very close to brea
The last question is in relation to your statement that 'Tolerance of intolerance is cowardice.' And it reminded me of Popper's idea that you need to be intolerant of intolerance, and your statement seems to endorse the advocacy of using illiberal means to achieve liberal ends. But I thought that there seems to be a danger in that it may actually attack the things that make a democratic society great, which is being pluralistic and tolerant.
So, in our liberal democratic societies in the West, they are pluralistic,
and they're tolerant. Once in a while, an intolerant group emerges and tries to invoke something, in the case of the Islamic State, they are invoking God. In the case of the woke, they're invoking Social Justice, but they then want to impose their ideologies on the rest of us. And I think we should be intolerant of that
of their intolerance, in order to sustain the pluralism and liberties that we have. For instance, here in America, we have all these people who have been cancelled and silenced
1. Ali AH. Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women's Rights. HarperCollins
2021.
2. Migratory Map. Accessed December 17, 2021. https://frontex.europa.eu/we-know/migratory-map/
3. Hudson VM, Den Boer A. A Surplus of Men, a Deficit of Peace: Security and Sex Ratios in Asia's Largest States. Int Secur. 2002
26(4):5-38.
4. Europe's man problem. POLITICO. Published January 6, 2016. Accessed December 16, 2021. https://www.politico.eu/article/europes-man-problem/
5. Adamson G. Migrants and Crime in Sweden in the Twenty-First Century. Society. 2020
57(1):9-21. doi:10.1007/s12115-019-00436-8
6. Henley J, correspondent JHE. Sweden's gun violence rate has soared due to gangs, report says. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/ 2021/ may / 26 / fatal-shootings-have-risen-in-sweden-despite-fall-across-europe-report-finds. Published May 26, 2021. Accessed December 16, 2021.
7. Filipovic J. Ayaan Hirsi Ali on Muslim Men and Western Women. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/09/books/review/ayaan-hirsi -ali-prey.html. Published February 9, 2021. Accessed December 16, 2021.
8. Mehmet Ozalp : The History & Philosophy of Islam | troublemag. Accessed December 23, 2021. http://www.troublemag.com/mehmet-ozalp-the-history-philosophy-of-islam/
9. Pipes D. When Muslims Leave the Faith. Daniel Pipes. Accessed December 16, 2021. https://www.danielpipes.org/19668/when-muslims-leave-the-faith
~
Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, founder of the AHA Foundation, and host of The Ayaan Hirsi Ali Podcast. She served as a Member of the Dutch Parliament from 2003 to 2006. While in Parliament, she focused on furthering the integration of non-Western immigrants into Dutch society, and on defending the rights of Muslim women.
She has written several books including Infidel (2007), Nomad: from Islam to America, a Personal Journey through the Clash of Civilizations (2010), Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now (2015) and The Challenge of Dawa (2017). Her new book, Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women's Rights, was published by Harper Collins in 2021.
Prior to joining the Hoover Institution, she was a Fellow at the Belfer Center's Future of Diplomacy Project at Harvard University, and a Resident Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C.
She received her Master's degree in Political Science from Leiden University in the Netherlands.
On DarkHorse, Ivermectin and Vaccine Hesitancy
References
Based on an interview with Eric Topol
Interview conducted on October 14, 2021
Mark Halloran: So I thought I'd like to pick up where the Sam Harris interview left off,1 and go into some of the things in more detail. I'd like to talk about the research in relation to ivermectin, vaccines and some of the immune escape mutations like Delta. In terms of the Bryant et al. (2021) meta-analysis that was done for ivermectin, which showed that COVID19 deaths were reduced by ivermectin
that was a moderate certainty evidence finding and there was low certainty evidence that ivermect
Eric Topol: That's pretty simple. Because the two largest studies that were in the meta-analysis, were both shown to be fraudulent. That is, the data was impossible, and they had to be withdrawn.3,4 And so then, what you're left with is a bunch of very small studies. And collectively, they're not enough certainty to say anything. So, whether it prevents infection and prevents adverse outcomes, we're left in the lurch. It's still possible that ivermectin does have an effect. I'm not saying it doe
But the problem with the story with ivermectin is that it's a hodgepodge of studies, some of which various doses were used, there were some indications for prevention of infection, and some for prevention of outcomes. So, it's all over the place. And it's left in the suspension of maybe this drug could do something? But when you have fraudulent research being conducted, that is a very worrisome sign. And the fact that we haven't had reliable sources of data from the usual entities like the Recov
I think that was the heart of it, aside from the fraudulent issues. I know Lawrence et al. (2021) had written a letter to Nature8 outlining all of the issues in relation to the study: impossible numbers, mismatch of trial register, inconsistent timelines etc. I would say outside of that, having worked in preclinical research with drugs for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) in transgenic mice, that what people generally don't understand is that sample size matters in relation to power and effec
Absolutely, you need big numbers. Remember, you're talking about treating millions, if not tens of millions of people. And you don't want to make the wrong call on a thousand people or a couple of thousand people, not that you have to have 10 million people in a study, but you want to be sure. And you also don't want to be making false claims. So, the ivermectin zealots were saying this was 99% effective,9 and having an emergency podcast with Joe Rogan.10 That should get you scared, because ther
Lawrence at al., called for a paradigm shift in relation to how meta-analysis is done. That, in fact, the meta-analysis should occur on individual patient data. What do you think of that?
That's really important. That's been part of the meta-analysis story for years. When you pool data, it isn't just like it's on the back of the envelope, or you just take the total numbers from each of the publications. In this case a lot of them were preprints. You actually have to have the data from each individual participant in the trials
in the patients. So, they didn't have the data. And had they had it, a lot of these mistakes would have been preempted. So, one of the rules of what would
The point made in the Bryant et al., paper which Tess Laurie is a coauthor on, is that corticosteroids were put forward as a treatment for COVID based on one randomized controlled trial, whereas ivermectin has had dozens. How would you respond to that?
I think you said it well, when you said that sample size is so important. If you have 20 studies, and there are about 20 people in each group, of the placebo and ivermectin
adding those things up - it's not a lot of veracity in that data set. So, the problem is you really want to bank the determination of whether a drug works on large bodies of data, rigorous studies and you can't just lump all the different doses together too which has been a problem with these meta-analyses of ivermectin. So,
I think that the people who are the advocates for it, if I'm to look at them as good actors, are simply looking at all the data and making a mistake based on the data they're looking at. They're looking at observational studies, like where they've introduced ivermectin along with multiple other safety protocols, and there's been a reported reduction in infection and death.11-13 How much weight would you give to those reports?
You're going to have a reduction just on a basis of time as we get smarter about how to treat people, just simple things
like putting people prone to avoid mechanical ventilation. And we make all these points of progress in the course of the pandemic. And if you just study a drug along the way, there's just the time, learning, wisdom, that comes along with it. So, you can't make judgments about that either. The only way you get the answer is randomized trials done with both the active drug, pla
When I spoke to Nobel Laureate Peter Doherty,14 this was at the beginning of the pandemic, we spoke about a paper released by his institute which is the molecular proof of principle for ivermectin. Caly et al. (2020), did an in vitro study that found that there was something like a 5000-fold reduction in SARS-CoV-2.15 Of course, they were using super physiological levels of ivermectin that are not FDA approved and cannot even be replicated in vivo. It feels like that's where it's kind of gone wr
The dosing is a big deal. There's been so many drugs, one of the famous ones was resveratrol, that would make you live forever, if you drink 10 cases of wine every day, in order to get enough resveratrol. And that totally was a bust. And whenever you have supra physiologic doses that can never be achieved in human beings, as the only real biological activity marker, that's' a problem. There are so many drugs - when you repurpose them in a screen, all the drugs that could have antiviral activity
It's a tenfold increase on the FDA approved level. I do want to talk to you about Israel and about Delta. I don't really understand this that well, but the escape mutations and the reduction in the effectiveness of the vaccines to protect against infection are down to something like 39%. I know you were initially against boosters to some extent, but what's our future look like with this? With more variants coming out that are more infectious and possibly even more lethal. What are we looking at?
Delta is pretty bad. Delta is something that won't make it easy for another version of this virus to compete with
it's so hyper-transmissible, and it also has some immune evasion features. So, to be able to beat Delta, and come up with another global strain, it's not going to be easy. There hasn't been one yet that has mounted any competitiveness with Delta, but we may see that because we don't have global containment of the virus. And there's a chance for it to evolve further, but hopefully, w
Now, we knew that the vaccines weren't going to stay effective for years, we knew there would be a third shot needed, likely maybe at one year, or two years, at some point. We didn't know it'd be six months. That was the big Israeli realization, when they first came out with that and said: 'Oh my gosh, protection has dropped from 95% to 40% against symptomatic infections.' At first there was denial among the medical community. Nobody wanted to see that. So, the double whammy was both that they h
And you add into that, that in Israel they gave Pfizer, at three weeks spacing, which led to a not optimal response of the Beta, the B and T cell immune response. So that now has been largely squashed by the boosters. They used boosters of the Pfizer, the same dose, the same original vaccine in millions of people. And they're well on their way to getting back to that one case per million people, which is the ultimate - we can't do much better than that. And I think what we've learned already, pe
It seems that that's a balance then because even though there's a decrease in approximately 39% for the ability to stop infection, there's still an 89 to 93% protection rate against hospitalization and death.
It's really a little lower than that. But if you zoom in on the people over age 65, then it drops down, and for the people in their 70s it dropped from 95 to 85, which is substantial. So, the point I am getting at, is that most of the hospitalizations and deaths occur in people over age 60. So that's where you see the big bang of the booster.
Because the immune response is just not going to be as good with older people, even with a good vaccine, they're just not going to be able to produce antibodies the same way.
Exactly. So then with the younger age group it's two things going on. One, they make better antibody and cellular responses
B and T cell, and they don't have as much of a risk to wind up in hospital or die. So, for those people as you get younger and younger, the benefit of an additional shot is lower. But it is consistent about the symptomatic infections. We just learned that data this week from Israel. There's one other point - if we get containment of the virus, where it's at very low levels
If you've got something as infectious as Delta doesn't it become sort of a pandemic of the unvaccinated? But then the unvaccinated can also affect the vaccinated if you've got a significant proportion of them. If we thought 70:30% - if we had 30% unvaccinated, we would get away with it at Alpha or Beta, we're not going to get away with it at Delta. I'm wondering whether if we vaccinate everyone say from down to 16 years old, then doesn't it becomes a pandemic of children? The virus then starts t
I haven't been a fan of the pandemic of the unvaccinated just because we're all in this together. And as you said, aptly, people who are vaccinated are not necessarily durably protected. So, they're involved. And they can transmit, maybe not as frequently, but if you're vaccinated, and you get a breakthrough infection, you may transmit before you have any symptoms, or you may never get symptoms, and you may be capable of transmitting particularly with Delta, because it's such high copies of the
The Delta problem changed the dynamics. We need 90% - 95% of a Delta wall of immunity
a combination of some type of vaccination, plus prior COVID in people who didn't get vaccinated, and particularly if it's within the last six months or a year of that prior COVID. And then the kids will basically benefit even without having to necessarily get vaccinated. But like in the US, we're so short
we're at 56% of the total population. We need those kids vaccinated to be part of the 90% because they ar
However, the safety profile hasn't been established for certain subgroups, has it? So, children are one, pregnant women are another, and then there are the immunocompromised. Are we going to be able to get vaccination in those subgroups without an appropriate safety profile?
I think the pregnancy thing has played out. Pregnancy is an immunocompromised state. And right now, in the UK, 1 in 5 of the intensive care unit patients with COVID are unvaccinated pregnant women.19 So, it's very serious matter. And we know that the safety has been assured and efficacy is short. And so pregnant women do benefit from getting vaccinated. The real immunocompromised patients are the ones that have an autoimmune disease or are taking drugs that are basically interfering with their i
And then there's the children, you're right, we don't have the safety data we would like. Let's say we saw in the teenagers that the myocarditis cropped up. And that wasn't expected. We didn't know that was going to happen, we still don't know the mechanism of it. And most of those are boys, most of them do really well. It's mild, it's self-limiting. The number of cases is, let's say, 1 in 50,000. But if you get down to teenage boys, it gets higher, but almost always, they recover well. And it's
In relation to the instances of myocarditis from the mRNA vaccines, it has been suggested that there may be some degree of molecular mimicry between the spike protein and self-antigens.21
Everything under the sun has been touted as a putative mechanism, and we have nothing yet to rule in or out. It's very elusive. I think that there was the idea that somehow the mRNA was getting into a vein during the injection, but that doesn't explain why it's just boys. And then why the second shot, and the age thing? There are so many unknowns here, whether it's an actual autoimmune, proinflammatory response. This mimicry. I've heard testosterone being put forward as a factor. Well, there's y
So COVID of the heart is not a good thing
from the infection. COVID caused myocarditis of the vaccine, even though we don't know why it occurs, I think we can at least say it's not likely to be of a durable, adverse impact. The rarity of myocarditis from the mRNA vaccines being a problem is notable.
What are the comparable rates between myocarditis from COVID versus myocarditis from the vaccine?
If you just looked at all people, without segmenting teenagers or older people, it's more than a 10-fold increase in myocarditis from COVID than you would ever get from a vaccine. And it was a New England Journal of Medicine paper from Israel that found this and others have confirmed it.22 It's orders of magnitude difference. And it's also a different type of myocarditis from COVID. It's a much more worrisome heart problem that you get through COVID infection, then when you get it through the v
People talk about getting natural immunity through catching COVID versus some type of artificial immunity from vaccines. The issue is that people don't take into account that after previous pandemics the increase in neurological illness, things like Parkinson disease, have skyrocketed. So COVID is not something that you want to go out and catch to get natural immunity because you don't really know what's down the track for you.
So, I think this is a really important topic, the so-called prior COVID immunity, or natural immunity ...
The problem we've got is none of it is long term.
The immunity that you get from a COVID infection, in some people, can be quite durable. You just don't know that until it's too late - when you actually wind up getting a reinfection. Even prior COVID - what some people like to call natural immunity - I don't think it's natural to get COVID. I don't think anybody wants to get COVID. And just like I don't want to have a chicken pox party to get chicken pox, you don't want to have a COVID party. The issue here is the immunity you get is very diffe
Long COVID is a mosaic of many things. Some of the constituent symptoms are brain fog, and cognitive impact. Obviously, fatigue is a central part of this, but also breathing difficulty, and many other things. Now, recent studies have shown that this is not uncommon at all, more than 10% of people who get COVID, even young, healthy people are getting long COVID symptoms. Diverse, debilitating symptoms, and they often can't return to work, or if they do go back to work, they're troubled. They real
Well even beyond long COVID. What we've seen from previous pandemics is that there's a correlation after the pandemics with people developing severe neurological illnesses.
To pinpoint that further, there's one really important study that came out of the UK. So, in the UK they have the Biobank. And they have taken hundreds of thousands of UK citizens who volunteer to participate and a large number had a brain scan. And by happenstance, they had it before the pandemic. Then they repeated their brain scans, if they had COVID, or they didn't have COVID, and they saw marked grey matter loss in the COVID group.25 And it gets to your point, which is that it takes a long
I wanted to address some of the claims that were made in Bret Weinstein's DarkHorse podcast with Dr. Robert Malone and Steven Kirsch.26 So, the first one is that the spike protein that's produced by the mRNA vaccine is cytotoxic. And then, the claim is that the transmembrane domain that is supposed to anchor the spike protein to a localized spot, fails, or can fail to some extent, and that the spike protein then cleaves, and then Steven Kirsch talks about a Japanese study that shows the distribu
It's all false. It's all unacceptable lying
making things up. For example, Bret Weinstein on one of his podcasts said that the reason people get headaches post vaccination is because the mRNA from the vaccine crosses the blood brain barrier, and that's what's causing it. That's ridiculous. This is what, in many ways, has ruined the American vaccination campaign, why we're sitting at 56% fully vaccinated instead of 80 or 90%. It is this kind of fabrication. Now, I want to make sure that your lis
I suppose the thing to be aware of is that SARS-CoV-2 is cytotoxic.30
There is no evidence that the that mRNA vaccines Pfizer and Moderna specifically, are cytotoxic. No evidence. To say this sort of thing is just outrageous. There's never the comparison with COVID itself, which, as we've already discussed - what it can do to the brain, what it does do to cells, how it hijacks the cells. So, these things have scared the public and their listeners and their followers from getting vaccinated. And this complete sham of inventing the vaccines so that that supposedly c
The thing that may have contributed to the vaccine hesitancy, is the skipping of the animal experimentation. The shortest period for vaccine development prior to this was the Ebola vaccine, which took five years. Do you think that this and then the emergency authorization by the FDA led to more hesitancy?
It took 30 years to have the mRNA platform, and that's with mRNA delivered by nanoparticles to get into muscle cells to then start the factory of the immune response. It took 30 years - not one year. The point being is that it took a long time. The animal studies were done in non-human primates
macaques. And it was done in the largest clinical trials in the history of vaccines, 40,000 participants in one trial, 35,000 in another trial, these were conducted in a compressed way. I've already allu
When it came down to the FDA to adjudicate whether these vaccines are safe and effective, they actually took great pains to delay the Pfizer to make sure the trial was complete. Because at one point, under the pressure of the Trump administration, they were trying to get vaccine emergency approval, on the basis of the first interim analysis of 32 events. 32 events! They wanted the administration of Trump and Pfizer to get approval. Well, the first thing the FDA said was, 'No, you have to finish
I know that at the beginning of the rollout of the vaccines that they were monitoring for things like antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE).31 But that turned out to not be an issue. But they're the sorts of things that you look at with vaccines. Your claim is that if you're going to see something it's within two months of a vaccine administration.
We've seen everything we're going to see with these vaccines - we saw it in the first two months. And that even includes the myocarditis that we discussed. It was seen in the first couple of months, when it's introduced to the population at large. So, there's not going to be any surprises. We talked about some of the pluses of a natural infection during our conversation. Let's just be truthful about all this. And unfortunately, a lot of the damage has been done. Too many innocent minds have been
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8. Lawrence JM, Meyerowitz-Katz G, Heathers JAJ, Brown NJL, Sheldrick KA. The lesson of ivermectin: meta-analyses based on summary data alone are inherently unreliable. Nat Med. 2021
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9. ?Bret Weinstein | DarkHorse Podcast: COVID, Ivermectin, and the Crime of the Century: DarkHorse Podcast with Pierre Kory & Bret Weinstein on Apple Podcasts. Apple Podcasts. Accessed December 14, 2021. https://podcasts .apple.com/us/podcast / covid-ivermectin-and-the-crime-of-the/id147158152 1?i=1000523859023
10. #1671 - Bret Weinstein & Dr. Pierre Kory.
2021. Accessed December 14, 2021. https://open.spotify.com/episode/7uVXKgE6eLJKMXkETwcw0D
11. Chamie J. Real-World Evidence: The Case of Peru. Causality between Ivermectin and COVID-19 Infection Fatality Rate.
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12. Chamie-Quintero JJ, Hibberd J, Scheim D. Sharp Reductions in COVID-19 Case Fatalities and Excess Deaths in Peru in Close Time Conjunction, State-By-State, with Ivermectin Treatments. Social Science Research Network
2021. doi:10.2139/ssrn.3765018
13. Indian States Turn to Ivermectin in COVID Crisis. Published May 18, 2021. Accessed December 13, 2021. https://www.medpagetoday.com/special-reports/exclusives/92644
14. Peter Doherty : COVID 19 - The Crown | troublemag. Accessed December 14, 2021. http://www.troublemag.com/peter-doherty-covid-19-the-crown/
15. Caly L, Druce JD, Catton MG, Jans DA, Wagstaff KM. The FDA-approved drug ivermectin inhibits the replication of SARS-CoV-2 in vitro. Antiviral Res. 2020
178:104787. doi:10.1016/j.antiviral.2020.104787
16. Cascella M, Rajnik M, Aleem A, Dulebohn SC, Di Napoli R. Features, Evaluation, and Treatment of Coronavirus (COVID-19). In: StatPearls. StatPearls Publishing
2021. Accessed December 13, 2021. http://www.ncbi. nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK554776/
17. Levine-Tiefenbrun M, Yelin I, Alapi H, et al. Viral loads of Delta-variant SARS-CoV-2 breakthrough infections after vaccination and booster with BNT162b2. Nat Med. Published online November 2, 2021. doi:10.1038/s 41591-021-01575-4
18. The Janssen Ad26.COV2.S COVID-19 vaccine: What you need to know. Accessed December 13, 2021. https://www.who.int/news-room/feature-stories/detail/the-j-j-covid-19-vaccine-what-you-need-to-know
19. Among England's most critically ill covid patients, 1 in 5 is pregnant and unvaccinated. Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/ 2021 / 10 /11 /england - pregnant - women - unvaccinated - covid /. Accessed December 13, 2021.
20. Walter EB, Talaat KR, Sabharwal C, et al. Evaluation of the BNT162b2 Covid-19 Vaccine in Children 5 to 11 Years of Age. N Engl J Med. Published online November 9, 2021. doi:10.1056/NEJMoa2116298
21. Bozkurt B, Kamat I, Hotez PJ. Myocarditis With COVID-19 mRNA Vaccines. Circulation. 2021
144(6):471-484. doi:10.1161/CIRCULATION AHA.121.056135
22. Barda N, Dagan N, Ben-Shlomo Y, et al. Safety of the BNT162b2 mRNA Covid-19 Vaccine in a Nationwide Setting. N Engl J Med. 2021
385(12): 1078-1090. doi:10.1056/NEJMoa2110475
23. Callaway E. COVID super-immunity: one of the pandemic's great puzzles. Nature. 2021
598(7881):393-394. doi:10.1038/d41586-021-02795-x
24. Higgins V, Sohaei D, Diamandis EP, Prassas I. COVID-19: from an acute to chronic disease? Potential long-term health consequences. Crit Rev Clin Lab Sci. 2021
58(5):297-310. doi:10.1080/10408363.2020.1860895
25. Douaud G, Lee S, Alfaro-Almagro F, et al. Brain imaging before and after COVID-19 in UK Biobank. medRxiv. Published online August 18, 2021: 2021.06.11.21258690. doi:10.1101/2021.06.11.21258690
26. ?Bret Weinstein | DarkHorse Podcast: How to save the world, in three easy steps. on Apple Podcasts. Apple Podcasts. Accessed December 14, 2021. https://podcasts.apple.com/si/podcast/how-to-save-the-world-in-three-easy-steps/id1471581521?i=1000525032595
27. Washington D of C 1100 CANS 1300B, Dc 20036. PolitiFact - No sign that the COVID-19 vaccines' spike protein is toxic or 'cytotoxic.' @politifact. Accessed November 8, 2021. https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/ jun/16/youtube-videos/no-sign-covid-19-vaccines-spike-protein-toxic-or-c/
28. Health Feedback. COVID-19 vaccines don't affect ovaries or fertility in general
the vaccines are highly effective at preventing illness and death. Health Feedback. Published June 24, 2021. Accessed November 8, 2021. https:// healthfeedback.org / claimreview / covid-19-vaccines-dont-affect-ovaries- or - fertility-in-general - the-vaccines - are-highly-effective-at-preventing-illness-and-death/
29. Dolgin E. The tangled history of mRNA vaccines. Nature. 2021
597(7876): 318-324. doi:10.1038/d41586-021-02483-w
30. Meckiff BJ, Ramírez-Suástegui C, Fajardo V, et al. Imbalance of Regulatory and Cytotoxic SARS-CoV-2-Reactive CD4+ T Cells in COVID-19. Cell. 2020
183(5):1340-1353.e16. doi:10.1016/j.cell.2020.10.001
31. Lee WS, Wheatley AK, Kent SJ, DeKosky BJ. Antibody-dependent enhancement and SARS-CoV-2 vaccines and therapies. Nat Microbiol. 2020
5(10):1185-1191. doi:10.1038/s41564-020-00789-5
~
Eric Topol is the Founder and Director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, Professor, Molecular Medicine, and Executive Vice-President of Scripps Research. As a researcher, he has published over 1,200 peer-reviewed articles, with more than 315,000 citations, elected to the National Academy of Medicine, and is one of the top 10 most cited researchers in medicine. His principal scientific focus has been on the genomic and digital tools to individualize medicine.
In 2016, Topol was awarded a $207 million grant from the NIH to lead a significant part of the Precision Medicine (All of Us) Initiative, a prospective research program enrolling 1 million participants in the US. This is in addition to his role as principal investigator for a flagship $35M NIH grant to promote innovation in medicine. He was the founder of a new medical school at Cleveland Clinic, Lerner College of Medicine, with Case Western University. He has over 500,000 followers on Twitter (
Black Politicized Lives Matter
References
By Heather MacDonald
On May 25, four Minneapolis police officers arrested a man for passing a counterfeit $20 bill. One of the officers kept his knee on George Floyd's neck and shoulders for eight minutes while Mr. Floyd was handcuffed on the ground and pleading that he couldn't breathe. Mr. Floyd died of a heart attack during the arrest.
The next day, Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey announced that whatever the investigation into Mr. Floyd's death revealed, being black in America should not be a death sentence. Mayor Frey's interpretation of Mr. Floyd's horrifying end - that it was a function of his race - instantly became universal. That idea was coupled with the claim that Mr. Floyd's death was representative of an epidemic of racially biased police killings of black men.
Together these two claims triggered an explosion of violence in Minneapolis and across the country, destroying thousands of livelihoods, turning city streets into war zones, and ripping apart the very foundation of law and order. Police officers were shot at, slashed, and assaulted with bricks and bottles
their precinct houses and cruisers were firebombed. Courthouses were vandalized. Firefighters let public and private property burn to the ground rather than risk being attacked by the rioter
The flames of that terrible week have burned out, but the attack on civil order continues. Monuments to the nation's Founders have been torn down and defaced
anarchists colonized portions of Seattle and New York with impunity. Violence has become the response of choice to any criminal justice decision the activists do not like. In mid-July 2020 vandals tried to torch the Georgia Department of Public Safety as part of ongoing protests against the police in Atlanta
in Salt Lake City, vandals br
Courthouses and police precincts remain favored physical targets. In Portland, Antifa thugs have hurled bombs at the federal courthouse
they have tried to blind federal agents with lasers.
And across the country, police officers are routinely attacked as they try to make a lawful arrest. Ambush assaults on officers rose 91% in the year following Mr. Floyd's death.
The unchecked anarchy of those riots and their long aftermath have sent a clear message to criminals: no one is controlling the streets. Gang shootings and homicides have spiked nationwide as a demoralized police force pulls back from discretionary stops and arrests. In the weeks following the Floyd riots, homicides were up by 100% in Minneapolis, 200% in Seattle, 40% in St. Louis, 240% in Atlanta, and 182% in Chicago. The year 2020 likely saw the largest percentage increase in the nation's hi
We have been here before. In 2015 and 2016, homicides in the U.S. saw their largest two-year increase in nearly 50 years, following the police shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014. Brown's death fueled the first iteration of the Black Lives Matter movement. Cops backed off from proactive policing, having been relentlessly told that they were racist, for example, to question someone hanging out on a known drug corner at 1 am hitching up his waistband as if he had
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The rapid rise of crime over the last year and a half makes that first version of what I have called the Ferguson Effect look like child's play. Today's Ferguson Effect 2.0, or better, the Minneapolis Effect, has been far worse, since the Black Lives Matter narrative that policing in the U.S. is lethally racist has been amplified by every mainstream institution in the country.
~
A lot is riding on whether that narrative about the police is correct-not just thousands of lives, but the very possibility of a civilized society. Essential criminal justice practices are being rapidly dismantled in the name of fighting alleged law enforcement bias. So is it true, as U.S. President Joe Biden routinely announces, that every time a black person leaves his house, his family members need to fear for his safety from the police? It is not. The idea that the police are wantonly kil
There are three types of evidence bearing on the Black Lives Matter claim about police racism: the raw numbers on police shootings and deaths, individual cases like Mr. Floyd's, and academic research.
The raw numbers are these: Every year the police fatally shoot about 1000 people, the vast majority of whom are threatening the officer or bystanders with deadly force. About 50% of those police fatalities are white and about 25% are black. Anti-police activists look at that 25% number and proclaim: police bias, since blacks are about 13% of the population.
That is the wrong benchmark, however. The decisive issue in assessing police activity is the choice of a benchmark. Every article you read, every news story you watch in the mainstream media, will compare police stops or arrests to a population benchmark, because that is the only way that the Black Lives Matter narrative can be sustained. But law enforcement actions must be measured against crime, not population ratios, because policing today is data-driven. Officers are deployed to where people
Here are the victimization data: Nationwide, blacks between the ages of ten and 43 die of homicide at thirteen times the rate of whites, according to the CDC. In Minnesota blacks of all ages die of homicide at 12 times the rate of whites. In Chicago's four most violent districts, the homicide rate is 26 times higher than in the safest districts.5
One might think that the Black Lives Matter activists would care about such loss of black life. They ignore those black deaths, however, because the victims are killed overwhelmingly not by the police, not by whites, but by other blacks.
Here are the criminal offending data: In the 75 largest U.S. counties, which is where most of the population resides, blacks constitute around 60 percent of all murder and robbery defendants, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, though they are only 15% of the population in those counties. Nationwide blacks commit homicide at eight times the rate of whites and Hispanics combined. In Chicago, blacks commit about 80% of all shootings and homicides, though they are less than a third of th
In a typical year, blacks in St. Louis commit all or nearly all homicides, though they are less than half of the population. In New York City, blacks commit about 75% of all shootings, on average, though they are 23% of the city's population. Whites commit less than 3% of all shootings in New York City, though they are 34% of the city's population.
These crime disparities have enormous consequences for police use of force. The biggest determinant of officer behavior is civilian behavior. The greater the chance that officers confront armed and resisting suspects, the more likely they are to escalate their own use of force. And that chance is far higher in black communities. As discussed below, blacks are actually shot less by the police than their crime rates would predict, and whites are shot more. The percentage of white and Hispanic hom
So that 25% or so share of fatal police shootings each year comprised of black victims - when measured against a crime benchmark - does not support the Black Lives Matter narrative.
What about the individual case?
Mr. Floyd's death was immediately portrayed as what is known in literary theory as a synecdoche-a part that stands in for a whole, in this case, the whole of anti-black police violence. But if we conclude from that one case, however shocking, that the police are biased against black men, we could just as easily conclude from other individual cases that the police are biased against white men.
Take the death of Tony Timpa, which adumbrated the death of Mr. Floyd. In 2016, the 32-year-old schizophrenic called 911 in Dallas to report that he was off his medication, frightened, and needed help. Three Dallas police officers responded and kept Mr. Timpa face down on the ground for 13 minutes with a knee to his back, all the while joking about Mr. Timpa's mental illness. Mr. Timpa was handcuffed and had not resisted or threatened the officers. He pleaded for help more than 30 times, exclaim
Very few Americans outside of Mr. Timpa's family know his name. His death did not make international news or spur widespread riots. Because Mr. Timpa was white, his death did not fit the Black Lives Matter narrative and thus was of no interest to the media.
That same year, a cop in Mesa, Arizona, unleashed a barrage of gunfire from his AR-15 rifle at a 26-year-old man in a motel who had been reported as having a gun. The victim was down on his hands and knees in the corridor outside his motel room, trying to comply with the conflicting commands that a sergeant was screaming at him, and begging "Please don't shoot me!" Like Mr. Timpa, the victim, Daniel Shaver, was white.
In 2015, the year that Black Lives Matter became a national phenomenon, a 50-year-old white man in Tuscaloosa involved in a domestic violence incident ran at the officer with a spoon and was fatally shot. A white 25-year-old male in Des Moines led the police on a car chase and walked quickly towards the officer when he got out of the car and was fatally shot. A white 21-year-old male in Akron escaped from a grocery store robbery on a bike and didn't take his hand out of his waistband when comma
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No one knows these men's names, either, because they don't help the narrative. Had any of these victims been black, however, there is a good chance that they, too, would have become international causes célèbres. If the press focused monomaniacally on white victims of police shootings, rather than ignoring them, the public would think that we were living through an epidemic of police shootings of whites. The widespread perception that questionable police shootings occur exclusively or almost ex
Let's look more closely at unarmed victims of fatal police shootings. According to the Washington Post's data base of fatal police shootings, there were 18 unarmed black victims of fatal police shootings in 2020 and 26 unarmed white victims of fatal police shootings. The Washington Post defines unarmed generously, to include suspects beating an officer with his own gun or fleeing a car stop with a loaded semi-automatic pistol in their cars.
Those 18 allegedly "unarmed" black victims of fatal police shootings make up .2% of all black homicide victims, assuming conservatively a black death toll in 2020 of around 8,300 blacks-more than all white and Hispanic homicide victims combined. Those 18 "unarmed" black victims make up an even smaller percentage of the country's 40 million or so blacks - .000007%. Neither ratio is large, to say the least.
The claim that the death of George Floyd was the result of a pattern of police racism is pure supposition with no supporting evidence.
~
What do academic studies say about the question of systemic police bias? I could cite a 2019 paper from the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences for the proposition that there is no racial disparity in police shootings once violent crime is taken into account. I will not do so, however. The authors retracted that study in July 2020,6 because I had cited it verbatim in congressional testimony and in several articles. The authors, a professor at Michigan State University and
As it turns out, the authors forgot to retract another article of theirs from 2018 which reaches the identical conclusion-that violent crime, not race, determines police shootings.7 That 2018 study analyzed two years of fatal police shootings from 2015 and 2016. About 1050 whites and 500 blacks were killed by the police in those two years. Calculated against population ratios, blacks were 2.5 times more likely to be killed by police than whites. This 2.5 figure surfaces regularly in the mainstre
Other studies have reached the same conclusion. Harvard economist Roland Fryer has found no racial discrimination in police shootings-officers in 10 large cities and counties were more likely to shoot a suspect without first being attacked if the suspect was white than if the suspect was black. An analysis by the Center for Policing Equity also concluded that whites were disadvantaged compared to blacks when it comes to lethal force. An economist at Maryland's Pacific Institute for Research an
So, a robust body of empirical work disproves the racism charge. What about the counterevidence? What little there is concerns non-lethal police force. Roland Fryer also analyzed the forms that New York police officers fill out after stopping a suspect. He found that blacks were 21 percent more likely than whites to have an officer use non-lethal force on them, such as an officer placing his hands on a suspect or drawing his weapon.
But Mr. Fryer's study made some questionable assumptions. He categorized suspects as "perfectly compliant" with an officer's instructions, for example, based only on the fact that the officer had not checked off any boxes on the stop form regarding suspect behavior. The absence of a check mark is not the same thing as an affirmative judgement of perfect compliance, as Mr. Fryer himself acknowledged in an email to me.
Other studies suggest that blacks resist officer orders at a higher rate than whites, which would produce any disparities regarding officer use of nonlethal force. A 2005 paper by criminologists at the California State University randomly sampled 400 police reports from a Southern California police department-200 cases where the suspect resisted and 200 where the suspect complied. It found that resistance was more likely in high crime areas, and, as the inevitable corollary of this fact, that b
This finding accords with studies from 1995 and 2001 that officers who come into contact with non-white suspects are assaulted at a higher rate and that most assaults on officers occur by suspects with criminal histories.
Given the lack of racial disparities in police shootings, those who argue that officers use non-lethal force disproportionately against blacks have the burden of showing that any disparities in non-lethal force are not the product of suspect resistance. The proponents of the bias thesis have not met that burden.9
But with the current tidal wave of hatred crashing down upon the police, further delegitimating their authority, suspect resistance will go up. That resistance will increase the chance of officer use of force, which, if videotaped and stripped of the civilian behavior that preceded it, will trigger new waves of civil violence.
~
Car stops are another enduring topic in the case against cops. Studies claiming bias in traffic stops as usual use the wrong benchmark: population. The relevant benchmark is the rate at which different groups break traffic and equipment laws. There was a short period in the early 2000s when a criminologist could still study such matters and keep his job, but that window quickly closed. Before it did, New Jersey and North Carolina speeding studies showed that blacks speed more-on the New Jersey
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, an office of the Transportation Department, has a program based on the "nexus of crashes and crime." For decades, research has found that neighborhoods with the highest rates of fatal accidents also have the highest rates of violent crime. It is a truism of policing that "criminals are bad drivers," says former Milwaukee Police Chief Edward Flynn. "They don't follow traffic laws or update their vehicle registration. Years ago, I learned that e
Given the higher rates of driving and equipment infractions in the black population, a higher rate of car stops is no proof of bias in enforcement. Many black cops report that if they stop a black driver, the first thing out of the driver's mouth is: you only stopped me because I'm black. The cop will respond: no, I stopped you because you ran that red light or were driving 25 miles over the speed limit.
The charge that blacks are at daily risk from white supremacy extends beyond police civilian interactions to civilian-on-civilian interactions. Basketball star LeBron James has tweeted: "We're literally hunted EVERYDAY/EVERYTIME we step foot outside the comfort of our homes!"
This, too, is a sentiment at odds with the data. In the universe of all interracial violence between blacks and whites, blacks commit 88% of that interracial violence, whites 12%. These numbers exclude homicide, since they are based on victim self-reports. But adding homicide would not change the proportions.
This black on white violence manifests itself in flash mobs, whereby youth rampage through downtown business districts assaulting passersby and looting stores
wilding
the knock-out game
and the usual brutal armed robberies. Two such robberies in Minneapolis in August 2019 were typical. In one, about a dozen people on the Target Field Plaza beat and kicked a man while ripping off his pants and shoes and stealing the contents of his pockets. They then jumped on the victim like a trampoline, hi
In the second incident, a man using his cell phone outside a downtown bar was kicked and punched by a group of youths until he was unconscious. The mob then stripped him of iPhone, wallet, keys and cash.
Then there are the gratuitous assaults. In New York in 2020, even before the George Floyd riots, a 92-year-old woman was slammed into a fire hydrant in Manhattan's Gramercy Park, hitting her head
a 78-year-old woman was punched in the head in Brooklyn
and an 80-year-old man was knocked to the ground, dragged, and robbed in the Bronx. During the August 2020 riots in Kenosha, a 70-year-old man tried to intervene in the arson and looting of the historic Danish Brotherhood building. One of the loo
The vicious beatings of elderly Asians that gained media attention in 2021 have been portrayed as the work of white supremacists. In fact, they are overwhelmingly committed by blacks.
If any of the victims mentioned above had been black and their assailants white, these, too, would have been international scandals, given nonstop coverage by the world's press as proof of America's savage white supremacy. But just as we turn our eyes away from black-on-black crime, we are just as adamant about looking the other way when it comes to black-on-white and black-on-Asian crime.
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The press routinely omits the race of unapprehended crime suspects in its news coverage-a practice at odds with the public good--and has started foregoing mug shots of arrestees, since such descriptions and photos are said to give the public a mistaken impression of who commits most street crimes. Actually, mug shots and suspect descriptions give an accurate sense of urban violence. This squeamishness about even acknowledging the reality of black crime is not consistent with an alleged regime of
The narrative about police-civilian violence is also the reverse of the truth. Police officers are far more likely to be killed by a black criminal than an unarmed black is to be fatally shot by a police officer. As of September 8, 2021, four "unarmed" blacks were slain by police officers since the start of the year, according to the Washington Post. The Post's "unarmed" category includes violently resisting crime suspects who are pummeling officers on the ground and refusing to comply with orde
Fifty police officers have been murdered in 2021 as of September 3, 2021.11 In 2019, there 694,195 were sworn officers in the U.S.,12 before the rush of retirements following the George Floyd riots.13 Conservatively using the 2019 headcount, those 50 officers represent a rate of 7 officers killed per 100,000 on the job, or 875 times the rate at which blacks are killed by cops.
Historically blacks have made up over 40% of cop killers nationwide - 43% between 2005 and 2013.14 In 2019 blacks nationally were over 37% of all cop killers whose race was known.15 Conservatively estimating that 40% of the cop killers this year have been black, 20 officers have been killed by a black suspect in 2021, for a rate of nearly three cops per 100,000 officers killed by a black. A police officer is 375 times as likely to be killed by a black suspect as an unarmed black is to be kille
Attacks on the police have been rising. Through late June 2021, ambush assaults on officers were up 91% compared to the same period in 2020. Ambush attacks on police officer are up 91% in 2021 compared to previous years.16,17 Those assaults will continue to increase, as the political establishment and the media fuel anti-cop hatred further.
Meanwhile, there is hardly a single aspect of the criminal justice system that is not being undone to avoid disparate impact on blacks. Felonies are being reclassified as misdemeanors to lessen the number of blacks sent to prison. Prosecutors are declining to prosecute low level offenses like public drinking, disorderly conduct, graffiti, and turnstile jumping. Bail is being eliminated. Gang databases are being purged. Undercover police units that get illegal guns off the street are being disban
Officers are demoralized and despairing. In no other profession are you condemned as a racist by the country's elites from the day you step on the job. Retirements were up 45 percent from April 2020 to April 2021 in 200 police departments surveyed by the Police Executive Research Forum
resignations were up 18 percent.
The Riverside, Ill., police department usually gets over 200 applicants for its police exam
in 2020, it had 62- its lowest turnout in 42 years. The Portland Police Bureau lost more officers to retirement in August 2020 alone than in all of 2019. The Asheville, NC, police have stopped responding to low-level crimes because they have lost about a third of their staff to resignations and retirement. Seattle's response times to the highest-priority calls have plummeted thanks to resignations by you
New York Mayor Bill de Blasio cancelled two future police academy classes as part of New York City's defunding movement. He needn't have bothered. Those may be the last fully staffed police classes the city can muster. Officers are telling potential recruits to avoid the job.
And now, with shameless hypocrisy, the anti-cop brigades are blaming the police for pulling back from precisely the types of enforcement that they so roundly condemn as racist. The Brooklyn Borough President and a city council member groused to the New York Times in 2020 that the police had not responded to complaints about illegal dice games, loud music, and other public order infractions. Had the police taken action, of course, they would have risked more charges of racism.
But people who live with street disorder understand that it is the breeding ground of violent crime
it is out of those rowdy gatherings of hundreds of youth on street corners that shootings often emerge.
~
The law-abiding residents of high crime communities have been the initial victims in this growing wave of lawlessness. These are the people whom the press never seems to talk to, people like an elderly cancer amputee in the Mount Hope section of the Bronx who told me: "Please, Jesus, send more police". The only time she felt safe to go down to her building's lobby was when officers were there, because it was otherwise colonized by trespassing youth selling drugs and smoking weed. "As long as you
Nor do the black toddlers who have been gunned down in their bedrooms, front yards, and parents' cars over the last two years carry any import to the Black Lives Matter movement, since their assailants are of the wrong race and do not wear a badge.
In one week in July 2021, at least 6 black children under the age of 12 were killed nationally in drive by shootings. In Minneapolis, six children 10 or younger were shot in June and July 2021, including a nine-month-old baby and two three-year-old boys. A six-year-old girl and a nine-year-old girl died of their head wounds
a ten-year-old boy, also shot in the head, will likely be a vegetable for life.
In Chicago over Fourth of July weekend 2021, a five-year-old girl, a six-year-old girl, a 12-year-old girl, and 13-year-old boy were shot
several days earlier a month-old infant was critically wounded and a nine-year-old girl was shot in the head.18-20 The nation turned its eyes away because none of those children were shot by a cop
they were killed by other blacks.
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The only thing that will slow this false narrative about police racism is if white children start to be gunned down in drive-by shootings. The allegedly anti-racist press ignores young black victims but goes into crisis mode if white children are shot, as the reaction to those rare school shootings show. Cumulatively, there are several Newton, Connecticut's, every year in the black community - only the police pay consistent attention.
1. Lopez G. 2020's historic surge in murders, explained. Vox. Published March 25, 2021. Accessed December 19, 2021. https://www.vox.com/22344713/ murder-violent-crime-spike-surge-2020-covid-19-coronavirus
2. Expanded Homicide Data Table 1. FBI. Accessed December 19, 2021. https: //ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2016/crime-in-the-u.s.-2016/tables/expanded-homicide-data-table-1.xls
3. Expanded Homicide Data Table 2. FBI. Accessed December 19, 2021. https: //ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2015/crime-in-the-u.s.-2015/tables/expanded_ homicide_data_table_2_murder_victims_by_age_sex_and_race_2015.xls
4. Expanded Homicide Data Table 2. FBI. Accessed December 19, 2021. https: //ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2014/crime-in-the-u.s.-2014/tables /expanded-homicide-data/expanded_homicide_data_table_2_murder_victims_by_age_ sex_and_race_2014.xls
5. Sweeney SC Annie. Violence spike of 2020 widened familiar safety gap between city neighborhoods, University of Chicago Crime Lab analysis shows. chicagotribune.com. Accessed December 19, 2021. https://www. chicagotribune.com / news / criminal-justice / ct-2020-homicide-rate-spike-safety-gap-20210729-3lau7u2mijgaxjkvfkqqnvooee-story.html
6. Retraction for Johnson et al., Officer characteristics and racial disparities in fatal officer-involved shootings. Proc Natl Acad Sci. 2020
117(30):18130-18130. doi:10.1073/pnas.2014148117
7. Cesario J, Johnson DJ, Terrill W. Is There Evidence of Racial Disparity in Police Use of Deadly Force? Analyses of Officer-Involved Fatal Shootings in 2015-2016. Soc Psychol Personal Sci. 2019
10(5):586-595. doi:10.1177/1948550618775108.
8. Belvedere K, Worrall J, Tibbetts S. Explaining Suspect Resistance in Police-Citizen Encounters. Crim Justice Rev. 2005
30:30-44. doi:10.1177/073 4016805275675
9. Fachner G, Carter S. An Assessment of Deadly Force in the Philadelphia Police Department. :188.
10. Tamir C. The Growing Diversity of Black America. Pew Research Center's Social & Demographic Trends Project. Published March 25, 2021. Accessed December 19, 2021. https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2021/03/25/ the-growing-diversity-of-black-america/
11. CDE :: Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted. Accessed December 19, 2021. https://crime-data-explorer.app.cloud.gov/pages/le/leoka
12. Table 44. Table 74. FBI. Accessed December 19, 2021. https://ucr.fbi.gov /crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-2019/tables/table-74/table-74.xls
13. Mourtgos SM, Adams IT, Nix J. Elevated police turnover following the summer of George Floyd protests: A synthetic control study. Criminol Public Policy. n/a(n/a). doi:10.1111/1745-9133.12556
14. Table 44. Table 44. FBI. Accessed December 19, 2021. https://ucr.fbi.gov/leoka/2013/tables/table_44_leos_fk_race_and_sex_of_known_offender_2004-2013.xls
15. FBI Releases 2019 Statistics on Law Enforcement Officers Killed in the Line of Duty. Federal Bureau of Investigation. Accessed December 19, 2021. https:// www.fbi.gov / news / pressrel / press-releases / fbi-releases-2019-statistics-on-law-enforcement-officers-killed-in-the-line-of-duty
16. Pagones S. Ambush attacks on police officers up 91% in 2021 compared to last year, group says. Fox News. Published July 1, 2021. Accessed December 19, 2021. https://www.foxnews.com/us/ambush-attacks-police-officers-law-enforcement
17. Law Enforcement Officers Shot in the Line of Duty: 2020 Year-End Summary. Published online 2020:9.
20. Rosenberg-Douglas MG Katherine. Girl, 6, shot early Monday in same Chicago neighborhood as 5-year-old girl about 8 hours earlier. chicagotribune.com. Accessed December 19, 2021. https://www.chicago tribune.com/news/breaking/ct-chicago-shootings-girl-shot-child-20210705-q7kz6us24bdjbi5kbybqma7jyy-story.html
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Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and a New York Times bestselling author. She is a recipient of the 2005 Bradley Prize. Mac Donald's work at City Journal has covered a range of topics, including higher education, immigration, policing, homelessness and homeless advocacy, criminal-justice reform, and race relations. Her writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Ti
Making Evolutionary Sense of Sex and Gender
Why sex?
Sex chromosomes are nothing but trouble
How did sex chromosomes evolve to be so odd?
Genes and sexual development
Sex and career choices
Evolution of sexual behaviour
Sex and gender
Sex, gender and sport
there is no level playing field
Why are we so obsessed with sex and gender?
References
By Jennifer A. Marshall Graves
The genetics of sex and gender is full of contradiction. That's why I love it. Sex development and expression breaks all the evolutionary laws of survival of the fittest. Y chromosomes that self-destruct, men who love other men and forgo having kids, men and women who believe they were meant to be the other sex and will do anything to make sex change a reality.
Nor are humans alone in their confusion. The natural world is full of sexual contradiction. Sex chromosomes with mixed messages, sex change, fierce female moles and nurturing male emus, gay sheep.
Like it or not, men and women are very different genetically, anatomically and behaviourally. But within each sex there is tremendous variation, so that for most traits distributions overlap. There are short men and tall women, fierce females and nurturing males.
We take the male/female divide for granted, but when you think about it, sex doesn't seem to make evolutionary sense. Sex is expensive, requiring animals to attract a mate and fight off competitors as well as making sperm and eggs, the ultimate waster of time and energy. And anyway, our genes would be better off if we cloned ourselves, as do many plants - and even some lizards. That way all our genes would make it into the next generation, rather than having to go halves on offspring as we do.
Generations of geneticists have puzzled over this, and there are many theories.1 Mostly these assume that there must be some very big advantage in combining varieties of our 20,000 genes.
Sex throws together two genomes, and there is a mechanism to mix them up each time a man or woman make sperm or eggs. A process called recombination takes place as the first step in sorting out a single copy of each chromosome for sperm or eggs. Recombination literally splices one part of mum's chromosome 1 to the other part of dad's chromosome 1, so that most chromosomes in the egg or sperm are patchworks of mum's and dad's gene variants.
Why could this be important? The classic explanation was that recombination continually creates new combinations of variants that could do well in new environments. A more recent refinement is that, specifically, new combinations of proteins on the surfaces of our cells bamboozle would-be pathogens that are always bombarding us.2 This idea receives support from studies of animals like cheetahs and Tasmanian Devils that are running out of genetic variability, and seem to be very sensitive to bein
I'll start from the start with sex genes and chromosomes, which break all the rules of proper function and evolution.
As most people know, women have two copies of a medium-sized chromosome called the X, and males have only a single copy (that's why it's called the "X for unknown
" its name has nothing to do with its shape). Men also have an extra small chromosome, called the Y, which women completely lack. So, men and women have different genomes.
The genome, a metre or so of DNA carrying about 20,000 genes, is chopped up into 23 handy sized DNA molecules that are bound with protein and bunch up when the cell divides so we see them as "chromosomes" (that is "staining bodies") under the microscope. We - and other mammals - carry two copies of the genome, one from mum and one from dad. That's why chromosomes come in pairs
two copies of the biggest chromosome 1, two copies of chromosome 2 etc, in both males and females. That's called diploi
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Sex chromosomes are different in many ways. The X looks normal enough, with more than 1000 genes that encode all sorts of functions including housekeeping enzymes, visual pigments, blood clotting factors - not at all dedicated to femaleness. It is its differential dosage in males and females that causes problems.
The first problem is that males have only a single copy, so men have no backup if any X-borne gene is mutated (witness the much greater frequency of boys with colour blindness or diseases like haemophilia and mental retardation). The second problem is the dosage difference between the sexes, which is hard on genes that must interact with genes on other chromosomes in a 1:1 way. To avoid problems with this dosage difference, there is a complex system that genetically inactivates the genes on one
As well as their single X, men have a male-specific chromosome called the Y. A pathetic little chromosome bearing hardly any genes, it seems to be composed mainly of junk DNA, simple sequences repeated over and over so it binds fluorescent molecules and literally glows in the dark. It contains hardly any genes
only 27 in the region that is present only in males. Several have amplified into many copies, though some (or most) of these copies have been disabled by mutation.
The Y may look a bit pathetic but one of its 27 genes determines that the embryo that bears it is male. This gene, called SRY (Sex Determining Region on the Y),3 directs other genes to turn a little "genital ridge" of cells in the embryo into a testis. The testis makes male hormones, and the embryo develops into a baby boy. In XX embryos with no SRY the genital ridge develops as an ovary and the baby is born a girl.
The Y has a peculiar set of genes. Its 27 genes are a very specialised set. Several are dedicated to male functions like making sperm, and others seem to be there because they are necessary in a double dose in males as well as females.
Nor does the X have a standard set of genes. There are a disproportionate number dedicated to male reproduction. The reason for this seems to be that because genes on the X are present in a single copy in men, they are exposed rapidly to selection - those that advantage males will do better. Harder to explain is that there are five times as many genes on the X as you'd expect that are involved in intelligence
4 perhaps they accumulated because females preferred to mate with smart males who had s
One curious factor is that some genes are good in one sex but not the other. Genes for making sperm are not much use in a female, and genes for making eggs are no use in a male. There are even some genes that are good for one sex but bad for the other - these are called "sexually antagonistic," and are well known from studies in a range of animals including fruit flies.5
So, sex chromosomes don't work very well. Like many peculiarities we observe in nature, they are better understood in terms of evolution, than of function.
Isn't evolution supposed to get rid of things that don't work well and favour ever better solutions? Well, no. Evolution, rather than working to some grand design, does not know where it is going and simply patches things up so they more-or-less work. Here I'll explain how our sex chromosomes came to be so peculiar - and are getting more damaged all the time.
The X and Y chromosomes look very different, and bear very different sets of genes, so you will be surprised to discover that they evolved from a perfectly normal pair of chromosomes, like chromosome 1, that had nothing to do with sex.6 The first evidence for the autosomal origin of the human XY pair was that the very top bit of the X and Y is the same. When the chromosomes pair and sort themselves out into sperm, the X and Y pair up in this little region, and recombination (the breaking and rej
Another curious thing is that most of the genes on the human Y, even those with male-specific functions in sperm (even SRY itself), have copies on the X from which they obviously evolved.7 So, the conclusion is that the Y chromosome started off with the same 1000+ genes as the X.
Indeed, we know from studying many animals, that our X and Y were once an ordinary chromosome pair
they still are in birds and turtles, which have quite different sex genes and sex chromosomes. In birds sex chromosomes are the other way around, ZZ specifies male and ZW female
a sex gene on the Z chromosome called DMRT1 operates via dosage difference
two copies specifies male and one copy female. Even platypus have different sex chromosomes, more like birds than like other mammals.
How did this happen? It all started with the evolution of SRY, the sex determining gene, which evolved from an ancient gene with functions largely in the central nervous system. A simple rearrangement that repositioned this gene so it worked in the embryonic gonad gave it new powers, to switch on other genes in the testis determining pathway. So, a respectable brain-determining gene became a testis determining gene.
The acquisition of a sex determining gene was the kiss of death for this proto-Y chromosome, and led to the loss of nearly all its active genes. There are many ideas about why genes get lost from the Y, and people write books on this. Put simply, the Y chromosome suffers from being always in a testis. The testis is a dangerous place to be because making sperm takes many cell divisions, each one an opportunity for a gene mutation to take place. The Y also suffers from being alone in the cell beca
The process of gene loss is still going on, as we see from the many men who are infertile because part of their Y chromosome has been deleted. So how rapid is gene loss and what is the future of the Y? We can date the start of our sex chromosomes to about 160 million years ago because they are not shared outside mammals, or even by platypuses, from which we diverged 180 million years ago. So, we can calculate that if the remaining genes on the Y continue being inactivated and lost at the same ra
What will happen when the human Y disappears in 6 million years? Well, providing humans survive that long (which seems increasingly unlikely), a new sex gene on another chromosome may take over. This has already happened in two groups of rodents, and in each, a new sex determining system has driven a wedge between species. So, if you come back in 6 million years, you may find no humans - or several hominid species. Scary thought!
Sex chromosomes are the posterchild of the evolutionary principle I call "Dumb Design." No sensible creator would ever have designed sex chromosomes that cause so much genetic havoc and are well on the road to self-destruction.
The Y may be small and peculiar, but it packs a developmental wallop. We knew this 60 years ago when it was discovered that babies born with unusual combinations of sex chromosomes were male if they had a Y chromosome and female if they didn't, no matter how many X chromosomes they had. And babies with parts of a Y were male only if they had the top bit of the Y, implying that a gene near in this region directed male development of the foetus.
Indeed, a gene was discovered on the Y in 1990 that directs male development of the embryo. SRY turns on other genes that instruct a ridge of cells on the embryonic kidney to become a testis. It's a complicated pathway of at least 60 genes, full of checks and balances, that turns on or off genes. So, you have SRY activating a gene that in turn activates other genes in the testis pathway, and as well inhibits genes in the ovary pathway. Likewise, in the absence of SRY, a gene in the ovary pathway
The embryonic testis makes male hormones (androgens), and these hormones direct the development of male genitals of a baby boy, and continue to exert their effects after birth in morphology, muscle strength and fat distribution, hair growth, voice pitch and behaviour, and, after puberty, the production of sperm. In the absence of SRY, other genes turn on to differentiate the same ridge of cells to become an ovary, which makes female hormones that direct female development and egg production.
The genetic differences between men and women go far beyond just this one gene, or the pathway of sex determination, and may exert their effects independently of hormone production. There are another 26 genes on the male-specific part of the human Y, and some of these encode proteins that are needed for making sperm.
Surprisingly, looking at which of our 20,000 or so genes are turned on in different tissues shows astonishing differences between men and women. Fully one third of our genome (more than 7000 genes) is expressed differently in men and women in one tissue or another. And not just in breasts and gonads, but other supposedly neutral tissues like liver and kidney.10 These differences are likely to underpin many of the differences, long known but only recently acknowledged, in the susceptibility of me
And most shockingly, many genes are expressed differently in the brains of men and women.12 Add to this the observation that the male-specific SRY gene is expressed in the brain and seems to have a role in the susceptibility of men to Parkinson's disease.13
There have been fierce arguments over decades as to whether sex differences extend to the brain and behaviour. Do men have superior spatial ability or women superior verbal ability? Are men on average more aggressive and risk-taking? I am not qualified to take sides in these debates, but will just comment that it would be remarkable if brain development did not respond differently to the demonstrated differences in gene activity in men and women.
A great deal has been written and discussed about the role of sex differences in abilities, career choice and progression, and very many schemes have been enacted to increase women's participation in STEM. In science, it is obvious that sex is a major factor in choice of study as early as primary school, and for decades there have been wails of dismay about the low enrolment of young women into science, particularly engineering, computer science and maths. There are programs on programs (many in
My own path through science might look very straight and confident, and when asked, I would aver that I did not suffer from discrimination - at least while I was a modest junior academic (things got nastier as I became more senior). However, subtle discouragement and discrimination was there at every turn, and the temptation to leave the pipeline was presented many times. It seemed so normal that it had no name.
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I remember the occasion, in sixth grade, when our class was asked what careers we would choose. Most of the little girls wanted to be air hostesses and the little boys' firemen. I learned how to spell "architect," which served me well over the next decade. But my (girls') school did not teach maths in the final year (modern history was deemed more suitable for young ladies), and I was one of only two girls in my final year university physical chem class (guaranteeing exclusion from the study gro
Postgraduate research was in quite a close-knit little group, but the pattern was still exclusion from corridor cricket and late-night excursions to buy "floaters" at the Adelaide Town Hall.
After a PhD at the University of California, appointment as the only woman in a blokey department in Melbourne rapidly taught me not to accept the classic female roles (one of my lucky breaks was to reject an early invitation to organize the departmental Christmas party), and to observe closely how my male colleagues came to amass their space and equipment and technical help. The real turning point came when I became pregnant
a point at which well-bred young women were expected to politely resi
Negotiating first a teaching and research career, building up a lab of enthusiastic young people gave me some immunity from the quiet sexism of Academia, but winning the L'Oreal-UNESCO For Women in Science prize in 2006 made me realise that being good at my job is not enough.
This is when I started taking seriously efforts to remove sexism from academia. I have spent a major part of my 50 year career on various women in science committees, institutional, Australian, and international. For 40 of these years, we produced report after report, saying much the same thing. We must remove barriers to employment of women. We must make STEM education more female friendly. We need good role models, good mentors for young women in science. But only in the last decade has there
But what is the end-point of these schemes? Can we measure progress toward this endpoint? The simple answer has been that we should not rest until enrolments in computer science are 50% women, and until our professors of physics are 50% women. Oh, and our nurses, too, and primary school teachers of course. On this measure, we are a long way behind, with women constituting only about 15% of engineering enrolees, and 10% physics professors.
But is 50% realistic? And is it desirable? We simply don't know whether girls' preference for arts and sociology is purely social, or is at least partly genetically determined. It is obviously at least partly social (for instance women make choices more compatible with running a household and bringing up kids) and I would like to see redress on workload balance between partners. But I would hate to insist on a 50:50 distribution of men and women in engineering and physics just to make up the num
Sex is essential for reproduction, so it is a big part of "Darwinian fitness" that drives the success of our species, any species. (Fitness is not measured as strength or health, but simply as the number of descendants who inherited our genes). This means that any trait that increases the chances of leaving children will be selected. And any trait that increases the chances that the children will leave children. Conversely, any variant that means that the bearer has fewer or less healthy and fer
These traits can be anything
favourable variants that make eggs longer-lived, sperm more active. Or that enhances success in attracting a willing partner who will help bear your genes into the next generation. "Mate choice" covers all the factors that go into selecting a mate, including being attracted by outward signs of fertility (at the core of men's fascination with breasts and hips), and being turned off by a smell that denotes a too-close genetic relationship. There is evidence that this
Geneticists are always interested in conditions that are common even though they would not seem to fulfill the criteria of evolutionary fitness, and sexual behaviour offers several that have defied logic.
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One of these is male homosexuality, which, by any reckoning, is common in all ages and all cultures, even those that impose drastic social sanctions. In 1998 the first convincing study was published showing that a gene variant ("gay gene") on the X chromosome was associated with homosexuality.17 This caused a furore in the conservative South of the USA, where homosexuality was seen as a "lifestyle choice," and a genetic factor was incompatible with the dictum that "God cannot create a sinner." H
This is not at all surprising. Almost every trait you can think of, including other behaviours (like toilet flushing and belief in a god18), is at least partly genetic. Much evidence comes from twin studies
identical twins show more concordance in the behaviour than fraternal twins (and it may be even more because recent research shows that identical twins may not be as genetically identical as we supposed because of mutations occurring in one or the other after the developing egg is split into
Homosexuality is also common in other species, including many mammals. In fruit flies, a single mutation in a gene changes mating behaviour in males so that they direct their flap-flap, tap-tap mating displays to other males.19 And indeed, variants in many genes affect fly mating. We are no different, not even that much more complicated.
What is surprising is how common homosexuality is, given that gay men have far fewer offspring than straight men. You would think that gay genes would not make it in a competition for Darwinian fitness.
Many years ago, during an interview with Phillip Adams alongside a gay men's rights activist, I suddenly twigged. Maybe homosexuality is a typical sexually antagonistic gene variant. The gay gene, I surmised, was really a "male-loving" variant of a mate-choice gene present in everyone. In a male it will lean toward homosexual partnering, and few offspring. But the same "male-loving" gene variant in his female relatives will push his sisters and aunts to partner earlier and compensate by having m
If this were true, you would expect to find the number of children mothered by the female relatives of gay men to be higher than average. And a few years later, studies in Italy confirmed that it is, indeed, 30% higher, enough to offset the fewer children born to gay men.21 I would predict that the same argument can be made for lesbian women, although there are few data. They simply have a preponderance of "female-loving" variants of a gene or genes. You might expect their male
variants, to partner earlier and have more kids.
I would be surprised if there were not tens or hundreds of genes, variants within which affect mate choice in both men and women. I see them as typical "sexually antagonistic" genes that in one sex curtail reproduction, but in the other sex boost it. So, evolution works in sometimes counter-intuitive ways to produce a spread of normal variation that we see in sexual behaviour, just as in visible traits like height.
Sex and gender are quite different concepts, and it is important to differentiate them. Sex is the different biological and physiological characteristics of males and females, such as genes, chromosomes, hormones, reproductive organs. Natal sex refers to the biological sex you were born with. Gender is how you identify yourself within (or even outside) the broad swathe of maleness or femaleness.
Sex, as I have discussed, is controlled by genes whose effects have been channelled by evolution into two alternative developmental pathways that yield male or female development. This is why sex is referred to as "binary," although there are a few individuals in whom development lies between or outside these two channels. Biological sex is pretty hard to change in mammals including humans
you can change the outward manifestations and even the hormones, but genes and chromosomes are unreachable
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But nature throws up variants in several ways. For a start, there are significant numbers of children born with a mutation in one or other of the 60-odd genes that translate the presence or absence of SRY into development into a man or a woman. Some of these variants - for instance a mutation in SRY itself, or a mutation in the molecule that responds to male hormone - produce physically normal girls, who discover that they have a Y chromosome only when they fail to menstruate at puberty and prov
Other mutations are harder to deal with as they produce babies with some intermediate characteristics that can change during development, so sex is uncertain and advice on sex of rearing is fraught. Children with a block early in the gonad differentiation pathways have "streak" gonads that have not developed in either direction, and they develop outwardly as female. At the other end of severity, some variants are downright life-threatening unless treated.
Although it is not possible to repair the genes or chromosomes of these children, some parents, fearful of bullying and exclusion, opt for genital surgery. Not surprisingly, many of these children with Disorders (or "Differences") of Sexual Development (DSD) grow up feeling discontented with their parents' choices, and tell heart-rending stories of deception and a lack of acceptance. Patient groups advocate leaving decisions till puberty, but this leaves a DSD child vulnerable and means surgery
Unlike sex, gender is anything but binary.23 Rather than being channelled into two alternative pathways, gender is a broad spectrum, in which a person may consider themselves at any point, regardless of natal sex. A person may define themselves as cisgender (same as natal sex), transgender (different from natal sex), non-binary or even gender-neutral.
Whereas it's hard to change biological sex, there are many ways of crossing gender lines, and this has always held great fascination across many cultures. History, literature, opera is replete with stories of women posing as men, and men posing as women to fight or avoid wars, woo or escape lovers. My personal favourite is watching a woman sing the role of a man posing as a woman in Der Rosenkavalier.
On the more serious side, there are people, young and old, whose sex chromosomes and genes, and sexual development is biologically standard, but who are convinced, often from an early age, that they were born the wrong sex. In severe cases of "gender dysphoria," patients have an intense wish to transition to the sex of choice, and may opt to undergo surgery. The rates of male-to-female transition is 1/200, and female-to-male is 1/400, quite high compared to biological variants.
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Again, treatment is fraught. Children who profess to be transgender are at least accorded respect and listening, but the concern is now that being gender fluid has become quite trendy for high school students. Caution has been urged in rushing major surgery and treatment with puberty blockers because at least half change their minds at puberty.
Again, there is some evidence that gene variants play a part in gender dysphoria. Several studies implicate "the usual suspects," including genes involved in hormone pathways. This sort of variation is not unusual for any trait, morphological or behavioural. The puzzle, again, is why gender dysphoria is so common when transwomen and transmen are infertile unless they preserve their eggs or sperm, so do not commonly hand down their gene variants.24,25
I wonder whether these genes, too, may be classic "sexually antagonistic" variants. I suggest that there are variants of these genes that predispose to femininity or masculinity, and everyone inherits a mixture that affects their gender identity. At one extreme are women and men who inherit a lot of feminine-leaning traits
the men may become transgender and have no children while their female relatives who share the same variants partner earlier and have more children. Conversely, among people
As transgender becomes more accepted and transmen and transwomen more frequent, there are issues to sort out. Some are relatively easy, like labels for toilets, some just take understanding and getting used to like use of appropriate personal pronouns. Others are insoluble.
One of the insoluble issues is the status of DSD people and transwomen in elite sport. Like it or not, men have, on average, significantly greater muscle strength, heart function and lung capacity than women, and sex tests have been a part of the Olympics for a century to prevent men gate-crashing women's athletic events. Originally a sex test was the presence of a sex chromatin body (the inactive X chromosome) in the cheek epithelial cells. This was rightly decried as discriminating against wom
Some of the high-profile cases have concerned women who are not intersex or transgender at all, but simply have traits that put them way ahead. The most celebrated is that of an Indian runner with extremely high levels of testosterone
although by any test she is female, her testosterone levels are naturally higher even than the average for men. Undoubtedly this gives her an advantage of muscle strength and sustainability. But to me it seems that banning her from competition makes no more sense
Adding to this confusion are now significant numbers of transwomen who were born and grew up as XY males but have had sex change surgery, androgen suppression and estrogen therapy.
Understandably, it is very important for transwomen to feel accepted as women in the community, and sport has always been an effective means of achieving identity and acceptance. Many transwomen speak movingly of the importance of their hockey or water polo team to their sense of self.
Yet a growing number of sporting organizations are now under pressure to ban transwomen from competing in women's sport, citing (incontrovertible) evidence that the presence of androgen early in their lives as boys gave them a permanent advantage in strength, heart and lung performance, even if they take androgen-suppressing drugs. Bodies such as the Olympic committee are tying themselves into knots trying to be fair.26
So how can we create a level playing field? It seems to me that the playing field can never be level. Elite athletes, although they invest enormously in training and coaching, are bound to be on the extremes of many distributions, and we can't ban them all. Perhaps we need to compete in categories like children's sport (e.g., Under 14 C grade basketball) or the Paralympics (e.g., Triathlon PT1). I look forward to representing Australia in the Over-80 medium height low androgen Olympic netball te
Sex is, of course, the most dramatic normal variation between humans. It's the first thing you notice about a new acquaintance.
Many of these problems I have discussed are problems only because we are so intolerant of difference. What's the big deal? We are not freaked out by differences in height or facial characteristics or intellectual ability, yet parents are horrified if their newborn is diagnosed with a DSD. Paediatricians and genetic counsellors have told me that parents of DSD kids are often traumatised beyond reason. "I'd rather my baby had a serious heart problem," one new mother was heard to remark. Often the
Perhaps the fears of parents of DSD children are intensified by primal distress that their own genes will not be passed on to future generations
parents are looking at the end of their lineage.
Why are we so intolerant of differences in sexual development? Why are we resistant to the ideas of variation in sexually different traits? They are not terribly rare in humans, and also occur throughout the animal kingdom. Examples abound in nature of females that act like males
for instance, female hyenas and moles aggressively claim the top spot in the hierarchy as the result of high androgen levels that drive male-like genitals as well as aggression. Or emus in which it is the male that inc
And why are we so appalled - and so titillated - by the concept of changing sex? Plenty of other animals do it routinely. There are whole species of fish that start out one sex then transition to the other when they get big enough. Some start off female, then transition of males when they get big enough to defend a harem. Others start of as males and transition to females when they are big enough to lay a lot of eggs. My favourite is the blue wrasse, a fish species in which a dominant (blue-hea
If we look around, we see that humans occupy a tiny spot in the grand panoply of sexual differences in morphology and behaviour. We can do a lot by removing rampant discrimination against minorities that occupy outlier positions on distributions of sexual traits. This has happened remarkably rapidly for gay men and women in most western countries, although there are still nations that sanction homosexuality.
But other problems arise with suspicions that people could use transgender as a means of infiltrating - and even attacking - women, for instance in restrooms or prisons. Or claiming a physical advantage on the track. Everything can be abused, and we have to guard against siding with the perpetrators, as well as the victims, of sexual discrimination.
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Maybe we are programmed by the evolutionary necessity to find a good mate to provide a superior genome for our kids and hopefully some parental care. And maybe we are programmed by the evolutionary necessity to evaluate the competition, comparing ourselves and anxiously assessing the chance that our genes will make it into the next generation - increasing our Darwinian fitness. It may not be sensible to ignore these biological imperatives, but like other traits evolution endowed us with (like ou
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14. The STEM Gap: Women and Girls in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. AAUW : Empowering Women Since 1881. Accessed January 17, 2022. https://www.aauw.org/resources/research/the-stem-gap/
15. Science in Australia Gender Equity | SAGE. Science in Australia Gender Equity (SAGE). Published May 22, 2018. Accessed January 17, 2022. https://www.sciencegenderequity.org.au/
16. Chaix R, Cao C, Donnelly P. Is mate choice in humans MHC-dependent? PLoS Genet. 2008
4(9):e1000184. doi:10.1371/journal.pgen.1000184
17. Hamer DH, Hu S, Magnuson VL, Hu N, Pattatucci AM. A linkage between DNA markers on the X chromosome and male sexual orientation. Science. 1993
261(5119):321-327. doi:10.1126/science.8332896
18. The God Gene: How Faith Is Hardwired into Our Genes: Hamer, Dean H.: 9780385720311: Amazon.com: Books. Accessed January 17, 2022. https:// www.amazon.com / God-Gene-Faith-Hardwired-Genes/dp/03857203 19
19. Khamsi R. Fruitflies tap in to their gay side. Nature. Published online June 2, 2005. doi:10.1038/news050531-9
20. Graves J. Born this way? An evolutionary view of "gay genes." The Conversation. Accessed January 17, 2022. http://theconversation.com/born-this-way-an-evolutionary-view-of-gay-genes-26051
21. Camperio-Ciani A, Corna F, Capiluppi C. Evidence for maternally inherited factors favouring male homosexuality and promoting female fecundity. Proc Biol Sci. 2004
271(1554):2217-2221. doi:10.1098/rspb.2004.2872
22. Graves J. Boy, girl or .? Dilemmas when sex development goes awry. The Conversation. Accessed January 17, 2022. http://theconversation.com/boy-girl-or-dilemmas-when-sex-development-goes-awry-49359
23. Richards C, Bouman WP, Seal L, Barker MJ, Nieder TO, T'Sjoen G. Non-binary or genderqueer genders. Int Rev Psychiatry Abingdon Engl. 2016
28(1):95-102. doi:10.3109/09540261.2015.1106446
24. Graves J. How genes and evolution shape gender - and transgender - identity. The Conversation. Accessed January 17, 2022. http://theconversation.com /how-genes-and-evolution-shape-gender-and-transgender-identity-108911
25. Foreman M, Hare L, York K, et al. Genetic Link Between Gender Dysphoria and Sex Hormone Signaling. J Clin Endocrinol Metab. 2019
104(2):390-396. doi:10.1210/jc.2018-01105
26. Pape M, Storr R, Bekker S. A win for transgender athletes and athletes with sex variations: the Olympics shifts away from testosterone tests and toward human rights. The Conversation. Accessed January 17, 2022. http://the conversation.com / a-win-for-transgender-athletes-and-athletes-with-sex-variations - the - olympics-shifts - away-from-testosterone-tests-and-toward-human-rights-172045
27. What we learn from a fish that can change sex in just 10 days. Accessed January 17, 2022. https://theconversation.com/what-we-learn-from-a-fish-that-can-change-sex-in-just-10-days-129063
~
Jenny Graves is an evolutionary geneticist who exploits our distant relationship to Australian animals to discover how animal genes and chromosomes evolved, and how they work. She uses this unique perspective to explore the origin, function and fate of human sex genes and chromosomes, (in)famously predicting the disappearance of the Y chromosome.
Jenny studied at Adelaide University (BSc, MSc) and the University of California Berkeley (PhD). She lectured at La Trobe University, then at ANU she founded and directed the Comparative Genomics Group and an ARC Centre of Excellence. She returned to La Trobe as Distinguished Professor and Vice Chancellor's Fellow.
Jenny has produced three books and more than 400 research articles. She received the international L'Oreal-UNESCO prize (2006), appointment as Companion of the Order of Australia (AC 2010) and the Prime Minister's Prize for Science (2017). She was elected to the Australian Academy of Science (1999), and the US National Academy of Science (2019).
Stories and Data: Reflections on Race, Riots, and Police
References
By Coleman Hughes
Originally Published in City Journal
The brutal death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers has sparked protests and riots around the United States. We have witnessed humanity at its finest and at its ugliest. Citizens of faraway nations have expressed solidarity with black Americans
police officers have marched alongside protesters
protesters have defended businesses against looting and destruction. At the same time, rioters have burned down buildings and looted businesses
protesters have been pepper-spray
At the root of the unrest is the Black Lives Matter movement, which began with the acquittal of George Zimmerman in 2013 and rose to national prominence in the wake of Michael Brown's death in 2014. My view of BLM is mixed. On the one hand, I agree that police departments too often have tolerated and even enabled corruption. Rather than relying on impartial third parties, departments often decide whether to discipline their own officers
the legal doctrine of qualified immunity1 sets what many s
On the other hand, the basic premise of Black Lives Matter-that racist cops are killing unarmed black people-is false. There was a time when I believed it. I was one year younger than Trayvon Martin when he was killed in 2012, and like many black men, I felt like he could have been me. I was the same age as Michael Brown when he was killed in 2014, and like so many others, I shared the BLM hashtag on social media to express solidarity. By 2015, when the now-familiar list had grown to include Tam
My opinion has slowly changed. I still believe that racism exists and must be condemned in the strongest possible terms
I still believe that, on average, police officers are quicker to rough up a black or Hispanic suspect2 and I still believe that police misconduct happens far too often and routinely goes unpunished. But I no longer believe that the cops disproportionately kill unarmed black Americans.
Two things changed my mind: stories and data.
First, the stories. Each story in this paragraph involves a police officer killing an unarmed white person. (To demonstrate how commonly this happens, I have taken all of them from a single year, 2015, chosen at random). Timothy Smith was killed3 by a police officer who mistakenly thought he was reaching into his waistband to grab a gun
the shooting was ruled justified. William Lemmon4 was killed after he allegedly failed to show his hands upon request
the shooting was ruled justified.5 Ryan B
For brevity's sake, I will stop here. But the list goes on.
For every black person killed by the police, there is at least one white person (usually many) killed in a similar way. The day before cops in Louisville barged into Breonna Taylor's home and killed her, cops barged into the home of a white man named Duncan Lemp,14 killed him, and wounded his girlfriend (who was sleeping beside him). Even George Floyd, whose death was particularly brutal, has a white counterpart: Tony Timpa.15 Timpa was killed in 2016 by a Dallas police officer who used his knee
At a gut level, it is hard for most people to feel the same level of outrage when the cops kill a white person. Perhaps that is as it should be. After all, for most of American history, it was white suffering that provoked more outrage. But I would submit that if this new "anti-racist" bias is justified-if we now have a moral obligation to care more about certain lives than others based on skin color, or based on racial-historical bloodguilt-then everything that I thought I knew about basic mora
You might agree that the police kill plenty of unarmed white people, but object that they are more likely to kill unarmed black people, relative to their share of the population. That's where the data comes in. The objection is true as far as it goes
but it's also misleading. To demonstrate the existence of a racial bias, it's not enough to cite the fact that black people comprise 14 percent of the population but about 35 percent17 of unarmed Americans shot dead by police. (By that logic, you c
Instead, you must do what all good social scientists do: control for confounding variables to isolate the effect that one variable has upon another (in this case, the effect of a suspect's race on a cop's decision to pull the trigger). At least four careful studies have done this- one2 by Harvard economist Roland Fryer, one18 by a group of public-health researchers, one19 by economist Sendhil Mullainathan, and one20 by David Johnson, et al. None of these studies has found a racial bias in deadly
~
All of which makes my view of Black Lives Matter complicated. If not for BLM, we probably would not be talking about ending qualified immunity, making bodycams universal, increasing police accountability, and so forth-at least not to the same extent. In fact, we might not even have a careful national database on police shootings. At the same time, the core premise of the movement is false. And if not for the dissemination of this falsehood, social relations between blacks and whites would be les
But isn't this the price of progress? Isn't there a long tradition of using violence to throw off the shackles of white supremacy, going back to the Haitian revolution and the American Civil War? Didn't the urban riots of the late 1960s wake Americans up to the fact that racism did not end with the Civil Rights Act of 1965?
To start, any analogy to slave rebellions or justified revolutions can be dismissed immediately. Taking up arms directly against those enslaving you is one thing. Looting21 clothing stores or destroying22 grocery stores is something else entirely. We must be careful not to confuse the protesters with the rioters. The former are committed to nonviolence. The latter are simply criminals and should be treated as such.
As for the riots of the late 1960s, progressives should not praise them for shocking Americans into action without also noting that they helped elect23 Richard Nixon president, which progressives certainly did not intend
that they directly decreased the wealth24 of inner-city black homeowners
and that they scared capital away from inner cities for decades, worsening the very conditions of poverty and unemployment that the rioters were supposedly protesting.
What's more, the case for violence rests on the false notion that without it, little progress can be made. Recent history tells a different story. In 2018, the NYPD killed five people,25 down from 93 people in 1971. Since 2001,26 the national incarceration rate27 for black men ages 18-29 has gone down by more than half. Put simply, we know progress through normal democratic means is possible because we have already done it.
In a perfect world, I would like to see the yearly number of unarmed Americans killed by police decrease from 55 (the number in 2019) 5517 to zero. But the more I think about how we would achieve this, the less optimistic I am. At a glance, copying the policies of nations with very few police shootings seems like a promising path. But on closer inspection, one realizes how uniquely challenging the American situation is.
First, America is a huge country-the third largest in the world by population. That means that extremely low-probability events (such as police shootings) will happen much more frequently here than they do elsewhere. For instance, if America were the size of Canada, but otherwise identical, about six unarmed people would have been killed by police last year, not 55.
Second, America is a gun country, which makes policing in America fundamentally different than policing in other nations. When cops pull someone over in the United Kingdom, where the rate of gun ownership28 is less than one-twentieth the American rate, they have almost no reason to fear that the person they've stopped has a pistol hidden in the glove compartment. That's not true in America, where a cop gets shot just about every day.29 So long as we are a gun country, American police will always
A third factor (not unique to America) is that we live in the smartphone age. Which means that there are millions of cameras at the ready to ensure that the next police shooting goes viral. Overall, this is a good thing. It means that cops can no longer reliably get away with lying about their misbehavior to escape punishment. (And that the claims of those accusing police in such situations will face objective video scrutiny.) But it also means that our news feeds are perpetually filled with out
Combine all three of these observations and one arrives at a grim conclusion: as long as we have a non-zero rate of deadly shootings (a virtual certainty), and as long as some shootings are filmed and go viral (also a virtual certainty), then we may live in perpetual fear of urban unrest for the foreseeable future.
The only way out of this conundrum, it seems to me, is for millions of Americans on the Left to realize that deadly police shootings happen to blacks and whites alike. As long as a critical mass of people view this as a race issue, they will see every new video of a black person being killed as yet another injustice in a long chain dating back to the Middle Passage. That sentiment, when it is felt deeply and earnestly, will reliably produce large protests and destructive riots.
The political Right has a role to play as well. For too long, "All Lives Matter" has been a slogan used only as a clapback to Black Lives Matter. What it should have been, and still could be, is a true movement to reduce the number of Americans shot by the police on a race-neutral basis. If the challenge for the Left is to accept that the real problem with the police is not racism, the challenge for the Right is to accept that there are real problems with the police.
If the level of discourse among our public officials stays where it currently is-partisan and shallow-then there is not much hope. In a worst-case scenario, we may see a repeat of the George Floyd riots every few years. But if we can elevate the national discourse, if we can actually have that honest and uncomfortable conversation about race that people have been claiming to want for years, then we might have a chance.
1. Special Report: For cops who kill, special Supreme Court protection. Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-police-immunity-scotus-specialrep-idUSKBN22K18C. Published May 8, 2020. Accessed January 1, 2022.
2. Fryer RG. An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force. J Polit Econ. 2019
127(3):1210-1261. doi:10.1086/701423
3. Twitter, Email, Facebook. Judge rejects request to seal body camera videos, dismiss suit by family of man shot by San Diego police. San Diego Union-Tribune. Published September 3, 2018. Accessed January 1, 2022. https:// www.sandiegouniontribune.com / news/public-safety/sd-me-sdpdshooting-2 0180831-story.html
4. Ferrise A, cleveland.com. Akron police officer fatally shoots man. cleveland. Published September 25, 2015. Accessed February 6, 2022. https://www. cleveland.com/akron/2015/09/man_killed_in_officer-involved.html
5. Akron police shooting ruled justififed. wkyc.com. Accessed January 1, 2022. https://www.wkyc.com/video/news/local/akron/akron-police-shooting-ruled -justififed/95-2261430
6. Des M. Officer inside patrol car fatally shoots unarmed man. Accessed February 6, 2022. https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/crime-and -courts / 2015 / 06 / 10/fatal-officer-shooting-ryan-bolinger-dancing-man-vanessa-miller/71010592/
7. Kauffman ME and C. Des Moines will pay $225,000 to family of unarmed man killed by police officer. Des Moines Register. Accessed January 1, 2022. https://www.desmoinesregister.com / story/news/crime-and-courts/2017/11/ 17/des-moines-pay-225-000-family-unarmed-man-killed-police-officer/873877001/
8. Another day, another drug raid fatality - The Washington Post. Accessed January 1, 2022. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2015 /03/06/another-day-another-drug-raid-fatality/
9. New details released in Stillwater homicide, officer shooting. Oklahoman.com. Published January 30, 2015. Accessed January 1, 2022. https:// oklahoman.com / article/5389230 /new-details-released-in-stillwater-homicide-officer-shooting/
10. Autistic 6-year-old shot, killed during police pursuit in Louisiana, report says. Accessed January 1, 2022. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/autistic-6-year-old-shot-killed-during-police-pursuit-in-louisiana-report-says/
11. Civil lawsuit in Jeremy Mardis shooting death settled. Accessed January 1, 2022. https://www.thetowntalk.com/story/news/2018/03/30/civil-lawsuit-jeremy-mardis-shooting-death-settled/465467002/
12. Dog in police shooting ruled not vicious. Accessed January 1, 2022. https://www. desmoinesregister.com / story / news / 2015 / 02/26/dog-police-shooting-vicious-burlington/24078037/
13. Report sanitized to justify Iowa cop's shooting of mother, family says. Accessed February 6, 2022. https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news /investigations/2018/10/18/autumn-steele-burlington-iowa-police-shooting-records-show-cover-up/1286178002/
14. News ABC. Lawyer: Man killed by officer was asleep when police fired. ABC News. Accessed January 1, 2022. https://abcnews.go.com/US/wire Story/lawyer-man-asleep-police-fired-house-killing-69587748
15. The Dallas Morning News. Dallas Police Body Cameras Show Moment Tony Timpa Stopped Breathing.
2019. Accessed January 1, 2022. https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=_c-E_i8Q5G0
16. Tony Timpa death: Dallas police body cam footage shows officers mocking a man who later died - CNN. Accessed January 1, 2022. https://edition. cnn.com / 2019 / 08 / 02/us/dallas-police-body-cam-footage-captures-death/ index.html
17. Fatal Force 2019 - Washington Post. Accessed January 1, 2022. https:// www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/national/police-shootings-2019/
18. Miller TR, Lawrence BA, Carlson NN, et al. Perils of police action: a cautionary tale from US data sets. Inj Prev. 2017
23(1):27-32. doi:10.1136/ injuryprev-2016-042023
19. Police Killings of Blacks: Here Is What the Data Say - The New York Times. Accessed January 1, 2022. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/18/upshot/ police-killings-of-blacks-what-the-data-says.html
20. Johnson DJ, Tress T, Burkel N, Taylor C, Cesario J. Officer characteristics and racial disparities in fatal officer-involved shootings. Proc Natl Acad Sci. 2019
116(32):15877-15882. doi:10.1073/pnas.1903856116
21. 'Please, I Don't Have Insurance': Businesses Plead With Protesters - The New York Times. Accessed January 1, 2022. https://www.nytimes.com/2020 /05/31/us/minneapolis-protests-business-looting.html
22. Looters attack groceries in impoverished neighborhoods - CNN Video. Accessed January 1, 2022. https://edition.cnn.com/videos/tv/2020/06/06/ looters-attack-groceries-in-impoverished-neighborhoods.cnn
23. Wasow O. Agenda Seeding: How 1960s Black Protests Moved Elites, Public Opinion and Voting. Am Polit Sci Rev. 2020
114(3):638-659. doi:10.101 7/S000305542000009X
24. Collins WJ, Margo RA. The Economic Aftermath of the 1960s Riots in American Cities: Evidence from Property Values. J Econ Hist. 2007
67(4):849-883.
25. Use of Force Report. NYPD.
26. Prisoners in 2001. Bureau of Justice Statistics Bulletin.
27. Prisoners in 2017. US Department of Justice.
28. Guns in the United Kingdom - Firearms, gun law and gun control. Accessed January 1, 2022. https://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/region/united-kingdom
29. Officer Involved Officer Injured in 2019 | Gun Violence Archive. Accessed January 1, 2022. https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/reports/officer-shot? year=2019
~
Coleman Hughes is an American writer and podcast host of Conversations with Coleman. His writing focuses on race, public policy, and applied ethics. Coleman's writing has been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, National Review, Quillette, The City Journal, and The Spectator. Born and raised in northern New Jersey, Coleman briefly attended the Juilliard School to study jazz trombone before dropping out as he discovered a passion for applied ethics and public policy at Columb
In Defense of Free Speech
References
Based on an interview with the late James Flynn
Originally published in Trouble magazine's Deep Trouble Podcast
Mark Halloran: I wanted to start with a question about your father who I read was a Socialist Democrat. I think the story about being locked out of the factory when the workers voted for William Jennings Bryan, was a pretty powerful one. And how he helped Eugene Victor Debs
the president of the American Socialist Party, out of jail after he was branded a traitor by President Woodrow Wilson. I was interested in the influence your father has had on your life politically, and in terms of your work
James Flynn: Well, he doesn't, I think influenced my life as directly as going to the University of Chicago. It's true that I was raised in a household where I had a father who had a favorable view of the Democrats, particularly insofar as they were behind the trade unions and the workers. I think also of equal importance was going to the University of Chicago, being in about the only atmosphere under their policy, where to be progressive was actually in fashion.
I think what I took away from your book
In Defense of Free Speech: The University as Censor,1 was the right-wing power within universities at the time that you were a young academic seeking tenure, and how that affected your career. And you talked about the power that was wielded by conservatives within universities and how that's very different from the power
that's wielded by far-left groups within universities today.
Well, that it (right-wing power) is more vicious, as it extends off campus. Not that some of the left-wing groups don't resort to saying that they'll beat up your family and your kids, but they don't usually. And they may have the power to bounce you from university. They don't usually have the power that was operative during the McCarthy period, where if you were working class person, they could prevent you from getting into a public housing project. Or if you're a teacher, you had to take a lo
I know that you said that nothing the left has done within universities in the last 50 years, approaches the totalitarian regime that the right ran when it was running universities.
So, they were in control, effectively throughout much of American history. There is the Red Scare after World War One, and America had heads of universities who considered themselves as devout Protestants who wanted to get rid of atheists. And they, of course, were terribly anti-gay. So, there was about 100 years really, from the time of the Civil War up through the Korean War, where you had mainly right-wing control of universities and people who were liberal or left had to suffer the consequen
People say to me, 'Oh, that's a fight between the right and the left.' You've lived long enough that you don't trust the right-wing - you know if they were in control, they'd be persecuting us. And indeed, they try to when they can. Sometimes they invite speakers in the hope they will be banned. So, they'll have a cause célèbre. And other times if someone on campus actually takes a left-leaning position, they try to get them banned. And my answer to that is dual. First, why give them ammunition?
Reading your book, it made me think that I wonder when the university had really ever been a place where you had freedom of speech?
It varies so much from place to place. As I say, in one chapter, Chicago today is a much more secure place from left-wing persecution than either Harvard is or Princeton. And certainly more so than these universities or Yale. Remember, the better the university, the more they have people who actually don't like persecution and violation of free speech. So, what would leave you reasonably safe at Harvard or Chicago exposes you to the mob, if you teach at some place that is less elevated than that
The valuing of free speech seems like a rare thing, because when I thought about it, everyone is susceptible to groupthink. And when the majority of people are of one political leaning, that's going to control the way that everybody communicates within the group.
Oh, yes, of course, their motives are pure. The conservatives wanted to protect America when it was being confronted by the Soviet Union against internal communists, and wanted people to rally to the flag. Today - and here's progress - thanks to cognitive gains over the 20th century, most young students are much less racist and sexist than they were 50 years ago. And indeed, many of them just get angry if you allow people who take a conservative view on race to speak. They have been told that th
To some extent you make the distinction between right opinion and right knowledge. And so, you and the students of Middlebury who ejected Charles Murray, kind of have the same worldview, in that there is no genetic difference between racial groups that would underlie a difference in terms of IQ.
They very well may be correct, but they're totally incapable of arguing to that conclusion. If you're lucky, historically, you are filled by your parents and the media and your fellow students with views that are less vicious than other views. And that's progress. But sadly - you're right on the distinction between knowledge and right opinion - right opinion is happening to be, as an accident of history, correct. Knowledge is knowing what the other side has to say, and being able to beat them in
The problem is that there are other factors at work. Students today just read much less broadly and in depth than they used to, despite the fact that more go to university, fewer adults are reading serious history or literature. And to a degree they don't realize they're like mediaeval serfs who are captive in the bubble - that their experience is dictated by the mass media and the politicians. That makes them much more malleable and makes it a lot easier to get them to march off to war. So, alt
It's interesting that point because what you're known for, and I remember you from my undergraduate psychology degree, is something called the Flynn effect.8
That's right. I've always cautioned people against thinking that the Flynn effect settles the race and IQ debate. Although, of course, it's used as a club to do that. I've always said, 'Yes, it takes us part of the way
it shows that the environment can really have a great deal of effect on IQ, setting genes aside.' But you still have to make a detailed case, that the environmental gap that separate white and black in America today is analogous to the gap that separates the generations. It doesn
When I heard the original interview between Charles Murray and Sam Harris,9 I immediately thought Murray doesn't understand the Flynn effect. And then I found out - he named the Flynn effect.
He coined the term Flynn effect, which was a good boon for me, it opened doors that otherwise wouldn't have been open. He quite rightly said that the mere fact that over 100 years, we have made enormous environmental progress, and may have raised average IQ by 30 points, doesn't mean that in a given time and place, those same environmental differences separate black and white. And of course, Jensen made what seemed to be a powerful point - you're still run into people who don't even realize this
Everyone who can read history with an unbiased eye and isn't full of either right-wing or left-wing nonsense knows that in America, that Chinese people of a certain SES, when equated with Irish people of a certain SES, set up a far more educationally efficient home. You don't, when you walk into an Irish restaurant, see an Irish kid asleep over his books and when he wakes up, he goes on reading the next passage - he is likely to be out playing sport. And when you enter a Jewish home, it's quite
SES doesn't capture. Historically, when you consider that during slavery, black people were considered to be three quarters human under the Constitution, and post slavery, black lives, were essentially being criminalized - that you could be imprisoned for looking at a white woman the wrong way.
Yes, of course. As I've said in my material, which I wouldn't never have developed if I hadn't been arguing with people like Jensen and Lynn, that, of course, a black kid from an upper middle-class home will have an advantage over a black kid from the home where everyone is high on some type of narcotic. No doubt. You remember my use of Elsie G. Moore's study?10 She was the one who looked at black children, all of whom were adopted by either white or black professional parents. Even though all t
I was also the first one to analyze, Han Eysenck's data with the half black kids in Germany during the occupation of Germany, and they did as well as white kids left behind by American servicemen.8,11 What was the difference? There was no black subculture in Germany. They were just dark-skinned acculturated Germans. They faced prejudice. But they didn't face the subculture, which differs widely between groups in terms of encouraging cognitive performance.
If I was going to be the devil's advocate, and perhaps take Charles Murray's side of the argument, there's the obvious thing in terms of the sample sizes being very small. Therefore, it's hard to draw any conclusions. The other thing is that, as you pointed out, the African American fathers who were enlisted in the Army had to pass cognitive tests.
And I had to study it, and then allow for that. And when I did that, I said, 'Well, you could make a case that due to the weeding out of less intelligent black fathers, that really the results show about a three-point genetic gap. Now you have to take into account that although you didn't live under a black subculture, your mother was convicted on the face of it of sleeping with the enemy! If you want to go into wild speculation, you would have to conclude that 12 points of the IQ gap between bl
Now, it could be that as we learn more and more about the human genome, I think it would be remarkable if we came up with a conclusion that more than two or three points was genetic. The difference between twins and singletons is four points, and no one runs around fighting in the streets over that. You remember, I published data that shows that blacks have gained five points than whites over one generation. And the gap is no longer 15 IQ points, it's nearer 10.8 And if that happens another gene
When I first read about the Flynn effect, I thought, 'Is it really likely that IQ is going to increase by about a standard deviation
up to 15 IQ points, in fifty years. Really, statistically, it's more likely that things will regress towards the mean. And then recently, I discovered the reverse Flynn effect.12
That's right. I wrote an article on that which was published in Intelligence a few years back.8 And I say there's nothing about the Flynn effect that's written in the stars like the law of gravity. The reason the Flynn effect has occurred is that over the 20th century, most people have been exposed to more cognitively demanding environments. And if that is no longer true, than they won't make gains. Not only won't they make IQ gains, which is trivial, they won't make gains in terms of developing
I've read that IQ peaked at around the mid 1990s.13
Yes, in Scandinavia among young adults, in Holland, it looks like it's stalled, but without regressing. If you look at Germany, there's an amazing difference
they're gaining still on vocabulary, but losing in spatial visualization. If you look at America, although they seem to be gaining a bit on all fronts, and you have to look at it by age group, elderly people in practically every advanced society are making big IQ gains over their parents at an elderly age. They're being stimulated, exercis
My point was that the 500,000 Danish men declined below pre 1991 levels. It seems like IQ tests may no longer be matching the environment for
selecting out what's important in terms of intelligent behavior.
Yes, the intelligent thing is to read widely, think hard, argue with your opponents and develop critical intelligence. That's always been the really important thing.
Could it change, though?
Yes, that can change. And I'm afraid it's not necessarily changing for the better. That is, I'm afraid that young people are reading less. Apparently, all the studies of American schools show that even in terms of occupational skills, kids are losing critical intelligence, and they barely even read the course material any longer. A majority of courses are now given in America by adjunct professors who can be fired at will and have terrible conditions. And they're desperately trying to publish de
Yes, I've been in that situation. I meant that perhaps what is required from the environment for intelligent behavior changes. So, I'm thinking that as technology develops and people have access to information all the time, then they don't need to develop general knowledge as measured by tests like the WAIS.
Well, you have to know something to take advantage of the internet rather than be corrupted by it. If you just set sail on it almost any screw ball could influence you. How can you know why there was a terrible war in Nigeria if you don't know that a war even happened? You're never going to put in to your Google. How can you know what were the causes of the war in Nigeria? You're ignorant that the war ever took place.
Many people seem to think that they are making use of the visual world if they merely garner a lot of helter-skelter information on what immediately interests them. That's not the way to proceed. I try and show how academics in some ways are their own worst enemies, they too can be dogmatic and persecute academics who have a minority view. And I also try to point out that people who train teachers are not innocent of the fact that the students that these teachers teach, come to university withou
It's a case of might is right.
Yes. It's a case of might is right. When you're on top, you'll bully whoever you disagree with. And that turns it into a test of strength. You still pay an incredibly heavy price for that, in terms of remaining intellectually naive, but at least you're not likely to be thrown out of university. When the pendulum swings back again, we'll see what all these people think of this notion that the administration and alumni and students can bounce anyone they take a dislike to.
You've faced criticism as well, because of your work on race and IQ.
I'm a racist. I blame the victim because I talk about subcultures. And I say black subculture is an important element that has to change if blacks are to have better educational achievement. I would say the same about Maori subculture. Certainly, this was true of Irish subculture of my own group. I'm not there just saying, 'Oh, we are persecuted. We were turned down for jobs. We were not given housing.' Which is all true, by the way. Irish in America, when my father was young, he faced 'No Irish
You take exception in your book to particular departments within the university. Some of the departments that you have an issue with are things like Women's Studies and Black Studies.
Within the university there are academic fashions, and people outside the academic fashion often find no home there. I name those departments, in particular, because they don't just have a sort of intellectual party line, based on too narrow a research agenda. They have an ideology that defines the ideal student, and the ideal student in a Black Studies department is someone who flirts with the revolutionary left, and has no time for reading conservative black scholars, like Thomas Sowell and ot
You take exception with some of the ideas within these departments such as trigger warnings.
Yes - that's the latest outrage. Every lecturer should comb through their lectures and find the slightest thing that might upset anyone. At Chicago university they say that people go to university to get upset. They go there to seek out ideas that upset them and think about those ideas. There was a terrible thing, I think it was at Vassar, where a group of women got together and said, 'One of the worst things about having Charles Murray come to campus is the time students have to spend to think
Your book made me wonder whether you thought there were any limits to free speech at all?
There are limits to free speech in the sense that even John Stuart Mill said you can't stand up on a balcony and shout 'Fire!' That can't in any way be described as political or religious debate. That's just a way of trying to get people killed by panic. And you certainly couldn't have people stand in front of a black hostel of a campus with Ku Klux Klan signs and when they walked across campus to go to class be pursuing them with racial epithets. We all know that this is forbidden - of course t
Free speech is always placed within the limits of inciting violence.
You can always twist free speech into a mere incitement to violence. But there's no evidence that in most of these cases on campus that any of these banned speakers or banned textbooks, resulted in black or women's studies students being confronted with people shouting sexist or racist epithets. What was obnoxious about these books was that they made a case that students disagreed with but didn't know how to refute.
There was a part in your book where you said 'If I were the university president, I would allow the KKK to come in and distribute flyers and even hold their rallies.'
My view is that anyone who is presented with a flyer, they can either read it or crumple it up. They don't have to pay any attention to it. If I were a university president and the Klu Klux Klan wanted to put up flyers on a notice board, I would say, 'Are you sure this is really worthwhile? Why don't you hold a meeting off campus where the authorities can deal with the problem? These flyers are just going to be snatched off the bulletin boards. And I'll have to pay the cost of having someone wat
I think there are some ideas that are really not worth discussing.
Yes. Well, as I say, no one has to read a flyer. I don't read most flyers I see on bulletin boards - I can immediately see they're nonsense. And what's the problem with a student seeing some stupid flyer in favor of the Klu Klux Klan? I would assume that he would think 'Sad that there are so many ignorant people around.'
I think there are limits in terms of allowing groups to come to speak at a university. You wouldn't allow a pro-pedophilia group or Islamic State to come and speak.
I would kill them by ignoring them. Why the hell does anyone have to pay attention to the fact that they want to give a lecture on campus - just study your chemistry. However, since their visits to campus so often create a riotous situation, I would say to them, 'Public schools of our state cannot forbid you to hold a meeting, find a Public school 10 blocks off campus and hold your meeting there. And at least the university won't have to bear the cost of giving you security - the local cops will
In America the right-wing media predominantly focusses on the university protests. However, it really seems it's a very small percentage of the university itself.
Look at how uncritical people are being at present about the climate debate. I was amused when a person whose intelligence I respect said 'Well now at least we know what we've got to do.' That, by the way, is now the message of the oil and coal companies 'Oh, it's not our fault all you have to do is not use oil and coal and junk your cars' when they know full well that that will never happen. It lets them off the hook. It's a wonderful idea that if everyone tomorrow threw their car into the Lei
It's a generational difference, isn't it? There's an ideological difference between your life experience, and the young people who are part of departments such as Black Studies and Women's Studies.
There is a difference, but there's also no difference in a certain respect. And that is, right from the day I was born, politicians and the media tried to brainwash me with what they thought would make me a complacent citizen. That still holds true - however all the forces at work may be more powerful now. I grant you that the internet may be a much more powerful influence than the daily newspaper was when I was a kid.
You take exception to departments within universities that are ideologically driven. And you in your book criticize postmodernism.
Yes, there's that nonsense. The problem is that so many kids now go to university just wanting to gain a vocational advantage. And of course, you can be a very good surgeon, and still know nothing about climate change, know nothing about the role of money in American politics. That is, you have none of the critical attitudes you need to improve the society. But you're very good at cutting on the brain. And you're very good at building a bridge. You're very good at programming a computer. So, the
I think there should be in every university a minor in critical thinking. You wouldn't make it compulsory, but every student may take it along with their major. And in it you would have a curriculum that would be designed to encourage critical intelligence, where you spent your time learning some history and reading some literature and taking some philosophy. And learning enough social science and economics to argue with these people. I don't have any notion that I'm going to be successful in pr
It might be that universities are losing their purpose.
They have always lost their purpose to some degree. They were started to train people to be clergymen. That was their original vocational setup. And then people started realizing universities could teach people vocational skills so that they could earn a living. There was a period of course, when universities were flooded to some degree, by upper class people, some of whom just wanted to drink and run around, but others of whom considered themselves to be reflective, genteel types. And, many of
There's a difference between the departments in terms of their ideological focus.
Some of them are much worse than others. The ones that really indoctrinate you in America are Black Studies, Women's Studies and Teacher Training. And then on the heels of those are departments are the ones where you can't discuss the race-IQ debate, departments where you can't discuss Israel versus Palestine, departments where you can't imply that different cultures are at different stages of development. They all have a certain bias against these views. And then there are a few departments, id
You mention Jordan Peterson, who has really found his fame through saying that the issue with the culture within universities is related to some version of what he calls a neo-Marxist postmodernism.
It's not just neo-Marxists. Yes, everyone tries to get in on the party
feminists, Marxists, God-knows-who will all go around mouthing that there are an infinite number of interpretations of the universe, and the people who try to rationally grapple with the universe are merely trying to get more powerful than people who don't. He tends to link it to Marxism. There are Marxists who do that. But there are many Marxists who follow Marx, who said that there is objective truth out there, there's an
His contention, seems to be, that the Marxism part is changed from being about the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, and instead focusses on different groups within society and the power interactions between these groups.
Anyone who is willing to look at reality will see that different groups vary in power, nothing particularly bizarre about that. I'd far prefer to argue with a Marxist who thinks that truth is possible, and is trying to argue for a position that you have to see ideas in a sociological context to deal with them, which is a truth of sociology, and who is convinced that history moves in terms of the invention of devices that serve human needs better, like the factory system. At least, you can bring
If you look at the ideological bent of Black Studies and the activism it produces, it may seem extreme. But it's been in response to something. It's been in response to a history of white supremacy
a history of slavery.
The history of white supremacy should be looked at very carefully in the light of facts and evidence that shouldn't be clouded by a lot of self-serving myth. There was a period after slavery, that for peculiar sociological reasons, black families tended to be more stable than white families. So, to now just run around and scream black family instability is a legacy of slavery needs more examination.16,17 There are many that question why women have a lower income on average than men. It's a very
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Professor James R. Flynn has combined political and moral philosophy with psychology to clarify problems such as justifying humane ideals and whether it makes sense to rank races and classes by merit. Emeritus Professor Flynn has been profiled in Scientific American and ran for the New Zealand Parliament in 1993 and 1996 as Alliance candidate for Dunedin North. Research Interests include humane ideals and ideological debate
classics of political philosophy
race, class and IQ. He was Head of De
Vale James Flynn
First and foremost, thank you to Steve Charman who recorded and edited all excerpts for each of the interviews. Thank you also to Steve and Melissa Proposch for supporting me to develop the Deep Trouble Podcast which was hosted by Trouble Magazine and which served as inspiration for the current book. Lastly, thank you to all the authors and interviewees for contributing to this project, in particular Heather Heying, Gad Saad, Nicholas Christakis, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Peter Boghossian, for reviewi

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