Edward Dutton & The Naked Classroom

<p>Professor Edward Dutton joins my wife Simone and I to discuss his theories on where our education system has gone wrong. We talk about the lack of teaching useful logic and reasoning, why science and math are made boring, the feminization of teaching, evolutionary mismatches in education, and more from his book "The Naked Classroom."</p><p>We also discuss the genetics and psychology of religiosity, why some people have dramatic conversions, the two types of religious people, and implications for fertility and mental health.</p><p><strong>Edward Dutton:</strong> [00:00:00] I suspect that what has happened with those, so there's, there's two kinds of, I mean, it's simplistic to say it, but there's two kinds of religiosity, William James. I think it's the snail on the head with, with, with that. I like that phrase. It's the snail. Yeah. And that is the religion of healthy mindedness and the religion of the sick soul.</p><p>And those two and those two sets of religiously are quite qualitatively different. And the religion of healthy mindedness tends to be, you know, that you, you're normally born into it and you believe all of the, the. the different ideas and whatever and that's associated with being a high in agreeableness with high, high in conscientiousness and and low in mental instability.</p><p>So highly mentally stable and those associations, at least the association between religiosity sorry. And, and mental health seems to be genetic in nature. There was a study by a guy called Koenig, and they could find no environmental reason why this was the case. Now, the religion of the sick soul, that's quite different.</p><p>That's the religion of the convert. And that is associated with relatively the opposite [00:01:00] personality profile, basically, and in particular with high neuroticism.</p><p>Would you like to know more?</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> Hello, Simone. It is wonderful to have you here today. And today we have a very special guest, the jolly heretic, or Ed Dutton, or Professor Dutton. I'm sure I would guess 80 percent of our followers probably also follow you or know broadly your work.</p><p>He's very well known for controversial, much more controversial than us, mind you takes within the field of human genetics. And human evolution, but today we're going to be talking about another shared interest, which is the failure of the education system.</p><p>I'm going to try to do the, I can only count to four song. Which our</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> son is obsessed with.</p><p><strong>Edward Dutton:</strong> Wait, have you seen this? No, sorry, no. It's [00:02:00] a</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> song where they redid bodies hit the floor. Yeah, let the bodies hit the floor, but it's Sesame Street,</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> But I want to hear your thesis on where the educational system has gone wrong and sort of the thesis that you lay out in this recent book that you laid out while also giving the title of the book and where listeners can find it.</p><p><strong>Edward Dutton:</strong> So the book is called The Naked Classroom, The Evolutionary Psychology of Your Time at School.</p><p>I published it on Amazon KDP. It's quite a short book. Basically, I suppose it's a sort of introduction to based science. And I was, that's what someone suggested I should do. And as you know, I don't have a formal science qualification. I I'm an honorary professor of psychology of various places, but I don't, I was always at school, a [00:03:00] humanities person.</p><p>I very quickly came to to the conclusion that science is boring. I could see no benefit in science. You know, history. I could look around England. I lived near Hampton Court Palace and I could imagine the kings and queens of England walking there and their ghosts that haunt the place at night. You know, English literature.</p><p>If you wanted to go back in time and know how they spoke, you could read, I don't know, the works of Thomas Hardy. And there you are immersed in the 19th century, even geography, you know, how a river's formed or whatever, but how flowers have sex. Or even when I was at school, how humans have sex was not really of interest to me.</p><p>And I, I just thought, I just, I just thought it was, it was terribly, terribly badly taught. And so, and I think that that's the fundamental problem that you quite quickly divide between being a humanities person and a science person at school. And when you do that, then the ignorance of science and scientific concepts and scientific thinking among, and mathematical thinking among humanity's people can be quite staggering.</p><p>So, for example, I there was a video I [00:04:00] did recently that British Members of Parliament, more than half of British Members of Parliament thought the probability, if you toss a coin, of getting heads, or rather than tails, It's half, but if you toss it twice, they also thought it was half.</p><p> I thought I'd offer some clarification on what he meant by that statement. Because it's so dumb, you wouldn't expect it to mean what it actually means. Which is, they were asked, if you flip a coin, what's the probability it turns out on head? And then they were asked, if you flip a coin twice, what is the probability it comes up on heads twice?</p><p>These people thought that there was a 50 percent probability that it came up on heads twice, and a 50 percent probability that it came up on heads individually.</p><p><strong>Edward Dutton:</strong> Now, that's obviously wrong.</p><p>And and that, it's so obviously wrong. And somebody gave me an example today. They said, well, that's not a sign of stupidity. I've got a friend who's got a PhD in whatever, and she got that wrong. I'm like, [00:05:00] no, right, that's the problem. So science is Science is not, is not integrated into the curriculum.</p><p>It's not taught in an interesting way. And it struck me, everything was based in science, because it should be. I mean, ultimately there's this idea of of E. O. Wilson, consilience, the idea that every. If you make an assertion in sociology, it has to be reducible to psychology. If you make it in psychology, it has to be reducible to biology.</p><p>If you make it in biology, it has to be reducible to chemistry. That's, and so if, if it was taught in that way, then first of all a lot of questions that are unanswered in humanity's subjects would be parsimoniously answered. For example, I always thought to myself when I was younger, Well, why was it that people in World War I were prepared to lay down their lives for their country and die, but were not prepared to now?</p><p>What's, what's changed? Why is, what, what, what, why is it that people</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> That's an interesting question!</p><p><strong>Edward Dutton:</strong> Right, why is it that you get these people that would be prepared to burn, be burnt at the stake? For their, what possible have they gone [00:06:00] mad? You know, that wasn't answered, you just learn the information, and then you write your essay and you get your A and whatever.</p><p>But first of all, I think it should be reduced down, all these questions need to be answered in a scientific way. And secondly, the other thing I thought was, well, think of all the questions that you ask when you're at school. All the things that are going to occur to you when you're at school. Like, why are so many of the teachers women?</p><p>Why, why, why, why do, why do some boys give women the ick and they find them disgusting? Why, why, why, why is, why, why is why are some people having sex with the teacher? Why are the side of teachers often male? Why are teachers so left wing? Why are so many male teachers gay? Why, you know, frankly when I was at school, when a lot of people went to school, why were there some teachers, male teachers that were a bit, you know, Yeah,</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> even if you had done a degree in science, they wouldn't have touched on these issues.</p><p>They wouldn't have</p><p><strong>Edward Dutton:</strong> touched on these issues, no. And these are the things that are going to fascinate you at school. Why is it that girls have these cliques [00:07:00] at school that are complete b*****s to each other, you know? Why is there this anorexia and lesbianism and transsexuality among girls? Why, why do the kids that are, that are retarded, like, literally look physically different? All of these kinds of these, these these, these kinds of questions. And so it struck me that that could, that could get kids into science.</p><p>If you understand the, the base questions that you're going to ask at school, and if other subjects are reduced down to the science, then you realize the importance of science, that science could really answer. parsimoniously, all of these questions, and therefore you don't make the mistake which so many of us make, which is a young age, really quite a young age, to just stop thinking in a scientific way.</p><p>I mean, when I did my theology degree, and you try to understand what causes some people to be religious and others not to be, right, I was in my late 20s. Like six years after I got my degree, when I found this information indicating that there was a genetic component to religion, it had never occurred to me, [00:08:00] and it had seemingly never occurred to any of the people that taught me at Durham University or whatever, that you just didn't look at these things.</p><p>They were separate subjects. So that was the idea with the book, basically, to show that science needs to be based. It needs to be taught in a based way. You can do this by showing its relevance to other subjects and all by just by showing its relevance to your life at school. Answering the question scientifically that you might have thought about at school.</p><p>It</p><p>seems</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> like all the things that like a little kid is not allowed, like if, if the little kid says like, why is this, why is that? And the mom's like, shh, that's what, that's what</p><p><strong>Edward Dutton:</strong> science should be about. Those to go back to school, put your tie, if it's an English school, not an American school, put your jaunty angle, put your satchel on.</p><p>Go back to school and, and look at these questions that would have occurred to you at school. Well, that was the idea. I,</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> I want to pull on two of these ideas you talked about because there's things that we haven't talked about on this show yet. And I don't think some of this stuff that you talked about, I think generically, if people are familiar with like a manosphere stuff, or they're familiar with like genetic nerd stuff, they're going to have some vague idea of what the answers are going [00:09:00] to be.</p><p>But other things you mentioned, I don't even see talked about in these communities and they're really interesting. One of them that is, is. Being able to predict people's personality and things like their level of testosterone based on their facial characteristics. Yeah, I think people would be really surprised the extent to which humans can accurately do that.</p><p>Yeah, you're going to say,</p><p><strong>Edward Dutton:</strong> well, I was going to say, yeah, I mean, what's more interesting now is the extent to which AI can do it. Yeah, which is, which is, which is way, way beyond what humans can do. But yeah, because of course it's, it's adaptive, isn't it? We, we are a social animal. So it's inherently going to be adaptive to be able to make correct judgments from appearances.</p><p>Now, at the same time, it's also going to be adaptive to be able to evolve in such a way as to mask whatever it is that is suboptimal about you. with an appearance which tells, which doesn't indicate to people that's the case. So there's going to be a kind of arms race all the time, whereas on the one hand, you're going to be, you're going to be evolving to be able to accurately judge my appearances.</p><p>And on the other hand, you're [00:10:00] going to be evolving to not be accurately judged by appearances. So, you know, you can, you can get around those problems and that kind of thing. So, but what we end up with is that certainly a level of, I look at this in an earlier book I did called how to judge people by what they look like.</p><p>But I also look at this again with regard to school in the new book. Is that is that with a level that is significantly exceeds chance we can, we can note intelligence from appearance. We can particularly the face, because the face is a huge number of genes involved in the face. So it's a very good indicator of basically, you know, your, your level of genetic health or whatever.</p><p>And, and, and personality. And a good, I mean, a good example. And it doesn't sound very pleasant to put it like this, but if you think about what is an example of a low intelligence person, well it's a person with Down syndrome. Now that's low, now that's low intelligence beyond the normal range, that's outside the normal range.</p><p>These people have an IQ of about, it depends on the severity of the condition, but they have an IQ of between 150, something like that, but often about sort of 60, something like that. So it's, it's way [00:11:00] out, it's way out of the normal range, which is 70 to 100, 130. And what you see there is that the, the developmental pathways have been interfered with at a very young age, you know, a very young age of And this has predictable results in what they look like, i.</p><p>e. they have small, they have small noses, they have sort of short faces, they have narrow eyes and they have various examples of minor physical abnormalities and whatever in the face. Now it follows from that, that if, that you're going to get that in a much diluted form. among, among people that have low intelligence within the normal range.</p><p>And you're going to get the opposite of that among people that have high intelligence. And that's exactly what we see.</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> Wait, you're saying that smart people have giant schnozzes?</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> Simone, I think you're getting into</p><p><strong>Edward Dutton:</strong> That's, that's, no, no, that would that, that would, if it was a giant schnoz, as, as you [00:12:00] put it, that would perhaps be a mutation, a mutational load tends to be associated with no IQ.</p><p>But, but, but, but in the normal range, the the studies indicate that being intelligent is associated with having a longer face, with having a narrower face, with having, you know, basically a more horsey like face, a more kind of Anne Coulter, you know, sort of face. You know, she's lovely, but you know what I mean.</p><p>And so</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> things like b****y resting face may just be a sign that someone's a b***h. One of the,</p><p><strong>Edward Dutton:</strong> the not, and also the pupil size at rest is larger. I eyes are larger. Pupil size at rest is larger, which makes sense.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> Really, people in more int intelligence, they like, have a base level of more, more interest in their environment.</p><p>Exactly.</p><p><strong>Edward Dutton:</strong> Exactly. So the, I mean, what is intelligence? Intelligence is solving problems. What is the pupil? It's the interface between the world. and the brain. And so it follows that you're going to, you're going to have a base level, a larger pupil. And also, I mean, I know you both wear glasses. Well, I think Simone does so for pretentious reasons, but one of the, one of the one of the indicators [00:13:00] of intelligence is short sightedness.</p><p>And the, the, the, there's a weak correlation. And the reason for is that the eye is part of the brain. So obviously if you've, if you've got a bigger brain, your eyes are more kind of, convex, basically. And so they're pushed out and so you're short sighted. Obviously these things only work within race.</p><p>You can't make those kinds of assertions between race, but that, that's the, that's the face. Yeah. And there's other things, personality as well. Fun, fun,</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> science y divergence here. So we were talking about the, the pupils, right? And so, somebody's pupils being a because they might not understand the implications of what I was saying there.</p><p>Somebody's pupils being constantly dilated. Typically, your pupils dilate when you're showing interest in something. And, and we even have a natural response when somebody's pupils dilate when they're talking to us. to believe that they like us more. And this is why the Deadly Nightshade's scientific name is Tropa Belladonna, the beautiful woman it's because it used to be used, you'd put little droplets of it in your eye before you would go on a date with somebody.</p><p>Women would do this, and it would [00:14:00] paralyze some of the muscles in the eye and cause the pupils to dilate an extra large amount. So they'd look like little, you know, anime girls. And so what you're literally seeing is more persistent interest in their environments in, in this intelligent group, which is really interesting.</p><p>Within the face category, one of the jokes we persistently make on the show, because I think just as a scientist, it really jumps out to you. And again, we have nothing against Andrew Tate, but his face is, if you're familiar with face models, almost the cliche of somebody who developed in a very low testosterone environment.</p><p>It's a very, very low testosterone face. And it's really interesting that that's so antagonistic to his brand. And we point out that likely now he's high testosterone. Because of his lifestyle, because he's sleeping around a lot, which increases testosterone, because he's living with competitive males, which increases testosterone, not that he's a naturally high testosterone person.</p><p>And in many ways, that's almost better. You know, he, he got to it honestly, rather than by birth. But the other thing you touched on that I really want to [00:15:00] pull on, because I think that it's really interesting too, is I totally forgot what it was.</p><p><strong>Edward Dutton:</strong> Let's,</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> let's talk about the teacher one. That could be an interesting one to dig into. Yeah, but why, why are teachers disproportionately women? That would be an interesting one.</p><p><strong>Edward Dutton:</strong> Well, that's yeah, I mean, that's, that's one of the more obvious ones, isn't it? I mean, it's a, it's a very interesting process. Basically you, if you open up a profession to women and it's the kind of, which it wasn't previously, and that is the kind of profession that is attractive to women, then it becomes Overwhelmingly female very quickly.</p><p>Because women are within apart from that. There's out women Males have more outliers both in terms of low iq people and high iq people and a slight iq advantage adulthood but basically intelligence is about the same and women are higher in conscientiousness higher in rule following and Harder working basically, and higher in agreeableness and things like this And so, this means that they will be able to get into that profession that they want to get into particularly if it's not particularly intellectually challenging.</p><p>Obviously, they're hiring a general desire to look [00:16:00] after children and be with children, so they're attracted to that profession, and then they get into that profession, and then you get more and more and more women teachers, and then at some sort of tipping point, it becomes seen as a kind of a girl's game, as Jordan Peterson summarized it.</p><p>And then when it's seen as a girl's game, then it loses status. It loses status and the salary goes down, commensurate to other professions. And then men stop being interested in this. And then it becomes even more of a female profession. And at the moment it's in England, it's something like 65 percent of secondary school teachers are women and about 85 percent of primary school.</p><p>So you're really, really young. It's a woman and that's just going to go up. And then when we, when in the. book I did in The Naked Classroom, when you interview men who are teachers, and you're like, well, why, why, why have you gone into teaching? They basically come across as quite unambitious men. It's just, oh, I've, I've, I've gone into teaching, I've got my degree in whatever, history, and I've gone into teaching because you get long holidays, it's good.</p><p>You know, I've, I've, I've gone into teaching because I can spend my time doing my hobbies and the holidays and it's a sort of stable job [00:17:00] and whatever. So they're not very, they're not very ambitious kind of men. And, and it's just overwhelmingly female and it's an evolutionary mismatch. It is clearly an evolutionary mismatch in all societies for young women in their early twenties to be hanging around.</p><p>16 year old boys, 17 year old boys, 18 year old boys. That's just not how it's supposed to work. That's not how it's done in any tribal society. Boys at that age are taken away from the society. They go through their rite of passage. They become men, they come back. This is their rite of passage. And the instructors are women, so naturally you're going to end up with relationships between the boys and the teachers.</p><p>As you do,</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> I've, I've, I've heard an interesting theory around this, that one of the reasons why education rates rose so much for a period is because teachers were one of the only jobs available to women. And respectable jobs, respectable jobs available to women, which meant that for a low price below market, what you could get somebody at that competence level, we were able to get many of the most competent women in our society.</p><p><strong>Edward Dutton:</strong> Really true. [00:18:00] And I look at this in the book, it's in the Naked Classroom. It's very interesting, this. It seems to me the standard of teachers has gone, the standard, the quality of teachers has gone down precipitously for a number of reasons. First of all, it's lost prestige. It's just lost prestige. And so men in the old days, like my RE teacher, Mr.</p><p>Sutton, who was highly intelligent, you know, that would, would, that would go into teaching profession. They're not going to do that now. They're going to, they're going to go somewhere else. Secondly, we have a more meritocratic society. So you could imagine a situation where a person who was born into the working class or something like that, and he goes to grammar school and he becomes a school teacher.</p><p>There's no there's, even though he's probably sufficiently intelligent to become, I don't know, an academic in whatever subject he teaches, but it's not a very meritocratic society. So he's not going to do that. He's going to become a school teacher. That person these days is more likely to become an academic, particularly as well, considering the expansion of higher education in tandem with that.</p><p>So he's eliminated. And then with women, of course, I mean, I had a teacher at school and she was a very intelligent woman. She wanted to be a lawyer. And they said to her, this is in the 50s, in the 40s. Of course, you can't be a lawyer, you're a girl. So, so, so she became an [00:19:00] English teacher. Now that generation of women that became teachers, they're gone.</p><p>And the women that are capable of becoming lawyers or doctors or whatever are likely to become that. Whereas in the old days, they would have become a school teacher. So you're right. You're quite right. You would, we probably had a substantial period of time where you have women that were quite good. But we're going into teaching and now they're not, you know, it's just going to be overwhelmingly midwhip types that go.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> Yeah, unfortunately, this is not unlike what a lot of people think, something that you can easily fix just by like raising teacher salaries or something like that, like the boat has already sailed. You would need to have a major cultural shift or just replace the profession, which is what we're trying to do is our.</p><p>institution.</p><p><strong>Edward Dutton:</strong> Well, it was a good point you make that because studies indicate this whole idea of would raise the salary, raise the salary. There's a lot of evidence indicates that people will trade money for prestige. So the problem is, is not, it's, it's the prestige. It's got low prestige. And once it's got, once it's got low, you could, it's like, oh, people are under being a plumber.</p><p>You can earn way more being a. Plumber than you can being a school teacher or whatever, but it has [00:20:00] lower prestige. Well, being a school teacher has got to that point because it's so female dominated because it bears up it's, this is exodus of high quality people from it, but it's just got low prestige.</p><p>And I don't know how the, it's very hard to reverse that. I think</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> that's really interesting. I, another thing, when we talk about men and women. Having different biological tendencies in terms of the types of jobs they take that is actually really important from the perspective of pernatalist advocacy.</p><p>And there was a great piece called the baby boom by Arctotherium that we did an episode on recently. I don't know if you read this. It was in Aporia where he basically argued a strategy that you could use to help fertility rates is to lower the amount of bureaucratic jobs within the government because those are predominantly held by women because they disproportionately take those jobs which would allow and put pressure on people to be more.</p><p>You know, stay at home moms it's an interesting theory. Well, and</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> it wasn't just that, it wasn't like let's force stay at home motherhood. It's let's give men the ability to be higher in status than women, because women won't get married if they don't have [00:21:00] access to higher status than the men. So that was like the bigger thing is like, how do we enable men to have relatively higher status than women?</p><p>And a lot of that involves reducing the extent to which women have an unfair advantage and really, really common and major. Like job segments. One thing I wanted to ask you though, is if you've read you probably have Paul Lockhart's and mathematicians lament because it really changed how I looked at mathematics and I, I like sort of to like recap it for people who haven't read this essay, basically.</p><p>Paul Lockhart argues that we teach mathematics to kids as though for the entire, like grade school, middle school, high school experience until you hit college, you're basically only studying grammar. You're not allowed to write a sentence. You're not allowed to like read books or discuss literature or build narratives.</p><p>You're only allowed to just look at grammar and punctuation and the rules and it's terrible and you hate it. And it ruins math for everyone, and that's why people hate math. And what [00:22:00] really math is all about is imagination, and sort of building imaginary worlds and constraints and seeing how things behave with those constraints.</p><p>What would be the equivalent of applying this kind of reasoning?</p><p><strong>Edward Dutton:</strong> That's what I argue in the book. I said, So the Why don't the schools teach pure, like, logical thinking? So just usable, usable stuff. That's usable maths. I can only think of a few times when I did maths at school where there was, for example, there was one, I don't mention this in the book, but there was one test we did, it was SAT when you're 14, and there was this question where you had to, there was a wardrobe, and you had to work out if you could get it out of the door.</p><p>You were given the proportions and you were given the, and I realized, ah, Pythagoras theorem, that will solve that. And that's the, that's the, that will give me the answer. And that's the one time in my life. And that was in the math test, not a real life situation where Pythagoras theorem came, you know, became useful.</p><p>And so I think that what they, you're right, I think they are, what mathematics teaches you at school [00:23:00] is the, is the sort of the grammar, as I said, the grammar, and I think you can go a level further than that and just take that down to the level of logic, of, of formal logic, obviously and then of informal logic.</p><p>And when I was doing my maths GCSE, that was the height of New Labour, that was the height of all of this emotional nonsense, you know, New Labour, New Britain. All this and I thought wouldn't it be good if they had sat us down said look boys that we've got this political party saying New labor new britain.</p><p>That's a fallacy Okay, the fact the fact that the party is called new labor It does not follow and it cannot follow that. It's going to renew britain. That's insane and there were and there were many other examples of these kinds of manipulative slogans that I think you could ultimately be reduced out Basically something like maths, basically formal or informal logic.</p><p>And if, and if you teach kids that, if you teach kids the benefit of of, of informal logic and then a formal logic, then they can start to understand the benefit of maths because it's an extension of that basically. And then they can start to see the math is not just some boring grammar. It's actually extremely [00:24:00] important and vital to everything.</p><p>That's not, it's not taught in that way. It's not taught in a way that is useful. It's like teaching languages. The new modern way that you teach a language, I think is an improvement. You can teach French by teaching everybody the grammar and stuff like this, or you can just immerse them in it and say, okay, here's some French, get on with it.</p><p>And that's what they should do with math. So,</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> so, I remembered the thing I wanted to talk about, which was the genetics of religion. Oh, yes. It is a very interesting topic, and it is really undersold how heritable religiosity is, but a really interesting phenomenon, and for us, this was what actually drove us on our path to pronatalism, is we had originally thought that what was being selected for, like the way humanity was changing, was that people were being selected to be higher levels of religiosity.</p><p>And then when we looked at the data, this doesn't appear to be what's actually happening, and it's really interesting, which is the historic research. And you're one of the few people who's going to immediately be like, Oh, yes, I've seen this phenomenon. When it looked at the religiosity [00:25:00] and hereditability, it would always point out, it does not determine what religion you are, just your fervor in terms of how much you follow that religion.</p><p>And it looks like this fervor, like this genetic fervor for religion is not protective of the religion that people are born into. And this is why when you look at the new atheist community, which you were. you know, on the edge of, I think, along with us for a while, a lot, like disproportionately, they were incredibly fervent within their religion before deconverting and joining the movement.</p><p>It was not that they were like loosey goosey religious types. They were like extremely religious</p><p><strong>Edward Dutton:</strong> types. Well, I don't, I don't know if that's necessarily a good example of people that are pronatal though. No, no, no, it's</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> not, but it's, but it's interesting because historically, this genetic fervor for religion kept people within their cultural group, but just made them extreme advocates of that cultural group.</p><p>Yeah. Well,</p><p><strong>Edward Dutton:</strong> yeah, I suspect that what [00:26:00] has happened with those, so there's, there's two kinds of, I mean, it's simplistic to say it, but there's two kinds of religiosity, William James. I think it's the snail on the head with, with, with that. I like that phrase. It's the snail. Yeah. And that is the religion of healthy mindedness and the religion of the sick soul.</p><p>And those two and those two sets of religiously are quite qualitatively different. And the religion of healthy mindedness tends to be, you know, that you, you're normally born into it and you believe all of the, the. the different ideas and whatever and that's associated with being a high in agreeableness with high, high in conscientiousness and and low in mental instability.</p><p>So highly mentally stable and those associations, at least the association between religiosity sorry. And, and mental health seems to be genetic in nature. There was a study by a guy called Koenig, and they could find no environmental reason why this was the case. Now, the religion of the sick soul, that's quite different.</p><p>That's the religion of the convert. And that is associated with relatively the opposite personality profile, basically, and in [00:27:00] particular with high neuroticism. So be going through a period of religious fervor of really extreme, really extreme religiousness or changing religion, so that is to say extrinsic religiousness, socially conformist religiousness, as opposed to intrinsic religiousness and going through a period of religious fervor, i.</p><p>e. a conversion, that's associated with mental instability. And so there's no reason what you would actually expect is that you would get people that if they had let's say something like one of the things that's associated with mental instability is a borderline personality where you have a weak sense of self and you're very fickle and changeable and you fundamentally fear abandonment and you feel feelings very strongly and these, these kinds of things.</p><p>And so you, and you can see that someone like that could have a dramatic conversion experience where they would move from being extreme in terms of, let's say, being a Christ, a fundamentalist Christian, to being extreme in terms of being an atheist or vice versa. And I, I know of many, many cases of this, but I would expect that personality type to a certain [00:28:00] extent to be associated with just general sickness, just sort of problems, mental illness and physical illness.</p><p>It's the religion of the healthy mindedness. That's more, more interesting because that seems. associated with fertility and that seems to be associated with, with you know, pro social nature and, and so on. But yeah, there's a, there's a definite distinction between those two. And it's very, it was very interesting when I was at university, I did my research and I think about the kind of people that converted one way or the other.</p><p>And it was always, as you say, to the most extreme manifestation. I can think of one example, a person who's fundamentalist Christian, and now it's like she just hates God, and God doesn't exist, and it's just totally woke. And that seems to me, to the token, you can think of a sort of a religious bundle that we were selected for.</p><p>A bundle of traits that is religiousness that then come together and become pleiotrifically related and then are associated with other things which are adaptive as well, such as mental health and physical health and pronatalism and [00:29:00] whatever. And they all become bundled together and equally you can You would think that if any deviation from that would be associated with negative things.</p><p>And I think that you have, if you have the breakup of the religious bundle, i. e. you have one element of it, i. e. extreme fervor and desire for black and white servanthood, for example, whether you get that from trad Catholicism or you get that from Wokeness, but you get it from somewhere. And and and it's and you can move between the two As as you because your sense of self is weak and oh, this isn't working break down or maybe this</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> And and you think these are two different genetic clusters and one is being sort of bred out of the population</p><p><strong>Edward Dutton:</strong> I yeah, I would, the, what I, my reading is that the, the personality involved is so different from, it's so fundamentally different that you're, you're, you're dealing with two separate kinds of two separate kinds of people.</p><p>I mean, there's all kinds of nuance. Of course, you're going to get some people that have converts and are religiously fervent and therefore have loads of kids or whatever.[00:30:00] But My, my understanding is that neuroticism tends to be negatively associated with fertility except in certain subsections of it.</p><p>And, and so, so, you know, overall, I would think they would be quite separate. I mean, one thing, for example, that could predict conversion and having being a fundamentalist Christian, for example, would be some kinds of narcissism. So borderline personality predicts dramatic changes in the nature of the self.</p><p>One example of a kind of borderline personality is narcissism, and some kinds of narcissism are positively associated with having children. Quite why I'm not sure. I don't know if the mediating factor is socioeconomic. It could be that to some extent we still look up to those that have children and say, if you're narcissistic, you want to have lots of them.</p><p>I don't know. I mean, it</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> was in specific sub communities. I mean, I'm thinking now about like the eight passengers lady and stuff like that. When children are a status symbol within their community, which is sort of</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> any mommy blogger, like kids are good props in many cases.</p><p><strong>Edward Dutton:</strong> That's right. [00:31:00] We found, I mean, we've got a study at the moment we're doing, we found a number, a number of indicators that among Mormons there is a EU eugenic among white Mormons in America, there is eugenic fertility because more intelligent people tend to be more socially conformist.</p><p>And in that community it's prenatal. And so the, and therefore you wanna have kids to show that God is heavenly Fathers blessing you or whatever. And so,</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> sorry, I'm gonna unpack what you said there just because I think. What he's saying is that if you look within most communities and most cultural groups in the world right now, you have what is called this genetic fertility, which means that they are selecting for traits that we would think of as non competitive traits IE, low IQ and stuff like that.</p><p>But that lead to. higher competitive within reproduction markets within our existing socioeconomic condition. He's saying within this one rare community, there is, and I've seen the studies on this, it's a very slight eugenic effect, but a eugenic effect within these Mormon communities. But this has been a great way to end this episode.</p><p>And I really would encourage people to check out this book. If you'd like [00:32:00] some of the topics that he was talking about or What's the word that I'm looking for here? Dissident science is what I call it. Real science. The last real science that's left. And it has been great to have you on, and we would love to have you on in the</p><p><strong>Edward Dutton:</strong> future.</p><p>Great. It was a pleasure to talk to you both. Bye bye. Bye. Oh,</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> and do check out his podcast as well, Jolly Heretic, our YouTube channel or whatever..</p><p>Speaking of people who really sex up science, well, acapella science, I have just had one of their songs stuck in my head recently, so I have to, uh, share a little clip from them, to share the, the infection with you guys and, if you want, after this clip, I'm going to have a sort of an outtake from us just chatting with, uh,</p><p>We are built of modules combined in a planned out way Each new piece must be told where to go Oh, now, there's a science helping us to [00:33:00] understand How ourselves encode this architectural plan Signaling each other with genetic tools, oh Oh yeah, wow Phenotype the interface for mouse and man Genotype the files and the sub programs What then are the switches, circuit boards, and boot code?</p><p>E V O D Looking at the logic in the ways that we grow Every gene directed by a signal key code Proteins that can activate, enhance, or be told E While these signals are controlled by other genes, let's signal Calculating in a networked labyrinth, though Where the heart and liver and the hands and feet go Signal, Signal, Signal, Signal, Signal Signal mapping tells each region what it ought to be, yo We're circling so deep they build a port They're older than D'Amelio D'Amelio's a wicked red baby In a crucial pathway, genes just tend to get torpedoed Where they go, calamity goes As the sun goes down So make sure you [00:34:00] turn it up, speak now!</p><p> Boxing day really, and this is sort of a second boxing day.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> What are we supposed to be doing on boxing day? I can't remember.</p><p><strong>Edward Dutton:</strong> Well, traditionally, isn't it that you fill boxes with meats for the for the, for the the downtrodden of the community and leave them outside? And then there's the boxes, that's why it's called box, that's my understanding.</p><p>Oh, that's what Wobblies</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> has thought. I can see why we forgot about this. Hold on, there's a toy in the background that I Definitely need to turn off.</p><p><strong>Edward Dutton:</strong> But my, my wife, my wife got me this cravat, which I was quite pleased with. Oh, so that's a Christmas cravat.</p><p>That's a Christmas. That's Christmas Cravat. Yeah. Christmas. That</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> is very well, there you go. You're already benefiting from the holiday. That's, that is very nice. Okay. That's,</p><p><strong>Edward Dutton:</strong> I I got her a book about feral cats. 'cause we've, we, we've just, we've just got our, we've just got our cat. A cat, so our cat is incredibly sociable.</p><p>Very ridiculously sociable, like a dog. Okay. Has to be entertained. So we got him a cat. It's his cat, but we [00:35:00] can't touch it. It's feral. It won't let us touch it. But they're, they're okay with each other. They're okay with each other, yeah. But it's his cat. So my cat has a cat. And and that's all going very well.</p><p>He doesn't pester us anymore for attention or anything like that. He's got his cat, but he can basically, like, dominate. That's</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> a very cat thing to do. That is very cat thing to do. The whole situation is a very cat thing to do. I'm gonna keep that cat, that cat anecdote in the, in the start here. I think that's a good one.</p><p>This is how we go from single cells Every generation and in life primeval Life in variations endless and beautiful From Devo to Evo Ivan and Mosquito Patterns are resolved as the signals proceedo Melvin and Chiggy with the glow tail Kill it with the light morpholino Shoot a legal morpholino From Devo to Evo Voyage of the Beagle Body plans evolve when proteins to the genome In this matter, life's beauty grows Is that a game, Devo?</p><p>If A C A P E [00:36:00] L L A S C I E N C E</p> <br /><br />This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&#38;utm_campaign=CTA_2">basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe</a>