AS203: Dr. Richard Carrier, Part 2

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 203, and for my non-patrons, this is the year 2016. Hooray! But for my patrons listening to this earlier, it's not. So, a little weird time-space continuum stuff going on here. Thanks for joining me. It's a pleasure to have you with me. I really appreciate you tuning into the show. It is going places. I'm getting more listeners every day, and I'm really excited about that because I like to try to have conversations that I think are important and done in a way that I'm not necessarily hearing anywhere else. In the spirit of that, in that spirit, let's continue with part two with Dr. Richard Carrier on whether or not evolutionary psychology is essentially a pseudoscience. We'll see.

0:01:34 Thomas: You referenced psychology, and I didn't let you break down how you got to your 90% number, but I think it's interesting. Why don't you go ahead and get into that a little bit? It.

0:01:39 Richard: Yeah. Well, it starts from recently – well, first of all, there were mathematicians who showed that using this – based on the standards that psychology papers under peer review have been using, that you can predict mathematically that about a third of them are false. That, in fact, they're false positives. In other words, that they get a positive result actually is about a 30% chance that actually the result did not exist, that they're fooling themselves. And then it was proved empirically when there was the Reproducibility Project actually took like 100 psychology papers and tried to reproduce them and found that a third of them could not be reproduced, that they did the exact same thing and it just did not get the same result. There are other aspects of that that you can see in my paper.

0:02:19 Thomas: Wow. And is that sort of just so people like me who aren't scientists understand, is that like statistical noise kind of thing? Like they couldn't, they pick, right.

0:02:33 Richard: Yes, yeah, it really is that. And it comes down to, there are multiple, there's two failed assumptions in it. One is that at some point in the past, psychologists decided that a 1 in 20 error rate was okay. And that's the 5% chance that what we're looking at is just a random accident.

0:02:52 Thomas: Is that like the p-value thing that they use?

0:02:54 Richard: Yeah, yeah, It's basically there's a 5% chance that just by random chance we'll have this fluke of a disproportionate number of people in our sample size than would normally represent the randomness of the world, right? And so it's a 1 in 20 chance of failure. Now that might have been okay back in 1920, I don't know, but now we're producing thousands of papers a year, 1 in 20 is not going to cut it anymore. More. And physicists have abandoned this ages ago. Physicists have like a 1 in 10,000 or 1 in 100,000 criteria. If you were to set that confidence level or that requirement for psychology, almost no psychology would be publishable, which I think gets to the same problem is that real psychology costs too much money.

0:02:55 Thomas: Okay.

0:03:43 Richard: So they're doing cheap psych and pretending it's real psych and publishing it and claiming it past peer review. Therefore, it's proven. It's like, No, no, your standards suck. And this is something that people in the field, mathematicians, psychologists, this has been published in mainstream journals that this is a problem. Everybody recognizes that it's a problem

0:04:00 Thomas: Yeah, I read that whole article that you linked on the p- value stuff. I'm sorry, I'm blanking on the name of the article, but I read the entire thing because I found it really fascinating. But I want to ask you, you just referenced it there. Is this a problem with all of science? I mean, is it a problem with medical trials, that kind of thing?

0:04:07 Richard: For any science that uses that low of a standard for statistical significance of the 1 in 20 standard. Now, medicine has actually gotten away from that in many respects. So medicine is going to a much higher standard. But there's also, you can find similar papers by experts questioning the problem, or pointing out this problem is existing in the medical science field as well. So they're aware of that. The medical science community is actually more responsive to this critique and has actually been taking steps to fix the problem.

0:04:25 Thomas: Okay.

0:04:49 Thomas: Well, there's so much at stake. I mean I imagine the feedback, yeah.

0:04:51 Richard: Yeah, well, yes, for sure. And there's a shit ton of money in medical, way more money in medicine than there is in psychology. So, And people who are spending that money get antsy if they find out that they're buying crap product, right? So, yeah, so there is change happening there. But, yeah. The same problem was there. But, the, but, yeah! So, you have that problem. But, it turns out the 1 in 20 is based on a statistical model that actually ends up resulting in 1 in 3 false positive rate. And, that's based on complex analysis that, I could go find

0:04:55 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, true. Right, right. Yeah, it'd

0:05:27 Richard: That paper. It's linked in my article but

0:05:27 Thomas: Be hard to go into. Yeah, people can check out the article. It is a little complicated to try to explain but

0:05:29 Richard: Um, yeah, right, and and and mind you, this is agreed. Like, there's no one really has challenged this conclusion. Realize Oh, you're right, actually. That's a problem, um,

0:05:34 Thomas: Right, Right, right, it was pretty much math, almost, almost a mathematical proof the way they laid it out. It'd be, uh, it's it's interesting, right, right, yeah,

0:05:45 Richard: Well, the the the mathematical study is, but also the reproducibility project was just a straightforward empirical test of the thesis and they found. Them, yeah, it's actually, it's a little worse than one in three, um, but anyway, so yeah, so we, we know one and three are bad, uh, so that's that's a really terrible rate of success. This is a problem, and it's only come to the fore. People have only started realizing this is a serious problem in the last year or two, maybe two or three years at most. So things might change in the future. But the thing is that psychology, this is psychology as a field, is already one in three false. Now, EvoPsych is adding another layer on top of that. Not only are they trying to argue that certain behaviors exist, which is the psychology part of it, but they're also adding the hypothesis of explanation. We're saying that not only does the behavior exist, but it exists for this particular reason, and they have this hypothesis as to what the reason is.

0:06:39 Richard: And I show in the article that there's no way you can cut it. There's no possible way that their rate of success is going to be better than 1 in 3 as well, right? There's not a way you're going to cut it, there's not room there. In fact, it's probably way worse than 1 and 3, I make the argument for, but certainly no better than 1 in 3, it can't be better than 1 in three, and when you have 1 in 3 times 1 in 3 for the convergence of the two hypotheses, it's 1 in 9. That's a 90% failure rate, that's pretty bad. So that's, that's how I came with the 90% number, and it's probably worse than 90% actually, but it's at least 90%, just based on what we know about the reliability of psychology and the markers of reliability in the evolutionary explanations of psychological behavior.

0:06:50 Thomas: Right, And Another thing you pointed out is that even if you're able to, sometimes they're testing their theories by merely proving that the phenomenon exists, but that doesn't really, that that's sort of assuming that the explanation is true. I thought that was interesting.

0:07:36 Richard: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's true. An example of that is they're really obsessed with male jealousy. I don't know if you noticed that. That's one where they have dozens of papers on this, tons of papers trying to prove that male jealousy is all about paternity defense, that it was evolved, involved, um, but it's all crap stuff though, it's really terrible, it's really difficult even to establish that there is a gender difference in jealousy response. Now, uh, jealousy is experienced by all genders, it's experienced in non-sexual situations, uh, everybody agrees with that, uh, so jealousy appears to be a, a bigger emotion, a more, a more broadly adapted emotion than something that has anything to do with sex. So EvoPsych is kind of going against the general evidence by saying that, that there's a special kind of jealousy just for sexual jealousy. And so they're really keen on trying to publish papers that prove that this particular kind of jealousy, which is different from all other kinds of jealousy, exists.

0:07:48 Thomas: Yeah.

0:08:42 Richard: And it's been really difficult for them to try and prove that. Even when you look at meta-studies of all of the dozens and dozens of studies that they've done, the data is just all over the place. I mean, literally, it's scattershot. Some studies find nothing, some studies find a huge difference, some Some studies find a small difference. When you do a meta study, you find that there is barely a 10 percentile difference between men and women in terms of sexual jealousy response.

That's a really piss poor difference. That's really small. It's really hard to explain as an evolutionary biological adaptation. It looks a lot more like a declining cultural adaptation. But again, that's a question that has to be resolved by studies and tests that are actually capable of distinguishing this. But an example of how ridiculous they get is that in this paper that defends EvoPsych against its critics, this is a peer-reviewed paper, and I talk about it in my article, they actually just propose, as if it's an obvious fact, that if a man, obviously it would make sense if a man evolved to react with hot jealousy to seeing their female mate kiss another man. And this whole string, this could have been genetically coded into the brain to react to this way and cause this reaction, which is a defense of paternity, and this would result in a differential reproductive success, and the math all works out, it would be great. The problem is that there's no evidence for this.

0:10:11 Richard: First of all, culturally, kissing is actually not universal. It's not a universal human behavior. There are actually cultures that regard kissing to be disgusting, so that's a problem, problem, but but bigger problem than that is that kissing is a really complex social phenomenon, there's no way it can be coded genetically in the brain, for example, you can kiss, like your, your wife, let's say, can kiss, let's say you're a man and you have a wife, she can kiss, uh, her son, she can kiss her dad, she can a female friend, um, she can kiss a male friend, there's a lot of cultures where there's that kind of, you know, just polite kissing. How do you distinguish between a sexual kiss and a non-sexual kiss?

0:10:57 Richard: That's a really complicated thing. If you think about it in terms of, if you were a computer programmer and you had to program a robot that could tell the difference between sexual kissing and non-osexual kissing, your code is going to be extraordinarily complicated. I mean, really freaking complicated. And if you're trying to explain that in terms of genetics, you're imagining a vastly more complicated genetic code than we have. And there are experts who pointed this out, I cite them in my article, that there just aren't enough genes in the human genome that can possibly explain such a massively complicated mechanism. So it's extremely unlikely that we evolved to know the difference between chaste and unchaste kissing. No, we learned that. We have to learn that culturally. That's something that we have the adaptive ability, the sort of generic skill to learn like that, and then we build them into our brain as we grow up.

0:11:47 Richard: But they have to be learned. You can't evolve that. But the fact that this EvoPsych paper that's defending EvoSych against its critics think that it's even remotely credible just tells you a lot about how off the rails they are in terms of even stepping back and thinking, wait a minute, is what we're saying even making sense? No, it's not, actually. And that's the problem, is that they aren't really testing the hypotheses that they're asserting. And sometimes they'll claim, well, no, no, they're just speculations. But yes, but then over here, you're claiming that they are proven facts. And I show examples in the article where they're mere speculations are claimed to be proven facts in the EvoPsych field. It's like you're not following your own standards here. So there are a lot of problems. Now, we've really ragged on EvoSych a lot in this. I want to throw a bone, at least, to the fact that there are some things.

0:12:29 Thomas: Do you think, well, I was just going to ask you if you think that, what do you think is the best example of evolutionary psychology? What do you are there good examples of? Yeah.

0:12:43 Richard: Now, I have Yeah. I haven't personally vetted the best examples. I think a good one, but like I said, I didn't test it. I mean, I could have, because I already thought it was a good one, so I didn't really think I needed to go into it, but maybe it'll be refuted in the future, I don't know. But the one I used in the article as a good one is the studies that show that there appears to be a genetic predisposition to be afraid of certain specific animals, spiders and snakes in particular, and that you can show that there is this sort of cultural universal fear of snakes and spiders and that there's no corresponding cultural innate fear of like cars and guns, even though cars and gun are way more deadly or way more dangerous to us actually than snakes and spiders, especially because we hardly ever encounter snakes and spider anymore.

0:13:33 Thomas: Right.

0:13:34 Richard: Or at least the lethal kind. I mean, it's just not a common thing in the Western world anymore. So I think the evidence in there could hold up, and it's plausible, it makes sense. And that is a good example of what they're talking about. It's psychological. So you have, there's something in the brain that is able to recognize a particular shape and form of animal and respond behaviorally in a particular way to experience fear, which evokes a behavior of defense or whatever. So that works. Works. And there could be a lot of other examples of that. I think, um, homosexuality we mentioned before, but even just heterosexuality, the, uh, now there was a, it was overhyped this idea that, um, men, uh. Focus on a particular hip to waist ratio.

0:14:19 Richard: It turns out that's not quite true. Um, but there nevertheless are definitely, uh genetically inborn traits in terms of what physical forms we find sexually attractive, uh both heterosexual and homosexual and bisexual sexual, by the way, have these things built into their brains and they must have been genetically coded. There's no plausible mechanism by which they would be trained in or enculturated in. And the evidence backs that up. So there are these kinds of traces of psychological emotion pairs that are built in through evolution. But the thing that's interesting about the ones that are well documented or that look really strongly arguable, is that they are autonomic, meaning that all it is is you have a stimulus and you have an emotional response.

0:15:07 Richard: There's no further behavioral programming than that. The emotional response is supposed to automatically evoke the behaviors that are supposed to result in your differential reproductive success. And that makes a lot of sense. You can see how that can be programmed in a certain number of ways, but most things can't be done that way. The whole kissing thing, for example, that cannot be autonomic because there's no autonomic way to distinguish chase from unchaste kissing. It's much too complicated a cultural behavior.

0:15:31 Thomas: Could it not be something, I'm just throwing it out there as a possibility and probably can't answer, but could Could it not be something that was dependent upon something, us already being able to recognize or sexual activity of two people? Could it be dependent on, maybe it's not one easy autonomic process, like you're saying.

0:15:49 Richard: It is too complicated. The way to figure that out, the way to know how complicated it is, is ask a programmer to program a robot that can do it. If they say you can't do that, then it probably can't have evolved by genetic evolution.

0:16:03 Thomas: Well, but we couldn't, well,

0:16:06 Richard: The thing is that cognitive Cognitive understanding, and what I mean by that is the ability to distinguish between the two. So you can program a robot to identify spiders and snakes. That's pretty easy, actually, from a coding perspective. I mean, it's not super easy, but it's doable. A coder can say, yeah, actually we can do that. But if you say, well, we want chased and unchased kissing, or like you said, sexually intimate versus, I don't know, whatever other kinds of behaviors, a lot of different kinds of behavior. Behaviors. When you start sitting down to put down what would be the stimulus that would distinguish that one from the other, it gets massively complicated really quickly.

0:16:36 Thomas: No, okay, let me, let we, well but, sorry let me at least try to flesh out, let let me try to flush out what I was saying just, and it might still still be wrong, but just to make sure that I'm putting it forth correctly. Could it not be that if we already had developed on a macro level something that, because there's no denying that we culturally or otherwise, some way we have this ability to recognize inappropriate, well,

0:17:06 Richard: Yes, the jealousy response in general exists. That's true. But it's triggered by lots of different things, not just by sex. So women get triggered by emotional infidelity. You You'll have sibling rivalry as a form of jealousy, jealousy where co-workers get paid more than you. So there's a lot of different – so jealousy is a generic emotion, right? And we can show that there is some sort of thing inborn in us that evokes this jealousy response based on certain stimuli. But the stimuli are so general and so broad and so culturally complicated that what actually is triggering the jealousy is something that we don't understand yet. It's something that EvoPsych isn't even looking at, which they should be doing if they really take their field seriously, is how is the jealousy response in general triggered?

0:17:59 Richard: So, for example, what is the similarity between sibling rivalry and male jealousy against sexual infidelity? It's the same emotion, so there has to be some commonality in the stimulation that's evoking and triggering that. The thing is that evo-psych proponents just aren't even seeing it in that terms. They aren't even looking at it as psychologists or anthropologists, which is to their detriment. They're seeing it through the lens of this sexist presumption that men are a certain way, women are a certain way. Obviously, they were evolved to be that way. Therefore, we can find the explanations for it. Rather than stepping back and looking at what's actually going on, you're saying, okay, we've got jealousy, we got this generic emotion that's being triggered by a variety of different complex cultural scenarios.

0:18:49 Richard: What do those things have in common that we can identify as stimuli that are actually triggering the emotion? That's a much more interesting question and a question we really should be trying to answer.

0:18:55 Thomas: Okay, all I meant to say is once, but once the ability to recognise those situations exists, could it not be something, sure, but could it, so are you, do you think that it's impossible for evolution or natural selection to prefer something that acts on that? So is it impossible to evolve to say, let's say certain people, what

0:19:03 Richard: Once it's learned, right? Yeah.

0:19:20 Richard: Oh, yeah. That's a good question. No, it's not impossible. And that's where we get to the example. Let's go back to the homosexuality example. All of this equipment in our brain would have evolved like 100,000, 200,000 or a million years ago.

0:19:38 Richard: So what the assumption would be, and this is all hypothesis, but it's a plausible hypothesis, is that we evolve certain ways of reacting emotionally to certain things that happened in that environment back in those days. And it could involve even the sort of exploratory learning thing like the walking because that can be a part of it as well. So you could – it could have just – I'm going to be a bad atheist and assume that nature is intelligent. And let's assume nature by natural selection is planning this stuff, but nature is not. But if you were going to try and program a human to behave the right ways that would maximize their survival, but you've got limited RAM. There's only an amount of code that you can put in there.

0:20:25 Richard: You just don't have enough to code everything. Everything. What you do is you put enough code in there to get them to learn the things through environmental exploration that will get them the point where they will react a certain way to the things you want them to react to. That's how you would do it, right? That's probably how biological evolution did it as well. Not intelligently, but through natural selection, through this limited information space of this relatively small genome.

0:20:52 Richard: When so when you look in those environments, and so we look at the homosexuality example, we have extended family co-location. We have a situation where combatants and laborers are extremely valuable for the survival of children within the extended family, all the children within the extended family. So if you look at that situation, if you have a program that's designed to kick up, let's say, 5% to 10% homosexuals in the group, you're going to have a certain amount of – you're gonna have just enough people who will leave the group to go propagate genes, but you'll also have enough that stay behind that add to the survival of the children that are staying in the family unit. And all of this stuff can be learned, like fighting, labor, sticking around like all of these things are actually cultural things, they're not genetically innate.

0:21:37 Richard: These are all things that they learn, but they evolved in an environment where it was just a rote thing that that's what they would learn once the programming was there to learn those things. And so it evolved in that environment, and so you can see that happen, right? But then when you get Western technology, you get democracy, you get reading and writing, you get science, you get this incredibly advanced, highly sophisticated civilization, everything changes. The environment is radically different than what we evolved for. So this complicates the problem is in terms of determining what kinds of family family units, and what kinds of mating scenarios existed 100,000 years ago.

0:22:23 Richard: Were they like the ones today? Are Western men at all like men 100,000 years ago? What kind of variability in terms of adaptiveness was explored? An example I point out in the article is that bonobos have a high level of promiscuity. They don't have a level of monogamy. Me, um, that doesn't mean we are the same as bonobos, but it shows that there's different models in terms of, uh, sexual fidelity, uh, that work just as well in different groups of social animals. So we don't know what our model was a hundred thousand years ago. We don't know how diverse our models were. There might have been a variety of different models, we might have been much more generically engineered by natural selection to be more adaptable in terms of our mating rituals and so forth, so that we're not stuck on a particular one.

0:23:14 Richard: And I give an example in my article where I talk about an article by Lowe, who did one of the few examples of evocyte-massive cross-cultural studies, where she looked at like a hundred different cultures in the ethnographic record, and anthropologists have created an ethnographic graphic record of a huge number of cultures with a whole bunch of different common criteria. So you can actually look at the database and compare a variety of different things. And one of the things that she was looking at was the frequency with which, or the difference between how much men versus women were taught to be sexually chaste, ultimately, or sexual restraint. How much was there a difference in terms of were men taught to being more sexually restrained than women, or vice versa.

0:24:05 Richard: And what she found was that in certain cultures of certain structure, social structure, women were disproportionately overtaught that. So men were not taught sexual restraint as much. Women were taught sexual restraint more. But she also found that there were a variety of cultures in which it was not the case, that there was a different model going on. And you can show, and I explained that in my article, you can show that the social structure appears to have created the behavior, that families have adapted to the complexity of the new social structures that they were involved in and started behaving differently. That shows the problem where once you start creating civilization, which we did not evolve for, and you start these massively complex social situations that we did not evolve for, everything changes.

0:24:55 Richard: We have to keep in mind that we might have been way more adaptable, or we might might have been totally different 100,000 years ago in terms of how we behaved in mating and other things like that than how we behave in particular cultures we look at today. It is a complex and problematic issue. EvoPsych just glosses over it, and that's irresponsible scientifically.

0:25:16 Thomas: Do you Think should be the future of Evosec? Do you think it should even exist separately from psychology or should it just be, I mean, You're making a strong case Yeah, that it really shouldn't bother

0:25:23 Richard: Oh, that's a good question. No, I don't think it should. No. It should just be be folded into psychology. Um, when a psychology, when there's a psychology study that can prove an evolutionary basis for something, that's great. That should just be a part of psychology. I don't think there should be a specific field of evocyte. Um. So yeah, I do think it should all be folded into psychology and then of course that would, uh, be very sobering because the demonstrated rate of failure in psychology is so high.

You start to realize, oh, maybe this is a lot harder to do this science than we've been thinking that we were, than we'd been thinking in the past. Yes, I think that's true. But as a historian, I love thinking hundreds of years instead of tens of years. I'm a historian of science in particular, so I'm especially aware of how things can change over a period of centuries. So imagine what we can do in EvoPsych terms like 200 years from now. We'll have a much better map of the brain, for example. We'll be able to actually test some of the fundamental hypotheses of EvoPsych, such as massive modularity. I talk about this in my article.

0:25:57 Thomas: You

0:26:31 Richard: We'll have a complete command of the genome, so we'll know what all the genes do, what structures in the brain they cause and which structures they don't cause. We'll able to answer a lot of these questions pretty quickly once we have that access to the data. Now, of course, aliens could come down and give us a complete instruction manual about our genome, a complete brain scan that has a complete coding map, program map of our entire brain, the actual rules of how it functions and all of the structures and everything in it. And then we can answer all these questions tomorrow. But we're not there yet. So that's

0:27:11 Thomas: Know, I, I was just thinking, as I was reading your article, I'm not so much, I wonder why there is so much interest in evolutionary psychology and what sets it apart. Maybe I should ask this earlier, but is it really the case that the only thing majorly setting it apart is the how question, or rather the why question? Because if I was just trying to study, if I just wanted to study people in general, you know, I would think, okay, I'm very interested in measured study, good studies, good science that is telling me there are certain differences in certain groups of people. Like, that would be very interesting to me. Okay, is this group of people, and maybe it's even geographically, culturally, whatever it is, this group of people tends to exhibit these traits, whatever it is. Where does the part where you have to answer the why question, what does that really add? You know what I mean?

0:28:02 Richard: An interesting question. I didn't think of it in those terms. And I haven't researched that. I don't even know if that's answerable, but I didn't even look into that because that's a meta question, right, is to the, like, what is actually driving EvoPsych proponents? Because that's different from what they claim is driving them, right? There's something else that possibly is actually driven them. Because really, like you said, if you're really interested in understanding human behavior, you should go into cultural anthropology, not psychology, because cultural anthropologists are doing the thing that you're talking about. They're actually going to weird alien cultures and looking at, oh, look how strange they are. Oh, shit. Actually, that means our culture is really strange. These guys might be more normal than us.

0:28:08 Thomas: Huh? Yeah. Yeah.

0:28:46 Richard: It calls into question the whole idea of what you think is normal. Like everybody assumes that they are normal, but actually we're all weird. We're all weirdly as individuals, but we're weird as a culture as well. It's certainly from an evolutionary perspective. Perspective, um, we, our culture is nothing at all like the culture of a hundred thousand years ago, and any culture a hundred thousand years ago, there might probably were hundreds of different diverse cultures a hundred 000 years ago. So, uh, so yes, cultural anthropology is doing that. So the question of why now, obviously any scientist wants to ask why, so I think there is already a an innate desire to know the answer to that. Um, the question though is, why would someone, let's say you're an an anthropologist and you you see, okay, there's this huge difference between these two cultures, or I see these this interesting similarity between all these cultures, no matter how diverse they are otherwise, and you go, I want to explain that, and you're an anthropologists, you would not immediately go to the biological hypothesis.

0:29:43 Richard: You would say, you know what, I'll bet that's evolved. No, you you'd say, well, I want, you your question would be, I wonder if that's cultural, I wonder of its convergent culture, I wonder f it's our convergent cultural evolution, I wonder if it's biological evolution? I don't know. Let's find out. And so your approach would be to look at all of those possible hypotheses, come up with a test that can rule out all of them except one of them, and apply that test. That's the science you would apply, but that's not what EvoPsych does. EvoSych assumes, starts with the assumption that there is an evolved biological neurological basis that's in the genes, and then they go and try and look for evidence for that, which is the worst kind of way to do science. When you have a hypothesis and you go looking for evidence for your hypothesis, that's bad science.

0:29:43 Thomas: Right, right, right.

0:30:29 Richard: Good science is you have a hypothesis, you look for every damn way to refute that hypothesis, you apply every single test that would refute the hypothesis, and if all those tests fail, now you've got a really well-supported hypothesis. So EvoPsych doesn't do that. And that's where they kind of betrayed the fundamental idea of scientific method, which is that the first thing you look for is you want to have your thing pass all the tests. You want to try and refute your hypothesis. You wantto try every damn way that you can think of to refuteyour hypothesis. That's good science. And even if you end up refutingyour hypothesis, you endup learning something. So it's goodscience either way. So what I can't explain, and I don't know the answer to this, is why has that not evolved as being the thing that's happening now? Why did Evopsych evolve instead? Why is thatthe thing that people are doing? I don't know.

0:30:58 Thomas: Yeah, yeah.

0:31:18 Thomas: It is really meta. Like you said, this is very meta. We probably have some, we've probably been selected to ask these why question...

0:31:22 Richard: I don t know the answer to that. Yeah,

0:31:28 Thomas: No, I'm just kidding.

0:31:29 Richard: Yeah. I can come up with some half-assed bullshit hypotheses, but I don't t have evidence for them.

0:31:31 Thomas: Yeah, yeah. Now, I've noticed, and this apologies if this is too much of a personal observation, but I've notice you have an incredible amount of time and patience to answer comments on your article.

0:31:46 Richard: Oh, well, that's not entirely true.

0:31:48 Thomas: Oh, okay. I saw a lot of them, but maybe you're deleting some.

0:31:49 Richard: No, you're right. But it's funny that you say that, but I also get criticized for not doing it more. So, what

0:31:52 Thomas: Okay. Huh. I can't imagine that. I've never seen anything like it.

0:32:01 Richard: I had to do... Oh, okay. Well, I wasn't aware of that. That was unusual. But yeah.

0:32:05 Thomas: Well, just to Just to let people know, if you go to the article, and I can't believe I didn't say this, but it'll obviously be linked in the notes. Freethoughtblogs.com/carrier is the main URL, I think, for your blog. But if you Go, you'll notice that Richard has answered almost every comment that there is.

0:32:26 Richard: No, I take that seriously. Because I do that, because I'm that diligent in answering comments, I've had to have said it so that my comments close after six days. So every blog post after six days, you can't comment on it anymore. And that's unfortunate. If I had a team of assistants, I would let them continue moderating the comments after that. But I just don't. I don't have the time.

0:32:27 Thomas: Yeah, yeah. Hmm. Sure, sure. Right.

0:32:51 Richard: But I find it kind of useless to just have a stream of comments, especially if you have YouTube where it's a stream of comments a lot of it full of just harassment and terrible stuff. Stuff. I want the comments to be useful and critical or expanding on or useful in some way to the readers. My model of comments is to be as interactive as possible, but I have to shut them down after six days.

0:32:57 Thomas: It's certainly useless. That's That's for sure. Yeah, yeah. What I wanted to ask, that makes sense. That's fair enough. What I was going to ask is, have you received any criticism that you took to heart? Did anyone have a good refutation for any individual point or anything in your...

0:33:25 Richard: Not yet. I was actually surprised because I did tweet this at a lot of EvoPsych proponents. I think they're just ignoring it.

0:33:29 Thomas: That could happen.

0:33:37 Richard: They'll use the the argument that I'm just a philosopher of science, what do I know, but um but

0:33:42 Thomas: Yeah, you and Massimo Pagliucci. That'll be the two.

0:33:47 Richard: Yeah, but um, but I didn't get any replies from actual members of the EvoPsych community, um, I, I got replies from fans of the EvoPsych community, some better than others, um, but I did not get any of that kind of reaction. Uh, I'm curious to see, in future I would love to see someone who's an EvoPsych write a refutation on their blog or a response, even if they don't even themselves think of it as a refutation. It's at least a response.

0:34:16 Thomas: Yeah.

0:34:16 Richard: I even say in my article, if someone does that, send me the link. I'll violate my six-day rule. I myself will go and post it in the comments so that people can go and follow the link, so I would love to see that happen.

0:34:24 Thomas: Hmm. Yeah I would love to see Steven Pinker response or something like that.

0:34:32 Richard: Yeah, I would love that. That would be great, and I'm sure he's got his own means, some venue where where he can publish an article on this reacting to mine, commenting on mine or whatever he wants to say about it. I would definitely put that link in the comments online.

0:34:33 Thomas: Yeah.

0:34:46 Thomas: Excellent. Okay. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come and talk about this article. You are able to talk at length about it. This is clearly something you're very passionate about.

0:34:56 Richard: Well, I'm one of those weird people that gets really interested in a lot of different things and studies the shit out of them. So, so I can actually talk like this on many subjects, but yeah, that's

0:34:56 Thomas: Yeah, that's really cool. I will have to take you up on that challenge. I'd be happy to if you'll ever want to come back, especially on the Jesus' mythicist topic. Do you have any books forthcoming? Anything you're working on like that to talk about?

0:35:06 Richard: True. Sure. Yeah, you bet. I do have something that I'm working on. I've no,

0:35:22 Thomas: Well, I'm not asking to spoil it or anything, but when it comes out...

0:35:26 Richard: No, no, no. Know that I've already spoken about this publicly, um, I think most likely my next book, is it'll come out hopefully early next year, is um, Science Education in the Early Roman Empire, and that, that's uh, one part of my dissertation, and I had to put, uh, after I finished my dissertation, I was going to publish it, but I put it on hold because my fans paid me to do the History of City of Jesus research, so I've been doing that for the last six years, that project is done, um, so now I'm dusting off my dissertation and revising it, updating it, because it's now six years out of date, to publish it in two volumes or two different books. One is Science Education in the Early Roman Empire. And the next one, maybe later next year, would be The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire, and those are two books, but I also have two other books I'm working on.

0:35:27 Thomas: Oh, okay, okay. Wow.

0:36:16 Richard: I won't go into detail on that. People who are interested in keeping up on what I'm coming out with can check me out at richardcarrier.info, follow my blog, follow Follow my Twitter feed. You can find all of that through richardcarrier.info. When I have publications or anything else, I announce it there. And appearances around the country, too. I speak all over.

0:36:36 Thomas: Like the one I saw the other year. It was very fascinating. So, thank you again so much for coming on. I'll put on as many links as I can find that you just mentioned. I will put those in in the show notes. And, uh, yeah, I encourage people to check it out, check out the article and thanks so much for joining us. All

0:36:51 Richard: Thank you. Yeah, it's a great conversation.

0:37:05 Thomas: Well, there you have it. Very fascinating stuff. I have to say I was a little skeptical going into it, but after hearing Dr. Richard Carrier's case, I'd have to say, I mean, I tend to be in agreement with him. It sounds like these experiments are not fully fleshed out. I'm open to new evidence. I am curious if any of my listeners, maybe I have some die-hard Evo Psych Proponents among my listeners, I don't know. If so, I'd be happy to hear any responses you might have. I think what makes the best case, if I were to summarize, maybe not summarize, but just identify what I think makes the BEST case for Dr. Carrier's points, is the plasticity of the human brain.

0:37:50 Thomas: I mean, that really seems to be established in all kinds of different ways, and it just makes sense that we would have evolved to be that way and that society would kind of craft us. Now, I think the part that is interesting to me, and maybe I just never quite thought of it, is I do think there are strong differences between men and women, but for me, I'm realizing now, it doesn't really matter if they're evolved or cultural. You know, it actually doesn't matter to me. I mean, I would, like I said in the discussion with Richard, I'm just interested if cultural anthropology or just psychology, if they have studies showing, well, a majority or at least there's a big difference in the sexes on a particular point, particular trait or something, I find that interesting.

0:38:43 Thomas: Or if they're the same on a particular trait, I find that interesting in a given society or maybe in the U.S. or whatever it is. That's fascinating to me, but I'm realizing now, like, I don't need that to be a product of evolution for any reason. That doesn't really matter to me. I mean, it's okay. It's enough for me to just, the difference is documented, it exists, and it could change, but I don't think changing society and changing our cultural evolution is any easier than changing our genes. It's probably just about as hard, really. I mean, it's such a strong force and it's such an established thing. So that was fascinating for me. I thought that was very interesting. It's still amazing to think with the young age that these kids, especially ones I've, you know, directly experienced in my family, key into these certain kinds of toys.

0:39:39 Thomas: It is so incredible to to imagine that that's due to any sort of cueing, especially because there are other traits about the children that happen at such an early age that, like, they just won't wear certain clothes, or they won't wear, even when their parents are trying to get them to. I know one of my nieces has that problem. They just will not do it. I don't know if that's related. I don't know what the factor is. I don't know. It could be many things, but it's interesting to think about. But, you know, I would want to see, if it's something you can study, I'd want to see a good study on it. I'd wanna see some good numbers, so there's no reason to conclude one way or the other, I suppose. So, anyway, long story short, I thought that was very compelling, and I'm pretty skeptical of EvoPsych now, but I'm happy to have my mind changed by the evidence.

0:40:29 Thomas: So, please let me know if you have any contrary evidence, or if you agree, you can can also let me know that at AtheisticallySpeaking.com or via email, AtheisticallySpeaking at Gmail.com. Patreon's the best part, because I can message you. We can message back and forth, patreon.com/atheist, but of course you'd have to be one of my fine, fine patrons to do that. So thank you very much for joining me, and I will see you guys for another great show on Thursday.