AS265: A Defense of Evolutionary Psychology

Transcript

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

0:00:29 Thomas: Hello, and welcome to Atheistically Speaking. This is episode 265, and I'm your host, Thomas Smith. Got a great interview for you this week. So here's what happened. You may recall something like six months ago, I had Richard Carrier on to discuss his article he wrote about why EvoPsych is 90% nonsense. And at the time, I said I wanted to hear from anyone from the other side. I didn't really get any good offers or takers on that until now. So this is really cool. I've got Lindsey on to make the case for Evosec. She emailed me a really good detailed email about how she's an expert in the field. She thinks this and this and I just wanted to let you know, anyone who emails me like that, I'm definitely open to having you on the show.

0:01:21 Thomas: Now, I do get emails from time to time that are just like, hey, I am a cool person, put me on your show. It's like, no, there's got to be a reason. You've got to have a topic or a view or something that really demands that we do an episode on it like this, because I really have wanted to fairly represent these arguments, and it's taken until now to get someone of the other side on. So I'm really excited to have her. With that, let's get over to the interview.

0:01:59 Thomas: Joining me right now is Lindsey. How are you doing, Lindsey?

0:02:03 Lindsey: I'm doing well, Thomas. How are you?

0:02:05 Thomas: I'm doing okay, and I'm so excited because you emailed me on a topic from a long time ago, actually. I guess it wasn't like a million years ago. So, episode 202, I think it was, and we're on episode something or other now, so doing some math, that would have been about six months ago or so. So, and it was when I had Richard Carrier on to completely bash evolutionary psychology.

0:02:18 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah.

0:02:33 Thomas: And just to talk for a couple seconds on that, I was actually, used to be a big fan of the field, but I was somewhat convinced by his whatever, his giant blog post. But I do remember at the time, I said, look, if there's another expert who wants to argue you this, feel free, you know, to contact me. And then six months later, you sent a really awesome email that, that you tried to keep short, but then didn't, which is, but, but it was funny because normally when I get, I think I mentioned this to you, normally when I get an email like that, like I'm going to try to keep this short, it's like just a bunch of somebody's opinions on things I've said, so I'm like, man, this is really hard to read.

0:02:52 Lindsey: And Thus did I.

0:03:16 Lindsey: Yeah.

0:03:17 Thomas: But when it's, hey, I'm an expert in the field of, you know, or rather, you know, I have a lot to say about evolutionary psychology and what Richard Carrier might have gotten wrong. I'm like, oh, awesome, let's do that. So we can I can finally complete the set, I can get, you Now, the anti episode and the pro episode, and then people can decide. So, I'm not going to talk too much about it, but unfortunately, the original blog post is no longer where it used to be for reasons that people may or may not know about with Richard Carrier. You said you found it somewhere? Can you shoot me a link after this and that way I can still link it to the listeners?

0:03:47 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. It's like richardcarrier.info, and then if you use our search function.

0:04:01 Thomas: Oh, okay. So it's, oh, oh. I thought you found on like the dark web or something. It's, oh, okay. Oh, wow. Another episode.

0:04:05 Lindsey: No. Although I do frequent it, so yeah. Indeed.

0:04:10 Thomas: So he, okay, so he must Have migrated it to his thing. It just, I didn't see it when I searched, but okay. So it was a giant blog post about why evolutionary psychology is complete crap. And I, yeah, he had a lot of stuff to say and I've already gotten a hint of what you're going to say based on your email, but why Don't I just let you start tackling it.

0:04:12 Lindsey: Okay. Mm-hmm.

0:04:32 Lindsey: Mm-huh. All right. Well, first, just a little bit about my background.

0:04:38 Thomas: Oh, duh, sorry, I meant to say that. Go ahead.

0:04:41 Lindsey: You promised. Thomas. Yeah, so I'm currently an assistant professor of psychology at Roanoke College, which is a small liberal arts school in Virginia. I got my PhD in 2012 from the University of Oklahoma. And my primary emphasis in that program was on social psychology, which is the study of how our thoughts and our feelings and our behavior are influenced by social context. But my secondary emphasis, and that's what drew me to contact you, is in biological psychology, And the training that we got at OU specifically was very, very heavily focused on an evolutionary perspective and how that's useful for understanding animal behavior, including human behavior. So that's me, and that's why I have an interest in this. I was fairly convinced by the necessity of incorporating biological and specifically evolutionary perspectives into understanding human behavior, here.

0:04:41 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:05:36 Lindsey: And just as a side note, it reinvigorated my interest in psychology. I think that it's probably not an entirely uncommon experience for people that are operating within quote-unquote normal psychology to get to a point where you feel a little unsatisfied, right? And the reason for that is that you realize that we have all these explanatory theories in psychology, but but they're all fairly descriptive and they aren't necessarily tethered to something. But by adding the evolutionary framework to that study, you're, you're tethering our understanding of psychology to something that has had, you know, a lot of empirical testing and has a lot to support and so on.

0:06:20 Thomas: It's interesting, I mean, how much, so when you say they're very descriptive, like they're not, are you saying they're predicting a whole lot, like there aren't a lot of theories where it's like, you know, and therefore People will act this way or Something. Oh.

0:06:29 Lindsey: No. Yeah. Well, no. So, I mean the, by, by descriptive, like essentially the distinction that evolutionary psychologists make is that they're not relating things back to fitness, which I know can sound a little recursive, but by descriptive what we mean is that they're still just describing like relationships between behavior without tethering it to something deeper. So if you take something like cognitive dissonance theory, for instance, that's a very good theory descriptively, and it predicts a whole bunch of different stuff, it's a great theory, but in the end it still feels like untethered, I suppose it's Descriptive.

0:07:03 Thomas: Okay. Okay.

0:07:04 Lindsey: Yeah, no.

0:07:06 Thomas: So you weren't talking like there's major problems or anything, it's more just A feeling for you studying it, you're like, oh, I feel like there's something more behind this or something like that. Okay, cool.

0:07:09 Lindsey: Yes. Right. I mean, there's always a temptation to, when you get an answer, to ask, but why? And taking a biological perspective on this, and specifically an evolutionary perspective, really scratches that itch, right? Now, that's not for being true, obviously, but it's, you know, that's what drew me.

0:07:21 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, right. I remember when I first started getting into like reading about evolution and stuff, because I actually wasn't really taught it. I don't know why, but the school that I went to just didn't, they didn't. They weren't religious, I don't think, but they didn't. I wasn't explicitly taught like anything about it. So when I really got into it, I read like, The Greatest Show on Earth, I love that one because it was really cool and went into all the different like proofs and ways we know all this stuff. And I kind of should confess that like when I got into that, I started thinking about all this behavior in terms of evolution. I was like, oh, just doing a lot of armchair evolutionary psychology.

0:07:47 Lindsey: Yeah. Right. Oh, yeah, yeah. Right, right.

0:08:11 Thomas: And, I can sort of see when, you know, when Richard Richard Carrier came on here or whatever. I could sort of see how there's a bit of a trap in that to sort of, yeah, to try to take

0:08:19 Lindsey: Yeah. Okay, so this, it's a really interesting point that you're making right now. Okay, so like the evolutionary approach, applying that to human behavior, it feels extremely intuitive. Like you can see how these things make sense. And for some scientific disciplines, that's like a benefit, right? Or at least that being counterintuitive presents the same problems. But in evolutionary psychology, it's almost like the intuitiveness is undercutting its credibility in some ways, right.

0:08:35 Thomas: Hmm. Right, right.

0:08:47 Lindsey: One thing that I was thinking about the other day was that, it was a physicist, I don't remember who, but they were talking about the fact that we should expect quantum physics to be deeply counterintuitive.

0:08:56 Thomas: Oh, sure. Yeah. There's, there's, There's a good old quote on that and I can't remember who it is.

0:08:57 Lindsey: Yeah. Yes. Yeah, but the rationale there is that it should be deeply counterintuitive because we have not been evolved to deal with the quantum. Them. But in the case of evolutionary psychology, we actually are adapted to deal with all of the problems that are under study. And so people have intuitions about them.

0:09:08 Thomas: Oh yeah.

0:09:22 Thomas: Well, that's interesting, but are we, are we would we be evolved to understand what, like how we're dealing with that? So that, yeah. So I don't know that, like, like Like a cat, you know, can jump and do all this crazy crap. Like my cat, I'm just thinking, I just want to talk about my cats, actually, is the reason I'm bringing up. They can do all these amazing stuff. But they don't, I don't think they have any clue why they're doing it or like they don't.

0:09:23 Lindsey: No, Absolutely not. The thing that's intuitive about evolutionary psychology is the predictions that it makes about behavior. That's very intuitive to people. But the rationale that that we're giving to it feels very unintuitive to people. And I think that's, that's where the problem comes in, in terms of people's intuitions.

0:09:50 Thomas: Okay.

0:10:00 Thomas: Well, if I may venture an explanation briefly before you start, I think the problem is, and let me know what you think about this. It seems like a lot of it boils down to people having a problem with generalizing about like, say, men versus women or, you know, like, so it's like, I think that's where a lot of this pushback comes from.

0:10:22 Lindsey: Well, I mean, there's different places, but like, you know, so we can talk about, about, you know people's resistance to it at different levels. But I think, that you know there is sort of an intuitive resistance when you hear, we've been adapted to have babies, right? Like that doesn't feel right to us. Is That true? Yeah, so um, so like, that on that level, that's an intuition that that feels wrong, right? And there's a reason it feels wrong, which we'll get to, and that has to do with like the proximate well

0:10:37 Thomas: Oh, that feels right to me.

0:10:50 Thomas: Wait, are you serious? Because that doesn't feel wrong to me? What am I missing? I don't get it. People, people don't, people find that unpleasant or, oh, okay.

0:10:56 Lindsey: Because we do a lot of other stuff, I guess, right? It's not like the forefront of your mind all the time is reproduction, yeah.

0:11:03 Thomas: Yeah, sure. Well, I'll go with that. Really?

0:11:06 Lindsey: Right. No.

0:11:07 Thomas: I don't know. It's, it's kind of the forefront on most men's minds, I think. Right? No.

0:11:07 Lindsey: I mean, wait, having babies. Oh,

0:11:12 Thomas: Oh, no. Yeah. I don't give a shit about the baby.

0:11:15 Lindsey: Yeah, what's on the forefront?

0:11:16 Thomas: Well yeah. But the process of, you know, reproduction that's on the forefront.

0:11:20 Lindsey: No, but that that's exactly the point, right? So like, the prediction that evolutionary psychology psychology makes is, for example, that we should be motivated to have sex. And that prediction seems fairly intuitive. It doesn't seem like you need a science to figure that out. But the thing that this perspective adds is it's because sex is linked to reproductive success.

0:11:28 Thomas: Sure. Yeah Oh, okay, so that's a very, like very basic level prediction that I'm sure would have been like the first prediction of evolutionary psychology. And they're like, yes, there's one. One down, guys. One for one.

0:11:48 Lindsey: And then you Can make those predictions more and more complicated by adding on different contextual factors and making predictions about how those should moderate those impulses.

0:11:58 Thomas: Gotcha.

0:11:59 Lindsey: But when it comes down to it at At the crux of things, we are talking about reproduction. We're talking about fitness, right? Which includes reproduction in a big way. And so, like, that's what I'm saying. The intuition doesn't line up with. It doesn't feel like I'm doing this podcast right now for any reason that has to do with reproduction, for instance.

0:12:18 Thomas: But ultimately, you are.

0:12:19 Lindsey: But ultimately, I am, probably. Yeah.

0:12:22 Thomas: Yeah, in some way. Okay, interesting. I mean, that's the only reason I'm doing it. Hey, ladies. No, I'm just kidding. So, awesome. No. I get it. I see what you're saying. I wasn't quite sure about that distinction, but now I get it. Okay. So yeah.

0:12:23 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So Let's come back to your other point, though, about the social issues. So this one I find interesting, too, in terms of creating some resistance. It's like the impression that by providing an evolutionary explanation for something that it's somehow justifying bad behaviors or justifying stereotyping or something along these lines. Right, and That's, that's a pretty strong intuition and the interesting thing is that you kind of get it from both sides politically that, like, from the right it seems to be, you know, biologizing away bad behavior, or

0:12:58 Thomas: Oh, okay. Yeah. For like criminal justice or something, that sort of thing.

0:13:13 Lindsey: Exactly, And Then From the left, it's often things like, you know, it seems to imply some limits on our individual opportunity, like for example along the lines of sex differences. And so you get these unease from both sides, from both perspectives. But in terms of, like, let's take the moral responsibility one. I mean, I think that Sam Harris has dealt with this in a much better and clearer way than I could. But the idea is that to provide an explanation for a behavior is not to endorse that behavior or say that we shouldn't prevent that behavior or anything along those lines. In general, evolutionary psychology is not in the business of trying to do that.

0:13:14 Thomas: Yeah.

0:13:52 Thomas: Right. Well, and, and most science, I would think like science isn't really about justifying behavior or whatever like that. Like it was sort of like talking to, you Tim, the historian the other day, like these disciplines, he's like, well, I'm not making any, any sort of value judgments on any of this, you Know?

0:13:56 Lindsey: No, no.

0:14:08 Lindsey: Yeah.

0:14:08 Thomas: So it's kind of interesting. So is it sort of of like that, where you're just, you're trying to look at what motivates people or what the underlying, you know, evolutionary drive is.

0:14:08 Lindsey: Yeah, right. What's the biological contribution to this? And it should be mentioned that like, you can make some of those you can makes the same argument about people who try to use culture to explain behavior, right? Well, oh, well, if it's all a product of my culture, then I'm not responsible for what I do. And do Whatever, so it's it's like you can plug in whatever cause you want and people will come away with the same conclusion a lot of times, um, so there's that. But then there's also this issue of of evolutionary psychology justifying stereotypes, right?

0:14:20 Thomas: Hmm. Right. Yeah.

0:14:46 Lindsey: Um, this too I don't think is true, I think this is a misrepresentation of what's going on. So, so one thing to talk about about is whether we want to equate identifying true sex differences as an instance of sexism, right? I would hope not as well. You know, I don't think that it's sexist to at least like point out the differences in bodies for males and females. But then when you start talking about the mind, then people start getting uncomfortable, But the fact is like, and you know Richard Richard did mention this, by the way, that, you know, males and females are actually very close together on a lot of things. That's true. Like compared to some other species, males and females and humans are fairly similar, right?

0:15:01 Thomas: Well, I would hope not.

0:15:29 Lindsey: There are other species that are further apart. But that doesn't mean that there's no differences, right. And it would be important to identify those differences.

0:15:15 Thomas: Yeah, mm-hmm. Yeah yeah. Yeah, I think that there's a strong gut reaction from, you know, well from most people I'd say, but specifically people on the left and far our left of no, everybody like the same problem we run into with Islam, like every religion has to be equal, there can't have been a different religion, they're all the equal, and then same with men and women, and I definitely see that. Now, I was, I had been a little convinced by these arguments that there maybe things aren't as different as I might have thought between men and women, so it's interesting, I guess, it is a question of trying to find the right, you know, amount of, because, because obviously you could go extremely sexist and just like, you know, one way or the other think men or women are inferior to the other. But I guess that you would just want to go, you know, have a good perspective on it based on the data that we have. So I'm curious because I remember the, what was it? There's some issue that Sam Harris got in trouble with feminists on.

0:15:52 Lindsey: Yes. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Actually,

0:16:35 Thomas: And I think, oh, you were? Wow. Wow.

0:16:37 Lindsey: I think I was there for that talk, it was a he, had a conversation, yeah, he was, he was in DC, at least I think this is what you're talking about, and

0:16:44 Thomas: Someone asked him why his audience is mostly men or why atheism is mostly men.

0:16:45 Lindsey: Yes. That's, right, and he made a, he made made a joke about, um, that he writes yeah, and then he got hammered for it, right, now first of all, like, you can talk about his motivation, his motivation was clearly not sexist, but also what he was saying was not necessarily sexist, right, there, there are differences between males and females in terms of their psychology, and he was pointing to one of them, right, I mean

0:16:48 Thomas: Yeah. Estrogen vibe. Yeah, and I would say, okay, so I would say this. My audience is also overwhelmingly male, and I just think atheism is overwhelmingly male for some weird reason, and the thing is, okay, I'm going to go ahead and say this, what the the easily packaged response. Like, if I ask someone like Greta Christina, like, oh, why, you know, like why is it all men and atheism? Or if I asked any typical feminist, they're going to say, well, just look at Richard Dawkins, look at the sexist thing, whatever. And I always think like, yeah, but that came a ways after the whole new atheism movement.

0:17:19 Lindsey: Yes, No,

0:17:50 Thomas: Like the movement started quite a while ago, or even just atheism in general. If there was a strong, like 50-50 balance between men and women in atheism, and then, you know, 10 years or 12 years after writing some of these books, these, a few authors start saying some sexist stuff, like, you think that would drastically just change the number of men and woman in atheism? I don't really think that's true. So, that's an answer I've never bought myself. Now, it certainly might be true that, like, we're not, if we don't help, or if we Don't have a good, like diversity in panel discussions, or if we, if it's always white males at every conference leading everything, I do think that definitely is going to discourage women from joining, but yeah,

0:18:34 Lindsey: Of Course. Yeah. But, but there's two different things, and I think that they get conflated in these conversations a lot. There's the question of whether males and females are different on a particular dimension. And then there's the questions of whether you should discriminate against males or females based on what we know about that statistical difference. And those are very different issues.

0:18:58 Thomas: Yeah.

0:18:59 Lindsey: I mean, let's say, for the sake of argument, right, that there was a difference in, and and actually just, I shouldn't have to qualify this, but I'm going to go ahead and do it. I don't think this is true, right? But I'm saying for the sake of argument, let's say that there was a massive sex difference in terms of mathematical ability.

0:19:19 Lindsey: Let's say that women really are bad at math. That's a stereotype that exists.

0:19:12 Thomas: Okay. Okay, right.

0:19:24 Lindsey: If that were true, that still wouldn't be grounds to discriminate against females for a position that required mathematical reasoning, right? You should still evaluate the candidate based on the skills that they display. All that that predicts is that using a completely unbiased system to recruit people, you're likely to get more males than females, right? So that doesn't justify discrimination, but it also doesn't mean that we should be looking for complete equal representation of males and females in every domain.

0:19:47 Thomas: Yeah. Well, that's, that'S just it, though, because I think I think what a lot of people look at in this day and age is if something isn't perfectly evenly represented, then it by definition is discrimination. So that threatens the narrative. So your science, assuming your science is right, would be threatening their narrative. And I think that's where the kickback comes from.

0:20:05 Lindsey: Exactly. Then that's discrimination. But that's not true.

0:20:17 Lindsey: I think so too, right, right? They do. They attribute a lack of equal representation to discrimination. And sometimes it is due to discrimination, right? But in order to separate those things out, what you want to do is to try to construct a system that is as unbiased as possible, right. And that's not a system in which you're denying sex differences. It's a great

0:20:19 Thomas: Okay. Yeah. Right. I would think of it like for firefighters, you know, I wouldn't, I don't want 50% men and women firefighters personally.

0:20:43 Lindsey: Example. I mean, there are certain domains in which people aren't going to argue that you're going to get an over-representation of males based on traits. Like just statistically, males have stronger upper body strength and stuff. And so you're going to get an overrepresentation of males in jobs that involve that, right? There's less of a temptation to call that discrimination.

0:20:43 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, right. Yeah yeah. So that's where likely a lot of the reasons that I think we've covered a lot, a lot reasons why there's a lot of pushback against your field. Is it, should I call it your field? Is it your field? Do you own it or you? No, I mean is this your main area or?

0:21:13 Lindsey: I do identify that way. I identify as, I mean, again, my trainings in social psychology, but my approach to questions is usually evolutionary. So, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

0:21:14 Thomas: Okay. Okay. So yes, your field. But yeah, so let's, you maybe want to start breaking down where Richard Carrier was critiquing the field.

0:21:33 Lindsey: Sure. Yeah. So one, one core issue that I want to, I want to get into and flesh out a little bit is this idea of modularity versus general function as an explanation of the mind. And he, he said at several points during the interview, and he, he says it also in his article, that we just know for a fact that the mind is not modular, right, that it's, it's a, we, we are evolved to be generalists, we're evolved to be general problem solvers.

0:22:03 Thomas: I may need you to be a little specific. So is it a core feature of EvoPsych that the mind is modular or something?

0:22:12 Lindsey: It is a, it is an assumption of the field, yeah. That the mind, absolutely, absolutely. So, so modularity means that the brain did not evolve to just be a general problem-solver. Instead, it evolved to solve a bunch of particular problems, and that the aggregate of that is, is, you know, the, the brain in all of its glory and, and complexity. So these are two very different understandings of both the history of the development of the brain and what we should expect to see in actual behavior. Those two things make very different predictions. And I want to dispute Richard's claim that it is just obvious and known that we are generalists. There's actually very good arguments suggesting that we're modular. And so, okay, so just to back up a

0:22:14 Thomas: Okay. Can you explain that a little bit?

0:22:28 Thomas: Sure

0:23:03 Lindsey: Little bit, right? The most basic assumption in evolutionary psychology is just that we evolved through natural selection, that we're the products of evolution, just like every other organism that has ever existed. And that our brains are not different, so that we've been produced by all the same pressures that we see in other animals.

0:23:23 Thomas: And Richard Carrier also said like yeah this is uncontroversial

0:23:29 Lindsey: Represented that correctly. But the problem is, like, this is the connection that we make between that general assumption and the assumption of modularity. Everything we know about biological evolution suggests that organisms are shaped in an incremental piecemeal fashion in response to very specific problems of survival and reproduction that produce very specific solutions. And then when you look at, you know, the product of this, of these processes over time, they look very complex, and they might produce like very flexible behavior. And they might even appear very general in function. But what we know about evolution is that they were shaped in this sort of progressive cumulative piecemeal fashion.

0:24:14 Lindsey: And so all we're saying in evolutionary psychology is, okay, we know this from evolutionary biology, so we should take that assumption and apply it to the brain. And there's some positive cases for why you ought to do that. Do I need to make the case further that physical structures evolve this way?

0:24:28 Thomas: So do you mean just any sort of physical structure like other examples of like, you know, animal brains that are modular or something? What do you mean?

0:24:38 Lindsey: Well, like I could, I could give an example of a physical structure that looks generalist and complex, and that has evolved through a piecemeal process. And that might help to show like why we're making this assumption about the mind.

0:24:52 Thomas: Oh, okay. Yeah, that'd be cool.

0:24:54 Lindsey: All right, so like the eye comes up a lot in this context, right? Because it's, in some ways, you can describe its function as very general, it's very complex, it'S very flexible in terms of what we can use it for. But we know what the history of the evolution of the eye was, right. And it didn't evolve to be this generalist structure, it evolved piecemeal to solve a bunch of very specific problems. So like at the, at the very most fundamental level, you start off with just a cluster of cells that is photosensitive, right?

0:24:56 Thomas: Mm-hmm. Mm hmm. Right.

0:25:24 Lindsey: And that allows you to do one specific thing and not much else, which is detect differences in ambient light level, and that's it. But once you have that, then you can add on these little other pieces, right, like adding a cup, right? Putting the photosensitive receptors in a bowl. And that allows one additional piece of function, which is that you can then tell the directionality of light that's coming on, right. And so that gives you a little bit more information. And then skip forward to the human eye. And we have all kinds of specialized cells in the eye that are designed to do very specialized things, like distinguish between colors and detect motion. And there are cells that are specifically sensitive to horizontal versus vertical lines and things like that. So it looks very singular in general purpose to us, but it evolved in this incremental way to give very specific pieces of functionality, right?

0:25:24 Thomas: Mm hm.

0:26:20 Thomas: Yeah. And so I guess to look at the analogy, and I don't, it might be more than an analogy. It might be an actual similarity in how they're built. So the advantage of looking at the eye as modular versus general purpose is what? That when it comes to studying how to fix vision problems or something, you need to know like, oh, this does this thing and this does that thing and this, that, and the other versus just saying like, here's an eye. What is the advantage, I guess, to to go.

0:26:48 Lindsey: Well, yeah. So the reason that I brought it up as an example is that we know that all biological structures evolved this way. This is the information we've gotten from biological evolution. If you want to say that something different happened with the evolution of the mind, right, You're adding on an unprecedented thing here, right? But in terms of why it's useful, I mean, yes, I think that those are relevant applications. If you can understand all of the different functions of the different pieces, then you can potentially have better, more precise applications in fixing.

0:27:01 Thomas: Sure. Yeah. Okay.

0:27:23 Thomas: So can you describe like just a basic way in which the, the mind is modular according to this theory, like just to basic, like, Oh, we have a module for this and that this has this implications or

0:27:36 Lindsey: Yeah, Absolutely. All right, so might help to contrast the modular with a generalist view, potentially, essentially. So like one, one thing that people queue in on as like, you know, this is likely to be, um, a general adaptation rather than a specific or domain specific adaptation is like learning or intelligence, right? These feel like, like very broad categories, and that if you have some amount or some ability to learn, or you have a certain amount of intelligence, that you can just solve all these problems, right? And so from a generalist point of view, you would expect that to have have developed as a, in response to essentially like a general pressure to solve problems well.

0:27:42 Thomas: Okay? Hmm. Okay,

0:28:18 Lindsey: Right, the problem with this is that there are no general selection problems. Because there is no general problem, right? For any specific problem that you can think of, it requires vastly different forms of behavior. And so what you would expect in terms of constructing an organism like, like us, that can solve all these different types of problems, is that you'd have specific modules that solve specific types of problems. And in the aggregate, this is going to look like a general problem solving ability. So, for example, like we can contrast problems of like food selection versus mate selection, two classes of problems, both very relevant to our fitness, but they require very different types. Of solutions distinguishing between good and bad foods is very different from distinguishing between good and bad mates.

0:28:23 Thomas: Right.

0:29:06 Thomas: Yeah, I'm not looking for very sandwich looking women very.

0:29:10 Lindsey: No.

0:29:10 Thomas: Yeah, well.

0:29:10 Lindsey: Nor am I, uh, yeah.

0:29:12 Thomas: Although now that I think about it, no, I. See.

0:29:15 Lindsey: Yeah. What, uh. I'm sorry, this is a tangent, but did you see that movie about the vampires with the guy from, uh, Flight of the Conchords? There's.

0:29:17 Thomas: Oh. No, I didn't.

0:29:26 Lindsey: A quote from it that he's like, you know, uh, something about justifying why they like virgin blood, and he's like, well, you know, if you will go to eat a sandwich, it just tastes better if you know, know that someone hasn't fucked it. That's fun. Anyway, but. Right. So these, these different types of, of problems are, are, um, very different in terms of the types of behavior that you would expect to lead to good outcomes. Right.

0:29:42 Thomas: Uh. Sure.

0:29:52 Lindsey: Um, so we could drill down on like the, the good versus bad food selection. Um. It's not that we have an adaptation to prefer sweetness. Like we really really like the taste of sweets. This is present like immediately in infants.

0:29:53 Thomas: Okay.

0:30:06 Lindsey: And it seems to be universal and all these things. So when we taste something sweet, we prefer it. We like to eat it again, right? The evolutionary explanation for this in terms of a module is that in our ancestral environment, there was this problem of distinguishing between high and low value food sources, right. And so if you didn't have any preferences, if you couldn't distinguish between between those food sources, then you might eat grass or you might eat apples, but you wouldn't necessarily distinguish between those two things. But if you develop a preference to prefer sweetness, then statistically the things that you're going to be eating have more energy value. They have more calories. Right?

0:30:43 Thomas: I have a couple questions that are probably going to be basic and not even exactly related to what you're talking about, but just to clarify, like this kind of evolution, it's not like humans were having this problem, right? Some far, far, far back ancestor, likely, that. Did.

0:30:57 Lindsey: I mean, depending on the problem that we're talking about, you're absolutely right. Some of these things are far older than others.

0:30:58 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. And that's something that I think, I don't know, I think Christians sometime or people that you're arguing with don't quite understand. They think like humans were doing all this evolution. It's like, no, a lot of this was done, well, probably the bulk of it was done before humans were in their present form.

0:31:16 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So part of of the the confusion there is that we use we use a term called the the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness, and some people think that that means that there was this particular period of time in which all these adaptations for humans developed, but that's not what it means. Right, the Environment Evolutionary Adaptedness describes like this set of statistical pressures that was present when a particular feature evolved, and each adaptation has a different EA. A is the the point there.

0:31:33 Thomas: Yeah. Right.

0:31:49 Thomas: Okay. So, is it possible to say, or is it likely to say like this sweetness propensity could have have been, we could have been what, like some sort of mouse or something? Like we could have been just totally entirely different, like an earlier form of us when that preference came around. Hmm. Interesting. And

0:31:49 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Right. Get, when you get differences in species that that that sort of put themselves into different niches in the environments, though, then you start to see the that preference go away, or not, right? So, like, cats, for instance, don't show a sweet preference the way that we do and that's that's thought to be, you know, because they didn't eat a lot of, you know, the carnivores, right, right.

0:32:15 Thomas: Hmm, oh that's interesting. Oh, okay. So they're getting all the, everything they need just from eating the rodents that they, they're trying.

0:32:31 Lindsey: Delicious.

0:32:31 Thomas: Yeah.

0:32:32 Lindsey: Room.

0:32:32 Thomas: So, and then this could, you may have no answer for this and that's okay, but I'm just curious, do why does the preference for sweetness like go away as you get older? Does that make any sense with evolutionary sick Yeah, well, it, your taste buds change, right?

0:32:43 Lindsey: Does it go away? Yeah.

0:32:47 Thomas: Is that just a plain old, like, medical thing, like your taste buds just get different as you, and it doesn't have any relation to, like, evolution? Well,

0:32:55 Lindsey: Well, no, I mean, your, your tastes definitely change from when you're a child to when you're an adult. And there's some interesting processes that we can use to describe those changes. But I don't know if it's true that adults don't show a preference for sweetness.

0:33:10 Thomas: Sure, but I mean, if I, the difference between like when you're a kid, you want that can of soda or whatever, and and then now it's just I want like an IPA, that's just like the sourest beer, you know, like just a nut. And it's weird. I don't really know why, but it just tastes better to me now.

0:33:26 Lindsey: Okay. All right. So, so you need, you need like associative learning theory to talk about how those different preferences develop. But the way that you integrate that with biology is that we say that there's, like, there's not an infinite number of ways that learning can can shape your preferences for tastes, right? Like, they're going to shake out along lines that have been developed, right? So, like, um, I'm sorry, let's backtrack

0:33:33 Thomas: Oh, okay.

0:33:50 Thomas: I'm not sure I know what you mean by that.

0:33:51 Lindsey: A little bit so like there are certain tastes, like sweetness, that we don't seem to need to learn to like, and then there's other tastes that we do acquire taste for because they're associated with certain properties, properties, right? So, like, kids hate bitter stuff. They hate it. But you can develop a taste for, like coffee, because it's associated with certain consequences, right.

0:33:52 Thomas: Yeah. Oh, OK. Hmm. Right. Oh, ok.

0:34:17 Lindsey: So we can learn to prefer coffee because it gives a certain effect, or maybe we pair it with like cream and sugar. And so, you know, the preference for the actual coffee taste starts to become associated with those nutrients. And so there's some complex ways in which learning interacts with this stuff. Um, no

0:34:30 Thomas: Interesting. OK, sorry to get you off track. But yeah, taste for sweetness seems to be basic preference and evolved?

0:34:32 Lindsey: That's fine yes Right, okay, so, and so the proximate, well, okay, yeah, did I define proximate and ultimate yet? This is, this is a really, really important point. When you're trying to give a biological explanation for a particular trait or a particular behavior, um, it has three different components when you're explaining it this way. Um, one is, is what triggers the expression of the adaptation. So in this case, what causes a food preference? One of the things that causes that food preference is the taste of sweet, right? So that's one part of the explanation, is identifying what is causing the expression of the adaption, what's causing it to come online. The other piece of the adapted is the food preference. The adaptation is why that connection exists in the first place in a fitness sense. So why is it true that we prefer sweetness? Why does that seem to be a preference? And in a fitness sense, it's for the reasons that I talked about before, which is that statistically things that tasted sweeter had higher caloric value, and thus they were more valuable to us metabolically, and

0:34:43 Thomas: No.

0:35:36 Lindsey: So people that preferred sweet tastes were likely to do better than people who didn't prefer sweet tastes. Is approximate ultimate distinction makes sense because this this is a real point of confusion for a lot of people.

0:35:43 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, I guess I don't understand why it's a point of confusion, but maybe that'll become clear later.

0:35:53 Lindsey: It's primarily because of the predictions that you make. So like going back to that point we've talked about before, one question that I get in my evolutionary class a lot from students at the beginning is that, you know, they're like, okay, so you're telling us that we evolved to reproduce a lot, right? So why do people use condoms?

0:35:57 Thomas: Okay. Right, right, right, yeah.

0:36:11 Lindsey: Well, that's a confusion of proximate and ultimate causation. We're not, we are not triggered to do things because of, I mean, we're not triggered, triggered, we're not evolved to be reproducers, we're evolved to be people that have sex, right? Sex is the proximate cause of of of that uh desire, right, not reproduction. Okay.

0:36:31 Thomas: Gotcha. Yeah, yeah mm-hmm.

0:36:32 Lindsey: So proximate causation and ultimate causation are two pieces of those biological adaptations, and then the third is like constraints. And by constraints, we mean, um, like the other things that are already present in the organism. So other adaptations are often constraints on what new adaptations can can develop. So it's unlikely, for instance, that we're going to sprout wings and start flying because we have other features that are constraining the future direction of our evolution.

0:36:58 Thomas: Right.

0:36:58 Lindsey: Yeah, so let me draw, put a line under that point about modularity. So first of all, again, to say that we just know that we're general purpose problem solvers, that we've been evolved to do that, is not true, right? There's a very good account of why we should assume modularity now. Some people think that something special happened in the evolution of humans that set the stage for us being able to develop these general purpose adaptations, right? I still haven't heard a convincing account of that, but if somebody listening has an article that they think I should read on that, then I will, right, but to me, I still err toward Cosmody's and Tooby's explanation of this, which is that there just doesn't exist a general adaptive problem. There exists a lot of specific problems that we evolve in response to.

0:37:47 Thomas: So a couple of things. First, I think neuroplasticity is something that people would bring up as like, oh, but our brain can, you know, if you chop off half of our brain, the other half will figure everything out. So that is, I think what people might give as an argument for why it's more general purpose.

0:37:53 Lindsey: Yes, that's very, very true, right. Like, as a learning mechanism, you can say, well, well, you know, the neural basis of all learning is this plasticity. It's the fact that you can form these new connections between neurons. That's all the same process at the level of neurons. And so it's a general purpose mechanism. But I don't think that actually follows, right? So there are certain types, there's two ways to approach this. So the first is to say that, like, if it was true, that but for experience, but for learning, we can learn every or we can solve every type of problem equally, or we can learn anything equally well, then we shouldn't see the certain differentiation and the ability to learn certain things versus others. There are certain things that we learn very readily. And there are other things that it's much more difficult to learn. And it's thought that that's because there are all There's all these different learning modules. There's not just this one mechanism that promotes learning in general.

0:38:05 Thomas: Yeah.

0:38:55 Thomas: Okay. Yeah, so as we grow up, there's some things we just get right away and do I have the argument right that you're saying an implication of being like general purpose brains would be that every problem would be like kind of equal. We just sort of learn these different problems equally, but you're saying in actuality, some things we just learn right away or we know right away and other things take longer. Is that right?

0:38:56 Lindsey: Right. Yeah.

0:39:24 Thomas: Essentially.

0:39:24 Lindsey: I mean, like, like language might be a good example of this, like, We seem to, we seem to have adaptations that allow us to pick up verbal language very easily, but it's, it's significantly more difficult for us to learn to read and write. And The, the, uh, the argument there is that we were evolved to be verbal, that those are adaptations. That's still a debate in the field, by the way, but I'm fairly convinced that we are evolved to to be speakers.

0:39:27 Thomas: Hmm. Oh, okay. Hmm.

0:39:47 Thomas: Oh, I didn't know that was A debate. I thought that, yeah, I thought, because I remember in what, well, it was Richard Dawkins or whatever, but like just the, the idea that you could spend, uh, you know, you could, you could keep a chimp around humans through its entire infancy and adulthood and it will will never express any interest in making verbal sounds, but, you know, but it could communicate with like, uh, sign language and stuff. But, but us, we're like, we have some weird curiosity where we pick up these, you now, verbal cues and, and want to say things verbally. So yeah, interesting.

0:39:47 Lindsey: Right. Yes, exactly. Again, like I I'm very convinced by, by the evidence for that. And I think that a lot of people are, it's fairly widely accepted, but there are still people who argue that that's not true just to provide that context. But yeah, so, so then the argument is we, we evolved an adaptation to be speakers, but we didn't necessarily, we don't necessarily have adaptations to be writers and readers. And so the writing and reading is much more difficult but it builds on these adaptations that promoted us learning language well or easily.

0:40:20 Thomas: Hmm. Interesting. Okay.

0:40:47 Thomas: Okay, so roughly speaking, we some sort of module for language, but we don't have like a writing module?

0:40:49 Lindsey: Right. Yeah. It would, our ability to write would build on the Specific adaptations that allow us to speak and understand life, yeah.

0:40:54 Thomas: Okay. Other things. Okay. Interesting. So, okay. So I, I guess a final question about the modular versus general purpose is like, how could you describe what, what the state of that argument is? Like how many people think it's one thing? How many people think it is the other? Like, is it all of EvoPsych basically has to think it's modular and then who disagrees and how big of numbers are we talking?

0:41:21 Lindsey: Well, I don't have numbers in front of me, um, but I do think that most people who identify themselves with the goals of evolutionary psychology, psychology, think that the brain is modular. And there, there are, there are differences in terms of how extreme people are in that regard. Like, so there's, there's one conception of modularity that says that, um, each module is sort of self-contained and that you don't have integration.

0:41:48 Thomas: Well, that sounds crazy.

0:41:49 Lindsey: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I, I don't particularly buy that. Like if you, if you did buy that about a module, then you would probably also have to add, add some sort of more general thing on top of it to account for the complexity and flexibility that we see. So some people take that line. I don't think that's all that popular. But most people in evolutionary psychology, I'd say the vast majority, would take this view that the brain is this very large collection of specific modules that are integrated with each each other in function.

0:42:01 Thomas: Huh. Okay.

0:42:21 Lindsey: The people who are generally arguing to the contrary, far as I can tell, right, they're pretty... I've seen a trend that this breaks down along disciplinary lines. So I've seeing arguments for this coming out of like philosophy and sociology and things like that. But I don't see it coming out evolutionary psychology in particular.

0:42:31 Thomas: Okay, what about plain old psychologists? Plain old psychology, not evo-psych. Do they have a say on that? Do they having a general opinion on that.

0:42:49 Lindsey: I I don't know. I mean, the way that we talk about certain functions, like intelligence and learning, tends to be in a very general way. But then if you take a course specifically on learning, for instance, the course is split up into all these different topics, right? There's all these these different types of learning that you can talk about. So, I mean, in terms of how they developed, I'd say that like as a field, psychology is fairly agnostic on it because they're not usually making direct claims about how these learning mechanisms evolved, right?

0:43:21 Thomas: Okay? Yeah, that makes sense.

0:43:24 Lindsey: That's my guess. I don't have any sources to give you on that,

0:43:25 Thomas: Hmm. So, I think we, I guess we've covered modularity, and now, so we've, shoot, we've gotten to step 0.7 of this thing.

0:43:36 Lindsey: Well, we covered some other things in our conversation about that.

0:43:36 Thomas: Uh-oh. Okay, okay, good.

0:43:41 Lindsey: So, like, the proximate ultimate distinction, I think is important because there were a couple of points in that discussion that you had with Richard that I think that this distinction got lost a little bit. Maybe this would be a good time to talk about the monkey studies. Yeah, okay. Should I give a refresher on this?

0:43:56 Thomas: Yeah, sure. Yes, definitely yes.

0:44:02 Lindsey: Yes, okay, all right, so the monkey cities, so he talked about two studies with vervet monkeys and I can't remember the other type of monkey. At any rate, they were both monkeys in these studies. And Richard's summary of this research was that these researchers had concluded that there were biological sex differences in human play because they observed that monkeys preferred pots, or girl monkeys preferred like pots and dolls, and boy monkeys preferred trucks. And one of his, his objections here was that there's no way that these monkeys know what a truck or a pot is. Right?

0:44:46 Thomas: Right, I remember that.

0:44:48 Lindsey: Yeah. So, first of all, there are a number of things to say about this. But first of all, that is a confusion between proximate and ultimate causation. The argument that would be made based on those results, and in fact, the one that the authors actually did make, was that there may be some low-level features of these toys that are like proximate causes for a preference, but they were not saying that the monkeys evolved to like trucks versus dolls.

0:45:14 Thomas: Right, okay. Yeah.

0:45:19 Lindsey: That was absolutely not the claim.

0:45:22 Thomas: And did he represent the study accurately, or Is there?

0:45:26 Lindsey: He represented the methodology fairly well. The thing that he misrepresented was the claims that the authors were making, and this was part part of what he was criticizing. He said that they were making claims that were far too strong based on the evidence that they provided. But that wasn't actually true. They made some very, very modest claims. And the conclusions that they drew were consistent with those modest claims So can I put these studies in context a little bit?

0:45:29 Thomas: Okay. Sure.

0:45:54 Lindsey: So there was this research literature indicating that there are differences between human boys and girls in what they like to play with. And one potential explanation of those sex differences is that it's purely socialization. It's purely the fact that we are reinforcing these gender stereotypes in children, that that fully explains the differences that we see between boys and girls, right?

0:46:14 Thomas: That's definitely what Richard said.

0:46:17 Lindsey: Yes. And so that's one explanation for it. But then, you know, some people were thinking, okay, is it possible that there's any biological contribution to these preferences at all? And they started looking looking at differences in hormone exposure prenatally and how that affected like masculine behavior, right? So in other words, they took this group of girls and they were looking at the extent of prenatal androgen exposure in these girls and then looked at how that affected their behavior when they grew up. And what they found was that across all these domains, mains, girls who were exposed to more prenatal androgens showed more stereotypically masculine behavior than girls who had been exposed to lower levels of prenatal androgens, right? So this is an interesting finding, right, these girls hypothetically should be reinforced for gender stereotypical behaviors in all the same ways, right but that they're still showing this difference based on this prenatal influence.

0:47:03 Thomas: Yeah.

0:47:14 Thomas: Right, right, right. So it's, it's the chemical factor rather than their environment.

0:47:19 Lindsey: Not rather than, but that it's a contributor to, So, you could still make a claim that, you know, well, maybe the parents of these children that have been exposed to higher levels of prenatal androgens are interacting with them differently. So you know you can't fully say that it is still not a socialization difference. So what these researchers with the monkeys were we're trying to do is see, can we get a gender difference in a toy preference in a species that is not at all exposed to human culture? That's it.

0:47:22 Thomas: Okay. Hmm.

0:47:50 Lindsey: And if you can get that difference, then you can claim that you can get sex differences on the basis of something other than culture, or at least you can get it independently of culture. And so on the back of these results, they were not saying, well, look at this. So this fully explains everything that we know about human sex differences at all. Right I would encourage anybody that's interested in this, in this controversy, to go back and read the actual studies, because they're, they're just not making claims as strong as he was saying they were making, and that was his primary critique of these articles.

0:48:21 Thomas: Right. Well, first off, I wonder how, as someone who's not terribly literate in reading studies and hasn't read the study. How How strong was this correlation of the male monkeys did this and female did that?

0:48:29 Lindsey: Right. Yeah, so he, he talked about this too, the fact that there was a discrepancy in the two studies in terms of which sex effect was significant in which study, and he's right about that. Now, what he actually said was that the two studies contradicted each other, which is not right. The pattern of results was actually the same, but you got a different pattern of significance in both, right?

0:48:53 Thomas: Okay.

0:48:53 Lindsey: It's like in terms of the mean differences, they reflected the same patterns. But anyway, so the, see, for one of the studies, they found a significant preference for the boy monkeys, and it was significant at p equals, you know, less than 0.05. And for the other one, they find a preference for for the girl monkeys that equals 0.05.

0:49:11 Thomas: Hmm.

0:49:12 Lindsey: Right. So honestly, and look, I don't want to suggest that like, this is the pinnacle of rigorous methodology. I mean, I also don't wanna shit on the study because I think that what they were claiming about it was appropriate to what they did. And ultimately that's the hallmark of good science is when people know how to appropriately qualify their claims. Right. Um, but he also suggested that like, as a field, we hold these studies up as like these exemplars of amazing research. And it's just not true. I mean, they're well cited, but they're wel cited because we have very, very few studies that tried to do what they did. And, you know, as time goes on, I imagine we'll accumulate more research in this area and we'll have a clear idea of what the sex difference means. Right. But I don't know. I was not a fan of how that was represented.

0:49:12 Thomas: Okay. Yeah. Well, I seem to remember asking Are you sure you're not strawmanning this? And you could tell me because you listened to it more recently than I did. But it did seem like could anyone be so dumb as to think what he was saying they were thinking?

0:50:05 Lindsey: Yeah. Yes. And when that intuition occurs to you, there's generally no

0:50:16 Thomas: Oh, I know. And I was not able to argue with him on the spot because I didn't know about the studies and I'm not an expert. But it, I do remember commenting that that seemed a little, you know, a little crazy that anyone could be that dumb, but I see what you're saying. So it's, it wasn't that they were testing for like, do monkeys like trucks? They were testing for like, maybe whatever it is that does lead, uh, males and females to different toy preferences would also happen in monkeys without any sort of, you know, human influence. Let's see if this happens. And it turns out,

0:50:23 Lindsey: Of course not Yes. Yes,

0:50:54 Thomas: Yes.

0:50:55 Lindsey: That's Exactly it, so they're looking to see if there's just any contributors here other than strictly culture. I

0:51:02 Thomas: So, there is something really basic that does underlie that for us, it sounds like, or at least, yeah.

0:51:10 Lindsey: Think so, and I mean, again, this is not to say

0:51:11 Thomas: It's like, what is it, like shapes or something? Like, we just see some sort of, I guess it would be really hard to know what it is, but, oh, okay.

0:51:13 Lindsey: Yeah, I, I really don't know. I mean, with the, with the, um, with the dolls, it might be a little bit more straightforward, um, than with the, the trucks and things. So one of the things that they noted was that the females would, um, one of the things that they did with the dolls was to flip them over and examine their, where their anal genital region would be, and that's a behavior that you see female monkeys engage in with infants, right?

0:51:25 Thomas: Right. Huh.

0:51:43 Lindsey: And we're thinking that, you know, it might be these proximate cues that like make this look like an infant that's, that's leading to this preference or something. Um, but, but again, that's, you know, that's still speculation, and Nobody's claiming that it's not, right? But it's also not valueless.

0:51:49 Thomas: Okay. Yeah, yeah, gotcha. Okay, All right, well, a few announcements. First off, exciting stuff. I'm told I get to give away a few tickets to the Myth Information Conference that I will be at in Milwaukee. That is October 21st, I'll be giving a really funny talk. I hope you will be there. And if you'd like to go, send me an email, atheisticallyspeakingatgmail, and let me know. I'm going to see how many people might be interested in free tickets, and I will determine a method of giveaway once I see who's interested. Because I know not everyone can make the trek out there to Milwaukee. But if you are someone who wants to go, planning on going, you're on the edge about whether or not you might go, I might have a free ticket for you. So thank you and contact me about that.

0:52:57 Thomas: That was a very interesting part one with Lindsey. Now part two, as usual, will be available to patrons. Normally, I say it's available right away. However, this episode was actually intended to be next week, but I had some scheduling issues with someone. So I had to do this short notice. I will be editing part 2 as soon as humanly possible for my lovely patrons, count on it, on the bonus feed. No later than tomorrow by the end of the night, I'll get that edited for you. So sorry for that little delay, but still plenty early for my fine patrons over at patreon.com slash atheist. Pledge as little as a dollar, get those bonus features, get the, uh, actually I might have another interesting bonus content coming up this week. We'll see, it's scheduled, but it may not have. We'll say, long story short, we'll see what happens, but there could be some, uh, really cool bonus episode for you guys this week as well.

0:53:48 Thomas: Okay. Uh, that said, thank you so much for listening. If you like the show, give it a review on iTunes. It really helps visibility for the podcast. Give that five-star review. Maybe write a little something about why you like the show. I'd really appreciate it. Especially if, hey, if you're someone who can't pledge to Patreon, I totally get it. No big deal. But one thing you can do that's totally free is follow me on Twitter at SpeakAtheism or write a review. On iTunes. All right, plenty to look forward to in part two with Lindsey. Get even more into EvoPsych, and it's fascinating. It's a really fascinating field to me, and I'm glad to hear that possibly Carrier wasn't exactly correct in how wrong, how much of a pseudoscience he thinks it is, because it's interesting stuff. So more in part 2, and I will see you guys on Thursday.