AS202: Dr. Richard Carrier on EvoPsych

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:30 Thomas: Hello, and welcome to Atheistically Speaking. This is episode 202, and I'm your host, Thomas Smith. All right, got a great show, got a great interview for this episode and the next one. A little pattern I've been doing that I like quite a bit because I can reward my fine, fine patrons with an early access to part two. Just to quickly address something from last episode, I read the comment that was a little bit negative on how I had done the abortion debate slash discussion. I'd like to just give a brief update. I've contacted both commenters. I think there were, by the end, it was two commenters, an emailer. So, I mean, it's something that I want to address very much. I take it very seriously because it's something that a number of listeners have expressed, a number of female listeners have addressed.

0:01:23 Thomas: So I was able to, I think, come to a pretty good understanding, or at least start to come to pretty good understanding with the commenters via email, and they've both been invited to come on the show, and I think one for sure is going to. We'll see if the other person wants to come on. So that's where that is. That's something I really want to do because that's, that's really important to me. It was, it was pretty hard to think that, that maybe I've been addressing an issue in a way that was not, was, I don't know, maybe what didn't quite meet the needs of all my listeners, you know, and that's something I take very seriously. So I'm excited for that because we can kind of just get on the show and discuss it and hash it out and maybe We'll all learn from it. So that's a little update on that. In the meantime, though, though, I better get to my guest.

0:02:21 Thomas: My guest for today is Dr. Richard Carrier. Hi, Richard. How you doing?

0:02:24 Richard: I'm doing great, huh?

0:02:26 Thomas: All right. I have, now I will say, I saw you, gosh, maybe a couple years ago in Sacramento for a talk you did on, you know, Jesus mythicism, I guess, and it was fascinating. I loved it. I meant to get you on the show, and alas, I just delayed too long until you had recently a blog post, which, well, more like a novel, I'd say.

0:02:51 Richard: It was extensive.

0:02:54 Thomas: On evolutionary psychology. And I saw it, I was so fascinated by it. I read it through it a couple times, actually. It took a while. But I was so fascinated by it I wanted to get you on. So I just mean, all I mean to say to the listeners is we're actually not talking about Jesus for today, which maybe I hope it doesn't come as too much of a disappointment because I know your work is very popular among atheists. And I don't know, how about among non-atheists? Does anyone give it the time of day?

0:03:22 Richard: Some, yeah, it should get more attention than it is, but yeah, and we could always do a future show on that if you're interested.

0:03:32 Thomas: I would love to. I was going to say that. Maybe a future show on that would be amazing. I'd be really into that. But for the time being, yeah, this blog post is 90% of all EvoPsych false. It caught my eye. I was very curious about it. And I just wanted to ask you, how did you go from what... My first thought was, this is a tome. This is a very long work. And secondly, what inspired someone who doesn't work in the field, you know, a historian by trade, right? I mean, that's your main focus.

0:04:05 Richard: Well I'm actually, I have two trades, I'm a historian and a philosopher. I'm published in both fields, even in peer-reviewed academic journals, so I do a lot of actual philosophy, and so this really fits into the category of philosophy of science, right? Right? It's a matter of epistemology and basically the foundations of scientific reasoning. What makes science a science as opposed to a pseudoscience, for example?

0:04:09 Thomas: Sure, sure. Right, right. Fair enough.

0:04:31 Richard: So that's the approach that I'm taking at it. And the reason it's so huge is that I've interacted with epopsych defenders so often that it's always like whack-a-mole apologetics, right? And I even say that in the article where they always come up with something else. So I had to make sure the article was complete. So there's really nowhere you can go once you're done with it. There's... there's no weasel room in here. So that's why it's so long. It's supposed to be comprehensive. It's meant to be kind of like the ultimate go-to article for people who want to explore this question.

0:04:31 Thomas: That does explain it. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.

0:05:01 Thomas: Interesting. So, can I just ask, as a matter of introduction, how did you get turned on to this topic specifically, and what inspired you to put in so much work to do the research in this?

0:05:15 Richard: Well, partly that's what I do is I find something fascinating and something that is a niche that hasn't been filled, and then I write an article about it. So I do that. That's one part of it. But the other side of it is for a while increasingly more so. So it's an interesting narrative because it used to be – and it's still somewhat the case. I mean obviously it's Still the Case that the reason I got involved in counter-Christian apologetics, the reason I got in writing refutations of Christianity and getting involved in counter-apologetics and that side of things is because as someone who had political goals to achieve, human rights, civil rights and things like that, it was always the Christians in my way. Always in our way. Of everything. Women's rights, gay rights, everything you can think of. Even things you would expect Christians would not be in favor of, like war. It's always Christians that

0:05:19 Thomas: Of course, yeah.

0:06:09 Thomas: Yeah,

0:06:09 Richard: Are in our Way. So that really got me going and interested. And that's what got me into the atheism movement a really long time ago. This was about the early 90s or mid-90s, actually.

0:06:10 Thomas: I

0:06:21 Richard: But the same thing has happened with EvoPsych, that as I get more involved in activism in terms of getting people aware of how culture has caused them to roll in certain ruts that lead them to be racist in ways that they don't even realize they are, or sexist in ways they don't even realize they are, that create systems that are biased towards certain groups of people, that the systems just work that way even if there's not any particular person who's causing that to happen. So in trying to fight these particular issues, it's always EvoPsych, or people citing EvoSych, I should say, who are always standing in my way. And in fact, they've actually become the number one opponent. The Christians are still there, but they're diminishing in their influence. I think they're kind of peaked in terms of their voting power. We're still fighting them. We still have to.

0:07:06 Richard: But it's still people citing EvoPsych, usually atheists even, who cite this stuff to argue against certain feminist and social justice causes. And that's been going on for years. So gradually, I was getting like, Like, they would make these ridiculous claims, and then I would check their science on that. And they were like, that's not only is their claim about the science wrong, but even the science was actually kind of bad. And this kept happening over and over and ever again. And then I started reading a lot of other experts in the field, other psychologists, other evolutionary biologists, and anthropologists as well, who have really important things to say about this, weighing in, pointing out many of the things that I was noticing. And these guys are experts who know what they're talking about. Out. Uh, and so I was seeing the same things they were, and they were showing, they're pointing out things that even I had missed. And so it just grew up over time.

0:07:52 Richard: So I acquired this sort of attitude about EvoPsych based on all of this, this collection, this bibliography that I had accumulated and read. And, uh, then maybe about a month ago, I think I got into kind of a Twitter battle with, uh, someone who actually is an evolutionary psychologist. Um. And. And he was, was very rude and snarky and so forth, um, and I said in that Twitter battle, I was like, I think like EvoPsych is 90% pseudoscience. And they're like, oh, you just made that number up. And, well, I didn't really, but I didn't, it's Twitter, you can't argue this in 140 characters. So, um, and that sort of stuck in my craw, like with, I even sent them links and they wouldn't even respond to the links. And I was like, you know what? Someone needs to write this article. Uh, cause no one else has done it. I needed an article to point them to. Um, I had a bunch of articles to point them to, but they said, well, those have been refuted. And I said, where?

And they didn't, couldn't answer that question as to where they've been refuded. Uh. And I'm pretty sure they haven't been. Uh and I, I found all the individual links I had were insufficient by themselves. So I wanted to create a sort of a clearinghouse of all the reasons why so many people think EvoPsych is largely a pseudoscience. Not entirely a pseudoscience, but largely a pseudo-science. And so I composed this massive article on this with thorough links, careful analysis. I even look at one of the best defenses in the peer-reviewed literature of EvoSych against its critics.

0:08:18 Thomas: Yeah.

0:09:09 Richard: So even the peer review literature acknowledges that EvoPsych has a lot of critics. And so I looked and analyzed that paper and found the serious flaws in even that paper. And then that's what led us to where we are here.

0:09:22 Thomas: Wow. Yeah so I mean it's fair to say that it is a bit political, because evo-psychologists maybe, or maybe people just interpreting it badly, or what, have made it political, perhaps.

0:09:34 Richard: It's a little of both. I mean, it's difficult. It's just like with Christian apologists where you don't know if they're lying or delusional, right? Because it looks the Same, right. So if they say ridiculous things, it's like you're either a liar or you're deluded and you're not seeing the facts or whatever. Whatever. EvoPsych is the same way in the sense that you can't tell if people have a political motive or if the EvoSych is just making them susceptible to political manipulation. You can't tell what's going on because you can't see into their mind, right?

0:09:35 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, or

0:10:05 Richard: Where you see it is when people use EvoPsych on the internet, right, that's where people will just say, this is my political position, Evopsych supports it, yada yada, and they'll give you citations and stuff. That you do run into a lot. The actual evo-psych people don't usually outright say those things. Sometimes they do, but usually they don't. But sometimes you can kind of get a strong whiff of it. It's very suspicious sometimes. But some of them might actually believe this. They might actually have duped themselves into thinking that this is a real science.

0:10:05 Thomas: Maybe the behavior... Wow.

0:10:35 Thomas: So, let's go ahead and, if you wouldn't mind laying out, because the basic premise, and I think you say this as well, the basic promise seems very intuitive, seems like something that would be promising. Why don't you go ahead lay that out, and why you think that it ultimately doesn't lead to a fruitful science, at least not yet.

0:10:43 Richard: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Well, first of all, the basic premise, I mean, the most fundamental abstract premise of it is obviously correct, that human psychology evolved biologically by natural selection. I mean, everybody agrees that that's true. Even all the critics of EvoPsych agree that that is true. But most critics of EvoPsych say that we can't know the things that EvoSych wants to know, that we don't have the data that we need to actually do this. And one of the key points, for example, and this is one of several, it's not the only one, but it is the big one, is that we have a serious difficulty in disentangling what has biologically evolved in the brain and what is actually produced and perpetuated through culture. And this is one of the biggest problems with EvoPsych is that they never rule out culture, almost never. There's very, very few exceptions to this.

0:11:39 Richard: They almost never rule out culture either at all, some take cases, or they use tests that are logically incapable of doing that. And consequently, they make a lot of assertions that are out of proportion to the the evidence. They'll say that, well, we did this study, it proves this. And then someone will say, well, actually, you didn't rule out the contrary hypothesis. So in fact, that's invalid science. Many critics have pointed this out. I mean, I give many examples in the article, but the most ridiculous one is the gendered toys study, which is the two of them even. It's really fantastically, it's almost comical. And yet the defenders of EvoPsych cite those as being examples of their best stuff, so it's kind of representative of the problem.

0:12:20 Thomas: So what are some of the shortcomings of those studies, if you don't mind?

0:12:24 Richard: Well, I think people will be amused if they read the article description of them. So let's see if I can capture this right. So they gave a bunch of different kinds of toys to some monkeys. Monkeys, mind you, not apes. And for example, in one study it was pots and stuffed dolls and a ball. I can't remember what else. But there's, for example, the stuffed dolls, the girl monkeys played with the stuffed dolls and the boy monkeys played at the pots or the girls played with stuffed dolls and the and the pots and the boys monkeys played with the balls and oh, trucks. That was the other thing I played with. And it was a police car, a police car, as if a monkey knows that a police car is anyway.

0:13:11 Richard: And and they and they showed and they did parallel studies with with Western. This is the other problem with EvoPsych, is they study weirdos, which is Western-educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic people as if we represent our Savannah ancestors. It's ridiculous. The culture is so radically changed. The conditions and environment are so radically change that you can't do that. But nonetheless, they studied these Western kids and said, no, Western kids divide gender in the same way. Now, in reality, that's not what they found. They found that only the female monkeys seem to have any kind of gender difference in their preference for toys. The male monkeys didn't have any and then another study came along and they claim that it, you know, it supported their study, but in fact it found the opposite. It found that the boys preferred one kind of toy over another than the females didn't.

0:13:09 Thomas: Yeah,

0:13:56 Richard: Um, I don't know how they can claim that's a corroboration, but anyway, all of this is in my article if you want to see the details, but one of the key problems with this is that there is no freaking way that a monkey knows what a pot is, a cooking pot, and there's no possible way there could be a gender division in monkeys' preferences for toys, for for domestic tools like a pot. Pots didn't even exist when our ancestors evolved. The pot is actually an invention of the Bronze Age, which, you know, we're talking 6,000 years ago. We're not talking like a million years ago, we're not thinking 100,000 year ago. So the premise is just fundamentally comically absurd. This is like a classic example of pseudoscientific thinking. It's just off the charts, ridiculous. And yet they claim to have found results and claim that this supports their thesis of gender differences and interests in toys and so on, that proves fundamental gender differences between men and women. Women are just evolved to want to cook and men are just evolved to want to play with police cars.

0:14:02 Thomas: Sure. Yeah.

0:14:56 Richard: 100% ridiculous.

0:14:57 Thomas: Yeah, especially if they're not using a monkey police car. If they're not specifically outfitted with monkey police officers, then maybe they'd have a point.

0:15:03 Richard: Yeah, well, yeah. But that's just one example and probably the worst example and yet they still cite that as one of their best examples.

0:15:10 Thomas: Yeah. It's interesting though, I mean just, just to try to push back a little bit, I, one of the things I have found fascinating is, and I'm honestly completely agnostic on this, I, I, I find your, your, uh, sorry, not completely agnostic, but I'm willing to entertain, like, if there's a good study that shows something, I'm totally willing to go with that.

0:15:31 Thomas: Um, But why is it that, and maybe this isn't something you have an answer to, maybe it is, it's okay either way, but why does it seem seem to be the case that so many, and maybe it's just anecdotes, but so many kids, they seem to be locked into things at such an early age. My nieces and nephews, it really appears, and maybe it is some sort of, I don't know, maybe it was an illusion of some kind, or maybe, I don't a misinterpretation, but it just seems like they are so keyed in, you know, boys on playing playing with trucks and

0:15:30 Richard: Oh, sure, so am I actually.

0:15:49 Richard: Oh, yeah,

0:16:03 Thomas: Et cetera.

0:16:04 Richard: It's cultural reinforcement. I mean, if you look at people who are having babies, they're already buying gendered toys before the baby's even been born. I mean, that just tells you right there where things are going.

0:16:13 Thomas: But how is it that, okay, so my brother has a boy and a girl and they absolutely will not play with each other's toy. But I don't, you know, they haven't forced them on him. You know, it's like, so

0:16:24 Richard: Yeah, yeah, but that's what you get is you get subtle reinforcement behaviors, right, which things you reward with a smile, which things you think you react to, weirdly they intuit that stuff. We've actually, that's one thing that EvoPsych doesn't get right, which is that we actually evolved to be generalists. We actually have, we're extremely adaptable. That's actually, actually, our feet, that's what makes us different from apes, right? Is that we are super adaptable. That's our superpower, right. That's the thing that we evolved that allows us to do things that apes can't do. You can throw humans, like a band of humans, into any environment and they'll figure shit out and come up with a culture

0:16:28 Thomas: It's something that's, hmm, interesting.

0:16:44 Thomas: Right, right, right,

0:16:59 Richard: That allows them to survive in that environment. That is what gave us this edge. That was what we evolved is this generalization of function. EvoPsych is all about denying the generalization function and asserting that we have, we are just a collection of specified input-output routines that each one evolved for a particular purpose. And I'm not strawmanning either. You can look at the article that defends EvoPsych and outright says this. And this is a ridiculous thesis. We know for a fact that we're generalized in function. Now, there are certain specific tracks where there are some things we can talk, maybe get to that, where I think EvoSych has got something right. But they're less

0:17:00 Thomas: Right.

0:17:35 Thomas: Well, sure. Let me, let me, if,

0:17:36 Richard: Relevant to that, that, but the, the significant point is, is that we are, one of the things we've adapted to do is we're extremely, extremely susceptible to influence by our peers and our environment and our parents. We very quickly absorb and adapt to social roles and cultural information that's to our survival advantage, or at least it was, because it's extremely useful to learn the roles we need really quickly that have been developed for this particular social situation in this particular environment.

0:18:04 Richard: We're designed, essentially, we're evolved by natural selection to do that. So kids are extremely susceptible to manipulation into cultural ruts in that way. Now, this doesn't mean we've solved the problem of these questions. It just means that the problem is complicated. So we actually have to develop a scientific method that can distinguish between these cultural influences and other kinds. And it's really hard to do this. Certainly, it's hard to doing this ethically, unless you're going to create, you know, Walden or something. But there are not a lot of ways to actually test this. One way to do it is to look at cross-cultural studies that are very pervasive cross-cultural studies. But even that's not enough because there's a thing called convergent evolution where this happens in biology too, where two different species converge on the same biological solution to the same problem.

0:18:04 Thomas: Interesting, it

0:18:54 Richard: And we have the same thing in culture. You can and have convergent cultural evolution. So even a universal behavior could still be cultural. So it's really difficult to tease these apart. And so critics of EvoPsych don't say that we know these things are culture or not. They're just saying that we can't rule it out. There's too much to study here. There's too much data to look at. We've got to look at everything and try and figure this out in its complex nature. And that's the point of that particular thing. But then when they come up with these ridiculous studies like the monkeys playing with toys, ways, you know, they're not really on the same plane of reality the rest of us are on in terms of what they're doing to try and solve these problems and answer these questions.

0:19:32 Thomas: Certainly seems to be a poor, poorly designed test, that's for sure. But it's really curious. Could you not say, I wonder, just for the sake of argument, because it sounds like you've set a very high bar for EvoPsych, and maybe that's appropriate. So even if cross-cultures, it tends to be that male babies play with certain kinds of toys, even if there are exceptions. Hypothetically, if you find a vast majority tend to play with a certain kind of toy and females tend to prefer other toys, depending on, you know, what your findings are. Are you saying, so even then it could just be some sort of cultural phenomenon that we can't really prove it's evolutionary? It seems like a very high bar to say.

0:19:35 Richard: Yeah, yeah, exactly.

0:20:13 Richard: Well, you would have to rule it out. I'm not saying it's impossible to do that. It's just you have to come up with a test that's capable of doing it, right? And if you can't, then you just can't know. I mean, that's the fundamental thing about science is if you don't have an instrument that can observe it. You just have to admit you don't know. You can't just magically wave your wand and invent knowledge. That's a fundamental distinction between science and pseudoscience, is that science admits that it can't know something. Pseudoscience is when you try to pretend you know it and then claim it's science.

0:20:17 Thomas: Okay. Right, right.

0:20:42 Thomas: And that's a point that you make really well, I think, in the article that this could be science. There's a lot of ways, and we can get to this later, but this couldbe science. And it could be that, correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like from reading your article, that if it was a question of presenting the observations or presenting the theories and saying, here's the test we've done, this seems to fit, and sort of leaving it there, kind of like the analogy you bring up is cosmology, you know, saying this fits the data, this seams to fit that we haven't disproven this theory, you now, and and sort of leaving it, there that's scientific behavior, right? Do I have you right?

0:21:11 Richard: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Some of that would be useful, but some of it's not so much. A good example of that is the... This is a good example of both problems. One is that they over-claim what the evidence proves, but also that they aren't doing what even you're suggesting that they do, which is testing the hypothesis that was proposed by another EvoCite person that why is there a consistent ratio of homosexuality in social species and in the human species as well? It's fairly cross-cultural. There's some some variation in percentages of reported homosexuality, but it comes pretty close in percentage. It seems pretty consistent. And according to the EvoPsych hypothesis itself, that should be impossible. Homosexuality reduces direct reproduction, therefore it should have evolved out of the species over hundreds of thousands of years. It shouldn't exist anymore.

0:21:25 Thomas: Hmm.

0:22:16 Richard: And they admit that.

0:22:16 Thomas: Is that really, hold on, is that not a straw man? That's not a straw man.

0:22:19 Richard: This is what EvoSych people say themselves. They'll say themselves that we can't explain this, this is something we should look at and try to explain.

0:22:25 Thomas: Well, but even, even among, I mean, just regular plain old evolutionary biology, we recognize that there's things that, so so I'm giving, are you saying I'm giving him too much credit?

0:22:31 Richard: Yeah. So that's true. And the example would be like, yeah, no, no. But you're thinking of things like Down syndrome and other things where we do know that there's extreme outliers that were not adaptively evolved. But no, homosexuality has a higher percentage than those things in the population. It's very difficult to explain mathematically why it exists, even by an outlier theory.

0:22:48 Thomas: Hmm. Hmm.

0:22:54 Richard: Now, it could be an accidental byproduct of something else. And that's another issue I talk about in the article. There's a lot of things that evo-psych people assume must have been adapted, a lot of that stuff could just be random noise. It's the accidental byproduct of something else. So that's entirely possible. But this other hypothesis that was proposed, which was the kin selection hypothesis, and there's a lot OF data to support it. It's not proved, but it's an example of where there's a lot of evidence from a lot of different areas, different directions that have accumulated and converged on the same conclusion. So it's kind of one of their best examples of something that they've got a good case for, except they aren't at the point of proving it, but it's at least something that's worth looking at, right? And that's the kin selection hypothesis, which is the idea that homosexuality, and you don't want to have too much of it, you don't want to have too little of it.

0:22:56 Thomas: Right.

0:23:42 Richard: If you have just the right amount of it, what you end up with is you have a certain number of women and men will remain back with their primary core family and provide labor and combat support and other things for that family, which actually benefits their co-related genes, which is the genes of their nieces and nephews, right? And you can show mathematically that this works out as long as the benefit of having those people stay home is large enough. And so it's plausible. And like I said, there's some data to support it. But what the EvoCite community did is they did some ridiculous tests that they claimed refuted this hypothesis. But the tests were completely 100% incapable of doing that. And what they did is they went to modern Western industrialized nations with modern capitalist economies and measured how much money gay relatives gave to their nieces and nephews.

0:24:37 Thomas: Yeah.

0:24:37 Richard: And they're like, no, that's not going to work at all. And, of course, they found nothing. They found no significant difference. Oh, so the hypothesis is refuted. It's like, No, that can't refute the hypothesis. I mean, first of all, money didn't exist when this stuff evolved. Evolved. Secondly, when this feature evolved in us biologically, we were defined by extended family co-location. That's not what Western society culture does anymore. We don't do the extended family co location anymore. Most of us, as soon as we're capable, we leave the household and go found our own household, often a nuclear family and so on. It's not like you have 30 family members living on one tribe or one piece of land or something like that. We don't do that anymore. But that's what was happening when this stuff would have evolved. The other feature is that, okay, money didn't exist. There was no such thing as money. What was valuable then, what made a huge difference in your survival is how many people, how many strong men did you have around to fight?

0:24:51 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah,

0:25:34 Richard: That's a huge evolutionary advantage to protect the kids in the tribe, right? And even women, how many women do you have around to do other labor? And we know in terms of sexual dimorphism, we know that that's the the division of labor that evolved in the hominid population, men as fighters, women as laborers. That doesn't mean that they evolved psychology that worked the same way. It may have done. We don't know. The evidence is pretty weak on that, actually. But physically, yes, we can see the dimorphism physically. That's the thing that happened. But the point is, if you have people staying home in those kinds of cultures, you're going to have a huge effect in terms of the the benefit to the survival of the kids in that extended family. So that's what you need to measure. You need to go find similar family models to the ancient world without modern economies.

0:25:35 Thomas: Yeah.

0:26:20 Richard: That's really hard to do. Even today when you go look at Bushmen civilizations and Amazonian tribes and stuff, these are kind of like the last holdouts where civilization has pushed these people into the most desperate deserted or wild areas. These are not representative of our ancestors. We wiped out the representatives of our ancestors, so you can't really go study a version of our ancestral environment anymore. You can kind of approximate it, but no one's even doing that. That's the other thing. No one's studying homosexuality in the Bushmen or stuff, except someone who did, an anthropologist, doggone it, not an evocyte person. They went and actually studied a culture that was very similar in these characteristics. It had extended extended family co-location, and labor and combat were more important than money. And they found support for the kin selection hypothesis for homosexuality. So refuting the refutation of the EvoPsych people. So anthropologists are doing better EvoSych than EvoPsych people are doing.

0:27:23 Richard: And I cite that article in my article as well.

0:27:23 Thomas: Well, can I ask what might be, oh, sorry. Sorry to interrupt. Can I ask what might be a silly question? Are they begging the question by assuming this is like a psychological thing? I mean, homosexuality, like, okay,

0:27:27 Richard: No, it's not. True. Oh, you mean homosexuality? Well, no, it is, of course, because it has to affect the psychology of the person, right? So if you are attracted to the male form, there's something going on in your mind. Something has to have been done in your brain, and that's psychology. So it is fundamentally psychological.

0:27:54 Thomas: Regardless of whether or not, okay.

0:27:56 Richard: Now, of course, all psychology is fundamentally biological, right, even culture is biologically changing your brain. So it's mind-brain determinism equivalence is a definite fact. So all psychology is biology. But there's a difference between biology that is caused to change by environment. So you have those two things you have to separate. And that's what EvoPsych often doesn't do any actual proper tests to distinguish.

0:27:59 Thomas: Okay.

0:28:25 Thomas: Yeah, interesting. So, it's just studying it on a different level, sort of. I mean, ultimately, it could all reduce to biology, really. It's just that studying it at that level is too impossible to try to break it down.

0:28:37 Richard: Yeah. Well, I mean, even EvoPsych proponents would agree that it doesn't all reduce to genes, right? They agree that we did not, we were not genetically selected to land a man on the moon. For example, example. Even though the fact that we can now colonize outer space and therefore survive an extreme impact event on the Earth gives us an enormous differential reproductive success over all of the other species on Earth, right? But that's a cultural byproduct, right, that's not something that we were physically evolved, it's not in our genes. Now it's in our genes in the trivial sense that we evolved to be problem solvers, we evolved to be culture bearers and so on.

And that led to ultimately figuring out how to put a man on the moon, unforeseen by nature, although nature doesn't foresee anything, really. So in a sense, it does all get back down to biology. But the real debate in EvoPsych is how much of it is genetically determined versus how much it is molded by environment, by culture, by enculturation, by peer pressure, by training, by even just exploring the environment. An example is the ability humans to walk, right?

0:28:38 Thomas: Yeah? Sure. Yeah!

0:29:49 Richard: We actually aren't evolved with a full walking skill, unlike most animals. You've ever seen deer give birth? They'll give birth to a deer, and that deer walks literally right out of the womb, right ?

0:29:56 Thomas: Right! Just bolts off! Yeah! It's gone!

0:30:01 Richard: Yeah, we don't have that, right.

0:30:02 Thomas: See you later, her, mom. I'm out of here.

0:30:04 Richard: We don't that, but we also don't teach kids to walk per se, right, it's not like we put them through walking school, school. Um, uh, we give them a little bit of help, but ultimately they learn it by just exploring their environment and using what autonomic processes they did evolve to have genetically and then figure it out. And, and it's just the way we've evolved is that's just, that's the way it works is that we don't have pre-programmed genetic program for walking. What we have is a pre-programmed genetic problem for figuring out how to walk. And then it's assumed that our parents will protect us for a few years while we just figure that out by exploring our our environment. And that does cause genetic, or not genetic, but biological changes in the brain, right? So that you can actually go in the brand and see what has changed from a toddler who can't walk and a toddler can.

0:30:50 Richard: So it is biological, but it's not genetic. And it's genetic only in the sense that the underlying substrate of the skills necessary to figure it out by exploring your environment are there. And a lot of what we do and figure out and become as persons, even culturally, what we think is cultured, could be that kind of thing where we just learn it from the environment. And so there are a lot of questions, a lot of alternative hypotheses you have to be able to rule out before you can rule in genetics. Especially if, as most evocyte people, and in fact I'm not aware of any example of an evocyste study that actually tries to find a genetic basis for any behavior, they just assert that there is one, but they never actually do genetic studies.

0:31:35 Richard: And this is, I point out, a lot of critics of EvoPsych experts in the field have pointed out this is a problem. It's not an unsurpassable problem. There are other ways to try and get the evidence that they want. But if you're not even going to do genetic studies, you're ruling out a huge area, essential area, for trying to prove the kind of hypotheses that they are proposing.

0:31:57 Thomas: That seems like an obvious thing. It seems like such an easy fix, is what I mean to say.

0:32:03 Richard: Well, it's not a easy fix because it's so hard to do. And that's, I think, part of what drives the pseudoscience within EvoPsych, the pseudo-scientific content of it, is that doing the real science is frickin' expensive. It costs shit tons of money.

0:32:03 Thomas: Oh, it's funding. Is that the issue?

0:32:21 Richard: Yeah, and there's this assumption that, well, we can't afford the studies we want to do, but these are the studies that we can afford to do. Let's pretend those studies can accomplish what we want, and let's do those studies. And so they pump out thousands, literally thousands of studies that are super cheap studies where they just hand out questionnaires to college students in their class, for example. And they think that this is doing good science, and that's really not. I mean, even critics of psychology, just regular psychology, have pointed out that this is bad science even in psychology, much less trying to extend it to evo-psych where you're trying to prove two different hypotheses simultaneously. Not just a behavior exists, but also a causal explanation of the behavior. It's double hard.

0:33:04 Thomas: Yeah, I was just going to say,

0:33:04 Richard: So really, if no one's willing to invest the real money to do the real studies they need to do, then they can't do the science. And it's unfortunate, but that's the fact.

0:33:13 Thomas: Right, and All right, that's it for part one with Dr. Richard Carrier, very fascinating stuff, part two's got just as much, it's all loaded, it all ready to go for my fine, fine patrons at patreon.com/atheist, thank you so much for your support, and as a reward, there's some early content for you, if not, no big deal, not a big deal at all, you'll just get the rest of the episode on Monday, and I'm sure you'll enjoy it just as as much then. So thank you for listening. I want to thank my patrons specifically. Kaile Riser, Zimu Zinu, Adrian Borschoff, Michael, Jonathan Moyet, Jay Aldenwalt, Bangs Naughty Bits, Christian Jaeh, Peter Skelton, Brian Gareford, Dale, Matt Garrett, Samantha, and that's it. Thank you guys so, so much.

0:34:09 Thomas: Enjoy your early sowed, as well as I think Jake and I are gonna get back on the bonus content, so all kinds of bonus stuff for my lovely patrons over at patreon.com/atheist. Alright, that's it for me for this week. Tune in on Monday for the thrilling conclusion with Dr. Richard Carrier. Thanks, see you then.