Iconoclast : Ideas That Have Shaped The Culture Wars [1 ed.] 2022939776, 9781680532661, 9781680532678, 9781680532685

Table of contents :
Iconoclast: Ideas That Have Shaped The Culture Wars
Edited by Mark Halloran Ph.D.
Iconoclast: Ideas That Have Shaped The Culture Wars
Edited by Mark Halloran Ph.D.
Academica PressWashington~London
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data 
Names: Halloran, Mark (author)
Title: Iconoclast : ideas that have shaped the culture wars | Halloran, Mark.
Description: Washington : Academica Press, 2022. | Includes references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022939776 | ISBN 9781680532661 (hardcover) | 9781680532678 (paperback) | 9781680532685 (e-book)
Copyright 2022 Mark Halloran
Iconoclasm:A Very Brief History of the Culture Wars vii
References xix
Mark Halloran
On COVID19 and Times of Plague 27
References 49
Based on an interview with Nicholas Christakis
Postmodernism and the Failure of Moral Triage 55
References 73
Based on an interview with Peter Boghossian
Me, She, He, They: Reality vs. Identity in the 21st Century 77
References 93
Heather Heying
On Free Speech Absolutismand the Deontological Pursuit of Truth 97
References 119
Based on an interview with Gad Saad
Let Us Prey: On Islamic Immigrationin Europe and Women’s Rights 125
References 141
Based on an interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali
On DarkHorse, Ivermectin and Vaccine Hesitancy 143
References 158
Based on an interview with Eric Topol
Black Politicized Lives Matter 163
References 176
Heather Mac Donald
Making Evolutionary Sense of Sex and Gender 179
References 195
Jennifer A. Marshall Graves
Stories and Data: Reflections on Race, Riots, and Police 199
References 205
Coleman Hughes
In Defense of Free Speech 209
References 226
Based on an interview with James Flynn
Acknowledgments 229
Iconoclasm: A Very Brief History of the Culture Wars
References
‘Culture war’ – even the term itself has historically been contentious and divisive. In America, it originated and gained popular usage in the 1920s, to describe the conflict between urban and rural America; between those who possessed liberal, progressive values and those who held to traditional, conservative beliefs.1 In the 1990s, the term was reintroduced into the cultural zeitgeist by University of Virginia sociologist James Davison Hunter, with the publication of Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America.2 Hunter argued that on a number of defining issues – abortion, gun ownership, separation of church and state, homosexuality etc., society had been divided into two warring factions – however these factions were not designated by the traditional markers of nominal religion, ethnicity, social class, or political affiliation but rather by two incommensurate ideological world views.2 Then, in April 2015, two months before Donald Trump officially launched his bid for the US presidency, historian Andrew Hartman published A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars. In the book Hartman recounts the history of the culture wars of late 20th century America, where the New Left of the 1960s; the radical antiwar, feminist, Black Power activists, overturned much of the racism and conventional gender and sexual biases of ‘normative’ America. In the conclusion, Hartman tells us that the ‘culture wars are now history.’3 Alas, much like Francis Fukuyama’s prognosis of ‘The End of History’4 the end of the modern culture wars seems nowhere in sight.
~
This book contains many of the ideas that have shaped the culture wars of the last two decades. Iconoclast, as a title, may seem somewhat hyperbolic. I know that the term had been used in reference to the New Atheist writer; the late Christopher Hitchens,5 but perhaps it is best reserved for historical figures of the magnitude of Galileo. Regardless, this is a book about ideas and the conflicts that come with expressing those ideas. It is also a very brief history. So let us now examine, fleetingly, some of the events that have shaped the latest culture wars.
~
In October 2015, sociologist and physician Nicholas Christakis and his wife Erica Christakis, who is a lecturer in early childhood studies, apologised for the hurt they had caused students and resigned from their positions as Co-Masters of Silliman College, Yale. This occurred due to student protests instigated by an email that Erica had sent to all Silliman students in regards to Halloween costumes. Erica’s email was in response to an earlier email by Yale’s Intercultural Affairs Committee which warned students to avoid wearing inappropriate and culturally insensitive costumes for Halloween. In recent years, it had become common practice for universities to send out such emails – this had been in response to students wearing offensive costumes and blackface.6 Erica enquired in her email if students wanted to hand over these decisions to university administrators. Erica stated that ‘American universities were once a safe space not only for maturation but also for a certain regressive, or even transgressive, experience; increasingly, it seems, they have become places of censure and prohibition.’ This resulted in an open letter, which 740 students signed, criticising Erica and Nicholas for downplaying the concerns of students of colour.6
In the aftermath, Nicholas Christakis decided to engage the students in a civil discussion. This resulted in 2-hour long debate where Christakis was surrounded by an angry crowd of protesting students, which was filmed from multiple angles, and subsequently became viral on social media.7 Christakis discussed the events on an episode of the then Waking Up podcast with Sam Harris titled Facing the Crowd.8 Harris commended Christakis for his patience and calmness in the face of truculence of the students. Harris wondered at one point how Yale students, who he stated are ‘objectively some of the most privileged people who have ever lived ... Whatever the colour of their skin’ could have acted this way. Christakis defended the students, saying that the ideas that the students expressed in relation to social constructionism had some merit; only they had been taken too far. Christakis had argued with the
students in favour of the values of classical liberalism and human universality.
In Iconoclast I discuss with Christakis the importance of free enquiry to the mission of the university and his book Apollo’s Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live.9 We discuss the evidence for the lab leak hypothesis, the issues surrounding the racialization of the American healthcare system, and his idea that the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests were not only a direct result of the murder of George Floyd and a history of racialized police violence in America, but also by the anxiety of living in a time of plague. Christakis’s view is that whether it is the January 6, 2021 Capitol Hill riots, or BLM, no-one should have been gathering in the streets to protest during the pandemic.
~
Evergreen State College is a public liberal arts and sciences college in Olympia, Washington which drew national attention in 2017. Evergreen had a tradition – the annual Day of Absence, which was based on the idea from a 1965 play of the same name by Douglas Ward Turner, whereby minority students and faculty would spend the day off campus to discuss campus issues and to highlight their contribution via their absence.10 Following the election of Donald Trump, Evergreen decided to reconceptualised the event, stating that undocumented migrants on campus were in fear of deportation, and wanted to hold a symbolic event that reaffirmed that students belong on campus. Therefore, instead of minority students and faculty leaving the campus they asked that white people leave the campus. After the policy was announced, Bret Weinstein, faculty member and evolutionary biologist, sent an email in protest of the change which read:
There is a huge difference between a group or coalition deciding to voluntarily absent themselves from a shared space in order to highlight their vital and under-appreciated roles ... and a group or coalition encouraging another group to go away. The first is a forceful call to consciousness, which is, of course, crippling to the logic of oppression. The second is a show of force, and an act of oppression in itself.
Protest activists stated that students were angered by Weinstein’s emails but this was not what triggered the protests.11 In May 2017 police apprehended two black students from their dorms at midnight due to a non-physical altercation in the cafeteria that day – the white student was not taken in for questioning. The protesters claim Weinstein came out of his classroom and confronted the students who were protesting this, agitating them, and when the police arrived they believed that Weinstein had called them. Weinstein then appeared on right-wing commentator Tucker Carlson and the protesters claimed that Weinstein failed to correct Carlson who stated that white people were being forced to leave campus and that the protest was in regards to Weinstein’s email alone.12
Weinstein and his wife, the evolutionary biologist Heather Heying, tell a different version of events.13,14 They tell the story of the new college president George Bridges, who, on taking the position, significantly increased administration and fostered an environment of radical political ideology. Bridge’s consistent acquiescence to the extreme demands of student protestors created an environment where the protestors were embolden to take control of the campus. Film of Bridges essentially being denigrated and humiliated by protestors is harrowing viewing.15 Weinstein and Heying left their positions with the college and filed a $3.8 million suit against the college alleging that the college had ‘permitted, cultivated, and perpetuated a racially hostile and retaliatory work environment.... Through a series of decisions made at the highest levels, including to officially support a day of racial segregation, the college has refused to protect its employees from repeated provocative and corrosive verbal and written hostility based on race, as well as threats of physical violence.’ Weinstein and Heying were awarded $500,000 and the college admitted no liability and rejected the allegations of the tort claim.10
In Iconoclast Heying writes about non-binary identity and the reality of the pronoun ‘they’ in an essay that came about in response to an article written by Anne Fadiman for Harper’s Magazine titled “All My Pronouns.”16 Heying argues for the distinction between biological and sociological categories and that linguistic terms have to be tethered to the reality of humans being a sexually dimorphic species.
~
On March 2, 2017, Charles Murray, a social scientist and fellow at the American Enterprise Institute was scheduled to give a talk at Middlebury college. Murray was the co-author, with the late Richard J. Hernstein, of the controversial New York Times bestseller The Bell Curve which was released in 1994;17 a book about the stratification of American society based on intelligence, which contained a chapter on race and IQ. A crowd of 400 protestors, predominantly students, filled the Wilson Hall in McCullough Student Center, carrying signs and chanting slogans. This caused Murray and the moderator of the event, Middlebury College Professor Allison Stanger to relocate to a locked room where they could conduct the Q&A via video link. After the completion of the talk, Murray and Stanger walked to their cars, where they were surrounded by angry protestors, who tried to block their path. During this altercation, Stanger was injured and required medical treatment for a concussion.18,19
Middlebury had become the latest flashpoint in the intensifying culture wars on college campuses. Major news outlets such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal condemned the actions of the protestors, and schools such as Middlebury gained a reputation as being intolerant of liberal values and essentially anti-intellectual safe spaces which were hostile to conservative thought.19 In the aftermath, Murray appeared on an episode of Sam Harris’s podcast titled Forbidden Knowledge, where they discuss his research on race and IQ and the protests at Middlebury.20 Harris faced extensive criticism from the left-wing media outlet Vox for giving a large platform to Murray, which they contended allowed him to spread pseudoscientific ideas about race and IQ – specifically that black and Hispanic people in the US are genetically predisposed to having lower IQ scores than whites and Asians.21,22
Harris then entered into an email exchange and debate with Vox journalist Ezra Klein who, validly, criticised Harris for not having an in depth knowledge of intelligence research, and also accused him of engaging in a kind of ‘anti-woke’ identity politics in relation to his collusion with Murray during their interview.23 In debating Harris, Klein drew on the work of the late intelligence researcher James Flynn, whose work focussed on the environmental causes for racial differences in IQ.24 In my interview with Flynn in regards to his book In Defence of Free Speech: The University as a Censor25 he says that Murray is ‘a serious scholar… That doesn’t mean that I agree with him!.’ In regards to the protests at Middlebury, Flynn differentiates between right opinion and right knowledge. ‘All those students at Middlebury proved was that they were more powerful than Charles Murray,’ Flynn told me, ‘none of them could have argued with him.’ Flynn wondered how the far left would feel, upon forfeiting the right to free speech, when the pendulum on censorship eventually swung the other way? In regards to Harris and Klein’s debate, Harris rejected Ezra’s assertion that he is influenced by identity politics of any kind, stating that he would come to the defence of Murray in the same way that he would come to the defence of his friend Ayaan Hirsi Ali, when she comes under attack from left-wing idealogues.23
~
Ayaan Hirsi Ali rose to prominence after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the US. Hirsi Ali had started working as a researcher for a think tank for the Dutch Labour Party, and the attacks served as the catalyst for her public criticisms and disavowal of her old faith. Two years later, Hirsi Ali was elected to the Dutch parliament for the centre-right party The People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy.26 Then, on November 2, 2004 Hirsi Ali’s friend and collaborator, the film maker Theo von Gogh was assassinated by Mohammed Bouyeri, a Dutch-Moroccan Islamist. Von Gogh had directed a film called Submission: Part 1, written by Hirsi Ali, which provided a strong critique of the treatment of women in Islam. Hirsi Ali had been living under armed guard since 2002, and was embroiled in a series of scandals relating to the government costs for her protection and her application for asylum. In 2006 she resigned from parliament, after the Dutch government tried to revoke her citizenship, and moved to the US where she established the AHA Foundation – a not-for-profit that fights for the rights of women and girls.26,27
Hirsi Ali has faced cancellation multiple times. In 2014 Brandeis University cancelled its plans to give her an honorary degree due to her criticisms of Islam,28 and in 2017 she cancelled a speaking tour of Australia and New Zealand with Think Inc. due to security concerns and ‘a succession of organizational lapses’ by the event organiser.29 She has been listed by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a well-respected entity known for its advocacy against discrimination and its classification of hate groups, as an anti-Muslim extremist.30,31 In an interview for Iconoclast I discussed with Ayaan her book Prey: Immigration, Islam and the Erosion of Women’s Rights.32 We discuss the central thesis of the book, that a wave of immigration from Islamic countries has led to an increase in sexual violence towards women in Europe, and a winding back of women’s rights. We also discussed her criticisms of woke feminism, her advocacy for reformation within Islam and her thoughts on a problematic verse in the Koran; the Surah An Nisa: 4:34, which seems to advocate the use of domestic violence to discipline disobedient wives.
~
University of Toronto psychology professor and clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson was first catapulted into the stratosphere of the cultural zeitgeist in October 2016, due to film of him interacting with student protestors and arguing with them about his refusal to use new gender pronouns, which subsequently went viral.33 Peterson then went on to be interviewed by Cathy Newman from Channel 4 News, to discuss his book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote for Chaos, where, in a fiery exchange, they discuss the patriarchy, the gender pay gap, campus protests and transgender rights. Newman’s antagonistic interviewing style, where she appeared determined to misrepresent her guests views, and Peterson’s ‘gotcha’ moment where he defends the right to free speech (leaving Newman briefly speechless), increased Peterson’s fame enormously and made him seemingly the voice speaking up against woke feminism and what he termed the ‘Postmodern neo-Marxism’ of left-wing idealogues.’34,35
Peterson and Gad Saad, a Lebanese-born Canadian Professor of Marketing at the John Molson School of Business at Concordia University, appeared before the Canadian Senate in 2017, to debate the introduction of Bill C-16, a piece of legislation which sought to include gender identity and expression within federal human rights protections.36,37 Peterson argued that the concept of gender identity and expression were too broad and that the legislation to make people use gender-neutral pronouns would constitute compelled speech that would elevate the failure to use a preferred pronoun to ‘hate speech.’38 Saad argued that the concept of gender fluidity meant that a person’s gender identity could change daily, and quoted from a flyer produced by Harvard’s Office of BGLTQ which stated ‘Fixed binaries and biological essentialism constitute transphobic misinformation that is tantamount to systemic violence.’36 The Transgender Rights Bill (Bill C-16) was passed and officially became law on June 19, 2017.39
In a wide-ranging conversation for Iconoclast, I discuss with Gad his book The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas are Killing Common Sense.40 We discuss his work within the field of evolutionary psychology and his commitment to free speech absolutism, as well his adherence to deontological principles. We also discuss how adherence to these principles became a point of contention which caused the rift with Sam Harris, who in Gad’s view, with his support of Trump’s removal from Twitter, violated the principle of free speech in the pursuit of political expediency.41,42
~
The Grievance Studies Affair (or Sokal Squared) was an academic hoax orchestrated by the philosopher Peter Boghossian, James A. Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose – to illustrate the corruption and bias occurring within ‘grievance studies’ fields in universities. Conducted over 2017 to 2018 the project involved submitting 20 hoax papers to academic journals in race, queer, cultural, gender, sexuality and fat studies fields to see if they would pass through peer review and be accepted for publication.43–45 By the time the trio had come forward to reveal their hoax in October 2018, due to an investigation by The Wall Street Journal46 which revealed that the author on one of the papers, Helen Wilson, didn’t exist, 4 papers had been published and another 3 had been accepted for publication, whilst 6 had been rejected and 7 were under review. The papers argued for ideas such as the existence of rape culture in urban dog parks,47 how males penetrating themselves anally with sex toys can lead to a reduction in transphobia, and included a feminist paper which was really just an excerpt from Mein Kampf rewritten with feminist language.44,48,49 The trio stated that they were trying to raise awareness that certain academic disciplines had been compromised by their underlying philosophies of postmodernism and critical theory, and that these areas of study were producing some dangerous and morally corrupt ideas that did not tether with reality.44 In their book Cynical Theories Pluckrose and Lindsay state that woke activism is driven by an ideology now taught within universities that they call ‘applied postmodernism.’50
In Iconoclast, I am in conversation with Peter Boghossian, where we discuss some of the philosophical underpinnings of postmodernism, why speech isn’t violence and the problem with the idea of cultural appropriation. According to Boghossian the far left’s current focus on controlling language within institutions, based on ideas from poststructuralism, is intended to manufacture different outcomes. He says that terms such as ‘anti-racism’ and ‘diversity, inclusion and equity’ simply don’t mean what most people think they mean – they have been changed to architect new outcomes.
~
On May 25, 2020, George Floyd, a 46 year old black man, was murdered by Derek Chauvin, a 44 year old white man who was a 19-year veteran of the Minneapolis police department. Chauvin, after apprehending Floyd on the suspicion of possessing a counterfeit $20 bill, had knelt on his neck for over 9 minutes, while Floyd was lying face down and handcuffed in the street - in spite of Floyd’s repeated protests that he couldn’t breathe.51–54 The incident had been filmed by bystanders and caught on security cameras and the following day the footage was made public, resulting in all four officers involved in his death being fired.55 Minneapolis Major Jacob Frey upon seeing the footage of Floyd’s death released a public statement saying that: ‘Being black in America should not be a death sentence.’56 The murder of George Floyd was the catalyst for worldwide protests against police racism and brutality, with protesters calling for greater accountability for police.57,58
In 2016, Heather Mac Donald, the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute,59 gave a talk at Hilldale College in regards to her book The War On Cops.60 In this speech she stated that black on black crime was a far greater threat to black Americans than police violence. She stated that: ‘There is no government agency more dedicated to the proposition that black lives matter than the police,’ and that ‘We have been talking obsessively about alleged police racism over the last 20 years in order to not talk about a far larger problem: black on black crime.’61,62 Then, in April 2017, Mac Donald was invited to give a speech at the Athenaeum at Claremont McKenna College, which resulted in 250 protestors blocking the entrance to the building and disrupting the event with chants of ‘Black Lives Matter.’63 Campus officials, fearing for the safety of students, faculty, staff and guests instead decided to live stream the event.62,64
In her essay for Iconoclast Mac Donald once again explores these themes in relation to the politics of BLM, and the hyper focus on the small number of police killings of unarmed black men. This seems to come about due to a confluence of factors: protestor and political advocacy, institutional support, the media focus which causes an availability heuristic about the prevalence of these killings,65 and a general social unwillingness to confront difficult truths about the crime rate in some black communities. Additionally, writer and commentator Coleman Hughes, who originally stated he was in support of BLM, discusses part of the reason he walked away from the movement in a reprint here of his City Journal article Stories and Data.66 Hughes, whilst acknowledging that police departments have issues with corruption and a lack of accountability, stated that he discovered that the central narrative of BLM is false; that racist cops are killing unarmed black people - from stories and data. He recounts the story of Tony Timpa, a white man who was killed by Dallas police officers in 2016, in almost identical circumstances to George Floyd. Although criminal charges were initially brought against the police officers involved in the Timpa killing, they were later dropped.67 Hughes ends the article by opining that if we can’t lift the national public discourse above where it currently is, we may see repeats of the George Floyd riots occurring regularly in the future.66
~
In early June 2021, Bret Weinstein began making claims about the anti-parasitic drug ivermectin, stating it was a highly effective prophylaxis and treatment for COVID19. On his DarkHorse Podcast he hosted Dr Pierre Kory (M.D) from the Front Line COVID19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCA),69 in an episode titled COVID, Ivermectin, and the Crime of the Century, where Weinstein and his guest stated that ivermectin was ‘99% effective’ in treating COVID19, and that if the drug were distributed widely it would ‘end the pandemic in a month.’70 Weinstein and Kory then appeared on the Joe Rogan Experience Podcast where they argued that pharmaceutical companies were supressing the data on the effectiveness of ivermectin as they wanted to bring new designer drugs onto the market rather than using relatively cheap, repurposed drugs to treat COVID19.71 In the weeks following the episode of Rogan’s podcast there was a massive increase in demand for ivermectin as a COVID19 treatment, with the CDC reporting that 88,000 prescriptions were written in a single week in mid-august compared to 15,000 in the week prior to the podcast.72,73 This was in spite of a trial by Edward Mills of McMasters University conducted in Brazil, that was larger than all other ivermectin trials put together, showing that ivermectin’s benefits in treating COVID were too small to detect.72,74
Weinstein also interviewed Steve Kirsch and Dr Robert Malone, who was touted as being the inventor of mRNA vaccine technology, in an episode of The DarkHorse Podcast titled How to Save the World in Three Easy Steps.75 In this episode Weinstein’s guests made a series of claims about the safety of the vaccines, including that the spike protein produced by the vaccines was cytotoxic and that the transmembrane domain, which is supposed to anchor the spike protein to a localised site, fails, and the spike protein is then distributed throughout the body and accumulates in the ovaries, bone marrow etc.75 The podcast was then taken down by Youtube, who were enforcing their COVID-19 medical misinformation policy.76 The podcast was also subject to a rebuttal published in Quillette authored by Claire Berlinski and Yuri Deigin, who sought to address misinformation about the effectiveness of ivermectin and the safety of the vaccines.77 There was a response to the article from Weinstein and Heying on their podcast78 and a war of words between Quillette editor Claire Lehmann and Weinstein on Twitter.79–82
Sam Harris, a friend of Weinstein, interviewed Eric Topol, who is a professor of molecular medicine at The Scripps Research Institute, on an episode of his podcast titled A Contagion of Bad Ideas, where Topol characterised Weinstein’s position on mRNA vaccines as ‘Totally irresponsible. It’s reckless. It’s sick. It casts unnecessary doubt... It’s taking people who want to believe in a conspiracy, or who don’t know what to believe, and making vaccines look like they are intended to harm. With no evidence whatsoever.’83 Youtube demonetized Weinstein and Heying’s channel due to their claims about ivermectin, and they subsequently moved their broadcasts to Odysee; an alternative video sharing platform.84
In a conversation conducted on October 14, 2021 for Iconoclast, I spoke with Eric Topol and we discussed the research on ivermectin, the Delta variant, and the claims made on the episode of The DarkHorse Podcast featuring Dr Robert Malone. In regards to ivermectin we discussed issues in relation to power and experimental design, as well as the fraudulent studies that had to be excluded from the meta-analysis. Topol also restated his belief that the views expressed on The DarkHorse Podcast constitute wilful disinformation about ivermectin and COVID19 vaccines and have, to some extent, led to the increase vaccine hesitancy currently occurring in the US.
~
This book contains some of the most important ideas that have shaped the current culture wars. It is not, however, a story about left versus right, or ‘anti-woke’ versus ‘woke.’ It is a book about the cultural transmission of ideas, and how we converse with one another. Eric Weinstein coined the term Intellectuals of the Dark Web (IDW)85 to describe an informal group of ideologically and politically disparate thinkers that now include Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson, Bret Weinstein, Ben Shapiro, Douglas Murray and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who have come together and found common ground in their opposition to identity politics and cancel culture. They have also come together to thresh it out in the realm of ideas. However, with Sam Harris handing in his ‘imaginary membership to this imaginary organization’86 due to some members extending ‘the principle of charity’ to Trump in regards to his claims of voter fraud, the IDW seems to have disintegrated.87 So, are our political and ideological differences too incommensurate to allow us to cross the divide, and has COVID19 shown us that some ideas are too dangerous to discuss?
We live in the age of social media, the advent of which has led to the mass democratization of opinion, which makes it increasingly difficult for many to discern truth from error.88 On social media, people seem divided; civility is low, and everything is hyperpartisan. The old gatekeepers; the traditional media, with their inherent flaws and biases, are receding into the distance and are almost gone – trust in institutions is low. The voice of one may now be broadcast and influence countless others, regardless of the veracity of the claims. We are in a double bind: any moderation can be viewed as cancellation; of censorship and suppression of free speech – and invite the descent into conspiratorial thinking. So, what if I told you that the only way out of this is to continue to have these conversations? What if, all we have left, is to try and speak to one another? And to listen.
Mark Halloran
Ph.D
February 2, 2022
1. The E Pluribus Unum Project. Accessed January 26, 2022. http://www1. assumption.edu/ahc/1920s/
2. Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America. Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture. Accessed February 1, 2022. http://iasculture.org/research /publications/culture-wars-struggle-define-america
3. The Q&A with Andrew Hartman: Did the culture wars ever end? News. Published September 12, 2018. Accessed January 29, 2022. https://news. illinoisstate.edu / 2018 / 09 / the-qa-with-andrew-hartman-has-donald-trump-brought-back-the-culture-wars/
4. Fukuyama F. The End of History? Natl Interest. 1989;(16):3-18.
5. Christopher Hitchens, great Iconoclast and Moralist, is dead - Haaretz Com - Haaretz.com. Accessed January 29, 2022. https://www.haaretz.com/1.52 20218
6. Nelson L. Yale’s big fight over sensitivity and free speech, explained. Vox. Published November 7, 2015. Accessed January 29, 2022. https://www.vox. com/2015/11/7/9689330/yale-halloween-email
7. The Asian Republican. Yale University - Full Version - New Videos of The Halloween Email Protest.; 2016. Accessed January 16, 2022. https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=hiMVx2C5_Wg
8. #100 — Facing the Crowd. Sam Harris. Accessed January 26, 2022. https:// www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/100-facing-crowd
9. Christakis NA. Apollo’s Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live. Hachette UK; 2020.
10. Roll N. Evergreen Professor Receives $500,000 Settlement. Inside Higher Ed. Published September 18, 2017. Accessed January 26, 2022. https://www. insidehighered.com/quicktakes / 2017 / 09 / 18/evergreen-professor-receives-500000-settlement
11. Berlatsky N. How Right-Wing Media Has Tried to Stifle Student Speech at Evergreen State College. Pacific Standard. Accessed January 20, 2022. https: // psmag.com/education/the-real-free-speech-story-at-evergreen-college
12. Fox News. Professor Objects to No White People on Campus Demand.; 2017. Accessed January 29, 2022. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_j9nFced _eo
13. Heying H, Weinstein B. Fox News. Washington Examiner. Accessed January 29, 2022. https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/tag/fox-news
14. How Activists Took Control of a University: The Case Study of Evergreen State. Quillette. Published December 18, 2017. Accessed January 26, 2022. https://quillette.com/2017/12/18/activists-took-control-university-case-study -evergreen-state/
15. Best of Evergreen. Student Takeover of Evergreen State College.; 2017. Accessed January 29, 2022. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bO1agIl Llhg
16. Fadiman A. All My Pronouns: How I learned to live with the singular they. Harpers Mag. 2020;August 2020. Accessed December 31, 2021. https:// harpers.org/archive/2020/08/all-my-pronouns-the-singular-they/
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18. Information on Charles Murray Visit. Middlebury. Accessed January 26, 2022. https:// www.middlebury.edu / newsroom / information-on-charles-murray-visit
19. Gee T. How the Middlebury Riot Really Went Down. POLITICO Magazine. Accessed January 26, 2022. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/ 05/28/how-donald-trump-caused-the-middlebury-melee-215195
20. #73 — Forbidden Knowledge. Sam Harris. Accessed January 26, 2022. https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/73-forbidden-knowledge
21. Nisbett ET Kathryn Paige Harden, and Richard E. Charles Murray is once again peddling junk science about race and IQ. Vox. Published May 18, 2017. Accessed January 30, 2022. https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/5/18/ 15655638/charles-murray-race-iq-sam-harris-science-free-speech
22. Klein E. Sam Harris, Charles Murray, and the allure of race science. Vox. Published March 27, 2018. Accessed January 26, 2022. https://www.vox. com / policy-and-politics / 2018/3/27 / 15695060/sam-harris-charles-murray-race-iq-forbidden-knowledge-podcast-bell-curve
23. Klein E. The Sam Harris-Ezra Klein debate. Vox. Published April 9, 2018. Accessed January 26, 2022. https://www.vox.com/2018/4/9/17210248/sam-harris-ezra-klein-charles-murray-transcript-podcast
24. Wilby P. Beyond the Flynn effect: new myths about race, family and IQ? The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/sep/27/james-flynn -race-iq-myths-does-your-family-make-you-smarter. Published September 27, 2016. Accessed January 30, 2022.
25. James Flynn : Free Speech and Universities | troublemag. Accessed January 30, 2022. https:// www.troublemag.com / james-flynn - free-speech - and-universities/
26. Ayaan Hirsi Ali: “If you disagree with the left, you’re punished.” New Statesman. Published September 9, 2021. Accessed January 27, 2022. https://www.newstatesman.com/encounter/2021/09/ayaan-hirsi-ali-if-you-disagree-with-the-left-youre-punished
27. The AHA Foundation - Founded by Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Published October 18, 2018. Accessed January 30, 2022. https://www.theahafoundation.org/
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32. Ali AH. Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women’s Rights. HarperCollins; 2021.
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36. Gad Saad. Full Testimony at the Canadian Senate (THE SAAD TRUTH_421).; 2017. Accessed January 30, 2022. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=4WqryoEJqZg
37. Jordan B Peterson. 2017/05/17: Senate Hearing on Bill C16.; 2017. Accessed January 26, 2022. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnIAAkSNtqo
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39. Canada: Senate Passes Landmark Transgender Rights Bill. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 20540 USA. Accessed January 30, 2022. https:// www.loc.gov / item/global-legal-monitor/2017-09-11/canada-senate-passes-landmark-transgender-rights-bill/
40. The Parasitic Mind - How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense. Regnery Publishing. Accessed January 22, 2022. https://www.regnery.com /9781684512294/the-parasitic-mind
41. Sam Harris. There’s an important debate to have about the wisdom of kicking Trump off @twitter. I still believe that it should have happened years ago and that we’ve paid a terrible price for the delay. But for the moment, all I want to say is: Thanks, @jack. @SamHarrisOrg. Published January 9, 2021. Accessed January 30, 2022. https://twitter.com/SamHarrisOrg/status/134770 0391874420736
42. Gad Saad. @SamHarrisOrg Are you going to publicly eat your words regarding supporting that Trump be banned from Twitter? Deontological principles should NEVER be sacrificed at the altar of tribal hate. Whenever you are ready to sit down for a chat, you know where to find me. I don’t need the publicity. @GadSaad. Published August 26, 2021. Accessed January 29, 2022. https://twitter.com/GadSaad/status/1431019682123890689
43. Mike Nayna. The Grievance Studies Affair - REVEALED.; 2018. Accessed December 5, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVk9a5Jcd1k
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45. Beauchamp Z. The controversy around hoax studies in critical theory, explained. Vox. Published October 15, 2018. Accessed January 26, 2022. https://www.vox.com /2018 /10 / 15 / 17951492 / grievance-studies-sokal-squared-hoax
46. Melchior JK. Opinion | Fake News Comes to Academia. Wall Street Journal. https://www.wsj.com/articles/fake-news-comes-to-academia-1538520950. Published October 5, 2018. Accessed January 30, 2022.
47. Statement of Retraction: Human reactions to rape culture and queer performativity at urban dog parks in Portland, Oregon. Gend Place Cult. 2020;27(2):(307)-(326). doi:10.1080/0966369X.2018.1475346
48. Hoaxers Slip Breastaurants and Dog-Park Sex Into Journals - The New York Times. Accessed January 30, 2022. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/04/ arts/academic-journals-hoax.html
49. Kennedy L. Hoax papers: The shoddy, absurd and unethical side of academia. The Irish Times. Accessed January 30, 2022. https://www.irishtimes.com/ life-and-style/people/hoax-papers-the-shoddy-absurd-and-unethical-side-of-academia-1.3655500
50. Pluckrose H, Lindsay JA. Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity-and Why This Harms Everybody. Pitchstone Publishing; 2020.
51. How long did Derek Chauvin kneel on George Floyd’s neck for? Accessed January 31, 2022. https://www.the-sun.com/news/2620110/how-long-did-derek-chauvin-george-floyds-neck/
52. McGreal C, Beckett L, Laughland O, Ajasa A. Derek Chauvin found guilty of murder of George Floyd. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news / 2021 / apr / 20/derek-chauvin-verdict-guilty-murder-george-floyd. Published April 21, 2021. Accessed January 31, 2022.
53. News ABC. Floyd died of cardiopulmonary arrest, tested positive for COVID-19, autopsy shows. ABC News. Accessed January 31, 2022. https:// abcnews.go.com / US / george - floyd - protest - updates - arrests - america-approaching-10000/story?id=71038665
54. George Floyd: What happened in the final moments of his life. BBC News. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52861726. Published July 16, 2020. Accessed January 31, 2022.
55. Seven days in Minneapolis: a timeline of what we know about the death of George Floyd and its aftermath. MinnPost. Published May 29, 2020. Accessed January 31, 2022. https://www.minnpost.com/metro/2020/05 /what-we-know-about-the-events-surrounding-george-floyds-death-and-its-aftermath-a-timeline/
56. “Being Black In America Should Not Be A Death Sentence”: Officials Respond To George Floyd’s Death. Published May 26, 2020. Accessed December 19, 2021. https://minnesota.cbslocal.com/2020/05/26/being-black - in-america - should-not - be - a-death-sentence-officials-respond-to-george-floyds-death/
57. Protests across the globe after George Floyd’s death. Accessed January 31, 2022. https:// edition.cnn.com/2020 / 06/ 06 /world/gallery/intl-george-floyd-protests/index.html
58. George Floyd death: Why US protests are so powerful this time. BBC News. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52969905. Published June 8, 2020. Accessed January 31, 2022.
59. Heather Mac Donald. Manhattan Institute. Accessed January 31, 2022. https://www.manhattan-institute.org/expert/heather-mac-donald
60. Donald HM. The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe. Encounter Books; 2017.
61. Hillsdale College. The War on Cops - Heather Mac Donald.; 2016. Accessed January 31, 2022. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67Fr-xKukco
62. She wanted to criticize Black Lives Matter in a college speech. A protest shut her down. Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point / wp / 2017 / 04 / 10 / she-wanted-to-criticize-black-lives-matter-in-a-college-speech-a-protest-shut-her-down/. Accessed January 31, 2022.
63. Lorem Ipsum. BLM Protests Heather Mac Donald at Claremont McKenna.; 2017. Accessed January 29, 2022. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8y ck_4ixgI
64. Heather Mac Donald by Claremont McKenna College. Accessed January 31, 2022. https://livestream.com/claremontmckennacollege/events/7234357?t=1 643587615
65. Racist Police Violence Reconsidered. Quillette. Published June 11, 2020. Accessed January 31, 2022. https://quillette.com/2020/06/11/racist-police-violence-reconsidered/
66. Institute CH a fellow at the M, Quillette contributing editor of CJH writing has appeared in, Times the NY, Journal the WS, Review N, Spectator the. Stories and Data. Accessed January 31, 2022. https://www.city-journal.org/ reflections-on-race-riots-and-police
67. Tony Timpa death: Dallas police body cam footage shows officers mocking a man who later died - CNN. Accessed January 1, 2022. https://edition.cnn. com/2019 /08/02/ us / dallas-police-body-cam-footage-captures-death/index. html
68. Junghanns FB. Home. FLCCC | Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance. Accessed February 1, 2022. https://covid19criticalcare.com/
69. ‎Bret Weinstein | DarkHorse Podcast: COVID, Ivermectin, and the Crime of the Century: DarkHorse Podcast with Pierre Kory & Bret Weinstein on Apple Podcasts. Apple Podcasts. Accessed December 14, 2021. https://podcasts. apple.com/us/podcast/covid-ivermectin-and-the-crime-of-the/id1471581521 ?i=1000523859023
70. #1671 - Bret Weinstein & Dr. Pierre Kory.; 2021. Accessed December 14, 2021. https://open.spotify.com/episode/7uVXKgE6eLJKMXkETwcw0D
71. Piper K. The dubious rise of ivermectin as a Covid-19 treatment, explained. Vox. Published September 17, 2021. Accessed January 20, 2022. https:// www.vox.com / future - perfect / 22663127 / ivermectin-covid - treatments-vaccines-evidence
72. CDC. Cases, Data, and Surveillance. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Published February 11, 2020. Accessed January 17, 2022. https:// www.cdc.gov / coronavirus /2019-ncov/covid-data/investigations-discovery/ hospitalization-death-by-race-ethnicity.html
73. August 6, 2021: Early Treatment of COVID-19 with Repurposed Therapies: The TOGETHER Adaptive Platform Trial (Edward Mills, PhD, FRCP). Rethinking Clinical Trials. Published August 11, 2021. Accessed February 1, 2022. https:// rethinkingclinicaltrials.org / news / august - 6 - 2021 - early-treatment-of-covid-19-with-repurposed-therapies-the-together-adaptive-platform-trial-edward-mills-phd-frcp/
74. ‎Bret Weinstein | DarkHorse Podcast: How to save the world, in three easy steps. on Apple Podcasts. Apple Podcasts. Accessed December 14, 2021. https://podcasts.apple.com/si/podcast/how-to-save-the-world-in-three-easy-steps/id1471581521?i=1000525032595
75. COVID-19 medical misinformation policy - YouTube Help. Accessed February 1, 2022. https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9891785?hl= en
76. Looking for COVID-19 ‘Miracle Drugs?’ We Already Have Them. They’re Called Vaccines. Quillette. Published July 6, 2021. Accessed December 14, 2021. https://quillette.com/2021/07/06/looking-for-covid-19-miracle-drugs-we-already-have-them-theyre-called-vaccines/
77. ‎Bret Weinstein | DarkHorse Podcast: #87: We Must Drive this Virus to Extinction (Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying DarkHorse Livestream) on Apple Podcasts. Apple Podcasts. Accessed February 1, 2022. https:// podcasts.apple.com / au / podcast/87-we-must-drive-this-virus-to-extinction-bret-weinstein/id1471581521?i=1000528685411
78. Claire Lehmann. You may dislike the style and tone of the article we published, but that does not change the simple fact that what @HeatherEHeying and @BretWeinstein have been saying regarding vaccines & COVID is both faulty & irresponsible https://t.co/FGESXXfyrr. @clairlemon. Published July 8, 2021. Accessed February 1, 2022. https://twitter.com/clairlemon/status/1413021640250707968
79. Claire Lehmann. @BretWeinstein @colwight You are *not* qualified to contradict the published research via podcast. If you are so sure of your expertise and the veracity of your claims then follow the normal scientific process. Write your hypotheses down, test them, & share your method with the world. @clairlemon. Published July 4, 2021. Accessed February 1, 2022. https://twitter.com/clairlemon/status/1411539943285944328
80. Claire Lehmann. @BretWeinstein @HistoryBound @mtaibbi Don’t patronise me. Your rhetoric is fuelling vaccine hesitancy, and you know it. You need to fix what you are creating. @clairlemon. Published July 3, 2021. Accessed February 1, 2022. https://twitter.com/clairlemon/status/141122954 6968350722
81. Claire Lehmann. @BretWeinstein Have you told your legion of followers that the ivermectin hype was based on fraud yet? @clairlemon. Published November 9, 2021. Accessed January 29, 2022. https://twitter.com/ clairlemon/status/1458165606960664577
82. Sam Harris. A Contagion of Bad Ideas: A Conversation with Eric Topol (Episode #256).; 2021. Accessed January 20, 2022. https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=7jQfNzk_CFk
83. Merlan A. The Ivermectin Advocates’ War Has Just Begun. Vice. Published July 1, 2021. Accessed January 20, 2022. https://www.vice.com/en/article /y3d5gv/ivermectin-covid-treatment-advocates-rogan-weinstein-hecker
84. Weiss B, Winter D. Opinion | Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/08/opinion /intellectual-dark-web.html. Published May 8, 2018. Accessed January 20, 2022.
85. Critical Thoughts. Sam Harris Cancels His Membership To The Intellectual Dark Web.; 2021. Accessed February 1, 2022. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=vPc7r9LRxBE
86. Freedom Pact. Why Did Sam Harris Leave The Intellectual Dark Web? | Bret Weinstein & Dave Rubin Respond.; 2021. Accessed February 1, 2022. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4SagZ06ecc
87. Olaniran B, Williams I. Social Media Effects: Hijacking Democracy and Civility in Civic Engagement. Platf Protests Chall Networked Democr. Published online February 27, 2020:77-94. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-36525-7_5
On COVID19 and Times of Plague
References
Based on an interview with Nicholas A. Christakis
Your arrow for my tears – Homer, The Iliad
Mark Halloran: I want to focus on your book Apollo’s Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live,1 but I did want to speak to you first about the culture of Yale. I know that you’ve been prominent in the free speech debates, both at Harvard and Yale, and you were involved in a fairly notorious incident a few years ago, in relation to Halloween costumes.2 And recently, there was a speech given at Yale by a visiting psychiatrist which was about ‘The Psychopathic Problem of the White Mind.’3 In terms of the cultural moment that we’re having, what is your best explanation of this?
Nicholas Christakis: First of all, I would say that elite universities in rich democracies, like the United States, are, in some ways, a hallmark of our civilization. They are remarkable institutions that are worth protecting and worth preserving. And their mission, in my view, is the preservation, production and dissemination of knowledge. That’s the mission of the university; that’s what it’s supposed to do. That’s not the mission of courts. That’s not the mission of the legislature. That’s not the mission of the market. All those institutions have other missions. But the mission of a university is the preservation, production and dissemination of knowledge.
Therefore, we want a set of circumstances that optimizes the furtherance of that mission. And that requires, in my view, a deep commitment to classic liberalism, which involves a set of principles that, among other things, address the importance of free and open expression. And it’s not just about protecting individuals from the actions of the institution or protecting citizens from the actions of the government, as the first amendment does in the United States. It’s about the affirmative effort of everyone in a university to create a culture in the university (or in the wider society), that privileges free and open expression. That is the sort of culture that universities should strive for.
If you’re so confident in the truth of your ideas: engage with your opponents and win the battle of ideas. Don’t silence them. And this, of course, goes back to the classic J.S. Mill, statement: ‘He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.’ How can you actually be sure in your beliefs if you do not engage with people who oppose your beliefs? In fact, your opponents are providing you a service. This is why, for example, in the martial arts, you bow to your opponents before you spar. You’re grateful to them for helping you become better. That’s how you become better - by sparring with them. And, I would suggest, the same goes with intellectual sparring.
The fundamental commitment, in my view, at any serious university - and in fact, my belief is that this commitment is also wise and helpful for our broader society - is to free and open expression. This is crucial to the production of knowledge. Universities do basic research for generations. The fact that we have mRNA vaccines that are available to us right now to face the COVID19 pandemic, which has depended on 30 years of basic research that came before it, is an illustration of this. It is not only because we are rich countries. It is also because we want scientists to seek and speak the truth. Unlike what happens sometimes in other authoritarian countries, as in Stalinist Russia, or nowadays in Communist China, where oftentimes, scientists there will be shut up. Their speech about what they’re seeing or discovering is sometimes quashed.
So those commitments to free expression are crucial to our ability to be rich and powerful, to produce knowledge that ultimately drives our ability to be wealthy and strong. So, these are deep and fundamental and important commitments to free and open expression that we should have in our institutions and in our broader society. Incidentally, I discussed the reasons and ways we evolved to learn from each other, precisely to derive such benefits, in my book Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society.4
Therefore, with respect to the specific example you gave of this visiting professor who was invited to campus at Yale, and I think the title of her talk, was this something like ‘the psychopathic tendency of the white mind?’
The Psychopathic Problem of the White Mind.
Yes, I myself would not have invited her to come to give a talk. I would regard that title, and the description of the talk, as ideological. But I would not prohibit anyone else on campus from inviting such a person to give such a talk, nor, if such a person were invited, would I oppose her speaking. I would not say she should be disinvited either, after having been invited in the first place. However, I would push back powerfully at her ideas, which I reject as racist and as incoherent. And I would ask: why would an institution whose fundamental mission is the preservation, production, and dissemination of knowledge, why is this institution devoting so much effort to an ideological project such as instantiated by this person? I would regard that ideological project as being separate from the fundamental mission of the university.
Universities during the McCarthy era had the problem of conservatism and also almost criminalizing left-wing thought. There was a right-wing suppression of free speech, but the issue for you is that you’re trying to create a dialogue. It’s been described in lots of different ways in terms of postmodernist thought, identity politics etc. Really, when I watched you in the video with the students, where you’re trying to communicate with them, it occurred to me that you’re trying to create a dialogue and dialectic, and they were more interested in a monologue.
Yes, well, I generally do not discuss the events of 2015,5 because they are so in the past now. My commitment to liberalism is very long standing, and goes back decades. But I’m politically on the left. Of course, not that that matters. But I think of myself as a classical liberal.
But then you look at the danger of this illiberalism in society because you brought it up in your book Apollo’s Arrow. You talked about hospital administrations and bureaucracies trying to silence healthcare workers. I once spoke with the late intelligence researcher, James Flynn, and I said to him, I wonder if the university has ever stably been a place of free expression and thought?
Like all institutions, some institutions fail to honor their fundamental commitments. For example, the judiciary is supposed to be an impartial arbiter of justice. But we know that sometimes judges are corrupt. It’s less common in our society than in some others, but even in our society, this happens. So, we have the fundamental commitment of equal justice under law. But any institution is capable of failing to honor its commitments. And so, you’re absolutely right that universities do, from time to time, fall down on their commitments. And as you pointed out, this occurred during the McCarthy era. But I would hope they would not. And I think it requires vigilance on the part of the citizenry and on the part of responsible leaders of our institutions to honor those commitments. But it’s difficult. The reason we create principles is so that, when we’re stressed, we don’t have to act impulsively. We are guided by principles.
It relates back to your work in terms of being quite optimistic in terms of human nature. Where you discuss the qualities of compassion, love, collaboration you state that these are fundamental human qualities. But I always feel as though they’re tied to their opposites: cruelty, hate, xenophobia.
Yes, but here’s the thing: the benefits of a connected life must have outweighed the costs. Otherwise, we would have evolved to live as isolated individuals. So, you’re absolutely right. When I come near you, I expose myself to the risk of violence, cruelty, and mendacity. And that’s true. But equally when I come near you, I expose myself to the benefits of being connected. I can learn from you, you can teach me, we can work together and cooperate to achieve greater objectives.
The way I discuss this in Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society is similar to what Steven Pinker is saying. In the last 200 years, driven by technological advances in Europe (such as the steam engine) that were in turn built upon scientific discoveries related to physics and chemistry, and coupled with a shift in ideological commitments (such as those advanced by the Enlightenment philosophers on the equality of human beings and on the importance of democratic principles – which also, to be fair, were not uniformly applied everywhere, but were, nevertheless, the principles), the world has become a more peaceful, healthy, and rich place. Driven by technology and philosophy, the world became better. And Steven is right about that.
But my argument is that we do not necessarily need to rely on historical and technological forces to provide an account of a good life and why human beings are capable of living in peace with each other. What I’m arguing is that more powerful, more ancient, deeper forces are at work propelling a good society. And in fact, the arc of our evolutionary history is long, but it bends towards goodness.
So, what I look at is our history over the last 300,000 years, not just the last 300 years. How has evolution shaped us and endowed us with these wonderful qualities? For example, the capacity for friendship. Like other animals, we mate with each other. But we also befriend each other: we form long-term, non-reproductive unions with other members of our species who are unrelated to us. This is exceedingly rare in the animal kingdom. We do it. Certain other primates do it; elephants do it; and certain whale species do it. In addition to that, we cooperate with unrelated individuals; we’re altruistic to people who are not our kin. Sometimes we work together in order to achieve objectives we couldn’t do on our own. And we also learn from each other; we teach each other things, which is at the root of our capacity for culture. This is extremely rare. We have all these wonderful qualities which have been shaped by evolution. My argument is that evolution has shaped a good society – not just history and technology in the last few hundred years.
We tend to focus on the Enlightenment as though the Enlightenment is the only wellspring of those ideas. You can find universality of human experience within African philosophy and you can find some of the tenets of the Enlightenment within the Islamic Golden Age. But I would say that the problem is the tendency for humans to form in-groups and out-groups, and we’re very good at collaborating within an in-group, but our tendency is to vilify and to see the out-group as the Other. And this tendency has developed as ethnonationalism.
Yes, but I discuss these ideas, again, in Blueprint at length. There’s a fundamental question about whether animosity towards the out-group was actually required for the emergence of cooperation in the in-group. In other words, must we be warlike without in order to be peaceful within? And there’s a lot of debate about this. It’s unclear. Many evolutionary models seem to suggest that ‘Well, no, what’s required at a minimum is indifference to the out-group, not hatred.’ It’s one thing to say ‘Our group is terrific’ and to not care about other groups. That’s completely different than going to war with those groups or burning them in ovens. That’s a completely different kettle of fish.
Now I should hasten to add I am not a genetic determinist; nothing I’m saying should suggest that culture and history don’t also play a role in shaping us to be good. But we are social animals and we have been for many hundreds of thousands of years.
I think we will move on to Apollo’s Arrow. I spoke to Nobel Laureate Peter Doherty,6 and we talked about COVID emerging through zoonotic transfer. Essentially, in bats, probably to pangolins, or some other sort of intermediate host. Now, the theory which seems to be taken much more seriously, even Dr. Fauci7 has talked about it, is the lab leak hypothesis. And I wondered what you thought of that?
In Apollo’s Arrow, I said that, most likely, it was a zoonotic leap, but that we could not exclude the lab leak hypothesis. The consensus among expert geneticists is that this is not an engineered pathogen, nor was it a modified pathogen (though some disagree). The latter possibility is a little harder to be certain about, but it seems very unlikely. Nobody thinks it was a deliberate lab leak, either, by the way. Thus, the competing hypotheses are: did it come from an animal and jump to humans? Or was it an accidental lab leak of a naturally collected pathogen? The latter hypothesis would be that a naturally collected pathogen had been brought to the lab for study and then it escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
If I had to bet, I still think zoonotic leap is more likely. Why? Well because SARS 1, in 2003, was a zoonotic leap, and so we have a nice precedent there. We also know many others zoonoses, from HIV to Zika virus. We know that influenza viruses do this – this is very common. And bats are often an origin of zoonotic diseases. So, I still think that a zoonotic leap is more likely, but we cannot exclude the lab leak hypothesis. There has been some evidence for the lab leak theory, too. There’s been some leaks from the US government that suggest that some healthcare workers were sick in the Wuhan Institute of Virology around the time when we know that the virus might have been leaking.8,9 Whether that’s true or not, who knows?
I suspect our intelligence agencies know a lot more than we do. And the Chinese have not acted in a transparent way to dispel the lab leak theory. If it was not a lab leak, what do they have to hide? Why wouldn’t they share more information so we could dispense with that theory? So that is a little suspicious. On the other hand, this has been so politicized and no doubt there is sensitive research being done in this institute, and they no more would like foreigners snooping through their elite research institutes than the Australians or Americans would. Maybe it’s not overly suspicious. In other words, maybe their failure to comply simply reflects the politicization of this, and ordinary sensitivities about defense technology? I don’t know. I do not find it inconceivable that it’s a lab leak. But I also don’t find it overwhelmingly likely. I think we’ll have to wait to see.
I know that when COVID first emerged that the ‘Bat Woman’ of Wuhan, Shi Zhengli, ran the genome on all of the coronaviruses in her lab and was relieved to find that none of them matched.10 Though since then they haven’t been able to detect SARS-CoV-2 to in any bats in the area or any intermediate species. In Apollo’s Arrow you cited a paper by Andersen, which was about the proximal origins of SARS-CoV-2.11 You stated ‘Well, it’s unlikely to be a recombinant construct; a genetically modified construct, because of random mutations.’ But then later there was a rejoinder to that paper, which looked at all of these really unusual features to SARS-CoV-2, one of them being that usually the spike protein is a mutational hotspot.12 I wondered if that information as well as the information about researchers from the Wuhan Institute becoming sick on November 19, mysteriously, starts to lean it another way?
No, I don’t think so. Not yet. I mean from what’s publicly available, I still think that, more likely than not, it was a zoonotic leap. And I have colleagues who have been to Wuhan and vouch for the care shown there. But it’s impossible at present to exclude the lab leak hypothesis. And there are some leaks of intelligence information that are relevant, as I noted earlier.
My own lab has used some data we have on mobility in China, based on cell phone tracking, to trace back when we thought patient zero first would have occurred.13 We put the earliest date of patient zero in early October. So, who knows how that fits in with the other information that’s publicly available? If these people were sick in the Wuhan lab in mid-November, then maybe they got it from somewhere else? I don’t know. Now, it’s exceedingly unlikely that the people working in a virology lab were infected with the virus from some non-virology lab source. It strains credulity. But the point I’m making is that we don’t know. I don’t think it’s irresponsible to ask. I think we do need to ask. And I want to de-politicize this. I’m willing to go where the data leads. If, in the end, it winds up being a lab leak, so be it. If it winds up being a zoonotic leap, so be it. There is a truth out there, and, hopefully, we will find it.
Is it part of the issue of silencing that we talked about earlier? Because it was originally written off. I know Bret Weinstein spent a lot of time on it,14 but originally it was written off as sort of just a conspiracy theory.
I don’t know who wrote it off as a conspiracy theory. I thought the idea that it was an engineered virus that was deliberately leaked struck me as extremely unlikely from the beginning, for obvious reasons. The Chinese couldn’t control it. And it would be a really stupid virus to engineer if you were going to engineer a weapon; you would prefer that it kill young people, not the elderly. So, there was a whole host of reasons that that struck me as nuts. But the lab leak theory didn’t strike me as nuts. It’s not nuts; it’s possible. It’s just not likely, in my view, given the current data.
The mechanism that I could think of was taking a coronavirus, and passaging it through human cell lines. That might optimize a virus to us.
It’s quite likely that the Chinese were doing such gain-of-function research in Wuhan, as do we. Every rich nation that has a bioweapons program is doing such research. Or forget bioweapons; people do that kind of work even for non-weapons type research. I think it is likely they were doing such work.
There was a US Senate inquiry recently with Dr. Fauci. The Obama administration had actually ceased gain-of-function research with coronavirus in 2014.15 And Fauci had written in a paper in the American Scientific Institute stating that we need to do this research.16 Even though it’s dangerous, it could possibly trigger a pandemic – the research benefits outweigh the potential costs.17 And then he re-instigated this research in 2017.
First of all, in that recent testimony, by Fauci, I think he was very careful to talk about NIH (National Institutes of Health). You think that the American military is not doing gain-of-function research? I’m sure that cannot be true. I don’t know for a fact, but I seriously doubt that. Second, the fact that we were giving money to scientists in Wuhan is totally normal and correct. In fact, it is precisely because that act was politicized, and that funding was stopped, that we’d lost one of our best contacts and access to what was actually happening in that lab. Think how great it would have been if we had collected even more bat information and more viral species information.
That particular scientist who the Trump administration demonized, who had actually gone to these caves in China and had really good bilateral relations with Chinese scientists,18 he was exactly the sort of person we need in our current situation, trying to figure out the origin of the virus. I myself have many Chinese colleagues who are terrific scientists and who I have good relationships with. We want those kinds of connections. In fact, during the peak of the Cold War, even though America and Russia were at odds, both nations saw it as useful to have their physicists talking to each other, or have cultural institutions and their artists talking to each other. This type of human or other professional interaction is valuable. And we see the value when now we’ve completely lost any ability to obtain samples of RNA in the case of this virus, from China. So, I don’t agree, I don’t think there’s anything suspicious at all about the fact that we were funding research in China. It was in our own national interest. And we do that with all kinds of countries for all kinds of topics.
I don’t know if we were funding gain-of-function research in an actual bioweapons lab in Wuhan. I think that’s a misrepresentation. I’m not sure about this, but my understanding is that we were supporting some research, and that also, elsewhere in that same Institute, they were doing gain-of-function work.
200 researchers at the Cambridge Working Group came out against this type of gain-of-function research in 2014.19,20 Obviously, we probably shouldn’t be doing gain-of-function research with coronaviruses?
Why coronaviruses? What about Ebola? Or other pathogens? There are many deadly viruses.
So, any of those viruses? Should we be doing that type of research or doing it under very, very specific conditions?
This is not my area of virology, this level of detail. Although, for what it’s worth, when I was 20, I worked in a virology lab in Paris, under Jorge Peries, and we studied coronaviruses and other enzootic viruses. On one hand, I generally would be against restricting research. I would not proscribe any particular topic. In fact, if anything, that goes against my liberal principles. I don’t want rules that prohibit scientific inquiry. On the other hand, we can discuss certain limits. So yes, if you’re asking me, as a citizen, do I want gain-of-function research with viruses done at every Tom, Dick, and Harry’s laboratory? No, absolutely not.
There was concern when the Wuhan Institute of Virology was built; there was a paper, I think, in the journal Science or Nature that expressed concern that this Biosafety Level 4 (BSL-4) laboratory in China was not, in fact, up to international standards of safety.21 There were some scientists, years ago, who were concerned about this. Of course, you can easily imagine that the Chinese would, in their own national interest, want to build these labs just like the Iranians want to build nuclear weapons. And we would want ideally to try to help them to do it safely, just like how we helped the Russians decommission their nuclear weapons after the collapse of the Soviet Union. It’s in our interest to do that.
I think that once you’re funding particular types of gain-of-function research ...
Hold on; we have not established that. I seriously doubt that American money was being used to fund gain-of-function research in Wuhan. Do you have an article you could show me where it says that?
That was the allegation in the senate inquiry.22
That was a deceptive allegation, if I’ve understood it correctly. I think what he was saying is: ‘This institute is doing gain-of-function research,’ and distinctly ‘You are funding the collection of bat species.’ But those are different topics, right? I doubt we are sending American dollars to foreign adversaries to fund the development of weapons. I can’t imagine that was being done.
Is gain-of-function research with viruses about weaponization? Gain-of-function research doesn’t have to be about the development of a weapon. It can be just about understanding the virus can’t it? You create different constructs to try and get a better understanding of the virus.
Yes, and the particular senator who was interacting with Fauci is not particularly reliable on many of these topics. I think he is extraordinarily politicized when he discusses such matters.23 I do not believe he was seeking the truth in that setting. I think he was trying to make political points. And I have very low regard for that – either on the right or on the left. For example, the same senators voted down a proposal to have a commission to investigate the truth of the insurrection on January the 6th at our Nation’s Capital. These individuals are not truth seeking, which is what I regard as important. Whether you’re on the right or the left, politically, is of little interest to me. But I am deeply interested in a commitment to the truth. This particular man is not, in my judgement, very credible on this particular point.
In Apollo’s Arrow you were talking about delays in action when coronavirus migrated into the US.
Yes, we were very slow in responding as a nation, and here I do think a lot of responsibility falls at the White House. Of course, many Democratic governors were incompetent as well, including Governor Cuomo in New York. I, along with a number of other epidemiologists, were releasing public statements to abort the St. Patrick’s Day parade in March of 2020, for instance. They were having a parade in New York City in March! And the mayor of New York is a Democrat, and so is the governor.
So, I think there was a lot of incompetence in leaders and a lot of denial, both in leaders and in the citizenry. I discussed this in Apollo Arrow, because this is not new. Denial is a feature of plagues and has been for thousands of years. But here’s the thing: I expect more from our government. The fact is that the White House was engaged in willful mendacity, which we now know, because we know the National Security Agency was briefing the President from back in November of 2019 about this.24 And the fact that the President politicized this to the point where the President was focused on how the pandemic was going to affect his election prospects, and for many, many months, as I document in the book, was making preposterous statements - this was very concerning to me. He made countless statements known to any epidemiologist that were just wrong: ‘Oh, it’s going to go away, it’s going to go away, it’s going to go away.’25 Nobody with any knowledge of respiratory pandemics thought it was going to go away. Or the president was saying that you could inject yourself with bleach and other such crazy statements.26 And these are highly irresponsible statements coming from the President of the United States. So, absolutely, he can be held to account for this incompetence.
I think that, from the moment the virus was loose in our species and arrived on our shores, and I said this in 2020, we were going to lose a couple of hundred thousand lives. But, through our incompetence, we have lost many more hundreds of thousands of lives than we needed to lose. We did not need to be so incompetent. And some people say, ‘Well, other leaders in other countries were equally bad.’ Okay, fine. I’m not particularly jingoistic, but I think the United States of America should be better. I don’t think we should be just as incompetent as other countries.
Your prediction was, which is sort of coming to fruition, somewhere between 500,000 and a million deaths. I wonder whether this is the consequence of a post-truth President to some extent?
Yes. I made that prediction when I finished writing Apollo’s Arrow in August of 2020, when there were still only something like 120,000 deaths. I think some of the excess deaths, beyond the minimum (that is, several hundred thousand deaths), can rightly be blamed on the incompetence of the previous administration. I think that’s true. But I don’t just think it’s just the far-right that has these kind of post-truth commitments. It’s the far-left as well, and this goes back to the point you were making earlier in our conversation.
My primary devotion is to the truth. Of course, I also am a political person; I vote, I donate to causes, I have political beliefs. But when it comes to questions about the world, I try, insofar as I possibly can, to see the truth, not to come to it with an ideological commitment – to the extent that I can. And this is also why I like to argue with people about scientific topics, because that brings you closer to the truth, in my view.
We started this conversation about the woman on the far-left discussing “the problem of the psychopathic white mind.” And now there are the coronavirus denialists, on the far-right. These people, all of them, are not dealing with the reality. They’re just not.
In terms of reality, if you look at China, 1.4 billion people, and the last report that I saw, it was just over 4000 deaths from COVID19. They’ve basically come out and said, ‘Well, this is the strength of the Communist government.’ We’re enacting Maoist principles to keep people safe.
Look at the propaganda victory we’ve handed them! New Zealand did well; some of the other island nations did well; South Korea did well; Australia has done well.
But there are only 5 million people in New Zealand. You have to take into account the population size as well, in terms of how you analyze this.
Of course. These are rich island nations; and other similar nations, like Iceland and England, did not do well. I think New Zealand acted swiftly and got lucky. I think Australia has done really well too. And I think a lot will now be down to how rapidly the Aussies and the Kiwis can vaccinate their populations; if they bring the same commitment and tenacity to vaccination and achieve very high levels of vaccination, then, when the history of this pandemic is written, Australia and New Zealand will be seen as having done it the best.
Now, in China, their vaccines are not as good. But I fear that the Chinese are going to win some propaganda victories. And this may be why, if it was a lab leak, why they’re fighting so hard to avoid that coming out. Because, if it was a lab leak, it would subvert any claims to how great the Chinese system is with respect to coping with the epidemic.
You mentioned the St. Patrick’s Day Parade before, and I know in Apollo’s Arrow you wrote about the Black Lives Matter protests, which were sparked by the murder of George Floyd. You used the history of plagues to say that the protests were also due to the anxiety around the pandemic itself; the lockdowns, the unemployment rate, a sense of hopelessness. That drives human behavior. Is it impossible, regardless of how just the cause may be, to justify a protest during a pandemic?
I went on record during the protests in the summer of 2020 as saying that I thought it was irresponsible to assemble large groups of people when there was a serious contagion afoot.27 Now, since then, my laboratory has done some research looking at, for example, the voting behavior during the primaries that took place in the spring.28 And we found, surprisingly to me, that, in those elections, turning out to vote did not seem to change the trajectory of the epidemic locally, for a period of a few weeks. Now we think that’s for a number of reasons. People line up outside, and voting is a relatively quiet behavior. You’re not screaming; you’re indoors very briefly. Often, polling places are large, aerated spaces. Prevalence of the virus was also relatively low at the time. I’m not prepared just yet to discuss similar analyses with the protests with the BLM protests or the Trump rallies that we are still doing. We are trying to quantitatively understand: do the assembly of people for political purposes change the trajectory of the epidemic? And I expect my lab to publicly answer that question before too long.
Still, when the BLM protests were taking place, I and a few other epidemiologists expressed a concern that it was irresponsible to encourage them. Yet still other epidemiologists took a different view.29 And I found their position to be intellectually inconsistent. Two months earlier, they had opposed the right-wing protests, for example, in the Wisconsin State Legislature. And they had opposed Orthodox Jewish weddings that had large numbers of people in New York assembling. They had opposed small family funerals. But then, suddenly, when the cause was different, they thought that was okay. And sometimes they said, ‘Well, these people protesting at BLM events were masked, or they are outdoors.’ And other times they said, ‘Well, this cause is a health-related cause, so this is different and we must weigh the public health considerations.’ So, they said, ‘Yes, we might lose some lives due to the extra deaths from coronavirus, but we’re going to save more lives by mitigating the adverse health implications of the racializing of our healthcare delivery system’. But I did not find those arguments compelling. They were too inconsistent. I don’t think the virus cares why people are assembling; it is just prone to kill us when we do.
Now, I think that it’s important to return to a different part of your question, which relates to what was going on with the January 6, right-wing insurrection at the nation’s capital where we had people storming the Capitol.30 Several people died. As I discussed in the book, plagues are a time when people search for meaning. And it’s not hard to imagine why. When death is afoot, when a deadly contagion is circulating, when people are cooped up at home, it gives them time to reflect: what’s the meaning of life? What kind of life do I want for myself? What kind of what kind of society is a good society? People ask these questions.
And this search for meaning has been reflected in many phenomena during times of plague for thousands of years. For example, a rise in religiosity is very typical; people become more religious during times of plague.31 And that happened in the United States during this plague, as various surveys showed. Also, plagues change people’s occupational preferences. We’ve seen a boom in applications to medical school, and nursing school during this during this period.32 It also changes people’s attitudes towards their occupation, for example, truckers suddenly see themselves as essential workers; they’re performing a very important function in society, keeping goods moving when everyone else is stuck at home. And it gives many people a kind of connection to their work and the meaning they didn’t previously have.
My argument about the BLM protests in the summer of 2020 is that they were driven not just by the history of racialized police violence in our country, nor just by the economic hardship that the pandemic imposed, as you mentioned, nor just by the fact that people were at home and idle, but also by a search for meaning. People were trying to say ‘I care about a just society.’ Now fast forward to the right-wing insurrection on January 6, and we see something similar. What struck me about the storming of the Capitol is how few of those people made any attempt to conceal their identity, because they thought what they were doing was good! They did not see a reason for secrecy, nor did they see themselves as undercutting the foundations of our democracy. They saw themselves as engaged in some kind of patriotic act. I think the search for meaning has been affecting our political experience during this pandemic.
You touch on the idea that people will view the other side as evil but each side views itself as good.
I don’t view any side here as perforce evil. Some people have that belief. I think what we need is healthy political parties, and a spirit of compromise. So, I think we need healthy, fact-based political parties that are engaged in a kind of rough-and-tumble political interaction in our legislatures, and, right now, I see threats, both from the far-left and the far-right, to that kind of political life in our country. And that concerns me.
In terms of the racialization of the health care system - I was really interested in this because it seems like a wicked problem to me. Because you’re citing the research in terms of who’s going to be more susceptible, and you were talking about American hospitals where they got to the point where they’re overwhelmed. They’re in a position of approaching battlefield triage. And so certain people based on their demographic are more susceptible and you use the example of men and women. That women because they have 2 X chromosomes produce more progesterone and estrogen, and this may affect ACE2 levels and be protective.33 The point was that you noted that all the research (e.g., the epidemiological research, critical fatality rates) said that black Americans, Hispanics, people in minority groups were at higher risk of fatality from COVID. I wondered whether you’re at this difficult point of triage, where you make a decision about someone, and it ends up being a racialized decision?
No, you don’t need to perforce take into account race or gender when assigning scarce treatments. And, thankfully, we avoided battlefield triage in this country. To my knowledge, there was no situation in which someone was taken off a ventilator and someone else was put on it. There were cases in Italy where this happened, I think; there was a case of an elderly priest who insisted that he be taken off a ventilator and that the ventilator be given to a younger person (and I think he died),34 when Lombardy collapsed in February of 2020.35 To my knowledge, there were no such cases in the US. But many people were talking about it, and all the protocols I saw said that those decisions would, of course, be made on clinical grounds, that is to say, the likelihood of survival, if resources were scarce, and not on demographic grounds.
And some people were outraged by this possibility of triage, but I thought that outrage partly reflected an inability in the United States to imagine that resources were not limitless. We’re so used to being such a rich country and have deluded ourselves into thinking that there is never any scarcity or allocation.
On the race thing, it’s unclear, and this is a challenging statistical issue. If you take into account the risk of chronic disease and obesity, and income and poverty, after accounting for those features, you will typically find that black people are be no more likely to die than white people.
Actually, I have to go further back. There are two distinct issues; there’s the probability of becoming infected, and then, conditional on being infected, the probability of dying. So, there was no doubt that race played a role in the probability of acquiring the virus. For example, because of differences in occupation, on average, across racial and ethnic groups, white people may have been more able to work at home than black people, on average. Therefore, black people were out and about and more likely to encounter the virus.36,37 That’s the first step.
The second step is, given that you’re infected, are you or are you not more or less likely to die compared to other infected people of a dissimilar ethnic background? There, the question becomes ‘Well, does that relate intrinsically somehow to your race or ethnicity?38 Or does that instead relate to your body size, or your other illnesses and so on?’39,40
This, in turn, goes into an even more deep and complicated question, which is how you see the potentially causal role of race and ethnicity with respect to health. Because, let’s say that, after accounting for whether someone is obese and has diabetes, being black does not affect whether they die from COVID. Someone else might say, ‘Well, no, but that’s how being black causes you to die from COVID!. It is because you’re black that you’re more likely to be mistreated or be in a situation in which you gain weight or whatever else. So, it’s not fair for you to control for that.’ This is a statistical issue and has to do with something called the ‘causal model’ that you have of how race and ethnicity might affect health outcomes.
I’m interested in that because I think, like I said, it’s a wicked problem. I understand models that control for extraneous variables. But the issue would be, and critical race theorists would say, that the higher death rate is evidence of a racialized health care system, because if black people or Hispanic people or immigrants are at higher risk of diabetes, obesity or cardiovascular disease, that is due to an intergenerational issue in terms of oppression or stigma and discrimination. You can see how complicated that is?
Yes, but I think you’ll have to unpack each step of that reasoning. For example, it’s quite possible that, in the coming months, we may find that being a Republican or being a white evangelical is a risk factor for dying from COVID. In fact, we’re already seeing that, because vaccine uptake is so low in those groups. We made a big push to make sure that we did not exclude minorities and poor people in our society, which was correct in my view. We rightly made a push in our society to make sure that we didn’t have allocation of vaccines that preferentially advantaged any particular ethnic or racial or economic group. But some of the risk groups are not just defined in the ways that you might think. Right now, we have a problem where there’s under-vaccination among white evangelical Christians, and Republicans in rural areas.41,42 And my argument would be, we should make an equal push to try to reach those people.
I care about all my fellow citizens; I don’t just care about my fellow citizens who share my political views. I care about all human beings and their lives. And I feel so sad for the people who think that the vaccine is a kind of conspiracy of Bill Gates to put in a nano chip that monitors you; those people are deluded, and we need to reach them, and help them to see that it’s in their interest to be vaccinated. And incidentally, in this case, we all benefit when more people are vaccinated. It’s in our collective interest to vaccinate as many people as possible.
In Apollo’s Arrow you talked about Russian and Chinese bots on social media. You were talking about these governments essentially enflaming racial division in America in relation to the pandemic. But I wonder if it went beyond that, I wonder if a lot of the issues that you see in terms of the culture wars may be also enflamed by this espionage.
We know the Russian government has been engaged in in all kinds of shenanigans in our society, one of which has been to support gun rights, for instance. The Russians have been very eager for there to be widespread availability of weapons. We know that they were connected with the National Rifle Association (NRA).43 Apparently, for quite a long time, they’ve been interested in this because they would want us, of course, to be at each other’s throats in a lethal way. So absolutely, our enemies are acting in a way to subvert our ability to work together.
Now, nation states have been doing this forever. I wish we were not that way. I would love for us to live in peace among ourselves and with everyone in the world. But I’m not surprised that this type of intervention and misinformation occurs. I think I read that the Chinese were engaged in some kind of misinformation campaign about the Pfizer vaccine.44 I think Russia also tried to do that in Africa during the HIV epidemic, to suggest that it was an American weapons program that started HIV. I suspect our own intelligence agencies also do some such things. I don’t like any of this. But I’m clearly not an apologist for the Russian or Chinese efforts. Not at all. I deplore those efforts.
It seems as though when variants emerge in different populations, like the Indian variant, it produces slightly different symptoms. And I wondered whether it’s an interaction between the virus and the lineage of the people that it’s infecting?
I’ve seen no evidence of that whatsoever. For example, with respect to the so-called UK variant, India variant, Brazil variant, South Africa variant, and some variants in the United States that have emerged: to my knowledge, these are not related in any material way to the nature of the populations. I think it’s idiosyncratic. What we also see around the world is that, when it comes to certain types of mutations that are advantageous to the virus, the virus rediscovers them repeatedly. There’s one particular mutation, it’s called the N501Y.45 These are lineages that have a particular mutation in a particular spot.46 This has been repeatedly discovered by the virus because it’s advantageous to the virus to be able to spread more easily. In other words, the virus is exploring the so-called Darwinian fitness landscape and is trying to find how it can be more infectious, how it can get (so to speak) more of itself to be around in subsequent generations. Over here, it stumbles on this mutation, and then, by convergent evolution, somewhere else, it stumbles on the same mutation. So, we’re seeing the virus, again and again, rediscover certain particular mutations that advantage it. I do not think that this relates to the kinds of things that you were alluding to (though there is some evidence of some modest ethnically based variation in natural immunity to the virus, which I discuss in Apollo’s Arrow, too).
As you have more variants, and it’s a fairly stable virus, it’s supposed to become less lethal, isn’t it?
In general, the theory is that, with time, pathogens tend to become less lethal, because, from a Darwinian perspective, they don’t ‘want’ to kill us. From the point of view of the virus, if it infects you, sickens you rapidly, and kills you rapidly, then those variants of the virus that do that don’t have as much chance to spread.
That was the issue with SARS1 and MERS; that it was too fatal.
That was one of their qualities, as I discussed in Apollo’s Arrow, but there were some other interesting biological differences between these various coronaviruses. For example, SARS1 did not have much of a capacity for asymptomatic spread, which was a huge difference with SARS2.47 In the case of SARS1, you could see who was sick and isolate them; but with SARS2 now, people who aren’t manifestly sick are out and about spreading it. In theory, viruses that are too rapidly fatal are bad, like Ebola, for instance. Ebola outbreaks often burn out because it just kills its victims, like a forest fire, just burning intensely, just consuming everything. Whereas, with viruses that are milder, you’re out and about and spreading it. Therefore, the argument is that the mild strains of the virus will come to predominate, and people will be exposed to a mild strain, gain immunity, and then, if they were exposed to a more serious strain, fight it off.
Now, first of all, it’s important to note that this is a theory. Second, in the short term, the virus can do any damn thing it wants. And right now, what we’re seeing, in the short term, is the emergence of variants, such as Delta, that are in fact more lethal, about 30% deadlier, and also more infectious, about 30 or 40% more so.48 There is a higher R-0, going from about 3 to 4. So, yes, these variants are concerning. But others may soon emerge which are milder. And the thing that I would be most focused on is whether we see evidence that any new variants that are emerging fully evade the vaccines. And so far, we have not seen evidence that there are any variants which materially evade the vaccines, especially the mRNA vaccines, at least not in most people.
You must be very surprised by the fast emergence of the vaccines, because in Apollo’s Arrow you’re talking about the Ebola vaccine taking five years.
When I wrote the book, in the spring and summer of 2020, there were already 120 vaccine candidates under evaluation and several phase 3 trials. And I discussed all that in the book. I said that, even if the vaccine were to emerge in the first quarter of 2021, it wouldn’t change the course of the epidemic very much. And I explain why in the book, for reasons having to do with herd immunity and so on. The vaccine miraculously did emerge in the last quarter of 2020, about two months earlier than I sort of expected, but not enough to make a big difference in the overall trajectory of the epidemic, in terms of its timing. In the forecasts contained in the book – namely, that the first phase of the pandemic would last into 2022, and that it would be roughly 2024 before we really put the pandemic behind us – this is what I foresaw. These vaccines are amazing; it’s amazing that we’ve been able to develop them; they are definitely very useful and helpful. But whether they are changing the trajectory of the epidemic in the United States, from what it would have been, is a little unclear, because we’re already have 630,000 deaths as you and I speak, and we’re going to have many more – surely above one million excess deaths due to the COVID19 pandemic in the USA before it is all over.
So, it’s great that we have the vaccines, and on an individual level, it’s very great. At the population level, I don’t know how many lives will have been spared because of the vaccine; it’s probably a very large number, but it’s not like it stopped the epidemic cold or modified its temporal course, in terms of phases of the pandemic, too much.
In Apollo’s Arrow you talked about the rapid development of vaccines. Obviously, they usually go through a long period of development and safety trials. Are there still, for you, any concern about not having that longitudinal data in terms of safety?
Not really, no. I think about the annual influenza vaccines that we release without randomized controlled trials (RCT) – which is done under a certain provision where we know enough about the biology that we’re not worried that each season’s influenza vaccines did not have a full scale, randomized controlled trial. And with respect to the COVID19 vaccines, we did do phase 3 RCTs. But, perhaps more important, we now know, after the administration of the vaccine to hundreds of millions of people, that they’re exceedingly safe.
What we don’t know is whether, after five or ten years, the vaccines would still be seen as so safe. But there’s no way to know that at all, except to wait five or ten years. But, in the meantime, we can rely on basic biology and be confident about safety over the long-term. So, we have no reason to suspect that they would cause problems, we have seen no evidence of material risks in the short term. Therefore, I think one’s risk of death from COVID is much higher than the possible risk of death from some unknown thing that could occur over a very long-time horizon.
So, I think these vaccines are very safe. And I use the development of the vaccines, the fact that we humans banded together to make vaccines, as an illustration of our goodness in the book. We human beings have banded together to create this knowledge over decades. And then, acutely over just a few months, thousands of people volunteered for trials, thousands of scientists and doctors from countries all over the world shared information. And I see much evidence that human beings have been acting in keeping with our good nature that we discussed earlier, in relation to my work in Blueprint, where we’ve cooperated. We have been teaching and learning from each other. Furthermore, ironically, in order to confront the pandemic, we banded together to live apart.
As you may know about me, I’m optimistic in my personality, and I’m also optimistic about human beings. And so, if you’ll let me, I’ll take the liberty to quote from Albert Camus The Plague. He writes this book in the 1940s and sets it then in a town in North Africa called Oran that is afflicted by a plague. We think that he had based this on a cholera outbreak in similar towns 100 years earlier, or on the bubonic plague in prior centuries (the book mentions what are called ‘rat falls’ which are typical of bubonic plague). And one of the protagonists in the book is a man by the name of Dr. Rieux. And this is a line from the book that stays with me, because I think that this applies very much to our current predicament, in my view:
Dr. Rieux, resolved to compile this chronicle, so that some memorial of the injustice and outrage done them might endure. And to state quite simply, what we learn in time of pestilence, that there are more things to admire in men and women than to despise.
And that’s very much how I see the world: there are more things to admire in us than to despise.
1. Christakis NA. Apollo’s Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live. Hachette UK; 2020.
2. Friedersdorf C. The Perils of Writing a Provocative Email at Yale. The Atlantic. Published May 26, 2016. Accessed January 16, 2022. https://www. theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/05/the-peril-of-writing-a-provocative-email-at-yale/484418/
3. Levenson M. A Psychiatrist Invited to Yale Spoke of Fantasies of Shooting White People. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/06/ nyregion/yale-psychiatrist-aruna-khilanani.html. Published June 6, 2021. Accessed January 16, 2022.
4. Christakis NA. Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society. Hachette UK; 2019.
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9. Beaumont P. Did Covid come from a Wuhan lab? What we know so far. The Guardian. https:// www.theguardian.com / world / 2021 / may / 27/did-covid-come-from-a-wuhan-lab-what-we-know-so-far. Published May 27, 2021. Accessed January 16, 2022.
10. Qiu J. How China’s Bat Woman Hunted Down Viruses from SARS to the New Coronaviruses. Scientific American. doi: 10.1038/scientificamerican06 20-24
11. Andersen KG, Rambaut A, Lipkin WI, Holmes EC, Garry RF. The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2. Nat Med. 2020;26(4):450-452. doi:10.1038/s41591-020-0820-9
12. Seyran M, Pizzol D, Adadi P, et al. Questions concerning the proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2. J Med Virol. 2021;93(3):1204-1206. doi:10.1002/jmv.2 6478
13. The data come from this paper: Jia JS, Lu X, Yuan Y, Xu G, Jia J, Christakis NA. Population flow drives spatio-temporal distribution of COVID-19 in China. Nature. 2020;582(7812):389-394. doi:10.1038/s41586-020-2284-y The analysis of patient 0 is reported in the afterword to the paperback version of Apollo’s Arrow.
14. ‎Bret Weinstein | DarkHorse Podcast: Bret Weinstein and Yuri Deigin: Did Covid-19 leak From a Lab? on Apple Podcasts. Apple Podcasts. Accessed January 16, 2022. https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/bret-weinstein-and-yuri-deigin-did-covid-19-leak-from-a-lab/id1471581521?i=1000477267706
15. Jr DGM. White House to Cut Funding for Risky Biological Study. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/18/us/white-house-to-cut-funding-for-risky-biological-study.html. Published October 18, 2014. Accessed January 16, 2022.
16. Fauci AS. Research on Highly Pathogenic H5N1 Influenza Virus: The Way Forward. mBio. 2012;3(5). doi:10.1128/mBio.00359-12
17. Markson S. Anthony Fauci backed virus experiments ‘despite pandemic risk.’ The Australian. https://www.theaustralian.com.au/world/anthony-fauci -backed-virus-experiments-despite-pandemic-risk/news-story/3c604681cfcb feda88bac25e372a1b8a. Published May 28, 2021. Accessed January 16, 2022.
18. Subbaraman N. ‘Heinous!’: Coronavirus researcher shut down for Wuhan-lab link slams new funding restrictions. Nature. Published online August 21, 2020. doi:10.1038/d41586-020-02473-4
19. Burki T. Ban on gain-of-function studies ends. Lancet Infect Dis. 2018;18(2):148-149. doi:10.1016/S1473-3099(18)30006-9
20. The Cambridge Working Group. Accessed January 16, 2022. http://www. cambridgeworkinggroup.org/
21. Cyranoski D. Inside the Chinese lab poised to study world’s most dangerous pathogens. Nature. 2017;542(7642):399-400. doi:10.1038/nature.2017.214 87
22. C-SPAN. Complete Exchange between Sen. Rand Paul and Dr. Anthony Fauci.; 2021. Accessed January 16, 2022. https://www.youtube.com/watch ?v=JBqXYpO1QpE
23. Dance A. The shifting sands of ‘gain-of-function’ research. Nature. 2021;598(7882):554-557. doi:10.1038/d41586-021-02903-x
24. News ABC. Intelligence report warned of coronavirus crisis as early as November: Sources. ABC News. Accessed January 16, 2022. https:// abcnews.go.com / Politics / intelligence-report-warned-coronavirus-crisis-early-november-sources/story?id=70031273
25. All of the times President Trump said Covid-19 will disappear. Accessed December 30, 2021. https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2020/10/politics/ covid-disappearing-trump-comment-tracker/
26. Coronavirus: Outcry after Trump suggests injecting disinfectant as treatment. BBC News. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52407177. Published April 24, 2020. Accessed January 16, 2022.
27. Nicholas A. Christakis. Essay by @JuliaLMarcus & @gregggonsalves re “hypocrisy” re COVID19 & protests is a bit loose in couple of spots, IMHO, but I think it’s thoughtful. I agree with most of it. But a key issue is that protesters impose risks on others, not just themselves. https://theatlantic. com/ideas/archive/2020/06/public-health-experts-are-not-hypocrites/612853 /45/. @NAChristakis. Published June 12, 2020. Accessed January 17, 2022. https://twitter.com/NAChristakis/status/1271556624164012036
28. Feltham EM, Forastiere L, Alexander M, Christakis NA. No increase in COVID-19 mortality after the 2020 primary elections in the USA. ArXiv201002896 Stat. Published online October 8, 2020. Accessed January 16, 2022. http://arxiv.org/abs/2010.02896
29. CNN MS. Over 1,000 health professionals sign a letter saying, Don’t shut down protests using coronavirus concerns as an excuse. CNN. Accessed January 17, 2022. https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/05/health/health-care-open-letter-protests-coronavirus-trnd/index.html
30. Capitol riots timeline: What happened on 6 Jan one year ago? BBC News. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-56004916. Published January 6, 2022. Accessed January 18, 2022.
31. NW 1615 L. St, Washington S 800, inquiries D 20036 U 419 4300 | main202 419 4349 | fax202 419 4372 | media. How COVID-19 Has Strengthened Religious Faith. Pew Research Center’s Religion & Public Life Project. Published January 27, 2021. Accessed January 23, 2022. https://www.pew forum.org / 2021 / 01 / 27/more-americans-than-people-in-other-advanced-economies-say-covid-19-has-strengthened-religious-faith/
32. Medical school applicants and enrollments hit record highs; underrepresented minorities lead the surge. AAMC. Accessed January 17, 2022. https://www. aamc.org / news-insights / medical-school-applicants-and-enrollments-hit-record-highs-underrepresented-minorities-lead-surge
33. Newson L, Manyonda I, Lewis R, Preissner R, Preissner S, Seeland U. Sensitive to Infection but Strong in Defense—Female Sex and the Power of Oestradiol in the COVID-19 Pandemic. Front Glob Womens Health. 2021;2:651752. doi:10.3389/fgwh.2021.651752
34. ‘Fake news’ aside, friend says priest dead of coronavirus was still a ‘special person.’ Crux. Accessed January 17, 2022. https://cruxnow.com/covid-19/2020/03/fake-news-aside-friend-says-priest-dead-of-coronavirus-was-still-a-special-person
35. Cereda D, Manica M, Tirani M, et al. The early phase of the COVID-19 epidemic in Lombardy, Italy. Epidemics. 2021;37:100528. doi:10.1016/j. epidem.2021.100528
36. Goldman N, Pebley AR, Lee K, Andrasfay T, Pratt B. Racial and ethnic differentials in COVID-19-related job exposures by occupational standing in the US. PLOS ONE. 2021;16(9):e0256085. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.025 6085
37. Asfaw A. Racial Disparity in Potential Occupational Exposure to COVID-19. J Racial Ethn Health Disparities. Published online August 5, 2021. doi:10.1007/s40615-021-01110-8
38. CDC. Cases, Data, and Surveillance. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Published February 11, 2020. Accessed January 17, 2022. https:// www.cdc.gov / coronavirus / 2019-ncov/covid-data/investigations-discovery /hospitalization-death-by-race-ethnicity.html
39. Gupta R, Agrawal R, Bukhari Z, et al. Higher comorbidities and early death in hospitalized African-American patients with Covid-19. BMC Infect Dis. 2021;21(1):78. doi:10.1186/s12879-021-05782-9
40. Yancy CW. COVID-19 and African Americans. JAMA. 2020;323(19):1891-1892. doi:10.1001/jama.2020.6548
41. Bokemper SE, Gerber AS, Omer SB, Huber GA. Persuading US White evangelicals to vaccinate for COVID-19: Testing message effectiveness in fall 2020 and spring 2021. Proc Natl Acad Sci. 2021;118(49). doi:10.1073/ pnas.2114762118
42. The Red/Blue Divide in COVID-19 Vaccination Rates. KFF. Published September 14, 2021. Accessed January 17, 2022. https://www.kff.org/policy-watch/the-red-blue-divide-in-covid-19-vaccination-rates/
43. Stone P. NRA in crisis: how the gun group became ensnared in the Russia inquiry. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/mar/ 01/nra-russia-investigations-gun-lobby. Published March 1, 2019. Accessed January 17, 2022.
44. Russia, China sow disinformation to undermine trust in Western vaccines: EU | Reuters. Accessed January 17, 2022. https://www.reuters.com/world/ china/ russia - china -sow-disinformation-undermine-trust-western-vaccines-eu-report-says-2021-04-28/
45. Huang H, Zhu Y, Niu Z, Zhou L, Sun Q. SARS-CoV-2 N501Y variants of concern and their potential transmission by mouse. Cell Death Differ. 2021;28(10):2840-2842. doi:10.1038/s41418-021-00846-4
46. Lu L, Chu AWH, Zhang RR, et al. The impact of spike N501Y mutation on neutralizing activity and RBD binding of SARS-CoV-2 convalescent serum. EBioMedicine. 2021;71. doi:10.1016/j.ebiom.2021.103544
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48. Here’s what we know about Delta now, after months spent fighting it. ABC News. https:// www.abc.net.au / news / 2021-09-29/covid-delta-variant-what-the-science-says/100497804. Published September 28, 2021. Accessed January 17, 2022.
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~
Nicholas A. Christakis, MD, PhD, MPH, is the Sterling Professor of Social and Natural Science at Yale University. His work is in the fields of network science, biosocial science, and behavior genetics. He directs the Human Nature Lab and is the Co-Director of the Yale Institute for Network Science. He was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2006; the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2010; and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2017.
Postmodernism and the Failure of Moral Triage
References
Based on an interview with Peter Boghossian
Mark Halloran: I wanted to start off with the Grievance Studies Affair and discuss some of the criticisms. And I think that in discussing the criticisms, I feel like we can talk about some of the ideas that don’t really get explored. And I’d be interested to see what you think the heart of the problem is.
Peter Boghossian: This is the way I think about it: The Grievance Studies Affair exposed the problem, and Cynical Theories explains the problem. So, it was point to the problem, corrupt scholarship,1 explain the problem, and now each of us are doing something different. Helen is engaging with people who have been damaged by woke ideology. James Lindsay is more on the front lines, fighting – and he has a nonprofit, New Discourses.2 I’m fully immersed in the culture war in an attempt to change the moral mind.
I wanted to talk about the criticisms. The first one: journals with higher impact factors were more likely to reject the papers, and secondly the chances were better if the manuscripts were allegedly based on empirical data.3 They’re two of the most significant ones. The idea, I think, is that there is an issue with peer review across academia. So, there’s a replication crisis in psychology and a similar crisis also occurs within biological sciences. So, I wonder how you respond to that?
I think Helen Pluckrose said it best, if you have rats in your house, and
you’re saying, ‘I have a problem, there’s rats in my house,’ and someone else comes along and says, ‘Well, wait a second, the neighbor’s house has cockroaches,’ that’s totally irrelevant to the fact that you have rats in your house. So, there is a problem in these disciplines. People have known that there’s been a problem in these disciplines for a long time. And to make the criticism that ‘Well, all disciplines have problems so why should we attempt to either intrude upon the academic freedom or do anything about our problem when other people have problems as well?’ Okay, other people have problems, fine. There’s a replication crisis in psychology. Perhaps how you deal with that problem tells you more about whether or not the discipline is based in reality or not, and whether there are actual corrective mechanisms for it.
I think there’s a deeper problem in relation to this. Because there’s often the quotation that comes up: ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.’
That’s from Audry Lorde’s 1984 piece. I think that’s the best way to explain the problem to people.
So, if you reject the ideas of science, and you say that these ideas are simply the ideas of white males and therefore they’re problematic, then you have to reject all the ideas that come from that. You have to reject falsification and you have to reject the idea of avoiding tautologies. How do you conduct research?
One of the things that folks want to do, it’s called Research Justice, is to forward certain citations. So, Research Justice involves the forwarding of the citations of non-white men. Black trans females, for example, would be forwarded, whereas white male citations would not. And the problem with that? Or do I actually have to explain that that’s the most insane, fucking deranged idea? But among the problems with that, are that you cut off knowledge and you cut off avenues of potential research; medical research, telecommunications, transportation, etc. It’s one of the most dangerous and pernicious ideas we have now: that your immutable characteristics limit or enable you to have access to the truth. And that idea is a social, cognitive and epistemological toxin. Because once you say that, then all of society almost necessarily collapses - you have no common bond. It’s like when folks resort to their lived experience. This has a long pedigree in the literature, but it’s come up now quite a bit. I can’t speak for Australia, but in the US, you hear so many college students say ‘In my lived experience...’ Well, who gives a fuck about your lived experience? I want to know what the data is. What’s the evidence? If there’s a conflict between one’s lived experience and the data, you have to defer to the data.
I’d read about postmodernism and social constructionism back in my undergraduate degree, and so I started to read Foucault and I found one place where we really agreed, which is where he says that the methods of the natural sciences such as physics, biology, and chemistry, translate imperfectly to disciplines like the humanities, sociology, and psychology. And so, what has happened with these academic disciplines is they’ve hothouse themselves, they’ve argued amongst themselves with these ideas, in a little bit like what happened to Freudian psychoanalysis. What they were talking about mostly was literature and philosophical ideas that had some truth. But it wasn’t science. Once you uncouple yourself from empiricism, you can start to wander off in multiple directions. So, you can do Gender Studies and call it literature or some type of ethics or philosophy. But I don’t think you can call it research.
They call it action research, which is a fancy way of saying that this doesn’t universalize; it’s not generalizable, it’s hyper-localized. But I think that the key in understanding these disciplines is that they promote moral ideas, and that it’s what Sokal calls fashionable nonsense.4 They are morally fashionable ideas. And if you want to publish a paper in a journal that goes against the zeitgeist, it’s almost impossible. And so, what we have is, and this is funny that this is actually a postmodern notion in and of itself, like a reality tunnel; we have a funneling of domains of thought that are untethered to reality. They’re kind of floating out there, but they’re extremely well layered upon themselves. When I was in the New Atheist movement, I read texts by N.T. Wright. It’s an astonishing exegesis of the Bible and the resurrection of Jesus. But it’s all built upon other people who have these experiences, and it’s layers of self-reinforcing madness. It’s just like an architectonic structure of mass delusion.5
So, what we have in these fields is morally fashionable nonsense. It’s idea laundering.6 And they’re not only informing public policies. When you look at society and the madness we see now, it’s because entire generations of people; probably a full generation and a half, depending on how you want to parse it, have been taught by ideologues. They’ve been taught that certain moral impulses these ideologues have are true. They’re tested on articles and journal materials, and then they get out of college and I think Jordan Peterson has said, five to seven years later, then not only do they go in the workplace, but they ascend in managerial capacity and administrative duty. And the consequence of that is they then institutionalize what they’ve been taught in schools because they think it’s true, but it’s not true. It’s completely untethered to reality.
When you’ve talked about this, you’ve talked about it developing from critical theory and postmodernism. The thing that stood out for me from a philosophical perspective was that postmodernism embeds its causal reality within language and culture.
That’s one of the reasons why you see—primarily on the left—the idea that if you change the institutions you can change the outcomes. It’s very structuralist, you see that in Saussure. It’s complicated, because there are many variables that go into play. But one of those is with this new phenomenon now. And you mentioned that in the Grievance Studies content, you see a kind of biological denialism. Eric Weinstein posed a fantastic question: ‘When there’s a conflict between gender studies and biology on which side do you err?’ So that’s really a litmus test for this whole thing. When you have a kind of biological denialism, what you have to have instead is a manufactured importance of language, and the institutions that govern the structure of society. For example, it’s the opposite of Tim Urban’s idea of an Idea Lab; there’s a concerted effort to control speech. And the idea is that if you can control speech, then you can help control outcomes. This is a sophisticated but hollow notion.
If you can’t root something in biology, or you can’t root it in theology, then what are you rooting it in? Well, you can’t root it in anything because that’s postmodernism, right? It’s an incredulity toward meta-narratives. It’s a skepticism of a God’s eye view. So, what are you rooting it in? Well, you’re rooting it in power-knowledge, as Foucault calls it, and you’re rooting it in the language people use. And they’ve been incredibly successful with the terms they’ve used: diversity, equity, inclusion, anti-racism. These words simply don’t mean what people think they mean. They’ve been changed to manufacture different outcomes.
When I first encountered the idea, it took me a lot of thinking to get out of the solipsism of language. That the only reason that you refer to an object as the thing that it is, is because that’s what your culture and your language has taught you. But of course, if you moved across time into a different episteme or different zeitgeist, it would be completely unfettered, and so that it’s all utterly relative.
That’s interesting because when I read Feyerabend Farewell to Reason. It’s a play on words: ‘Farewell, fare well to reason.’ French postmodernists tell me these ideas translate better in the French, I don’t read French so I’ll take their word for it. But there is unquestionably some truth in the consequences of having captured the meanings of words. I’m very interested in the practical aspect of how we solve this problem. That’s one of the things that FAIR (Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism)7 is doing. It’s headed by Bion Bartning, and I’m a founder and currently on the board of advisors. Bion is trying to reclaim certain terms. I don’t know if it’s going to work, but I’m incredibly sympathetic to that project. He wants to reclaim anti-racism, which is currently a ubiquitous term, but I will say that there was a lot of truth to the idea that if you can control - this is kind of Orwellian in a sense - if you can control the language, you can control people’s cognitions. And if you can control certain words which have a positive valence and people want to be associated with those words for a whole host of reasons but personal entity is chief among them, you can control outcomes.
I had a friend who is a teacher at a very expensive private school tell me that a student said to him that genitalia is a social construct. And I think it is a social construct - in the same way that cyclones are.
Right. And that’s one of the reasons that we did The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct.8 If you think in terms of everything being a social construct, then where does that leave you? Well, that leads to the position of the Brazilian educator, Paul Freire who stated that the purpose of education is to develop a critical consciousness, or conscientização, and to eliminate oppression. And when you think in those terms, and there’s no grounding again, there’s no grand explanatory mechanism like science or Christianity, then it becomes easy to understand why using words and defining words in certain ways is essential to navigating social power hierarchies.
Foucault has been acknowledged as having really taken the philosophical idea of power, and extending it: to the institutional, political, personal, diffuse, structured, non-structured. It’s everywhere, it’s in the criminal justice system, it’s in every personal interaction.
He’s saying that power differential; it’s not that there is no objective truth, which is a common mistake, it’s just that it’s all mediated, and you can’t really get there to external reality because you use language. And then you’re dealing in a kind of anti-Socratic idea.9 When you wed your personal identity, particularly in terms of identity politics, to your ability to access the truth, not only is that limiting, but it makes any kind of liberation, particularly social liberation, impossible. I would argue that they’ve got it dead wrong. I don’t believe this should be the purpose of education. I think the purpose of education should be orientated toward the truth.10 Jonathan Haidt talks about the telos of the educational institution. And briefly, institutions have changed their mission from truth seeking enterprises because of applied postmodernism and postmodernism, to instruments of social change in that they basically teach people how to recognise these individual power structures and power differentials and then disrupt them.
Henry Giroux writes about that again, building off the work of Paulo Freire. These are notions now that you see institutionalised. Not only institutionalised, actually, I’m going to go beyond that. You see them as the North Star of almost every college and university in United States right now. This is within a very short period time - we’re talking literally five years. The president of Portland State just sent out an email saying, and he said it twice: ‘Racial justice is his highest priority.’ Let’s linger on that for a second. His highest priority. Not teaching excellence, not financial solvency. The university has gone bankrupt. They’re talking about laying people off. And he’s still sending emails and making pronouncements about racial justice being the highest priority. It’s astonishing.
That’s the power of language, though, isn’t it? This is the problem I think you face, is that racial justice sounds like a good thing?
Well, it is a good thing. Racial justice. It’s that you’d have to modify the word justice with anything, right? Why would you have to modify it with anything?
You mean there is just justice? Well, there are different elements of justice. I would say that there’s the lowercase social justice, there’s natural justice…
That’s a more philosophical conversation. Broadly, Socrates would say that justice is anything that participates in the good. I love The Republic, it is one of my favorite, if not my favorite book of all time, but that topic, which Dan Dennett calls the topic of abiding significance is really wrestling with what justice means.11 And it’s an anathema to even think in those terms, to talk about the immutable trait someone has and say; ‘Well, you’re a man, you can’t have access to that.’ What are you talking about?
I feel like often the simple kind of narrative that comes up about this, is that all of the ideas of science, and even philosophical ideas like individualism and universality, come from the Enlightenment. And then when this is critiqued by postmodernists, or Marxist feminists, they say, ‘It’s white male ideas.’ However, all of those values can be found in Islamic culture during the Arabic transmission, it can be found in African philosophy etc.
Well, of course, it’s even more of a problem; it’s a derangement syndrome. Let’s say that we’re not going to put a ridiculous restriction on this conversation, and then someone says something ridiculous, and we want to engage it, to borrow a phrase from Christians ‘in good faith.’ Okay, what’s the problem with that? It all came from white guys. So what? No, I mean, I actually am asking a sincere question. So why is that a problem?
I don’t think it’s necessarily a problem. But if you allow that to be problematized in terms of the history and the history is wrong ...
First of all, that’s the whole idea; it is to problematize everything and find grievances in everything. But that assumes that their identity was responsible for falsification, as opposed to falsification being a fundamental guiding principle of scientific inquiry. So, one would have to make an argument why that would be the case, and there’s nothing you could do, because there’s no reasonable argument that you could make. You’re not talking about the culture or the philosophy they develop. You’re talking about inventing and discovering things. It’s not about belonging to a period like the Enlightenment - it doesn’t belong to white guys. I did an event with Faisal Saeed Al Mutar, at Portland State University titled ‘Are Western Values Worth Defending?’12. And it’s an incredibly important concept. And if you watch that video, it’s crystal clear that everybody has access to Enlightenment values and the tools and the fruits of the scientific method.
I thought that where we would have disagreement is in relation to the idea that gets spoken about a lot now, which is speech is violence. You have said, ‘Well, speech is violence is a category error.’ And I’m not sure I think that’s true. I think speech can be violent.
I think I said it’s a category mistake, that’s a term that comes from the philosopher Gilbert Ryle. It confuses categories, like three is not in the tactile field. So, Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff wrote a wonderful piece in The Atlantic about it, and they actually perfectly captured my views.13 Why do you think speech is violence?
If I make a threat to kill, and the other person believed it, and I never acted upon that, that’s not to say the other person wasn’t traumatized by that threat. So, I think the problem is what people would call concept creep, or what I would call extrapolation.
So microaggressions, the claim could be, are a kind of speech violence. So it goes: ‘I’m going to punch you in the face you four-eyed bastard’ to ‘I hate you,’ to ‘We should be colorblind.’ The threshold for violence is continuously lowered. But in every case, the answer is always more resilience. I guess in the highest case, the answer is a gun and Brazilian jujitsu! But barring that, the answer is always ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me.’ I just read a tweet from Paul Graham about that the other day, and it would seem to me that it’s inevitable if there’s a homeostasis, if there’s a balance, and you take care of the big things, and you always have to be offended, or outraged at something, then the threshold is continually lowered and so you’re always outraged about smaller and smaller things; the minutiae of life. I think that could very well be a universal human constant.
So, resilience has to be a value. Again, back to ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me.’ Think about this: when you say ‘Sticks and stones will break my bones,’ you’re saying that physical violence can get me for sure. You can smash my head with a rock, but names will never hurt me. So, it’s a value you’re taking upon yourself, as opposed to ‘I’m offended’ when you want someone else to stop. You are ceding power to everybody around you with that switch from the old mantra that we grew up with, sticks and stones, to the new, ‘I’m offended, that’s a microaggression.’ You’re actually making yourself more brittle and more fragile. As my friend Douglas Murray says: ‘Part of the problem is that there are not enough Nazis, so we have to invent them.’ Everybody’s a Nazi if they say something I don’t like. How many Nazis do you think are actually running around? I mean, actual Nazis? I don’t think there are any left. My mentor was interred at Buchenwald, and he died at 98 years old about five years ago. World War II ended in 1945. I think they use Nazi to mean very bad person, but how many actual skinheads and neo-Nazis do we have running around? So, we need to invent more Nazis. And then the most Orwellian thing of all, is when you profess to be an anti-fascist, and you act exactly like a fascist.
This is sort of a personal question, but you live in Portland. And it seems as though this is the epicenter for woke ideology. What’s happened in Portland that this has really taken hold? And what are your experiences? Because you’ve obviously decided to come out against this, because you’ve recognized that it’s stifling.
It’s totally worse than stifling. So why Portland? That’s a very complicated question. I think it has to do with intellectual homogeneity. It’s really a political monoculture here. It has to do with the university continuously cranking out utter madness and stamping it with an academic imprimatur. And they have been for years and all of the University of Oregon system as well, it’s beholden to some pretty vicious ideologies. It was a fertile ground for breeding bad ideas. And when you cull intellectual diversity out of the mix, the problem becomes more extreme, because the more deranged your ideas, the more normative they become. Many if not most faculty at Portland State do not inform students of the other side of an argument, because it’s racist, or homophobic, or however they’ve construed it. As just one example, take Martha Nussbaum’s criticism of Judith Butler.14 If something goes against the narrative, it’s not taught, even if the counterview is espoused by a woman and one of the world’s leading philosophers, like Nussbaum.
Again, along with the theme of this conversation, one becomes more brittle and more fragile, instead of developing the cognitive and emotional capacity to deal with arguments they don’t like and the intellectual capacity to argue against those ideas. And there are some monstrously bad ideas floating around. And the most important thing is that we have to retain our ability to call them out. And once we lose that, we’ve lost everything.
There’s the kernel of truth inside each idea that you’ve talked about. For instance, if you take an idea, like victim blaming, this has come from a time when women could be blamed for their own sexual assault.
Still today, if you look at India, Pakistan, South Africa…
And the same thing can be said with cultural appropriation, you can simply see that as cultural theft. So, I’m taking indigenous art from indigenous people and not paying them and not recognizing them for it.
That’s not what people mean when they use the term cultural appropriation.
No, but that is probably where it started and if the idea isn’t clear then it creeps.
Or people just problematize things and their taught to find grievances in everything. There’s a place here in Portland where white business owners had a taco stand, and then some people went crazy, because the owners culturally appropriated Mexican food. That’s a derangement.
How would you have fusion in culture?
How do you have anything? You literally couldn’t exist! You couldn’t speak English, because that’s an appropriation, you couldn’t wear clothes, because you’ve appropriated that from another time. You couldn’t cut your hair, you couldn’t fill your cavities; there’s literally nothing you could do. You couldn’t even be in a mud hut, because mud huts are appropriated! So, there’s literally nothing you could do, you would be dead, the whole society would be extinguished.
If you took Foucault and the idea of power and a cultural narrative, for instance British colonial ideas around the criminalization of homosexuality. So, if he says, ‘Well, you’ve got to really be a little bit suspicious about a culture that criminalizes homosexuality and what’s considered a cultural norm.’
So, even that is, to borrow a turn of phrase, ‘problematic.’ I was just reading about the laws against homosexuality, I don’t know if you want to call it the Palestinian territories, Gaza maybe is the most neutral, and these laws are draconian. And when was the last time you heard any of the wokester’s criticize that? Just a few years ago, and we know this, not only was this not a secret, people were screaming out about it from the rooftops. And we have unequivocal testimony of Yazidi women who had been sold by Islamic State; literal, actual physical slaves - actual sexual slaves.15 We know that - that’s a fact. Did you see a single protest on a college campus about the female sexual slavery of the Yazidis? No, not one. Zero. Did you even hear of one person carrying a sign: ‘Free the Yazidis’? No. So the question is, why?
Isn’t the narrative of postcolonial studies basically: ‘If ISIS or Taliban soldiers are enslaving women, that’s only because the West created it?’
It’s just intellectually exhausting to me to try to make a better argument for the unhinged ideas of people who are uneducated and uninformed. I would circumvent all of that and say it’s a grotesque failure to morally triage. What would be the gold standards of bad? The gold standard of bad would have to be genocide. One right down from that, but not very far down, would be institutionalized slavery. And so, you can formulate a kind of a hierarchy: not paying your parking ticket is low down, stepping on an ant that runs across your floor, maybe that’s not even an issue? Maybe if you’re a Jain it is. And so, if you have a hierarchy, the failure to criticize the institutionalized slavery of Yazidi women while at the same time screaming at the top of your lungs about gender disparities in conferences is a failure to morally triage. It’s also a failure to be honest about the nature of the problem.
The problem here is that some of the ideas have infiltrated from people like the Foucault, Gayle Reubin or Judith Butler. I don’t really know how many gay, bisexual or trans people would actually know where these ideas come from?
It’s not like with queer theory, that there’s a small group of activists, and then they talk among themselves. It’s that there’s been a cultural shift. And these ideas which weren’t heard of are normative now. And the Overton window has shifted.16 So, the whole idea about how we think about these things has changed, and many of those ways are very, very good. But some are certainly not good.
Homosexuality was first decriminalized in the United States in the 1960s. However, up until 2003, there were still some American states, Texas was one, where homosexuality was still criminalized. And so, you can see that these ideologies might be driven by anger about real injustice.
The idea is, of course, there have been injustices historically, and some of those injustices persist. And those injustices have to be dealt with, and they have to be dealt with honestly. If you believe that moral values are rationally drivable, then certain things follow from that; certain pedagogical methods,17 certain dialectical methods ... You want conversation,18 you want debate, you want to talk - let the best ideas win, sunlight is the best disinfectant, etc. But if you don’t believe that, you believe that these ideas are artefacts of culture, or you believe that they are historical accidents, and then certain methods also follow on from that as well. And those tend to be more totalitarian, more speech restrictive, etc. I think that’s one of the things you see happening now is that you see a denigration of and a turning away from reason. So certain things follow from that with necessity. And that gets back to the idea that speech is violence. If you say ‘You feel unsafe,’ someone said something, and then everybody then has to shut up. Another word for that is an inclusive space - you’ve created an inclusive space. And the reason that the space was inclusive is because an inclusive space is a welcoming space. And the only way you can create a welcoming space is when people don’t feel offended. And the only way you can make sure that people aren’t offended is if you restrict speech. So, an inclusive space restricts speech.
I wanted to talk about where the ideas go wrong. For instance, Foucault’s idea around questioning the criminalization of homosexuality. Good idea. But then if you extrapolate that and you say: ‘If a society is oppressive, and they’ve criminalized homosexuality, they’ve also criminalized pedophilia. So is pedophilia just another oppressed identity?’
That gets back to the rationally derived value again, and so there are rules you can use to rationally ascertain that pedophilia is bad - you can rationally derive that. There are a metrics that you can operationalize in psychology, for example. But even beyond that, I think that there’s another key thing that may be worth exploring, which is whether or not a lot of this ideology and the manifestations of the ideology come because people do not at their core believe in the emancipatory power of human reason. The Enlightenment values; live by our own lights, human flourishing, the idea that through reason and science we can figure things out, we don’t need God figures, we can construct systems outside of ourselves that bring about our flourishing. Many of the postmodernists would call that a narrative. It’s not a narrative. It’s not merely a story we tell ourselves. There’s something liberating and powerful about human reason; it is unprecedented in its ability to improve our lives in demonstrably meaningful ways.
I suppose that there are norms that are developed that are good norms, because you can tell from consequences.
That’s called instrumental rationality, when you use rationality as an instrument to achieve some end. And I don’t think anybody is at the point of denying consequences. I think that what they think is that they weigh the consequences of different actions and different institutions differently - different structural advantages is a term you’ll hear frequently.
If you go back to postmodernism, and the idea that things are embedded in language. So, I can create two narratives which are: I step off the Empire State Building, and I’ll plummet to my death, or I’ll step off the Empire State Building and I’ll fly. So, they’re both narratives developed through language, but they have very different consequences.
In that case, that’s such an extreme example. People who make those arguments wouldn’t make that claim because one narrative is demonstrably false. And the idea behind this project is that there’s a kind of egalitarianism of narratives. Foucault talks about power-knowledge, and that’s why in Fat Studies for example, they don’t like the word obesity as they think it’s a medical narrative. They prefer the word fat. So, there are these competing narratives, but they would never use a narrative like that, in which to borrow a turn of phrase from the philosopher Walter Kaufmann, every individual rational agent would not agree that the idea behind the narratives are all equally true.
Often narratives are more complex, but they still lead to different consequences. Example: Lysenko’s genetics, which ends up killing millions of people because it’s based on Stalinist ideology. They crushed Mendelian genetics, which is the true narrative. So, you can develop truth and objective reality through speech, which undermines the whole project.
Yes. In those cases, the question is again: how are you making the judgement that one of those is true? How you adjudicating that? And you need some ultimate arbiter adjudicating - in that case it would be science. Which is again, a grand narrative, which is a contradiction, which is what Habermas’s critique of Derrida and Foucault was; it’s a performative contradiction. It just doesn’t hold up. I said to one of my best friends, Matt Thornton,22 ‘You know this is just really sophisticated nonsense.’ And he said, ‘No, it’s not. There’s nothing sophisticated about it.’ And the more I thought about that, the more profound that was to me. There’s just nothing sophisticated about this. It’s not even sophistry. It’s just silly.
I wonder whether identity politics, tribalism, is sort of the norm that people can revert back to easily? Like it’s evolutionary.
You are not the first person who has said that - that idea has been floating around for a while. It has a long pedigree. Before it was easy to determine who was part of your tribe because you could see people on the basis of some characteristic like skin color. My mentor grew up in Nazi Germany, he was interred at Buchenwald, and he had black curly hair, and he would straighten it. This was during Kristallnacht. But the idea is, before, in tribalism, you could see differences with people. But now it’s more in terms of people’s ideological beliefs. In fact, I’m working with two guys right now, two people in Portland, black Jews, and I would say we’re in identical moral tribes. We have identical causes, and yet I’m not black, and I’m not Jewish. Those traditional markers in this age are no longer there.
There’s a quote by Crenshaw that for African Americans, other people of color, gays, lesbians… Identity politics has been a source of strength, community and intellectual development. You’d probably disagree with that?
I don’t disagree with that. I’m sure that that’s true. There’s a lot of community support, particularly if one is marginalized, and getting together with other people who are marginalized, and if nothing else, commiserating about what bastards your oppressors are. There’s a lot of truth to that. That doesn’t mean it should be an ought, right? We need to create conditions so that people don’t have to do that.
Does social justice activism just mean missionary now?
I don’t know. I think there is a kind of a zealous, somewhat of a proselytizing nature in activism. That’s what makes it activism. And I also think that there’s a certainty embedded in the whole concept of activism. The question is: is this certainty warranted by the evidence? Epistemology must come before anything else. And that should always be one’s first priority. And if we can figure out that then we can figure out if one’s activism is justified.
I’ve read that the only two disciplines that took up postmodernism and social constructionism in the early 80s, were education and social psychology. It was the only places it took root in the university.
One of the reasons we’re in this catastrophe right now is because of colleges of education, and to have this conversation without mentioning colleges of education, you’re doing your readers a disservice. Because the primary way that this propagates is through college of education. Let’s talk about that very briefly. To get a teaching certificate, I can’t just walk into a classroom - even with all my teaching experience and publications - I can’t just walk in and teach. You need to have a teaching certificate. Colleges of education and the standard pedagogical models are woke. It’s like a woke indoctrination factory. They’re minting teachers and giving them their imprimatur and then sending them out to K through 12 to teach. The problem is replicating itself. Dr. Robert Asher has some fantastic material on this that I’d highly recommend.23,24
I think political correctness in the 90s was kind of like SARS-CoV-1. It seems like it’s really strong, but not very virulent. And then you move on to about 2015. And you’ve got a complex series of things that go on with the uptake of social media and so woke is SARS-CoV-2 - it’s highly infectious.
It’s hard to say because it was creeping and then there was an explosion. It’s also hard to say because I’m in the belly of the beast at Portland State. I saw the transformation around 2015. I saw it at the same time in the sceptic and atheist movement, which were canaries in the coal mine with Social Justice. I was just at a conference in Bozeman, Montana, and Wilford Reilly who I find to be an utterly fascinating, fearless thinker, and he said, ‘Woke is a mind virus of the lower upper class.’ And I thought, ‘Wow, that’s exactly right.’ I think your analogue works well. Part of it is - and I think one thing that’s very helpful to think about in relation to this - is to break it down into discrete ways of thinking about the university and the educational system. Because you’re right, it didn’t just happen overnight. And then all of a sudden, the censoriousness and illiberalism; the not teaching and not exposing people to different ideas, the hyper rigid orthodoxy surrounding certain positions about race, sexual orientation and gender. Positions which have literally no evidence behind them. Not only do they have no evidence behind then, there’s actually evidence against them. When you really start to think about that - that’s the next level of systemic derangement.
And I think concurrent with that, there were changes in the culture, and there was the weaponization of certain offices of diversity, equity and inclusion, that made sure people stayed in line. There’s no due process there. The university system has, again as Jonathan Haidt says, abandoned its telos of truth and turned into an instrument of social change.
1. Academic Grievance Studies and the Corruption of Scholarship. Areo. Published October 3, 2018. Accessed January 3, 2022. https://areomagazine. com / 2018 / 10 / 02 / academic-grievance-studies-and-the-corruption-of-scholarship/
2. New Discourses. New Discourses. Accessed January 3, 2022. https://new discourses.com/
3. Lagerspetz M. “The Grievance Studies Affair” Project: Reconstructing and Assessing the Experimental Design. Sci Technol Hum Values. 2021;46(2): 402-424. doi:10.1177/0162243920923087
4. Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity. Accessed December 10, 2021. https://physics.nyu.edu/ faculty/sokal/transgress_v2/transgress_v2_singlefile.html
5. Boghossian P, Lindsay J. Deluded Departments. Philos Mag. 2019;(87):14-17. doi:10.5840/tpm20198781
6. ‘Idea Laundering’ in Academia - WSJ. Accessed February 6, 2022. https://www.wsj.com/articles/idea-laundering-in-academia-11574634492
7. FAIR – Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism. Accessed February 6, 2022. https://www.fairforall.org
8. Lindsay J, Boghossian P. The conceptual penis as a social construct. Cogent Soc Sci. 2017;3. doi:10.1080/23311886.2017.1330439
9. Boghossian P. Socratic Pedagogy, Race, and Power. Educ Policy Anal Arch. 2002;10(3).
10. Peter Boghossian, forthcoming lecture, March 19, 2022, University of Antwerp.
11. Boghossian P, Lindsay J. Chmess, Abiding Significance, and Rabbit Holes: The Problem of Philosophical Progress. In: Philosophy’s Future: The Problem of Philosophical Progress. ; 2017:61-74. doi:10.1002/9781119210 115.ch5
12. Faisal Saeed Al Mutar at Portland State University, “Are Western Values Worth Defending?” The AHA Foundation. Published November 8, 2017. Accessed December 6, 2021. https://www.theahafoundation.org/faisal-saeed- al - mutar - at - portland - state-university-are-western-values-worth-defending/
13. Lukianoff JH Greg. It’s a Really Bad Idea to Tell Students Words Are Violence. The Atlantic. Published July 18, 2017. Accessed December 6, 2021. https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/07/why-its-a-bad -idea-to-tell-students-words-are-violence/533970/
14. Nussbaum MC. The Professor of Parody. New Repub. Published online February 22, 1999. Accessed February 6, 2022. https://newrepublic.com /article/150687/professor-parody
15. Otten C. Slaves of Isis: the long walk of the Yazidi women. The Guardian. https:// www.theguardian.com / world / 2017 / jul/25/slaves-of-isis-the-long-walk-of-the-yazidi-women. Published July 25, 2017. Accessed December 6, 2021.
16. Boghossian P, Lindsay J. Is the Unthinkable the New Acceptable? | Free Inquiry. Published March 30, 2017. Accessed January 3, 2022. https://secular humanism.org/2017/03/cont-is-the-unthinkable-the-new-acceptable/
17. Boghossian P, Lindsay J. The Socratic method, defeasibility, and doxastic responsibility. Educ Philos Theory. 2018;50(3):244-253. doi:10.1080/00131 857.2017.1343111
18. Boghossian P, Lindsay J. How to Have Impossible Conversations: A Very Practical Guide. Hachette Books; 2019.
19. Guesmi H. Reckoning with Foucault’s alleged sexual abuse of boys in Tunisia. Accessed December 10, 2021. https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions /2021/4/16/reckoning-with-foucaults-sexual-abuse-of-boys-in-tunisia
20. Hobbes M. Everything You Know About Obesity Is Wrong. The Huffington Post. Accessed December 10, 2021. https://highline.huffingtonpost.com/ articles/en/everything-you-know-about-obesity-is-wrong/
21. The philosophical society. Accessed January 5, 2022. https://www.philo sophicalsociety.com/Archives/The%20Performative%20Contradiction.htm
22. The Gift of Violence. Thornton, M. | Independent Publishers Group. Accessed February 6, 2022. https://www.ipgbook.com/the-gift-of-violence-products-9781634312301.php
23. How Ed Schools Became a Menace. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Published April 8, 2018. Accessed February 6, 2022. https://www.chronicle .com/article/how-ed-schools-became-a-menace/
24. Look Who’s Talking About Educational Equity. Quillette. Published August 12, 2020. Accessed February 6, 2022. https://quillette.com/2020/08/12/look-whos-talking-about-educational-equity/
~
Dr. Peter Boghossian is a Founding Faculty member at the University of Austin, Texas. Peter has a teaching pedigree spanning more than 25 years and 30 thousand students. He focuses on bringing the tools of professional philosophers to people in a wide variety of contexts and helping others think through what seem to be intractable problems. His articles can be found in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Philosophers’ Magazine, Scientific American, Time Magazine, Skeptic, National Review, and elsewhere. Peter’s most recent book is How to Have Impossible Conversations. His can be found on online at Substack, Twitter and his webpage: https://peterboghossian.com
Me, She, He, They: Reality vs. Identity in the 21st Century
Look At Me!
References
By Heather Heying
A few years ago, I had a curious exchange with a friend’s young child. We were admiring his pet from a distance, and I asked him “Is your cat male or female?” He considered this for a moment, then replied, “I don’t know. Maybe both?”
“Can’t be.” I told him. “Cats aren’t like that.”
At which, with no hesitation, the young boy declared, “you’re a liar!”
It seems unlikely that a child of the 20th century—or the 19th, or 18th—would have been convinced that a cat could be both male and female. There are occasional, very rare developmental mix-ups—on which, more below—but no mammal species makes a go of it by being a hermaphrodite.1 Even very casual observers of cats (and humans) easily conclude that there are two functional types, male and female, and that they do not show up in the same individual.
Some other animals do things differently, of course. Banana slugs are simultaneous hermaphrodites, meaning that single individuals have both male and female reproductive parts at the same time, like the child’s fictional cat. Many reef fish are sequential hermaphrodites, having the capacity to switch from one sex to the other, although there are limits, in terms of both direction and frequency. It is the rare fish, for instance, that can switch sex from male to female, while individuals in many species go the other direction—bluehead wrasse, for instance, start out female, and can become male later on. But mammals? Nope. We are not hermaphrodites.
Sex is real, and ubiquitous. Sex, in this usage, is shorthand for “sexual reproduction,” which is the raison d’être for there being distinct sexes. In our lineage, sexual reproduction has an uninterrupted history of at least 500 million years; it may well be closer to two billion years.2 Furthermore, sex is binary, at least among all plants and animals.
Sex is not, at its most fundamental, about chromosomes or hormones, about breasts or facial hair, about behavior or fashion. Sex, at its most fundamental, is about DNA from multiple individuals being brought together to create a zygote. But DNA isn’t sufficient for a new life—you also need cellular machinery like mitochondria and ribosomes.
Without this cellular machinery—the cytoplasm—no zygote will be formed. Cellular machinery is big, though, compared to DNA. Someone’s got to bring it if sex is going to work. So, some sex cells—gametes—are big because they contain the requisite cellular machinery. Those big gametes are eggs.
That’s one of the two large problems posed by reproducing sexually: from whence to source the cellular machinery. The other is how to find a partner. Trade-offs being what they are, big cells are slower than small cells. Eggs being big (for cells), they therefore also tend to be slow or entirely sessile. So, it falls to the other type of gamete to move around its environment, looking for eggs. This other type of gamete is largely devoid of cellular machinery. It’s called pollen in plants, sperm in animals. Eggs are large and cytoplasm rich and sessile; sperm are small and stripped down and fast. Two types of gametes; two sexes.3–5
In much of life on Earth, in nearly all plants and animals, and in absolutely all mammals, which includes humans, sex is real and ubiquitous. In his masterful compilation and analysis of the anthropological literature, Donald Brown writes that all cultures “have a sex terminology that is fundamentally dualistic, even when it comprises three or four categories.6 When there are three, one is a combination of the two basic sexes (e.g., a hermaphrodite), or one is a crossover sex (e.g., a man acting as a woman). When there are four there are then two normal sexes and two crossover sexes.”
Brown’s “crossover sex” is now referred to as the umbrella term “trans.” Trans has emerged in many cultures, but it has never been common—not nearly so common as homosexuality, for instance. And Brown’s “hermaphrodites” have more recently been called intersex, who are now often referred to as having a Disorder of Sexual Development (DSD), although here we begin to run into problems. The distinction between people with DSDs and trans people is sometimes hard to parse, the boundaries between them sometimes fuzzy. Some people who actually have DSDs may never have them diagnosed, and may live as trans people, thus belonging in both categories. Both categories are indeed real, and—in contrast to sex itself—very, very rare.
In a few places, Western science has discovered a mechanism which explains a relatively high rate of unusual sexual presentation. In the village of Las Salinas in the Dominican Republic, for instance, some number of people are understood to be machihembras —intersex, in fact, but presenting as female through childhood until puberty transforms them into decidedly more male in appearance. The molecular explanation for this particular DSD is, in part, that mutations in the 5α-reductase type 2 gene (which is autosomal, not on a sex chromosome) affect the steroid 5α-reductase 2 isoenzyme, which in turn causes a dihydrotestosterone deficiency, which in turn inhibits development of male typical characteristics such as external genitalia.7
We should all be grateful for the scientists who are driven to discover molecular pathways like the one above, but for most of us, the human side of the story is more compelling. In Las Salinas, Felicita was a little girl who enjoyed going to birthday parties with her sister until, as she approached puberty, she came to prefer playing with boys. During adolescence, as her sister’s body became rounded and fuller, Felicita’s shoulders broadened, and she grew strong and tall. Like most children with 5α-reductase deficiency, she had looked like and been raised as a girl, until puberty revealed that for her, the truth was more complicated. Felicita was a machihembra.8
Las Salinas is not the only place on Earth in which a DSD has come to be explained by scientists, a DSD which explains, in retrospect, the relatively high number of people in those communities who transition from female to male during puberty. Las Salinas is not unique, but it, like DSDs and transness more generally, is very rare.
Those individuals who can or will or have or might make eggs are female. Those individuals who can or will or have or might make sperm (or pollen) are male. This is a true binary, which DSDs make more difficult to parse, but DSDs are the extreme exception. They are, indeed, disorders.9
Sex is not assigned at birth. Sex is observed at birth. A baby born with ambiguous genitalia or an undiagnosed DSD may be observed to be the sex that they are not, and that observation is therefore in error. Development is complicated, but the fact of anisogamy—two different types of gametes, not three or five or thirteen, but two, which come together to create a new life—is true.
Furthermore, development being complicated means that sometimes, some of the manifestations of your sex will be out of sync with your actual sex: hence the idea of being “born in the wrong body.” Again, sex is not, at its most fundamental, about chromosomes or hormones, about breasts or facial hair, about behavior or fashion. But if your sex chromosomes determined your sex accurately with regard to gamete type and primary sex characteristics, but ran into some hiccups as your brain was being formed, or as your secondary sex characteristics were developing, you might well feel—as some do—very much at odds with the body you are in. Of course, you might also feel that way during adolescence regardless. The vast majority of people who feel uncomfortable in their own bodies as those bodies transform from child to adult are not trans.10
Let me be clear: We are dealing with the interface between long standing products of evolution, subtle matters of humanity which have blurry borders, and a brave new world of technological modifications that has yet to stand any test of time. That leaves all of us, even those who are thoroughly versed in the facts and logic of sex and sexuality grappling with new and genuinely difficult questions. No one has yet worked out the solutions that best resolve all of the tensions.
~
Sex is real and ubiquitous. Trans is real, but extremely rare. In the 21st century WEIRD world (those countries that are Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic)11,12 however, both of those points are increasingly taken as hostile to individual autonomy. To simultaneously observe that sex is real and everywhere, and that trans is real and rare, seems to guarantee running afoul of someone’s ideology. Some will insist that anybody who says they are trans is trans. Others that sex is an artifact, perhaps of the patriarchy, perhaps of society writ large. Lurking just below the surface is the belief that speech creates reality: claims of truth become the truth. You can be freed from the very concept of sex, just by believing that you are. Such emancipation!
As Libby Emmons so cogently points out,13 modern instantiations of transgenderism, like transhumanism, imagines a split between body and mind. “Transgender practice,” writes Emmons, “is the ultimate biohack. The claim that one has been born into the ‘wrong’ body is a total rejection of mind-body unification, and a statement that mind and body can be so disparate that the body must be thoroughly altered to match the mind’s perception of how it ought to be.” There is something in this line of thinking that believes that if I want it hard enough, it will be so.
To a degree, believing that you are the master of your own fate is empowering. It can open doors that might not even be recognized as doors had you not insisted on something that others find hard to believe. But sex isn’t like that.
We do not change underlying reality by thinking about it differently, nor does it fail to apply to us if we are unaware of it. Ignorance of the physical laws of the universe does not make them go away, unlike what you may have inferred from the Road Runner cartoons. Gravity is not the product of our minds—or of the minds of animated coyotes. Gravity is a product of the universe. Sex is not a product of our minds either. Rather, sex is the product of our entire evolved beings. We are fully embodied, and cannot be otherwise. There is no essence of the human experience that can be distilled, from brainwaves or neuron maps or genomics or anything else. We exist at the interface with the world in which we live, in which we have evolved for three and a half billion years.
This concept of a fundamental duality within each of us, between body and mind, in which they are independent of one another, both struggling for primacy—it’s wrong. And it’s reductionist. Somehow it manages to fall prey both to the postmodern notion of reality as a social construct, and to the reductionist model currently imposed on so many modern institutions, including much of science, medicine, and nutrition. Too often, those who apply reductionist thinking imagine that if you come upon a complex system, and succeed in naming some of the parts in that system and counting them, then you have come to know not just those parts, but in fact have mastery over the whole system. Viewing ourselves through a reductionist lens inhibits our ability to see ourselves, and others, as whole, complete beings. In doing this we fail ourselves—trans or not—by fooling ourselves into seeking solutions that serve only isolated facets of our being.
Reductionism is at odds with emergence, though. Complex systems are emergent: in complex systems, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
~
Childhood is a time of exploration. It is a time to learn rules, to break rules, and to make new rules. Humans have the longest childhoods of any organism on the planet, and we are born with more potential than we will use.14 Our potential fades with time—note for instance the ability to pick up a new language in childhood, and the increased difficulty when the same attempt is made even in young adulthood. So, childhood is a time of exploration and of practice, of assessing the world and testing boundaries. In childhood we come to understand what is real and what is not, what is changeable and what is not, and how different the world is from that in which our elders came of age. Adolescence, therefore, when children transform into adults, can be challenging and difficult under the best of circumstances.
The 21st century WEIRD world has left many bereft of choice, lacking in passion or insight to contribute in a way that feels meaningful. Coming of age can be filled with angst, but this historical moment goes well beyond what is common. The blame for the widespread failure to find meaning in existence can be placed in several additional courts: Currently fashionable parenting styles “protect” children from risk and experience. Screens are replacing social engagement in real life. Schools are ever more broken, teaching compliance and obedience to the new orthodoxies, as they actively punish rigor and extrapolation, critical and independent thought.15 Prescription drugs are being used widely to treat disengagement, hyperactivity, and anxiety—a “corrective,” in part, for the fact that some children resist underwhelming or toxic school experiences.16,17 And falling economic prospects make things like owning your own home an ever more distant dream for most young people. Add to this the recognition among many that our economic and political systems are decohering. The rate of change is accelerating so fast that even the near future will not look anything like the past.14 All of these contribute to the ever-greater number of people who arrive at the cusp of adulthood with the bodies of adults, but either the minds of children, or an overwhelming sense of futility, or both.
Enter into this minefield the expectation that everyone is their own brand, and should be, at all moments, declaring themselves as that brand. How to distinguish yourself, if you don’t know what you’re good at, can’t seem to care about anything, and wouldn’t know how to find out? If you have grown or are growing into the body of an adult but still have the mind of a child, and have emerged into a world seemingly bent on incoherence, what is there to do?
Some will lash out at the system; this is a time-honored response to feeling disenfranchised from the status quo, although its modern manifestations have a different character from those of the past. Others strive for what they already know, seeking comfortable lives in which past markers of success—a stable family, job, and home—are the totality of their goals. Those who would make their mark on the world - as scientists, or artists, explorers, or healers - are more adrift than ever, unless they choose one of two routes. They can join the establishment, get the appropriate degrees, get jobs with or appeal for funding from the appropriate entities, and become ever more beholden to those entities. They may well find their thoughts converging with what everyone else thinks. They’re not engaging in a craven embrace of orthodoxy; it’s simple survival. Or they can gamble on becoming “influencers,” many of whom are a caricature of the creative lifestyle, a kind of hedonistic embrace of all that is frivolous, fleeting, and decadent. Successful influencers make a “good living” doing this, but are they living a good life?
Within the last decade, an additional route to social belonging, to feeling like you have a place in an incoherent, unforgiving, and uncaring world, has been to declare yourself trans.
Jazz Jennings “came out” as trans at five years old, was encouraged to transition by a family that has been described as “supportive” in some quarters, began doing media appearances at the age of 6, and catapulted into a life of fame in 2013, at the age of 11, when interviewed on 20/20 by Barbara Walters.18 Jazz is hardly the only person who has found fame in being trans. But out of the limelight, many thousands of other young people are transitioning, often to the celebration of their immediate peers (and social media contacts), but to the consternation of their families.19
Over the last several years, the number of people declaring themselves trans has increased by a factor of twenty (see data from the U.K.20 and the Netherlands,21 and find more at statsforgender.org22). Furthermore, historically, the very low number of trans people has been biased towards MtF (Male to Female): young men transitioning into transwomen. But that has recently reversed.23 In one year alone in the U.S.—from 2016 to 2017—the percentage increase in FtM “gender confirmation” surgeries, in which young women are surgically modified into transmen—was 289%.24 This is not subtle. And it is not organic. As with eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa, social contagion is likely playing a powerful role, as evidenced in part by the rapidity with which trans identity spreads through female friend groups.25
One additional deeply unfortunate possibility, which might partially explain the rise in trans-identification, is that our hyper-novel world is indeed driving an increase in DSDs. For instance, atrazine, a widely used herbicide and known endocrine disrupter, is detectable in rainfall even in regions where it is not actively applied. Frogs that are exposed to atrazine in lab experiments, even in low doses, do not develop normally. Furthermore, exposure to other endocrine disrupters is known to have perplexing effects on amphibians, such that at some doses only females are produced, and at slightly different doses only males are produced. And in the wild, hermaphroditic frogs are more common in areas with atrazine use or contamination.26
Frogs may be more susceptible to environmental chemicals than are humans, in part because they breathe through their skin, easily taking in toxins through that massive organ. But imagining that we are immune to the effects of known endocrine disrupters is naïve at best. An increase in endocrine disrupters in the environment may be contributing to the uptick in declarations of transness among the young.27
Even if this is true, however—even if the chemicals that we are practically bathing in now have effects on people that are similar to the effects they are known to have on frogs—this is no justification for wilting in the face of declarations from children. We owe Jazz Jennings and the many thousands of less famous children futures that are as full of potential as possible.
Most of the young people who are now declaring themselves trans are not trans. But declaring yourself something you are not can help a person feel, if nothing else, very much alive, at least during that period of time when everyone around them is celebrating their bravery for “coming out” as something that they are not. It will be a fleeting high, and unsustainable, but as with the rush that comes with many illicit drugs, the costs are not easy to see in the moment.
~
Into this landscape arrive those who would defend the use of new pronouns in children in order to be “inclusive” or “kind.” We do not try to be inclusive or kind to an anorexic who insists that, at 5’8” and 82 pounds, she is fat. We do not try to be inclusive or kind to a schizophrenic who insists that he is working with the King of Siam to save the world from the lizard people.
Nor should we try to be inclusive or kind to a child who wakes up Tuesday and declares himself Spiderman, come Wednesday he’s a T. rex, and on Thursday he’s a princess. Given that we don’t embrace the child’s fantasy on Tuesday or Wednesday, what makes Thursday different? “Kind,” in this case, is a euphemism for: accede and cater to the fantasy. And this kindness is no kindness at all.
Children are in the act of figuring out what the world is. They check their experience against what the trusted adults say, a sibling’s interpretation against that of a friend, today’s experience against last week’s. Childhood is when we learn how to be, and discover what we can be. Free and wide-ranging exploration will include ideas that are out of this world. Adults should allow children their fantasies, within reason, but not allow them to believe that fantasies are real as they approach adulthood.
Affirming the delusions of a dangerously thin girl who thinks she’s fat is not kind. Affirming the delusions of a girl who believes that her interest in “boy stuff” makes her a boy is also not kind. We owe people who are stuck in a fantasyland of reality-denial a correction. We owe them compassion and truth. We don’t owe them a celebration of their confusion and naivete. In fact, such celebrations actually do harm.
We have all seen pronouns in profiles and email signatures. Most of us will have been asked to announce our pronouns in meetings or zoom calls or classrooms. We are told that this is simply about respect. I don’t buy it, and neither should you.
~
The newest kid on this block is “non-binary.” Announcing yourself as non-binary literally requires nothing on the part of the person “coming out,” but now they may well get accolades for doing so. Google “non-binary in Hollywood” and be regaled with assurances from the famous and almost famous that because they don’t entirely feel like a woman (or a man) all the time, they are therefore non-binary.
The concepts of “man” and “woman” are as ancient as humans. Remember the universality of “sex terminology that is fundamentally dualistic” in human cultures.6 The fact that every human culture to ever exist correctly recognizes that there are two sexes, should not be surprising, given that—again—male and female go back several hundred million years in our lineage alone, perhaps two billion years.
Gender is the software of sex. Gender norms flow from the sexual binary, but they are far more fluid, their boundaries less rigid, their expressions infinite. Remember the sex-switching reef fish? Not only do they switch sex, they switch gender, too. Female bluehead wrasse produce eggs (sex) and are docile, neither defending territories nor approaching conspecifics (gender); once switched into males, however, the same individuals now produce sperm, and are both active and aggressive in inspecting both sites and individuals that come near them.28
Gender follows from sex, but it is far more labile. Gender is not a binary. Because of what sex is and how it manifests in humans, men have traditionally been more likely to have power—at least, overt, outward facing, society-level power. And women have been more likely to use covert means to achieve their goals, working behind the scenes, using social rather than physical means to diffuse tension.29
Is it possible to move beyond those gender norms now, in the WEIRD world? I believe that we can. But observe that the very manifestation of so much of trans-ideology hinges on those very gender norms. Here is the (devout Christian) mother of a boy describing how she “knew” that what she actually had was a daughter, “I tried so hard to force her into wearing clothes with camouflage and superhero patterns, and I even gave her severe, flat-top haircut.”30 But the child was having none of it. So instead of recognizing that this boy, at least for now, had little interest in traditional, stereotypical gender norms, the mother decided that her boy was in fact a girl. And here is Dr. Diane Ehrensaft, a clinical and developmental psychologist, explaining how you can tell if a preverbal child is transgender: “I have a colleague who is transgender. There is a video of him as a toddler – he was assigned female at birth – tearing barrettes out of then-her hair. And throwing them on the ground. And sobbing. That’s a gender message.”31 A baby girl tears barrettes out of her hair, thus indicating that she is actually a baby boy. Well, that’s certainly one interpretation.
In Harper’s Magazine in 2020, Anne Fadiman,32 Writer in Residence at Yale, argued in favor of the singular they for people who view themselves as outside of the binary. It may at first seem that we owe such people this much at least. No, we do not. What we owe people is resistance to foolishness. This foolishness is not the next civil rights battle. It’s a battle for fantasy over reality, for a fragmented and fractured human experience over an integrated one, for a reductionist understanding of ourselves over a holistic one. In Fadiman’s telling, one big rift between linguists is between the prescriptivists, who favor rules and standards (“this is how people should talk”) and descriptivists, who favor popular usage (“this is how people actually talk”). What fails to be included in this categorization scheme, of course, is whether language is accurately representing reality.
From my scientific perspective, it looks very much like this scheme—prescriptivists vs. descriptivists—is an incomplete solution set. At least one category is missing from the analysis. In all the discussion among linguists about pronoun usage in English, I have never seen an analysis that asks: “what is actually true?”
What is actually true is that we have two sexes. Gender is somewhat more complicated, but male and female, man and woman—these refer to biological realities that do not change no matter what we say about them.
One year after Fadiman’s piece, writer Michael Waters33 made a similar argument in The Atlantic Monthly: “Today’s gender-neutral English-language pronouns make space not just for two genders, but for many more, serving as a way for people who fall outside the binary of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ to describe themselves.”
And in the New York Times, linguist John McWhorter,34 who has written brilliantly on adjacent topics, fell prey to the same incomplete logic in September of 2021. Arguing, again, on behalf of the singular “they,” he imagines that he understands the complaints: “Why does language have to change all the time, with all we have to think about?” This, I contend, is not the objection that most of us have. The next example that he gives is the shift, in English, from a preponderance of double, and even triple, negatives, in Shakespeare’s time, to a rejection of such usage. The difference, I hasten to point out, is that double and triple negatives are entirely a human construct, with effects on communication and clarity, but in no way reflecting underlying reality. Our pronouns, in distinct contrast, refer to a reality that we do not change simply because we change the way that we talk about it.
I have always called adults by the pronouns that they wish to be called by. Never in my experience as a college professor was I asked to use brand-new pronouns. I did have trans students, and their cross-sex pronoun preferences posed no problems in our classrooms. But children’s flights of fancy, their fantasies that could be their greatest strength as they imagine all of the ways to be human, should never be cemented into permanence. That risks turning their greatest strength into their greatest tragedy. The adults in their worlds are doing them a great disservice—which is putting it mildly.
One of the oddities of this moment, and of these ideologies, is that they
simultaneously complexify what is simple (e.g., the binary of sex), and simplify what is complex. The former is surprising for its utter lack of connection to reality, both easily observable reality and deep historical reality. The latter—the simplification of the complex—is, unfortunately, such a banal instinct that it is very common through human history. We simplify the complexity of the world in order to feel in control, in order to feel like gods. Left to our most banal devices, we are, again, reductionists, seeking single answers with easy cures for complex problems.
Suffer from tonsilitis? Rip them out! Feeling anxious? Take a pill! Wishing for freedom from restrictive gender norms? Declare yourself a man! Or better yet: declare yourself non-binary!
Trans people are real but rare, but nonbinary people? This is just a fiction, a sign of a society that has forgotten to check its beliefs with reality, a society so wealthy, insulated, and comfortable that it has, too often, forgotten that reference to an objective reality is actually a necessary precursor to making things happen in the world. At the end of her essay in Harper’s, Fadiman argues that there are five reasons to use the singular they, “from most conservative to the most revolutionary.” The striking thing about this list, to me, is that the situation that Fadiman thinks is most conservative, likely to be accepted by a larger fraction of people than any other, is using they “only for nonbinary people.” This presumes that “nonbinary” is a real category. But just as a cat can’t be both male and female, or neither male nor female, the same is true for people. If you like, go ahead and throw gender norms out the window; but don’t conflate the norms of your culture with underlying biological reality, which is what the language, and our pronouns, are actually describing.
As I was writing this essay, I saw a young woman wearing a sweatshirt that said “anti-gender roles club.” Yes to that. Yes to freeing ourselves of the now unnecessary baggage that has been entrenched by social norms. Let us free ourselves from that part of our expectations that we can free ourselves from, without pretending that we, men and women, are the same.
But as I was writing this essay, I also saw a piece in a Science magazine headlined “Why I came out as non-binary to my PhD lab.”35 We are not told what kind of science the author is allegedly learning how to engage in. What we are told is that “I knew that if I wanted to survive graduate school, I needed to be open with my lab mates” about the use of “gender-neutral/non-binary pronouns.”
I’ll match that anecdote with one of my own: When I was in graduate school (as it happens, at the very same institution, but many years earlier), becoming a credentialed scientist, it never occurred to me that my peers or advisor needed to know the inner workings of my psychology in order for me to survive. Nor was it in fact the case. In fact, in order to do my research—which entailed, among other things, contending with aggressive lemurs and errant spice boats and cyclones, while living in a tent on a remote island off the coast of Madagascar—I needed to not succumb to my own psychology. I was in the field, and in grad school, to do science, not to engage in group therapy.
The “non-binary” category seems to be evidence of either deep mental confusion, or deep narcissism, or perhaps both. The author of the “Science Careers” piece continues that, in the six months since informing said lab mates, “The word ‘she’ has slipped out in conversations more times than I can count, and every time, it feels like a knife is being stabbed into my stomach.”
We all have preferences about what we want to be called. Perhaps a nickname from childhood has stuck around past its use-by date. Perhaps you prefer your middle name to your first. When I was a college professor, I was happy to have students call me by my first name, but a few preferred to use a title, in which case “Dr. Heying” was fine too. But occasionally a student would call me “Mrs. Heying.” As I told them—gently, privately—that wasn’t fine by me, because while it was true that I was married, my marital status had no bearing on my role as their professor, whereas my academic degree did. So I bristled slightly at being addressed as “Mrs.,” especially (but not only) in an academic setting, and I told the students why, but you know what I didn’t do? I didn’t harangue the students, nor did I dwell on a mistake that was clearly trivial. If being misgendered feels like “a knife is being stabbed into your stomach,” I’m pretty sure that you need to get out more.
Some “first-world problems” are real challenges which would nevertheless not rate on a list of complaints had the complainant want of food, shelter, or clean water to drink. Spending hours navigating an automated customer service system to get to a real person, or facing the newest round of software updates that have broken a once functional system—these are legitimate first world problems. Other first world problems, though? They are fabricated. Out of confusion. Or for attention. As the inimitable Douglas Murray observes,36 he has yet to hear the distinction between coming out as non-binary and simply shouting “Look at me!”
~
We need science, and we need scientists. One of the things that will get in the way of both things is allowing the institution of science to fall prey to ideology that patently makes no sense. When one of the two most influential science journals in the world publishes a self-indulgent piece on the visceral pain experienced by a “non-binary” grad student upon being misgendered, while truly important scientific issues remain uninvestigated or patently botched, it all seems a lost cause.
Add to this that medical schools are now falling down the rabbit hole as well: a professor apologizes for referring to pregnant women (because men can apparently get pregnant; or so tomorrow’s doctors are being taught); another one insists that biological sex is a “social construct;” while others get lambasted for referring to breastfeeding instead of “chestfeeding.”37 So too is the American Medical Association. In their guide to “Advancing Health Equity: A Guide to Language, Narrative and Concepts”38 jointly produced with the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), they argue that sex is assigned at birth; that transitioning between sexes is possible in humans; and that while “two-spirit” people (from the Ojibwe) have bodies that “simultaneously house a masculine spirit and a feminine spirit,” the “gender binary” is nonetheless “colonial.” Medicine and its practitioners are losing their collective grip on reality, and on science, and are failing the very people they purport to be trying to help.
And yet. Consider this: A smart and capable young person approached me with this true story. A natal female who had transitioned to male, Ronny (a pseudonym) grew alarmed at having doors close as womanhood receded in the rear-view mirror. Realizing that “passing” as female was no longer possible, Ronny settled on non-binary as a result. Ronny does not seem confused to me. Ronny is not in denial of reality. Ronny does seem sad, and almost resigned. And Ronny arrived here, in part, because of a mainstream narrative that assures people that if they don’t fit regressive stereotypes of what it means to be male or female, if they are butch women or feminine men, or if they are attracted to members of their own sex, then they are actually a different sex than they’ve been told. Well, no. Ronny was manipulated and misled by a system, and is left with an array of bad choices. At this point, non-binary may well be the right choice for Ronny.
I grew up with Ms. Magazine, and Title IX, and Mary Tyler Moore throwing her hat into the air on a Minneapolis street, beamed into my living room every week without fail. Mary Tyler Moore’s hat throw was an expression of such unbridled freedom and possibility that it filled me, as a little girl, with joy every time that I saw it. I did not view it this way then—and it was apparently not the intention—but her joyous hat throw could be seen as an homage to the trope of the bride throwing her bouquet to the single women in attendance at her wedding. The single women fight to receive the bouquet in hopes that it would give them the luck they want, to land a man, to become the next woman on the altar. But Mary Tyler Moore’s exuberant hat throw was not a rejection of marriage; we do not need to throw out the old in order to embrace the new. Rather, it was a celebration of the additional opportunities afforded by a world that was opening up to the reality that women are just as varied as men, just as skilled and flawed, with just as much capacity for both passion and tragedy. Just as—but not the same as. Equal to under the law—but not identical to.
Sex is real and ubiquitous and fixed. DSDs are real and very rare. Transsexual people do not exist, but transgender people do. But feeling out of step with gender norms does not make you trans. Also, feeling out of step with gender norms is neither wicked, nor should it be noteworthy. Feeling out of step with gender norms certainly should not warrant the creation of fictional new categories, like non-binary, unless the point is to keep the rest of us on our toes.
To that little boy who would have us believe that his cat might be both male and female—and to the legions of people who would have us believe that their sex is a matter of choice—I say this: Your beliefs are not merely wrong, they are acutely disempowering. This marks a step backwards for all of us individuals who are gender non-conforming: the girls who like to play in the mud and with numbers, and the boys who like to save injured birds and discuss their feelings. It therefore marks a step backwards for society, because allowing all humans to find their skills and interests and passions, rather than constrain them to stereotypes, is fundamental.
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28. Semsar K, Godwin J. Multiple mechanisms of phenotype development in the bluehead wrasse. Horm Behav. 2004;45(5):345-353. doi:10.1016/j.yhbeh. 2004.01.003
29. Heying HE. Covert vs. Overt: Toward a More Nuanced Understanding of Sex Differences in Competition. Arch Sex Behav. Published online January 7, 2022. doi:10.1007/s10508-021-02278-0
30. Shappley K, R AT to B, ALL. I Let My Daughter Transition at 4 Years Old — And Have Zero Regrets Today. Good Housekeeping. Published April 13, 2017. Accessed December 31, 2021. https://www.goodhousekeeping.com /life/parenting/a43702/transgender-child-kimberly-shappley/
31. 4thwavenow. Gender-affirmative therapist: Baby who hates barrettes = trans boy; questioning sterilization of 11-year olds same as denying cancer treatment. 4thWaveNow. Published September 29, 2016. Accessed December 31, 2021. https: //4thwavenow.com / 2016 / 09 / 29/gender-affirmative- therapist - baby - who - hates - barrettes-trans - boy-questioning-sterilization-of-11-year-olds-same-as-denying-cancer-treatment/
32. Fadiman A. All My Pronouns: How I learned to live with the singular they. Harpers Mag. 2020; August 2020. Accessed December 31, 2021. https://harpers.org/archive/2020/08/all-my-pronouns-the-singular-they/
33. Waters M. Where Gender-Neutral Pronouns Come From. The Atlantic. Published June 4, 2021. Accessed December 31, 2021. https://www.the atlantic.com/culture/archive/2021/06/gender-neutral-pronouns-arent-new/61 9092/
34. McWhorter J. Opinion | Gender Pronouns Are Changing. It’s Exhilarating. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/21/opinion/gender-pronouns-they.html. Published September 21, 2021. Accessed December 31, 2021.
35. Roldan B. Coming out. Science. 2020;370(6521):1242-1242. doi:10.1126/ science.370.6521.1242
36. Vacuous liberal ‘wokeness’ is now beyond parody. Accessed December 31, 2021. https:// www.telegraph.co.uk / news / 2019 / 09 / 16 / vacuous-liberal-wokeness-now-beyond-parody/
37. Herzog K. Med Schools Are Now Denying Biological Sex. Common Sense. Published July 28, 2021. Accessed December 31, 2021. https://bariweiss. substack.com/p/med-schools-are-now-denying-biological
38. Advancing Health Equity: A Guide to Language, Narrative and Concepts. American Medical Association. Accessed December 31, 2021. https://www .ama- assn.org / about / ama - center-health-equity/advancing-health-equity-guide-language-narrative-and-concepts-0
~
Heather Heying is a scientist, educator, and author. An evolutionary biologist who has conducted research on the evolution of social systems and sexual selection, from frogs to humans, she earned her PhD in Biology from the University of Michigan, where she earned the university’s top honour for her dissertation. She has a B.A. in Anthropology.
Heather has been a visiting Fellow at Princeton University, and before that, was a tenured professor at The Evergreen State College. She resigned in 2017 in the wake of violent campus protests. She architected curriculum that prioritized the scientific method, and exploration of both ecosystems and ideas; and has since been invited to speak about higher ed, the evolution of sex and consciousness, and the culture wars, in venues including the U.S. Department of Justice, the Krishnamurti Institute, Joe Rogan, and Oxford University.
Her first book, Antipode, is based on her life in Madagascar while studying the sex lives of poison frogs. Her second book, co-authored with husband Bret Weinstein, is A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century. A New York Times best-seller, the book provides an evolutionary toolkit for living a good and honourable life as a modern ape. She also writes Natural Selections on Substack, and co-hosts with Bret a popular weekly livestream on the DarkHorse Podcast.
On Free Speech Absolutism and the Deontological Pursuit of Truth
References
Based on an Interview with Gad Saad
Mark Halloran: You’ve described yourself as a free speech absolutist. The only other absolutist I’ve spoken to was the late intelligence researcher James Flynn.1 I’ve always been interested in what the limits of free speech are beyond just incitation to violence. So, I wonder what you consider to be the limits of free speech?
Gad Saad: I think the best way to answer this question is via a concrete and tangible example. If I were to think of the absolute most offensive thing that someone could utter, especially to someone who is Lebanese Jewish, such as myself, someone who has escaped severe persecution in Lebanon - the worst thing that you could say is the Holocaust never happened. Obviously, I wasn’t personally affected by the Holocaust, but given that it was Jewish people who were affected, I could argue that that is the height of triggering for me; of offending me, of insulting me. And yet, what free speech absolutist means is that I support the right of imbeciles, morons, racists, anti-Semites, and truth negators to engage in the most vile discourse. That’s what free speech absolutism is. So, things like ‘Oh, it’s hate speech, if you criticize a religion - you’re hurting someone’s feeling.’ And that should be the red line. No, it shouldn’t. You could say that Judaism is a bunch of crock, and that’s fine. What you can’t say is there is a synagogue on Wellington and Queen Victoria boulevard - let’s go there and wait for the Jews to come out and beat them up or kill them. That’s incitement to violence. But you could criticize anything, you could mock anything, you could ridicule anything, you could do whatever you want in a free society. Short again of things like defamation, libel - I can’t go on social media and say, ‘I know that Mark is a child killer. And this is not an opinion, I have proof that he is’ and then you could come after me. Short of the usual caveats everything is fair game.
The issue seems to be that there’s a blurry line in relation to the incitation to violence. But I think about Karl Popper’s criterion of the tolerant society needing to be intolerant of intolerance. And so, there are conversations and symbols of things that are sort of not worth having - like with Holocaust deniers. And I wonder what you thought of that?
Let the free market of ideas decide. When I was a doctoral student at Cornell University, there was one person, the name of the gentleman escapes me, who argued under the guise of ‘Let’s just have a debate,’ and who wanted to come on campus, to discuss whether the Holocaust happened or not. And the reality is that most people were not interested in what he had to say, and I can’t remember his name today, because in the battle of ideas - it’s a form of evolutionary epistemology; good ideas eventually get selected, bad ideas eventually lose out. You allow that epistemological Darwinian mechanism to take hold. And I hate to invoke the usual cliches, but if we don’t allow that mechanism then we have a slippery slope: who decides what constitutes out of bound dialogue? For example, when I was going with Jordan Peterson to speak at Ryerson University in 2017, in an event, ostensibly titled: ‘The Stifling of Free Speech on University Campus,’ guess what happened to that event? It was ironically stifled and shut down, and they passed around fliers and posted things on Facebook and on social media saying ‘We don’t want neo-Nazi, white supremacists on campus.’2 They’re including a Lebanese Jew as a neo-Nazi white supremacist because to them, whatever we were going to talk about - which was literally just defending free speech - was beyond the pale. It was unacceptable. It was inciting people. It was triggering. One man’s triggering thing is another man’s joke. So let the ideas get into the ring and let the best one win.
John Stuart Mill’s marketplace of ideas. I wonder whether you end up on a slippery slope either way? I talked about this with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who was quoting Popper in relation to her latest book ‘Prey’ about the issues with Islamic immigration in Europe. If you allow too much tolerance, people aren’t rational actors and you run the risk of the society being overtaken by authoritarians. It’s a double-edged sword.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not arguing that all ideas can be allowed to flourish. If an idea is inherently built on the subjugation, the eradication or the extinguishing of another group, then we can discuss whether those ideas should be allowed to flourish in a free society. One can argue that there are some religious beliefs that don’t fall under the proviso of religious freedom, because they are seditious, they are literally contrary to freedom, and so that would fit under the not tolerating the intolerable; Popper’s paradox. It’s not as though I’m coming at this from a naive perspective - there are contexts, but again, it has to be under the scope of: are these ideas ultimately seeking to eradicate the voices of others if they were in an ascendancy position? If yes, then I think Popper has a point. The problem is that everything now falls under an incitement to hate. For example, when Donald Trump says on January 6th,3 ‘Okay, folks, why don’t you march down to Capitol Hill and exhibit your displeasure, but make sure to do so peacefully.’ Well, it didn’t matter that he gave that caveat. The fact that he said ‘march down;’ that was an insurrection, that was as bad as Pearl Harbor, that was completely the same as World War II. There was no distinction. January 6th will live on in infamy. I’m still hiding under my desk because I’m so traumatized because of the 75-year-old folks who rushed Capitol Hill taking selfies. Those guys were just military commandos. So, the reality is that all this woke stuff is able to usurp language so that anything I say, even if I say ‘hello,’ that could be construed as a form of incitement to hate. It’s bullshit.
The argument that is made in relation to that is that some of his language is warlike language, for example, ‘going into battle,’ whilst his lawyers defended him by saying that he’d asked for the people to march peacefully.4 The issue that you’ve faced is an extension of the idea of incitement to violence to epistemic violence.
By epistemic violence you mean? I want to make sure I understand what you mean, because for example, I use the term in describing postmodernism, I call it intellectual terrorism. Not that I literally mean that there is violence, but that it akin to the way that the 9/11 hijackers flew planes into buildings. I argue that postmodernism flies planes of bullshit into our edifices of reason. It’s a metaphor. So maybe you could explain to me what you mean by epistemic violence?
I took the term from Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay’s book, Cynical Theories. I wonder whether people really do believe in free speech? I know you’ve found a division with people like Sam Harris in relation to Trump’s ability to exhibit free speech on Twitter. I wonder whether even people who present themselves as perfectly rational actors truly believe in free speech?
That’s the reason why we had a fallout because I am someone who lives by a strict code. If you read The Parasitic Mind- How Infectious Ideas are Killing Common Sense5 in chapter one, I talk about the two ideals that drive my life: truth and freedom. I live according to an exacting level of purity, to the extent where it’s a punishing code of personal conduct, a pathological code of conduct, whereby to me, I would be tossing and turning in turmoil, if I were not always consistent in my foundational principles. When I look at someone like Sam Harris, who, I facetiously refer to as the ‘Malibu Meditator,’ who built a career on being the dispassionate and rational guy and speaking with a soft voice, because that makes you sound as though you’re more profound, and then he violates every single conceivable deontological principle, when it is politically expedient to do so, that triggers my ire, that upsets me. For many years, I stayed quiet. This is not really about Sam Harris - it’s a larger principle. I stayed quiet because we had a personal relationship, I knew him, we’ve hung out, we’ve had dinner, he’s invited me on his show. But then the number of deontological violations were so great that I started using my satirical approach to mock him, but in a nice way, and he didn’t take well to it. And that to me is hypocrisy and is one of those sins that we need to incorporate within the seven deadly sins; we need to have an amendment to the seven deadly sins. So ‘I believe in presumption of innocence’ - but not for Brett Kavanaugh. Surely, he must have been a gang rapist going up and down the East Coast raping everybody. Now we don’t need to really presume that he’s innocent, because this is not a courtroom. This is not a criminal case. It’s just a job interview. So, he doesn’t deserve that deontological principle. Whether it be Sam Harris, or others - all of my super smart, highfalutin colleagues, all thought that presumption of innocence didn’t apply to someone as supposedly execrable as Brett Kavanaugh.6
Let me give you an example of a deontological approach to this issue. In 1961, I believe, the Mossad was in Argentina trying to find Adolf Eichmann.7 Adolf Eichmann might be considered a slightly nastier guy than Brett Kavanaugh. And yet their deontological position was, ‘We can either put a bullet in his head right now, because we’ve identified him and end this story and ensure that we are safe, or we don’t do it this way, he needs to have his day in court at great personal cost, and to ensure the reputation of Israel.’ We will find a way to smuggle him out back to Israel, where he will stand trial. That’s what the deontological principles are. So, someone like Sam Harris who was able to from this side of his mouth, say one thing, and this side of his mouth say something else. I find that vile.
I think you quoted Hume, in your book from memory, talking about how rationality is driven to some extent by emotion and desire. So, we’re all vulnerable to that, aren’t we? We’re all vulnerable to confirmation bias?
Here’s what I argue in that chapter; the one where I quote Hume - it’s not that we are just cognitive animals; thinking animals, or just emotional animals – I don’t think that these two systems should be pitted against one another. We’re both. The struggle is to know when to invoke which system. When I am walking down an alley, and I’m taking a shortcut to get home, and I see four young men, loitering, that look suspicious, and my heart starts racing, my blood pressure goes up, I might get a bit of anxiety - that’s my affective system that’s kicking in, but it makes perfect adaptive sense for me to have had that response. On the other hand, if I’m trying to solve a calculus problem during a calculus exam, the triggering of my affective system is not going to help me much. The problem arises when we apply the wrong system at the wrong time. When we are examining which prospective politician might be ideal, you’d like to think that we’re able to activate our cognitive system. And yet, most of the positions that people have taken, vis-à-vis Obama, vis-à-vis Trump, are completely emotionally based.
There is an expression in Arabic: ‘To get drunk simply by smelling the cork of the wine bottle,’ meaning that I don’t need to actually go through the heavy lifting of drinking the wine to get drunk, I can simply take a whiff and I’ll get drunk.8 What are we conveying here? When people say ‘I despise Trump; he disgusts me. He’s going to cause a nuclear holocaust. The economy is going to tank. He’s going to institute martial law.’ Those were literal things that were said by guys like Sam Harris and Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman.9 When they’re saying things like that, they are smelling the cork of the wine bottle in the same way. They’ll get drunk “smelling the Obama cork.” Obama is majestic. He’s got a radiant smile. He is lanky. He speaks with the cadence of a Southern Baptist minister. Every single syllable that he says might be an utter, empty, vacuous platitude of bullshit. But my God, does he intoxicate me; I am getting drunk by smelling the cork of the wine bottle. When you actually try to challenge people with ‘Can you give me five reasons why you hate Trump?’ They’ll respond with: ‘He disgusts me, he’s a brawler, he’s vulgar.’ So, they are using peripheral cues to judge him. It’s not substantive. So that’s the tension between passion and reason that I referenced in chapter 2 of The Parasitic Mind. Activate the appropriate system for the right occasion.
It seems as though you’ve got to be vigilant against that. If you wanted to make an assessment of Trump it may be in relation to something like COVID-19. For instance, early on in the pandemic, Trump simply saying ‘It will go away’ - that was unhelpful, and damaging, and potentially led to greater loss of life.10 And then you may look at the Trump administration and say: ‘Perhaps the Abraham Accords were a success.’11–14 However, if I made some sort of ad hominem attack about you, and then I went on to legitimately criticize your work, you may not be as even handed in your response to me, because your emotional system is activated.
Of course. But again, you would think that people whose business it is to be nuanced thinkers, to not be black and white, to be rational, to be well reasoned would be able to do this. In The Parasitic Mind, I explained that all of the idea pathogens that I’m discussing in this book originate from academia. It’s not as though if you are highly educated with a PhD from a fancy university this inoculates you against bad ideas - you are the progenitor of those bad ideas. Now, that doesn’t mean that all professors are babbling idiots, but to paraphrase Orwell; it takes intellectuals to come up with really dumb ideas and so that’s in essence what I find disheartening because you expect better from the supposedly intellectual class.
It’s as though we pick a soccer team, but we don’t pick them based on their athletic abilities. It turns out that all the soccer players are babbling, obese people who can’t kick a soccer ball, and that’s what you end up having in universities. That’s why I oftentimes, in a jocular way, I’m righteously indignant at some of my colleagues because of their faux intellectualism. Their posing really upsets me, because I am authentic to a fault. For example, I’m not a Democrat nor a Republican, notwithstanding the fact that I’m not American. I’m not liberal nor conservative - not because I’m trying to be coy, and I don’t want to show you my hand as to which party I belong to. It’s because I truly am an ideas guy. If you were to ask me, ‘What do you think about the death penalty?’ And if I give you an answer, then you’re going to think, ‘Oh, he’s a conservative.’ If you ask me about transgender rights and gay rights, you’re going to think I’m the most socially liberal guy in the world. If you ask me about open borders, you’re going to think, ‘Oh, he’s a conservative.’ I’m neither conservative nor liberal, I judge each idea on its own, and therefore I don’t succumb to tribalism. And that’s why I say in the book: belong to the tribe of truth.
Everyone can have a moral tribe can’t they?
We do. And it’s tough to extricate yourself from that penchant. We are a coalitional creature. The ability to view the world as us versus them; to view the world as blue team versus red team, is one that is hardwired into the architecture of our minds. I get that. But we’re able to sometimes overcome these Darwinian realities. I have an evolved penchant to eat fatty foods, because I’ve evolved to solve the problem of caloric scarcity and caloric uncertainty; that doesn’t mean that I am doomed because I also have an opposing Darwinian drive, which is, I don’t want to die tomorrow, because maybe I have a Darwinian drive of moral restraint. The fact that it is incontestable that we are a coalitional creature, doesn’t mean that we have to become these tribal idiots. We are pulled by competing Darwinian pulls at any given moment.
I felt like that was the heart of it. When I was reading The Parasitic Mind, it reminded me of the conformity experiments of Solomon Asch.15 So, I wonder how much of it is simply that people can get indoctrinated into an idea, any idea, through the pressure of the group?
It’s interesting that you mentioned Solomon Asch’s experiments. It’s one of the classic examples that I give in any behavioral science or psychology course, whether it be consumer psychology, or psychology of decision making, or evolutionary psychology. The fact that a single person - never mind the actual conformity rates that we see - would succumb to the group pressure to conform for such an unambiguous set of stimuli shows us that in the real world, where the stimuli are not as clear as three lines with another line, how easy it becomes to get people to conform. And I think that’s what makes people who don’t succumb to such pressure such unique individuals.
I always tell people don’t be a fence sitter. If you’re able to articulate a good defense for your positions, be a honey badger. Because the honey badger is an animal that is extraordinarily fierce, despite the fact that it is the size of a small dog. So be ideologically fierce, and stand tall in your commitment to defend your deontological foundational principles. But most people, I hate to say it, and I don’t want to sound misanthropic - most people are just abject cowards. If you go ‘boo!’ they’re going to go into a corner and suck their thumb and go into the fetal position. This is why I admire guys like Christopher Hitchens, because whether I agree with him on a position or not, he didn’t suffer fools gladly. If you went after him, you better have your story straight, or he’s going to come hard after you. Not because he’s a nasty guy, but because he just doesn’t suffer fools gladly. I respect that personality trait.
The reality is, certainly in academia, we almost by design choose people who are just intellectual cowards, rather than having Navy Seals as academics - these are intellectual warriors, right? Not frivolously combative: you and I have different positions - let’s have a respectful disagreement. Let’s see what happens. Instead, people want to play nice. At departmental meetings it’s unbelievable the number of niceties that people say to each other, because they don’t want to come across as though they might have contradicted what someone else says. Therefore, we have to be so empathetic and apologetic. You could be very nice and polite, but get to the point. So, I don’t appreciate that, maybe it’s partly my Middle Eastern background. No, not maybe - it is the unique combination of genes that make me who I am. I don’t like that. That’s why people sometimes think, ‘Oh, you’re so different when I see you on social media, then when I see you in real life, you’re such a nice and warm person.’ I say, ‘But I’m not on social media?’ And they’re like, ‘No, you seem much rougher.’ It’s not a dispositional issue. It’s a situational one. It’s not that I am a violent guy on social media. But if you come at me on social media, I don’t recoil to a corner, I’ll come right back after you. As an analogy, when I tuck my children to bed, I’m very loving. But if you attack me in an alley, I’m less loving. I didn’t suddenly become dispositionally violent. It’s this situation that demanded that I exhibit behavioral plasticity. I respect people who’ve got this fortitude who step into the ring and say, ‘Let’s have at it.’ It’s a beautiful trait.
It seems you admire not being too high on agreeableness, even though that probably has an evolutionary benefit in terms of the in-group. James Flynn said to me that in the 30 or 40 years that the left has gained ascendancy within the university, anything that they’d done, and he was critical of it, did not even begin to approach the totalitarian regime that the right ran under regimes like McCarthyism. How would you respond to that?
I don’t know what he went through, I can only respond to the current reality. Short of having studied the history of the type of squashing of free speech that might have happened in different eras, I can tell you that the last 40 or 50 years that I’m aware, all of the nonsense comes from the left. As a matter of fact, I can’t think of an industry within intelligentsia that is not overwhelmingly dominated by one political aisle; the left. McCarthyism was a unique short point in history. But let’s talk about now because I don’t know what he went through. There have been many studies that have examined the distribution of political affiliation of professors at universities.16 And the data is just astounding. First of all, if you look across all disciplines, it could be 5 to 1, 10 to 1, 20 to 1 - Democrats to Republicans or Liberals to Conservatives. Let me contextualize this; if you’re comparing the efficacy of two drugs, and you have an odds ratio of 1 to 1.2, it means it’s 20% more effective. And you ran all of the statistical tests that you want, whether it be an effect size, or the p value, you’re going to get a huge effect. That’s 1 to 1.2. In academia we’re talking 1 to 10, 1 to 20. It’s multifold greater than the typical statistical effects that you would see in all the papers that are ever published. Now, depending on the field that you’re in, the more activist the field is, then you have ratios of 44 to 1; sociology and ethnic studies and bullshit studies. Especially when you’re dealing in topics that don’t have absolute scientific veracity. For example, for the theory of evolution we now understand that to be absolutely true, although we are open to its falsifiability, as everything is provisional in science. But that’s within the realm of science.
When it comes to us discussing in an economics course and a political science course – is the death penalty right or wrong? Are abortion rights right or wrong? What is the optimal fiscal policy? What is the optimal foreign policy? Well, there are very, very compelling arguments on any side for those issues. Now, I may fall on one side ideologically or not. But there are truly very valuable arguments on both sides. So, I can really listen to someone who thinks that the death penalty is a terrible idea, and they might have some objectively good and valid points. Now imagine that you live in an ecosystem where in some departments, the last time that you might have run into a conservative professor was when Baruch Spinoza was writing something [i.e., the 17th century]. Well, that’s probably not a good thing. So, I don’t care what James Flynn may or may not have gone through, the academic ecosystem that I live in and that I have known for the past 40 years, is one that is dominated by one political party. And that’s really not good for the flourishing of ideas.
I think to some extent you’ve come out as a warrior in this culture war because your discipline; the merger of evolutionary psychology and consumption, is at the epicenter. If there is going to be a discipline that is the flashpoint for ideas of social constructionism then it is going to be that, isn’t it? And that is why you are coming out in such strong defense I imagine?
The first hints of the insane departure from reason and reality that I saw in academia, is precisely how you describe it, which was in the pursuit of my scientific work. It was kind of a precursor to the eventual broader culture wars. But idiotic ideas begin in the lab, just like the COVID virus, as far as we know, it starts off in the lab, but then it escapes. These parasitic and moronic ideas begin in some esoteric place in the halls of the ivory tower, but eventually those ideas escape and then they infect everything: journalism, Hollywood, politics, and human resources departments of companies. So, my first exposure to the lunacy came when I was trying to Darwinize these behavioral disciplines. In my case, I truly was fighting against the orthodoxy, because even today - I’m housed in a business school – and the word biology is never uttered in the business school.17,18 Somehow employers and employees and consumers and traders and economic agents exist in a supra plane that transcends biology. They are not prone to biological processes. Biology really matters for the mosquito and the zebra and the dog. But ‘What the hell are you talking about Dr. Saad with this biology stuff and consumer behavior? We transcend our biology.’ This is called the human reticence effect.19,20 You’re reticent to apply the exact same evolutionary principles that explain the behavior of 1,999,999 species. But there’s one species where biology and evolutionary principles don’t apply and if they apply to that species, they stop at the neck.
So, ‘Oh, you want to use evolution to explain the evolution of opposable thumbs? - I’m with you. You want to explain the evolutionary mechanisms that explain why our kidneys operate the way they do? Okay, I’m still with you. But you want to explain the human mind using the evolutionary framework? What are you some kind of Jewish Nazi?’ So that’s the kind of idiocy that you’d get. Listen, I’ve interacted with editors of top journals in psychology, where they said, ‘Well, come on, evolutionary psychology, that’s just racist pseudoscience?’ And it’s breathtaking. Because what is the alternative game in town? Through what mechanism did the human mind evolve? Well, it’s culture. It’s learning. It’s socialization. Of course, that explains nothing. As I’ve written and as I explain to my students, to explain something through the invoking of culture has zero explanatory power, because I could replace the word culture with the letter ‘X.’ Why do women love tall guys? Because it’s X. Why do men like this type of women? Because it’s X. What needs to be done is to explain why socialization is of that form. So, no one is denying the fact that socialization occurs, and that culture occurs, and that the environment matters.
Evolutionists don’t deny the importance of the environment. But there needs to still be an ultimate explanation for the causal mechanisms that result in that socialization process. Otherwise, you’re saying nothing. Still today, I encounter endless babbling buffoons who say, ‘Come on. This is not serious science.’ So, in chapter seven of The Parasitic Mind, I discuss an unbelievably powerful epistemological tool called Nomological Networks of Cumulative Evidence.21–24 If people take nothing away from that particular book other than understanding this powerful tool - although I hope they take every syllable away from it - but if they take nothing else away, that it is such a revolutionary way to construct arguments.
Nomological networks of cumulative evidence is not a literature review. It’s not a meta-analysis. It’s much more than that. Because what it’s basically saying is I have to provide distinct lines of evidence in support of an argument. Let’s say I want to prove to you that there is a sex specificity of toy preferences; boys prefer certain toys, girls prefer other toys. Or I want to make an argument that men’s preference for the hourglass figure is an adaptation.21 How would I go about proving that point to you? Now I’m going to put on my hat of this nomological network architect, whereby I’m going to try to find data from across cultures, from across time periods, from across disciplines, from across frameworks, from across dependent measures. Imagine triangulation, but on hyper-steroids. It’s an epistemological triangulation. It’s not triangulation, the way you would come up with a way to validate the construct of a personality measure. That is a form of nomological network. But it’s much more than that.
I thought it is interesting in terms of sex differences, because now, with the replication crisis in psychology,25 that seems to be undermining this research to some extent …
In a sense, a nomological network protects you against the replication crisis. There are two types of replications. When you talk about replication, there is what’s called a direct replication. Let’s say that you have published a paper on facial symmetry. So, now I want to replicate your finding in a direct way, meaning I want to use your exact stimuli, your exact instructions, so I do a direct replication of what you did. A conceptual replication is broader. Let’s say you found that beauty is captured through facial symmetry. Well, is there some alternate way where I can establish that phenomenon using different stimuli? That would be a conceptual replication. So, there are two types of replications. Now a nomological network is not a replication, but what it’s saying is, ‘I can offer you distinct lines of evidence, all of which point to the same incontrovertible, true finding.’ Now, why did I start by saying all this? Because when evolutionary scientists are trying to argue that something is an adaptation, they typically are going to look for multiple lines of evidence to make that argument. Therefore, the evidentiary threshold that evolutionary scientists operate under is astoundingly higher.
It has to be because you’ve got the danger when you’re trying to construct an evolutionary theory, that when you extrapolate backwards, you increase
the error rate. If that makes sense?
It does. And that’s why you build those nomological networks. That’s why when people say, ‘Well, it’s unfalsifiable just-so storytelling,’ it really pisses me off, because it is actually doing the exact opposite. When I want to try to prove to you that the hourglass figure is an adaptation, what do I do? I can get you data from radically different cultures. I can go to the Yanomami tribe in the Amazon and show you that they prefer an hourglass figure.26 So already that is way higher in terms of the evidentiary threshold. In most psychology studies, one takes 30 undergrads into their lab, and they’re done, good night, mic drop. I could get you data from across cultures; I could get you data cross-temporally (i.e., across eras). I can show you that there are figurines from 3,000 years ago that possess that waist to hip ratio hourglass figure.21,27 I could get you data from female escorts, as I did in a paper that I published showing you that across 48 countries where women advertise their sexual services online, they tend to advertise the waist to hip ratio that is universally preferred.28 I can get you brain imaging data that shows you that the pleasure center in men’s brains are much more likely to light up when I show you images of an hourglass figure.21,29 The bottom line is that I can get you an astoundingly varied set of data, which makes it incontrovertible that there certainly seems to be very compelling evidence in support of my argument. And yet some idiot will write to me and say, ‘But come on Dr. Saad you just smoke a pipe, while sipping whiskey, and just come up with these fanciful stories.’ Meanwhile, I put myself through the rigor of an astoundingly higher set of thresholds before I prove my point. So that’s why it’s galling, because to me, it’s an attack on the decency of reason. Because you are attacking me for exactly the opposite of what I do.
It’s an invalidation, I suppose. I want to get back to that, because I think there’s a point that I’m really interested in, in relation to this. I think what you and other people like Jordan Peterson have struggled with, is that if social constructionism embeds all causation in culture and language, it becomes a form of solipsism, which is maddening to argue against.
You’re right. True. I’ll just build on what you just said. When I was laying out all of the idea pathogens in The Parasitic Mind, I wanted to try to come up with some universal mechanism that explains why these varied idea pathogens arise. While different cancers behave very differently, what they all have in common is the unchecked division of cells. At least we can agree that that’s a commonality across all cancers. I wanted to look at what is common to all these idea pathogens. I think what they all do, is that they offer hope, whilst injuring truth. In other words, it’s a consequentialist bent. There is a noble goal of providing people with hope and if in the pursuit of creating a more hopeful world, we murder and rape truth - so be it. You mentioned social constructivism, so let me use it as a telling example. It is a wonderfully, hopeful message to say that, my child, if only I hug him enough, or don’t hug him enough, or whatever the sequence of reinforcement, could be the next Michael Jordan. It’s not a very nice message for me to know that my son was not born with equal potentiality to Michael Jordan; that he could never jump as high as Michael Jordan. That sucks. So, it’s much nicer to construct a narrative of bullshit that makes us all be able to wallow in endless hope - my son could be the next Einstein, he could be the next Jordan, he could be the next Messi. So social constructivism at its root, is a beautiful message perfectly rooted in bullshit. But it’s a beautiful message. The reality is we’re not equal - we may be equal under the law. We’re not equal in potentiality. There is something unique about Lionel Messi that allows him to move on a soccer pitch in ways that you will never be able to. And that’s not because mommy didn’t hug you enough. Now let’s take another one. Cultural relativism suffers from the exact same mechanism. Cultural relativism came about from Franz Boas, the cultural anthropologist ...
And Margaret Mead…
Margaret, his eventual student, who was desperate to extricate the human condition from any biological imperatives, because there are all kinds of cretinous people who misused evolutionary theory. They start off with a noble goal, which is let’s create a worldview where these kinds of ugly realities will no longer happen. And in the service of that noble goal, if we erect 100 years of edifices of bullshit, so be it. They are consequentialist, whereas I am, when it comes to the truth, I am pathological as a deontologist. I never sacrifice truth for careerist aspirations. Although, one might argue I’ve had a very successful career, I’ve nonetheless suffered professionally, because I call it like it is, because I simply cannot modulate my defense of the truth. Doesn’t mean I’m impolite. It doesn’t mean by the way, that we’re not all consequentialist at some point. But when it comes to the pursuit of truth, with a capital T, as an epistemological pursuit, never sacrifice your deontological principles.
You’ve mentioned deontological ethics quite a few times. It always strikes me as much harder to achieve than what it sounds. Deontological ethics is like the 10 commandments: ‘Thou shalt, thou shalt not,’ but even the 10 commandments are not purely deontological. ‘Thou shall not kill?’ Well, unless I’m at war with the Philistines and then I’m going to kill. Deontological ethics is very difficult to achieve, I think...
Well, how about presumption of innocence? Is that a deontological principle that we should always follow?
Yes, I think it’s a good principle. But I don’t think that it’s impervious to change; I think that societies can change it, and then we’ll face the consequences for that, whatever they may be …
I’m thinking of writing an article where I analogize the current crisis of irrationality in the West with the Fine-Tuning Argument;30 that all of nature’s laws have to be exactly set at a particular place for life to be amenable on Earth. Well, I argue that for a civil, free, and enlightened society to function in the way that it has requires that a set of foundational values be adhered to (the levers of liberty, so to speak). It’s akin to a cosmological Fine-Tuning Argument and that you need the levers of certain foundational principles to be set at the right place. Once you start moving these levers in ways where you are really now saying ‘But the presumption of innocence does not apply to Brett Kavanaugh’ or ‘Oh no, but free speech doesn’t apply if you’re criticizing Islam’ - you start attacking the integrity of the rigidity of some of these levers that are truly non-negotiable, then you end up with the chaos that we’re finding ourselves in. And that’s why I have a chapter in The Parasitic Mind called ‘Non-Negotiable Elements of a Free and Modern Society’ because these are elements that should be pursued from a deontological perspective. Although I realize what you said that, for many things, it’s very hard to be a purist deontological person, but for some foundational things, I think those should be non-negotiable.
Particularly with the law. The law is not necessarily about justice. It’s about being as polemical as possible and being an advocate. So, there is a deontological principle of innocence until proven guilty. However often, even in recent times, that has occurred, I couldn’t say.
You mean that we adhere to that principle?
Let’s move away from presumption of innocence. I know you’ve used the example of O.J. Simpson’s trial in the past;31 a trial that is confounded to some extent by social influences.
Although I would say in the O.J. Simpson case there wasn’t, I don’t believe, a violation of a deontological principle. Rather, human beings that are part of that system are flawed, and therefore they succumb to their cognitive and emotional biases. The deontological violation would have come whereby we would have said, ‘There is so much astounding evidence to support the fact that O.J. Simpson is guilty, let’s not waste time with taxpayer money, let’s take him out the back and put a bullet in his head’ - that would have been a violation. So, it’s not the outcome, which was grotesque in my view, that proves that there was a violation. There was no violation as he had a fair trial. I have heard that if you took 10 trials that resulted in the death penalty in the US - amassed the totality of evidence of those 10 trials, it would have amounted to a fraction of the evidence that was presented against O.J. Simpson. Yet some bombastic lawyer puts on a glove, and says ‘If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.’ And therefore the 12 jurors say ‘It doesn’t fit, you must acquit.’ The fact that his DNA was on the victims, their DNA was on him, all that must have been a racist cop that planted all these things.32,33 All of that proves the earlier point that we spoke about - we’re invoking our emotional systems as jurors rather than our cognitive systems, regrettably.
Interestingly, from the social constructionist perspective, I was thinking about your writings on gender differences. I thought, ‘Well, these are biological but are they immutable to change?’ So, I would think about gender differences possibly like the genes for height, meaning that if you put enough selective environmental pressures on them, you can change height. Whereas the gene for limb development is impermeable; it takes a very acute toxicity like thalidomide to affect it. And I wondered whether gender differences were like that because I think you can see society changing. And you use Sweden as the example when referencing universal sex-specific toy preferences, but I would use movements like the Kurdish Workers’ Party, and the Peshmerga and say, these are movements now that have 50% female fighters on the front line that are going up against ISIS.36 They’re effective. But of course, that’s a very specific culture. They take Marxist principles when they form their militias, and combat in the 20th and 21st century changed.
You can create so much selection pressure - let’s say through quotas. You can see it in different societies such as India which now has 34% of its IT population female.37 So, you can see that cultures and selective deliberate pressure could change things that may even be biological.
Well, yes and no. It depends what you’re saying. For example, if you’re saying, with the Peshmerga, how many female fighters there are - that’s just an outcome-based reality. We can change the cultural tradition so that a particular role that women were not allowed to engage in, they now can, but that’s not really where the selection pressures that I talked about in my research on sex differences come from. Here’s one preference that will be impervious to change, unless you had many years of selection pressures. The fact that women are attracted to ambitious, highly driven, status seeking males, is not going to change. Whether we have more women in IT in India or less, or we have more women driving in Saudi Arabia or not, it’s completely irrelevant to the fundamental sex-specific difference when it comes to human mating. As a matter of fact, extraordinarily successful women insist even more on a man being high status; as such the rate at which an adaptation takes before it becomes part of our manifestation of our human nature, depends on a slew of factors.18 For example, the fact that I have 10 fingers is now a fixed trait. It’s not a normal distribution. So, for us to move away from that will undoubtedly take hundreds of thousands or millions of years of a particular selection pressure, like the mole rat, that lives underground, has now evolved away its visual system; it can’t see.
On the other hand, there are some human traits that evolve very quickly in the order of several hundred years, if not thousands of years. For example, the fact that some societies have individuals with a greater propensity for lactose intolerance, that happens very, very quickly. Cultures that have pastoral living as a cultural tradition, end up having lower rates of lactose intolerance, those cultures that don’t have traditional pastoral living have higher rates, that doesn’t take long, it takes them in the order of a couple of hundred to a couple of thousands of years.21,38,39 So, depending on the trait, the selection rate will vary. My feeling is, again, it depends which sex difference you’re talking about. But the most fundamental sex differences that define our differences are not really within the purview of environmental changes within the lifetime of an individual human being. Does that make sense?
Absolutely. I was thinking of an example, I can’t remember the name of the village or the small region, but there’s a place in China where it is a purely matriarchal society.40 Women own everything, run everything, and they’re all the heads of families. So, you have a situation where women who have no choice but to be attracted to men who aren’t ambitious.
I don’t know about that particular context - I’d have to look into it. But that example, by the way, actually proves an important evolutionary point, which comes from behavioral ecology. And it’s as follows: there are some things where the human universals are really quite ubiquitous, but the reality is that for many phenomena, we’ve evolved adaptability as an adaptation. Now, that’s actually a really profound point that people might miss so let me just expand on it. The immune system has evolved to have degrees of freedom. If the immune system had only evolved to solve three specific pathogens P1, P2, and, P3, then we’d all be dead long ago, because pathogens mutate very quickly. So as soon as we go from P1 to P,* if the immune system cannot have the plasticity to deal with a new pathogen on the fly, we’d all be dead. The same logic applies for human behavior; humans have evolved the capacity to be plastic in their behavior. That’s exactly what the field of behavioral ecology is all about. Behavioral ecologists study cross-cultural differences as adaptive responses.
Therefore, while most cultures practice polygyny; meaning one man with multiple women — about 85% of documented cultures at least allow for the possibility of polygyny,41 all other cultures are monogamous, and there are exceedingly rare cases of polyandrous societies. Polyandrous societies, the most famous of which is Tibetan polyandry, is where one woman is shared by multiple men. Now, an imbecile, who doesn’t understand evolutionary theory says ‘Aha! well now that invalidates evolutionary theory.’ But once you realize that there are very clear evolutionary reasons why the human capacity to change can be channeled this way or that way, depending on varying ecosystems, then you realize that those cultural differences are themselves due to biology. So, without knowing anything else about the Chinese example you gave, I can guarantee you right here with complete swagger and assuredness that there is an evolutionary reason for that reality.
I know that you developed a nomological network of evidence to show the link between Islam and the propensity to commit terrorism. I suppose when I thought about the principles of scientific philosophy, I had always considered Islam to be a necessary but not sufficient condition in extremism. If you said it was a necessary and sufficient condition that would mean that every Muslim on the planet would be an extremist. It’s about multiple causation. It seems to be a combination of factors - potentially geographical area, political affiliation, family structure, temperament - all sorts of things that converge to produce someone who ends up in Boko Haram.
Yes. In the most basic sense, that’s an obvious statement. This is what I made fun of in the book: this is due to paleo, organic, social, cultural, bio, anthropogenic… So, you can concatenate a bunch of bullshit terms, so that the more you can concatenate, then you move away from what seems to be the very clear causal link. This apparently makes you a nuanced thinker. It’s due to many causes. Well, everything is due to many causes. So that says pretty much nothing. But what we do know is that if you are convinced by a set of doctrines within Islam, and you are a true purist who wishes to exactly abide by those principles, then there is a direct path to you doing bad things. Now, the reason why most Muslims don’t do that, is because just like in any population, most people are kind. So, what do they do? They shut their eyes to the nefarious parts of their religion. In some instances, they don’t even know that those parts exist.
They don’t recognize it, I think. I spoke to a Palestinian refugee who had been in the camps in Lebanon, and their family and their friends had faced persecution from Gemayel’s Christian militia. Some people had been murdered. Most Christians wouldn’t recognize that as Christianity.
Yes. I addressed this in the book, you may or may not remember. When a Muslim commits 37,000 plus terror attacks in the name of Islam since 9/11 alone, and when he says, in taping a video, before he commits that act, ‘I am doing it because of these four Quranic quotes,’ it becomes very difficult to argue that it’s because of solar panels, or because of lack of art exposure, or that it is due to beard bullying, or that Christians also do bad things, which is a form of whataboutism. Because I am from Lebanon, I understand those gaslighting dynamics. The massacres that you speak of did not stem from the edicts in the New Testament; the massacres while inexcusable and grotesque, were not being justified theologically. So, details matter. Of course, Christians do all kinds of horrific things. So, there is no monopoly on the evil heart. There are evil people of all faiths and of no faith. When we’re talking about a particular religion preaching love or hate, what we’re saying is, is there something in the canonical textbooks that if adherents of that faith take such edicts seriously, it will cause mayhem? So, let’s build a nomological network of cumulative evidence to evaluate whether Islam is peaceful or not. And I would argue that it’s a pretty convincing nomological network. And if one could come up with a similar network for Christianity, that proves that Christians are more likely to commit violence if they are more religious, then show me that nomological network.
Well possibly 500 years ago...
Well, as I said, there is no monopoly of evil from one ideology. No one is saying that Islam contains the only set of religious doctrines that can result in horrific things. You can find things in the Torah and the Old Testament that has all kinds of horrible things, for instance; ‘Take your insolent children to the gates of the city, and stone them to death.’ But here’s a small detail. We don’t have too many ultra-orthodox Jews today taking their insolent children and stoning them to death at the gates of Jerusalem. Again, historical realities matter. This is why I think nomological networks are so powerful. Many people have read The Parasitic Mind. I’ve never had someone write to me and say, ‘Hey, Dr. Saad, box four in your nomological network is simply wrong.’ And this is why people say to me, ‘How come you don’t get cancelled? How can you say all the things that you do?.’ Because I don’t trigger my emotional system, I let the data speak for itself.
And I completely recognize what you said. As a matter of fact, I have more Muslim friends than most people will ever meet in their lives by virtue of me being from Lebanon. So, I don’t need to be convinced of that argument that most Muslims are peaceful. But is Islam a set of ideas where gay life flourishes? Where black dogs flourish? Where Jews flourish? Where irreverent non-Muslims’ flourish? No. And there’s about 1400 years that supports that idea. Here’s another one that we hear: ‘But Professor, what about the Andalusia love fest? Weren’t Jews, Christians, and Muslims living beautifully then?’ And ‘What about you Professor? You lived in Lebanon peacefully?.’ Yes, I lived in Lebanon peacefully, until I had to put on my running shoes and run really fast so I don’t get my head decapitated from the rest of my body. You are healthy, until you have a fatal heart attack. You didn’t know that you’re going to die. It’s not as though Islam leads to a never-ending orgiastic killing field 24 hours a day - killing everybody in sight. But does it create societies that are congruent with the enlightened liberal values that we cherish in the West? I think the data are pretty clear there.
1. James Flynn : Free Speech and Universities | troublemag. Accessed December 30, 2021. http://www.troublemag.com/james-flynn-free-speech-and-universities/
2. Hauen J. Facing pushback, Ryerson University cancels panel discussion on campus free speech. National Post. https://nationalpost.com/news/canada /facing-pushback-ryerson-cancels-panel-discussion-on-campus-free-speech. Published August 16, 2017. Accessed December 30, 2021.
3. News ABC. A visual timeline on how the attack on Capitol Hill unfolded. ABC News. Accessed December 30, 2021. https://abcnews.go.com/US/ visual-timeline-attack-capitol-hill-unfolded/story?id=75112066
4. Capitol riots: Did Trump’s words at rally incite violence? BBC News. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-55640437. Published February 14, 2021. Accessed December 30, 2021.
5. The Parasitic Mind - How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense. Regnery Publishing. Accessed January 22, 2022. https://www.regnery.com/ 9781684512294/the-parasitic-mind
6. Sam Harris. Kavanaugh’s defenders appear to believe either (1) Ford is lying to keep him off the court and willing to destroy her life in the process. (What’s more, she’s been preparing the ground for this accusation for years.) or. @SamHarrisOrg. Published September 27, 2018. Accessed December 30, 2021. https://twitter.com/SamHarrisOrg/status/1045451022515064832
7. Staff T. Eichmann was nabbed by Mossad after tipoff from German co-worker, report reveals. Accessed December 30, 2021. https://www.timesof israel.com / eichmann - nabbed - by - mossad-after-tipoff-from-german-co-worker-report-reveals/
8. Gad Saad. The Obama-Trudeau Effect: Getting Drunk by Smelling the Wine Bottle’s Cork (THE SAAD TRUTH_1112).; 2020. Accessed December 30, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-HiS4r4MV4
9. Times TNY. Paul Krugman: The Economic Fallout. The New York Times. paul-krugman-the-economic-fallout. Published November 9, 2016. Accessed December 30, 2021.
10. All of the times President Trump said Covid-19 will disappear. Accessed December 30, 2021. https:// www.cnn.com / interactive / 2020 / 10 / politics/ covid-disappearing-trump-comment-tracker/
11. Why the Abraham Accords didn’t resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - Vox. Accessed December 30, 2021. https://www.vox.com/2021/5/13/2243 4142/israel-gaza-hamas-war-trump-biden-abraham-accords
12. Green L. Trump’s Peace review: dysfunction and accord in US Israel policy. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/dec/20/trumps-peace- review - barak - ravid - israel - netanyahu-kushner-uae-iran. Published December 20, 2021. Accessed December 30, 2021.
13. The Abraham Accords. United States Department of State. Accessed December 30, 2021. https://www.state.gov/the-abraham-accords/
14. Biden, the Abraham Accords and carrying forward Trump’s legacy. Accessed December 30, 2021. https://www.trtworld.com/opinion/biden-the-abraham-accords-and-carrying-forward-trump-s-legacy-49998
15. Asch SE. Studies of independence and conformity: I. A minority of one against a unanimous majority. Psychol Monogr Gen Appl. 1956;70(9):1-70. doi:10.1037/h0093718
16. Table 2 . Political identification of college professors by field (%). ResearchGate. Accessed December 30, 2021. https://www.researchgate.net/ figure/Political-identification-of-college-professors-by-field_tbl1_40823273
17. Saad G. Evolutionary Psychology in the Business Sciences. Springer Science & Business Media; 2011.
18. Saad G. The consuming instinct. What Darwinian consumption reveals about human nature. Polit Life Sci J Assoc Polit Life Sci. 2013;32(1):58-72. doi:10.2990/32_1_58
19. Gad Saad. Human reticence effect: evolutionary principle is used to explain mating behaviour of salamander. Good work professor. Same principle /2. @GadSaad. Published April 23, 2015. Accessed December 30, 2021. https:// twitter.com/GadSaad/status/591317253041291264
20. Ranney, M. A., & Thanukos, A. (2011). Accepting evolution or creation in people, critters, plants, and classrooms: The maelstrom of American cognition about biological change. In R. S. Taylor, & M. Ferrari (Eds.). Epistemology and science education: Understanding the evolution vs. intelligent design controversy (pp. 143–172). New York: Routledge.
21. Saad G. The Epistemology of Evolutionary Psychology Offers a Rapprochement to Cultural Psychology. Front Psychol. 2020;11:579578. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2020.579578
22. Schmitt DP, Pilcher JJ. Evaluating evidence of psychological adaptation: how do we know one when we see one? Psychol Sci. 2004;15(10):643-649. doi:10.1111/j.0956-7976.2004.00734.x
23. Saad G. (2020). Building a global database of nomological networks of cumulative evidence. - PsycNET. Accessed December 30, 2021. https://doi. apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Febs0000223
24. Saad G. On the Method of Evolutionary Psychology and Its Applicability to Consumer Research. J Mark Res. 2017;54(3):464-477. doi:10.1509/jmr .14. 0645
25. Replication Crisis | Psychology Today Australia. Accessed December 30, 2021. https://www.psychologytoday.com/au/basics/replication-crisis
26. Saad G. Beauty: Culture-Specific or Universally Defined? | Psychology Today Australia. Accessed December 30, 2021. https://www. psychology today.com/au /blog /homo-consumericus/201004/beauty-culture-specific-or-universally-defined
27. Hudson MJ, Aoyama M. Waist-to-hip ratios of Jomon figurines. Antiquity. 2007;81(314):961-971. doi:10.1017/S0003598X00096046
28. Saad G. Advertised Waist-to-Hip Ratios of Online Female Escorts. Int J E-Collab. 2010;4:40-50. doi:10.4018/jec.2008070103
29. Platek SM, Singh D. Optimal Waist-to-Hip Ratios in Women Activate Neural Reward Centers in Men. PLOS ONE. 2010;5(2):e9042. doi:10.1371/journal. pone.0009042
30. Landsman K. The Fine-Tuning Argument: Exploring the Improbability of Our Existence. In: Landsman K, van Wolde E, eds. The Challenge of Chance: A Multidisciplinary Approach from Science and the Humanities. The Frontiers Collection. Springer International Publishing; 2016:111-129. doi: 10.1007/978-3-319-26300-7_6
31. Gad Saad. Let us hope that OJ Simpson & Noble Victim @JussieSmollett join their efforts in finding the common culprit across their 2 tragedies: Killer in the OJ case is also the racist homophobe who attacked Noble Jussie. There was a citing of him at the corner of Unicornia & Munchausen. @GadSaad. Published March 26, 2019. Accessed January 22, 2022. https://twitter.com/ GadSaad/status/1110620106420297729
32. Five Things That Suggest O.J. Simpson Killed His Ex-Wife And Ron Goldman. NewsOne. Published June 12, 2019. Accessed December 31, 2021. https://newsone.com/1334425/five-reasons-why-we-know-o-j-did-it/
33. Why the Civil Case Against O.J. Simpson Would Never Be Enough | Vanity Fair. Accessed December 31, 2021. https://www.vanityfair.com/magazine /1997/04/dunne199704
34. Tickle C, Towers M. Sonic Hedgehog Signaling in Limb Development. Front Cell Dev Biol. 2017;5. Accessed January 22, 2022. https://www.frontiersin. org/article/10.3389/fcell.2017.00014
35. Wilgenburg WV, Fumerton M. Kurdistan’s Political Armies: The Challenge of Unifying the Peshmerga Forces. :10.
36. Jessica Trisko : Women at War | troublemag. Accessed December 31, 2021. https://www.troublemag.com/jessica-trisko-women-at-war/
37. IANS. India Far Ahead Of US, Europe In Women’s Tech Equity; Female IT Employees Form 34 Per Cent Of Total Indian Workforce. Swarajyamag. Accessed December 31, 2021. https://swarajyamag.com/insta/india-far-ahead-of-us-europe-in-womens-tech - equity-female-it-employees-form-34-per-cent-of-total-indian-workforce
38. Laland KN, Odling-Smee J, Myles S. How culture shaped the human genome: bringing genetics and the human sciences together. Nat Rev Genet. 2010;11(2):137-148. doi:10.1038/nrg2734
39. Moya C, Henrich J. Culture–gene coevolutionary psychology: cultural learning, language, and ethnic psychology. Curr Opin Psychol. 2016;8:112-118. doi:10.1016/j.copsyc.2015.10.001
40. Booth H. The kingdom of women: the society where a man is never the boss. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/apr/01/the-kingdom - of - women - the - tibetan - tribe - where - a-man-is-never-the-boss. Published April 1, 2017. Accessed December 31, 2021.
41. Henrich J, Boyd R, Richerson PJ. The puzzle of monogamous marriage. Philos Trans R Soc B Biol Sci. 2012;367(1589):657-669. doi:10.1098/rstb. 2011.0290
42. SearchTruth. 10. The Book of Transactions (Kitab Al-Buyu`) - Sahih Muslim - 0 - 3813. SearchTruth.com. Accessed January 23, 2022. https://www.search truth.com/book_display.php?book=10&translator=2&start=0&number=3813
43. “Dogs in the Islamic Tradition and Nature” (Article Included). Scholar of the House. Accessed January 23, 2022. http://scholarofthehouse.stores.yahoo .net/dinistrandna.html
44. Gómez-Rivas C. Law and the Islamization of Morocco under the Almoravids: The Fatwās of Ibn Rushd al-Jadd to the Far Maghrib. BRILL; 2014.
~
Dr. Gad Saad is Professor of Marketing at Concordia University (Montreal, Canada), and former holder of the Concordia University Research Chair in Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences and Darwinian Consumption (2008-2018). He is the co-recipient of the 2015 President’s Media Outreach Award: Research Communicator of the Year (International), which goes to the Concordia University professor whose research receives the greatest amount of global media coverage. 
Professor Saad has pioneered the use of evolutionary psychology in marketing and consumer behaviour. His works include The Consuming Instinct: What Juicy Burgers, Ferraris, Pornography, and Gift Giving Reveal About Human Nature; The Evolutionary Bases of Consumption and Evolutionary Psychology in the Business Sciences, along with 75+ scientific papers. His Psychology Today blog and YouTube channel have garnered 6.9+ million and 24+ million views respectively. His podcast The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad is available on all leading podcast platforms. 
In addition to his scientific work, Dr. Saad writes and speaks about idea pathogens that destroy logic, science, reason, and common sense. His fourth book The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense was released in October 2020 and is an international bestseller.
Let Us Prey: On Islamic Immigration in Europe and Women’s Rights
References
Based on an interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Mark Halloran: I have the impression that you’ve lived in three worlds: you’ve lived in tribal Islam, and you converted to political Islam, through the Muslim Brotherhood and sister Aziza. And then when you escaped an arranged marriage and went to Europe, you essentially converted to classical liberalism, and atheism. It seemed like a large ideological change for someone to make over a lifetime. And I wondered how you related to the past versions of yourself?
Ayaan Hirsi Ali: {Laughs} That’s a great question, and especially the way you put it. It may seem as if it happened all of a sudden; that I had a sudden awakening. A lot of people have asked me about that. I think it wasn’t a sudden awakening. I think it was a gradual evolution. If I start with the tribal Islam of my grandmother and my mother’s attitude towards the faith of Islam, it was a mix of the tribal and the old fashioned, superstitious notions. I was born into it. So, I imbibed with it from childhood onwards. So then, this is in the mid 80s and we lived in Nairobi, Kenya, and that’s where Sister Aziza becomes our teacher at the Muslim girl’s secondary school, and she introduces this form of puritanical Islam, which was a rejection of the more tribal Islam I had known up until then. Around the same time, we lived in two neighborhoods called Kariokor and Park Road; and in those two Somali communities we were also seeing individuals who had been educated in Medina in Saudi Arabia and who had been to Sharia universities. They came and explained to us that Islam as we practiced it was actually superstitious and wrong. So, they introduced the more pure form; what these days is called Salafi or Wahhabi. And then this gentleman called Boqol Sawm; he who fasts 100 days - I discuss him in Infidel - he basically initiated me and the other children, we were teenagers at the time, into the Muslim Brotherhood movement. So, I started to wear the hijab, and gradually dressed myself even more restrictively in black without anyone forcing me to do it, and I started to pray five times a day. I took this very seriously, when I was told to ask the non-Muslim classmates to convert, and I was asked to just adopt a wide range of these practices from a more radicalized, puritanical Islam. Then fast forward to when I come to the Netherlands, this is in 1992, and by then I have had some doubts about that particular way of practicing my faith. But I’d never had the courage to ask any truly probing questions. So, if you go back to 1989, when Salman Rushdie had published his book and was condemned to death by Ayatollah Khomeini, I was within the natural community of people who condemned Rushdie for his transgressions.
This condemnation, on my part, was obviously done without any questioning at all. But then, in 1995, when I’m in the Netherlands, I take up political science courses in the University of Leiden. The reason why I say my change was gradual was because it was in those years at Leiden, where the emphasis lay on how to think and how to ask questions - maybe that’s where classical liberalism was introduced in a more formal way; not as a set of beliefs that you adopt, but as one approach among others. So, we obviously started learning about socialism as well as other paradigms. But I found classical liberal ideals to be the most attractive. And by the time September 11, 2001 came round, I had, I think, evolved to a place mentally where I was able to ask these very direct questions of myself. These nineteen men who attacked these civilians, do they do it because of what everyone was saying? Because of America’s foreign policy? Or because they were young, disillusioned men? Or were they really driven by their convictions? I recall reading whatever it is that I could find of these nineteen men, and their beliefs resembled very much what I had believed in myself in the 1980s.
So, you could empathize with them, to some extent?
I don’t know if you would call it empathy. But I could see the logic of their thinking. If you’re a young man, and you’re being asked to destroy the infidels who had invaded Muslim lands, if it is a requirement of your faith, you believe God is the Creator, and you have only to answer to God, and that you risk going to hell in the afterlife, unless you obey Him. One of the big reasons that Bin Laden was pushing this narrative at the time was that the American infidels were allowed into Saudi Arabia, and that was an affront. If you believed in that you had to act. So, I wouldn’t call it empathy. But I would say yes, I saw a certain logic. And I was frustrated by the leadership at the time, not just the American leadership; President Bush and his administration, but also the Europeans who were, in my view, trying to make excuses, away from the ideology, the creed that had inspired these young men to act. So, it wasn’t a moment of empathy. But it was: ‘Look, it’s very clear, we do have a problem with the basic fundamentals of Islam unchanged and unreformed.’
I do want to speak about your book, Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women’s Rights1 - because that’s the reason for this conversation. In Prey, the premise is that the fifth wave of immigration occurred where 3.5 million people; immigrants and asylum seekers, crossed into the European union,2 three quarters occurring in 2015, after events like the Syrian Civil War. The premise of your book seems to be that these were predominantly young men who came from Muslim dominant cultures, and that this led to an increase in sexual assaults against women, and an erosion of women’s rights. So, I wanted to briefly talk about the compelling evidence that shows that the cultural beliefs of Islam were really important in these types of offences.
I think when I was writing the book, and working on the question: ‘Is there an increase in sexual violence against women? Is it possible to link this with the increase in immigration, and an influx of young unaccompanied men? And if Islam is relevant at all, then in what way is it relevant?’ So, some of these questions, obviously, are very difficult to answer without solid data. And I described in the book, that exercise of data gathering was frustrated by the way the European leaders fear that the immigration issue is going to be exploited by populist and far-right parties. So, a lot of that data, if it exists, is hidden. And very often it is also overlaid with data, or conclusions, that say there is no link, there is no correlation to be seen here. And in fact, imagine you’re a white man asking these questions; then you are accused of harboring anti-immigrant feelings and sentiment. Now Islam, it comes into it in the first question that you asked me, you see this separation between tribal Islam, and that more puritanical, Wahhabi, Salafi type of Muslim Brotherhood Islam. Now with both of these forms, there is a code of conduct for men and women and how they relate to one another. And women are regarded either as good or bad. There’s a very clear framework of behavior that a good woman is supposed to follow. She’s supposed to have a male guardian, and obey her male guardian, stay at home, and remain a virgin until her wedding day and when married with her husband still continue to practice these very, in what Western feminists would call, submissive behaviors.
The doctrines of modesty.
Yes, the doctrines of modesty. So, with that in place, the men when they do engage in sexual misconduct, the first question that is posed, unlike the West, is not: ‘Is the man the perpetrator? And he ought to be punished for that.’ Rather, the first question that arises is: ‘Did the woman in question break this modesty doctrine or not?’ And, ‘What was she wearing?’ or ‘What was the context?’ And that context almost always favors man. If it is the puritanical Islam and this was to go to a court of law, then she would have to produce four witnesses and so on, she would have to explain why she was outside and not with her male guardian and other chaperones. So, that’s in the formalized Sharia law. The informal tribal one is another way and again, I tried to describe this in the book, where the clan protects its women; the ones that are regarded as modest and decent, and anyone who breaches that, then the clan will take revenge. That is readily understood by all within that community.
Again, the burden of proof still lies on her. So, when men shaped by that and with those attitudes come to Europe, which is a radically different context, and they see white European women as women who live outside of the modesty doctrine, then they consider them immodest and therefore bad. I spoke to one Egyptian man Hamed Abdel-Samad, and I asked him to explain to me how their attitudes towards European women developed. And he said, for those men who have dysfunctional views of women in the West, there were three key points. One was women, as seen in the movies, from Hollywood. So that’s one image of white woman that they have, the unrealistic and sexually objectified portrayals that occur in Hollywood. And the other is the porn industry, which totally misrepresents women and what they “want.” And the third, interestingly, is that there are some women looking for boyfriends who happen to volunteer in refugee compounds.
So, the prejudice, if you will, is that it’s justified to attack these women because they are actually somehow looking for it. This indicates little respect for women in general, you could say it is ingrained for the men in question. And the only type of woman they respect is the one that they can’t reach; someone who is covered up and protected by her clanmates and is locked up, and all other women are fair game. And that is where the book title Prey came from.
In the book you said on average, over the last 10 years, 67% of first-time asylum seekers were men and over 80% of these men were under the age of 35 years. And in Germany’s 2015 immigration wave, male asylum seekers outnumbered women at a 2.81:1 ratio. When this is discussed from a criminological perspective, what people say is that in any community where the sex ratio suddenly become extremely imbalanced, then you have an increase in the number of sexual assaults against women. The other thing we have to be mindful of is that sexual assault rates, amongst Muslim migrants constitute a small percentage of the population of sexual assaults. But what people misunderstand, and they’ll say, ‘Well, the sexual assault rate is much larger in Germany amongst native born Germans,’ but actually, what we’re talking about is standardization to the population. In fact, when you standardize the rates of sexual assault against a migrant population, they may be orders of magnitude larger than the general population. They’re the points that I’d like to get clear. How important is each factor? Because I felt like you were saying there are the cultural factors; whether that be say someone coming from Afghanistan with Pashtun tribal values and Islamic values. Then there is the fact that the sex ratio is severely skewed, and that people are coming from countries that are war-torn like Syria, and they’re traumatized. How would you weigh all those things up? What would you give more weight to?
I say that in the book, it is obviously all three factors; the cultural factors that we just talked about now, but also the sex ratios. And here, I think a woman called Valerie Hudson has done some very good work on that - she shows that where these sex ratios are skewed to that extent, you do get spikes in sexual misconduct, but also aggression in general.3 So, you have a youth bulge, and you have a large number of men. And there aren’t enough women for these men. She says that’s a very, very important factor. She looked into Sweden and other Scandinavian countries. In fact, when she was doing her research in Sweden, she was condemned for it. But she says that they are playing with fire, the Swedish government.4 She says that a share of the violence that we’ve been seeing in Sweden lately perpetrated by immigrants can be partially explained by this factor,5 so she does put a lot of emphasis on that demographic sex ratio that’s off.
And then there is the issue of broken societies. When I was a translator, I saw this with my own eyes in the Netherlands - young men whose tribal society had broken down. The tribal code didn’t apply to them. The authoritarian government of Mohammed Siad Barre in Somalia had broken down. So, they weren’t even familiar with institutions like the police or the military or any other order keeping institutions. They were born in an anarchical, very unstable, structurally unpredictable environment. And they were used to witnessing a lot of violence, and a lot of violence was also perpetrated against them. These were young men who were locked up or beaten, some of them are forced into doing things they would otherwise not do. And yes, they are very, very traumatized in psychological terms. And in many ways, I would say also hardened psychologically. And so, when you go through some of these court cases, and you read through the court report, I thought it was striking that very often, when the judge asks or members of the court ask, ‘Do you feel sorry? Do you have any remorse?’ That these men show absolutely no remorse whatsoever, and would perpetrate that particular crime again, and felt misunderstood by their own communities if they had any, and the new communities that they had come into. And so yes, that is also a very, very important factor. And you have to take all three of these factors: the religious, cultural variables, the sex ratio, the demographic youth bulge, and also that these men are coming from war zones, and violent societies.
There was one Eritrean man, I think it was again in Scandinavia, in Norway, where he was very open and honest about it when he was asked, ‘Would you treat women in your country that way?’ And he said, ‘Yes, we do that all the time.’ So, I don’t think that these young men, if they’ve ever been interviewed, are actually really dishonest about what their motivations are. It’s the social workers, the politicians, sometimes members of law enforcement, the media, academia, who are trying to make excuses for them - that the young men themselves aren’t even using. Cultural factors are not being properly addressed. So, I think the conclusion is, it’s very, very important to understand all the factors that contribute to this misconduct. But the one conclusion is that we have to start integrating these young men.
The problem seems to be that any call to integration, and especially assimilation, would be instantly branded racist. And that seems to be where the conversation has completely broken down.
In many parts of Europe, that is the case. In a country like Sweden, which I think is the country that’s facing the worst problems, that’s what happens the minute you start talking about assimilation, the conversation is shut down, although I should say there are now signs that mainstream Swedish political figures are at least beginning to reconsider some of their premises. Now in Denmark, the conversation has continued, and they have developed integration or assimilation programs that are promising. And they did this in Austria, only after they had what they call a rape epidemic that shocked public opinion. So, it became inevitable; there was no other next step left to do, it was impossible to continue to live in denial.
I know you use the example of the Red Army in Germany, in terms of their violence against German women, so it made me think about war and trauma, and how unique the problem was. Is it essentially the same problem, just with a different group at a different time?
I think that is partly true; different group, different time. But the Red Army was still European, and so, the cultural barrier was not as high as it is in this case. Also, there was a mindset from many Russian troops that brutal revenge for the German invasion of Russia was somehow justified: in that sense, German women were easy targets and could not do much, if anything, to stay safe from those attackers. Soviet military domination made any real accountability afterwards impossible.
What we’re running up against here is this postmodernist type of cultural relativism that is used to shut down debate and to explain away bad behavior - if that bad behavior is perpetrated by men of color. But that doesn’t do anything to help the victims. So those women who have fallen victim to this, get no justice, and other women are at risk. And so that is now the predicament of some of these European countries today. They have let down their women - they had already let down immigrant women. I had written quite a lot on when immigrant women, Muslim women, were excluded from the de facto protections of the law. So little girls are forced into marriage and they’re subjected to female genital mutilation. They are first taken out of school and forced to marry people they don’t want to. These are all violations of the law. But many of these girls of foreign descent were absolutely not protected. And the idea again was often ‘Well, they’re different. It’s their culture.’ And now there’s a spillover. It’s that the problem is spilling over, not the one of forced marriages, but that these men are acting in groups and attacking women that they have never seen before.
Let’s talk about the psychology of it at a national level. I think about postmodernism and your views on Western feminism and ideas such as decolonization. I also thought about the psychology of the German people, especially the generation who grew up during World War II; the Kriegskinder, and perhaps their real aversion to anything that even remotely looked like some sort of ethnic or religious profiling, which you could totally understand. It took me to the idea that you could criticize the politicians, social workers, bureaucrats, and the justice departments for not collecting the data. But their rationale would be if we collect the data, the data could easily be used by a right-wing populist political group to mobilize people in hate. And whilst your message is very nuanced, it doesn’t mean that other people would take it that way. So how do you deal with the problem that your message can be misappropriated?
I think the way to deal with it is to look and see if the strategy of pretending that there is no problem actually helps far-right groups or hinders them. If you look at countries with very strong far-right movements, those are the countries that bungled the immigration policies, and have no integration or assimilation programs to speak of - it’s where the problems are at their worst. If you look at the countries with weak or non-existent far-right movements, they’re the ones who have actually taken their voters very seriously. So, in Denmark, the ruling coalition is led by Social Democrats; it’s a center-left party, that has implemented most of these so-called difficult programs. I think the experience is different ever since the cartoons of 2006. But they have been very, very honest about the challenges of immigration - they talk about national identity. They talk about borders, and they talk about assimilation very openly. And so although Denmark certainly has a populist right-wing party, you can’t really say they have a meaningful far-right movement. In contrast, countries that stuck their heads in the sand like France, Germany, Sweden, do have strong far-right movements. So, my conclusion is that denial, and this is what I call the ‘head in the sand’ approach to the problem, actually strengthens the far-right. It’s where voters are taken seriously that temptation for the far-right, the extreme right, decreases. Where the leadership is honest, that is where the far-right does not flourish. So, I think it’s very interesting. Germany, I think is a special case, because of the Second World War. And because of this terror of profiling people along ethnic or religious lines, it’s extra difficult for the Germans to pull off something like this. But even they could do it because Germany of today is radically different from the Germany of the Second World War.
Now, with regard to these postmodernist narratives about decolonizing. And trying to somehow atone for what happened in the past, atone for them today, by sacrificing women and children, or the working-class groups. I don’t think that makes any sense at all. Are we simply going to sacrifice our women and risk a very strong, far-right movement? But they’re also risking something else. They’re risking that voters lose faith in existing institutions, and then start doing things for themselves. For instance, a good example, the number of guns sold in Sweden, I don’t have the statistics in front of me, but it’s grown exponentially.6 That is a loss of faith in law enforcement and the police, that is a loss of faith that the Swedes are displaying for the rule of law. So, this is the kind of thing that these European countries are risking, by sticking their heads in the sand.
I wonder if they’re able to do that, politicians or journalists, because most of the problems that you talk about in your book affect neighborhoods which are entry points for asylum seekers, which are low socio-economic neighborhoods. So really, to some extent, who cares what happens to poor women?
Exactly. That is exactly where the decolonization narrative, just… It goes bonkers, really, because it is working-class women, and the working class groups in general, that were the people that the left was supposedly protecting. They’re the ones that are sacrificed to this mismanagement of immigration and the negative, unintended consequences of immigration. And now you have a development, like Biden’s sudden withdrawal from Afghanistan. That’s going to trigger a lot more immigration, not just from Afghanistan, but also the other countries that will get destabilized because of the withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Your book came out during the pandemic, and that would have radically changed border control and immigration policies. That may reverse now, once we adapt to a COVID normal.
I just got back from Italy. And Heathrow was full as it always was. I was standing there the day before yesterday. Yes, people were wearing masks, but in terms of crowd numbers, it didn’t feel at all like there was some kind of major lockdown. It was all very frustrating. There’s a lot more bureaucracy and forms that one needs to fill out, but in terms of just masses of people … The number of immigrants now trying to cross from France into the UK - that’s spiking, and the ones that are coming through the fourth route, the Mediterranean and Turkey - that’s already all back on trend. So, I think for the European countries right now… I think they should have a very, very urgent conversation on how to assimilate these young people. I know they’ll be discussing border control a little bit and who is going to take how many Afghans and that sort of thing but we will have learned nothing if we don’t have very serious conversations about where these people are going to be housed. Who is going to bear the burden of these negative, unintended consequences of immigration, which are not just sexual misconduct? And who’s going to pay for it? And what are the consequences for those people who fail to assimilate?
I remember your critique of Western feminism; you said that it was focused on its own self-actualization. And you alluded to it before, that ideas in relation to critical race theory and decolonization are actually hurting asylum seeker women, and that these ideas have gone too far. But it seems as though they can always make the argument that US foreign policy, for instance, has led to the victimization of people in places like Afghanistan, where the US helping to radicalize the Mujahideen to fight against the Russians. And so there is this idea of you reaping what you sow, if that makes sense?
It does make sense. And I think maybe the most charitable thing I can say about the feminists who regard themselves as woke is they’re doing nothing for the working class. It’s all about them, and their intersectional problems. And if you look at some of this gender fluid stuff that’s coming at us, they seem also to be okay with ‘woman’ being removed from the lexicon. So now we’re not women anymore. We are ‘chest feeders’ and ‘people who birth’ and ‘persons who menstruate’ and so on. So even on that level, they seem to be quite happy for women to be erased. And this is not just a corruption of language. If they accept women being erased from the public space, as they are doing, and as the Taliban is also doing now. We are being erased, and they seem to be okay with that. Some would rather focus on J.K. Rowling than the Taliban. So, in many ways, perhaps the most charitable thing you can say about them is that they’re just useless. Their whole narrative is useless. It’s a nuisance. What we really need is some very strong feminism, that type of classical liberal feminism, and I think that there is an opportunity for a coalition for working class women and immigrant women, because they’re the ones who feel the pain of this particular type of globalization.
It is often communities, not even of working class people, but of generational poverty. People who are essentially invisible, and I think that’s probably where the problems really may lie because those communities don’t really have a voice and don’t engage in activism. And I think that’s where it gets lost. I read an article in The New York Times by Jill Filipovic.7 She talked about you rolling out old colonial tropes about virtuous white women being at risk from dark-skinned men. It seems like that is the heart of those types of criticisms.
That is a typical millennial woke feminist who is completely out of touch. And just spewing this nonsensical jargon, but really not a word of empathy for the victims described in the book. So, you have to wonder if she actually read the book? And because of the way it was difficult to come by official data, I do use testimonies of women who have fallen victim to this, and that is pretty gruesome, and she doesn’t even spend a word on any of that, and just dismisses it with this nonsense. She has a platform like the New York Times, and instead of approaching this problem with the seriousness it deserves, it’s just another instance of ‘Let’s shoot the messenger.’ I think we have to get past that. So, women and men as well, we really have to say, this is a very, very serious issue. And in the coming years, we are going to have more immigrants coming from Africa, from South Asia, and from the Middle East. These are places where women are treated very differently. We have to get ready to have programs to assimilate the men and women. And the sooner we start the better, otherwise, I think we’re going to leave the way open for far-right movements and other mischief makers to come and take over these topics.
Her criticism of you was that under your own ideas around integration and assimilation, when you were younger, and you were a supporter of the Fatwa against Salman Rushdie, would you have made it as an asylum seeker or refugee?
Oh, no. But I, at that time, wasn’t interested in seeking asylum. I was completely full of my own fanaticism, and basking in the warmth, as we - myself and my fellow 18 and 19 year old students - happily burnt Salman Rushdie’s book. We weren’t seeking asylum.
I think you also said you shouldn’t have been accepted at that point.
Yes. Because I would not have come with good intentions anyway. If you believe that the society that’s hosting you is infidel and it deserves to be destroyed…Then I think it would be very foolish of that society to welcome you and accept you.
Let’s get to some of the important ideas within Islam itself. So, I think you’d agree that Quranic verses such as the Surah An Nisa 4:34, which seems to condone a husband perpetrating domestic violence against his wife, as a means of disciplining her, and seems to say that quite explicitly, that that would be the heart of the cultural problem.
So, what I have said in the past, and I still stand by it, is those texts are in the Quran. And yes, there are people who are fanatical and puritanical enough, who want to use these Quranic texts, the way we use the GPS, when the book says, ‘Hit your wife, if she disobeys you,’ then I do it, because the book says that and so you get into this circular reasoning. Again, with things like this, I just believe in accepting looking at reality as it is; there are male Imams, shouting this from the pulpit, they are preaching it to young men. So, a lot of these young people by reading that verse, feel morally justified when they engage in domestic violence. And then some other guy comes along and says, ‘Well, it’s not really meant that way. It’s meant some other way.’ Well, if God is absolutely so clever, and so omniscient, why couldn’t He just make it very clear? And it is perfectly clear. And then what that whole exercise of interpreting the text does, is it takes you away from discussing the problem, and holding the perpetrators of the domestic violence responsible. Instead, we’re having a discussion about theology, and again, that is just not fruitful, it’s not productive.
I spoke about this particular verse with an Islamic scholar once. And his interpretation was, in terms of from the Arabic, that it’s not a verse about domestic violence. It’s a verse about divorce and that it means ‘strike out.’ He was also talking about Mohammed in the Hadith, who explicitly states that domestic violence is not to be perpetrated.8 I then thought about when you heard Osama Bin Laden, and you thought that what he offered was a very plausible version of Islam. I think you may disagree with this, but is that part of the solution? To offer a plausible reinterpretation of those texts that are nonviolent?
I actually don’t disagree with it. And the main point I make in my book Heretic, is that it is for the people who are saying Islam can be reformed - it should be reformed. I just make the case for a reformation; for change, for a modification. I talk about these three groups of Muslims: the Mecca Muslims, the Medina Muslims, and reformers who are the modifiers. Now the Medina Muslims are very clear in their fanaticism. They’re saying ‘No, we want to live by the laws of the Quran and the Hadith, and we want to follow Mohammed’s example. No changes required, the people who are seeking change are bad.’ And then you have a very large, silent majority that I describe as the Mecca Muslims, who would simply rather not be confronted with all sorts of dissonance with regard to how they lead their lives, which is generally peaceful, and what’s written in the Quran, and so they can’t handle that kind of dissonance. So, they ignore it altogether. And just say, ‘No, the Quran is a good book, it’s a peaceful book, let’s change the subject.’ And then you have the modifiers, who try and struggle as you described, with verses like this, when I say it says ‘beat,’ actually, it means something else. So, it’s with that group that I say, ‘Look, here is five key points if you’re serious about change.’ Here are these five points that are big and problematic, and it would be nice to have some kind of consensus and maybe some kind of movement that gets behind these five things and changes them. Then after that we can speak about an Islam that is changed and reformed and liberal.
It’s an attempt at Islam finding its modernity. I thought in terms of your call for reformation, you said that there would be a need for Muslims to be able to think critically and criticize the Prophet Mohammed. I wondered whether that was very likely? Sort of like Christians criticizing Christ.
The historian Daniel Pipes has written quite a bit on it and has studied Muslims in America.9 He says Muslims start asking these questions of Mohammed as a moral guide, ‘Yes or no?’ And many of them come to the conclusion that they don’t want Mohammed as their moral guide, and quietly leave the religion. He says it’s the most interesting, untold story of our time, just the sheer number of Muslims who are secularizing, who are leaving Islam, and maybe either going to other religions or living as atheists. So, to the reformers; the Muslims who were sincere about changing the faith, I think they also have to contend with that trend. That if you say, ‘Mohammed is a moral guide, and he’s infallible and absolutely perfect, you can’t question him,’ then you risk Muslims either becoming non-Muslims or fanatics, and taking him very seriously and literally. Or there is the other option, the one of saying, ‘Well, let’s just twist his words around until it fits with my lifestyle.’ That doesn’t seem to work. People don’t seem to want to do these mental acrobatics for a long time.
It possibly creates too much cognitive dissonance. So, I wanted to talk to you about your solutions. I think you’ve talked about addressing the ‘push’ factors, like using military intervention, and civilian forces to build institutions and rule of law in countries that may be to some extent, failed states. However that hasn’t seemed to be very successful in the past. I mean, we’ve just come out of 20 years in Afghanistan ...
No, I didn’t put it that way at all. So, I’m definitely not proposing that European countries start mounting invasions in these countries. Absolutely not. I’m just saying it is better if European countries would get involved. And this is on a diplomatic level, on an economic level. Sometimes America does that, and I think France does the same thing, too. When some of these countries are challenged, for instance, with terrorist attacks, and these homegrown militias seem to come very close to breaking down order, then it would be, I would say, in their self-interest, if European governments were to help militarily, those fragile governments in putting down the insurgencies. And the people I have in mind are the Islamists, and many of these developments you now see are in Africa, where local governments are just too weak to stand up to an Islamist insurgency. And what the Europeans have been doing is just displaying complete indifference until the problems come to their shores. And so, it would have been nice if they engaged in some kind of proactive dealing; saying to these countries, ‘We don’t want large numbers of people coming from Eritrea.’ So, we might want to help Eritrea address her economic problems or problems of that nature. And I think it was Trump’s administration, that probably criticized some of these European countries as they just want to lean back and hope that Uncle Sam is going to solve all their problems.
The last question is in relation to your statement that ‘Tolerance of intolerance is cowardice.’ And it reminded me of Popper’s idea that you need to be intolerant of intolerance, and your statement seems to endorse the advocacy of using illiberal means to achieve liberal ends. But I thought that there seems to be a danger in that it may actually attack the things that make a democratic society great, which is being pluralistic and tolerant.
So, in our liberal democratic societies in the West, they are pluralistic,
and they’re tolerant. Once in a while, an intolerant group emerges and tries to invoke something, in the case of the Islamic State, they are invoking God. In the case of the woke, they’re invoking Social Justice, but they then want to impose their ideologies on the rest of us. And I think we should be intolerant of that; of their intolerance, in order to sustain the pluralism and liberties that we have. For instance, here in America, we have all these people who have been cancelled and silenced; losing their jobs, losing their livelihoods. I think we should be intolerant of that kind of behavior and when it came to Islamists again, invoking God to hurt other people, I think we should be intolerant of that too. Being intolerant of intolerance is a way of maintaining and preserving our liberal order. So, it’s the opposite.
1. Ali AH. Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women’s Rights. HarperCollins; 2021.
2. Migratory Map. Accessed December 17, 2021. https://frontex.europa.eu/we-know/migratory-map/
3. Hudson VM, Den Boer A. A Surplus of Men, a Deficit of Peace: Security and Sex Ratios in Asia’s Largest States. Int Secur. 2002;26(4):5-38.
4. Europe’s man problem. POLITICO. Published January 6, 2016. Accessed December 16, 2021. https://www.politico.eu/article/europes-man-problem/
5. Adamson G. Migrants and Crime in Sweden in the Twenty-First Century. Society. 2020;57(1):9-21. doi:10.1007/s12115-019-00436-8
6. Henley J, correspondent JHE. Sweden’s gun violence rate has soared due to gangs, report says. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/ 2021/ may / 26 / fatal-shootings-have-risen-in-sweden-despite-fall-across-europe-report-finds. Published May 26, 2021. Accessed December 16, 2021.
7. Filipovic J. Ayaan Hirsi Ali on Muslim Men and Western Women. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/09/books/review/ayaan-hirsi -ali-prey.html. Published February 9, 2021. Accessed December 16, 2021.
8. Mehmet Ozalp : The History & Philosophy of Islam | troublemag. Accessed December 23, 2021. http://www.troublemag.com/mehmet-ozalp-the-history-philosophy-of-islam/
9. Pipes D. When Muslims Leave the Faith. Daniel Pipes. Accessed December 16, 2021. https://www.danielpipes.org/19668/when-muslims-leave-the-faith
~
Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, founder of the AHA Foundation, and host of The Ayaan Hirsi Ali Podcast. She served as a Member of the Dutch Parliament from 2003 to 2006. While in Parliament, she focused on furthering the integration of non-Western immigrants into Dutch society, and on defending the rights of Muslim women. 
She has written several books including Infidel (2007), Nomad: from Islam to America, a Personal Journey through the Clash of Civilizations (2010), Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now (2015) and The Challenge of Dawa (2017). Her new book, Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women’s Rights, was published by Harper Collins in 2021.
Prior to joining the Hoover Institution, she was a Fellow at the Belfer Center’s Future of Diplomacy Project at Harvard University, and a Resident Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C.
She received her Master’s degree in Political Science from Leiden University in the Netherlands. 
On DarkHorse, Ivermectin and Vaccine Hesitancy
References
Based on an interview with Eric Topol
Interview conducted on October 14, 2021
Mark Halloran: So I thought I’d like to pick up where the Sam Harris interview left off,1 and go into some of the things in more detail. I’d like to talk about the research in relation to ivermectin, vaccines and some of the immune escape mutations like Delta. In terms of the Bryant et al. (2021) meta-analysis that was done for ivermectin, which showed that COVID19 deaths were reduced by ivermectin; that was a moderate certainty evidence finding and there was low certainty evidence that ivermectin reduced COVID-19 infection by an average of 86%.2 I suppose I’d like to talk to you about why this isn’t compelling evidence for the use of ivermectin in the prevention and treatment of COVID.
Eric Topol: That’s pretty simple. Because the two largest studies that were in the meta-analysis, were both shown to be fraudulent. That is, the data was impossible, and they had to be withdrawn.3,4 And so then, what you’re left with is a bunch of very small studies. And collectively, they’re not enough certainty to say anything. So, whether it prevents infection and prevents adverse outcomes, we’re left in the lurch. It’s still possible that ivermectin does have an effect. I’m not saying it doesn’t, in fact, maybe it does? But the point is, you can’t make that judgement, based on a collection of small studies that are inconclusive. That’s very different from, for example, the drug that Merck developed recently - another Merck drug, interestingly, because ivermectin is also made by Merck. And I’m not a fan of Merck by any means, having been part of the Vioxx exposure years ago.5 But they had a trial of molnupiravir, a drug that had known anti-viral activity that’s potent, whereas ivermectin’s mechanisms, are still a little bit fuzzy, as far as where SARS-CoV-2 is concerned. But they did a real trial, which was intended to be quite a reasonable size, and it was judged by an independent data and safety monitoring board that it had to be stopped because it was overwhelming in its efficacy with regard to reduction of hospitalizations and deaths: 50%.6 In fact, there were eight deaths versus zero, for placebo versus the active drug. Now, you need trials like that, to be able to say something definitive. And that’s even just one trial. Usually, you like to have independent replication. And there is an ongoing trial for that drug, in relation to prevention in people with early COVID infection, confirmed.
But the problem with the story with ivermectin is that it’s a hodgepodge of studies, some of which various doses were used, there were some indications for prevention of infection, and some for prevention of outcomes. So, it’s all over the place. And it’s left in the suspension of maybe this drug could do something? But when you have fraudulent research being conducted, that is a very worrisome sign. And the fact that we haven’t had reliable sources of data from the usual entities like the Recovery Trial out of Oxford, or large study groups like Solidarity or the World Health Organization (WHO). A lot of the studies that have come forth had tiny numbers and are not coming from trusted sources of trialists. So, no, the way I look at it is, it’s just that the zone of uncertainty is too high. And you have these zealots that are pushing this, saying it’s a panacea; it’ll end the pandemic. That makes it even worse, because you want to have definitive data, ideally; two large trials, and independent replication to say anything. And there’s not even one large trial for ivermectin, the total body of evidence was based on less than a couple of 1000 people.
I think that was the heart of it, aside from the fraudulent issues. I know Lawrence et al. (2021) had written a letter to Nature8 outlining all of the issues in relation to the study: impossible numbers, mismatch of trial register, inconsistent timelines etc. I would say outside of that, having worked in preclinical research with drugs for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) in transgenic mice, that what people generally don’t understand is that sample size matters in relation to power and effect size. And so, I could have cited multiple drugs that looked effective in animal models that were either totally ineffective, or actually had adverse effects in ALS patients. And that was not even fraudulent. Just bad study design, low numbers, insufficient power.
Absolutely, you need big numbers. Remember, you’re talking about treating millions, if not tens of millions of people. And you don’t want to make the wrong call on a thousand people or a couple of thousand people, not that you have to have 10 million people in a study, but you want to be sure. And you also don’t want to be making false claims. So, the ivermectin zealots were saying this was 99% effective,9 and having an emergency podcast with Joe Rogan.10 That should get you scared, because there is no drug in the world that has 99% success. Even if ivermectin someday is proven to have some efficacy, it’s not going to be 99%. We know that. So, these are the things that really are disturbing, actually.
Lawrence at al., called for a paradigm shift in relation to how meta-analysis is done. That, in fact, the meta-analysis should occur on individual patient data. What do you think of that?
That’s really important. That’s been part of the meta-analysis story for years. When you pool data, it isn’t just like it’s on the back of the envelope, or you just take the total numbers from each of the publications. In this case a lot of them were preprints. You actually have to have the data from each individual participant in the trials; in the patients. So, they didn’t have the data. And had they had it, a lot of these mistakes would have been preempted. So, one of the rules of what would now be considered for a top tier meta-analysis would be that you have talked to the authors of each of the papers, you’ve had them submit their data; the actual raw data for each person, so that when you do your pooling, you have all that information and then you can actually look at the granular aspects of each person. But when you don’t do that, and you just have basically kind of bottom-line data from papers without you connecting with the authors, you have a weak meta-analysis that has to be automatically suspect.
The point made in the Bryant et al., paper which Tess Laurie is a coauthor on, is that corticosteroids were put forward as a treatment for COVID based on one randomized controlled trial, whereas ivermectin has had dozens. How would you respond to that?
I think you said it well, when you said that sample size is so important. If you have 20 studies, and there are about 20 people in each group, of the placebo and ivermectin; adding those things up - it’s not a lot of veracity in that data set. So, the problem is you really want to bank the determination of whether a drug works on large bodies of data, rigorous studies and you can’t just lump all the different doses together too which has been a problem with these meta-analyses of ivermectin. So, no matter how you look at it, this data doesn’t cut it. Ivermectin, is still a big question mark. And maybe someday we’ll get the truth about it. But it’s discouraging how it’s gotten so much mileage, and you have these people that are basically saying, if you’re not giving the drug, you’re hurting people. When in fact it could be just the opposite.
I think that the people who are the advocates for it, if I’m to look at them as good actors, are simply looking at all the data and making a mistake based on the data they’re looking at. They’re looking at observational studies, like where they’ve introduced ivermectin along with multiple other safety protocols, and there’s been a reported reduction in infection and death.11–13 How much weight would you give to those reports?
You’re going to have a reduction just on a basis of time as we get smarter about how to treat people, just simple things; like putting people prone to avoid mechanical ventilation. And we make all these points of progress in the course of the pandemic. And if you just study a drug along the way, there’s just the time, learning, wisdom, that comes along with it. So, you can’t make judgments about that either. The only way you get the answer is randomized trials done with both the active drug, placebo, contemporaneously. Randomized, large numbers, with rigorous collection of the data, and sharing of the data. That’s important. I’ve been involved in some of the largest randomized trials in cardiovascular research Global Use of Strategies to Open (GUSTO) and had over 41,000 people in 18 countries looking at death as the endpoint and heart attack. We know how to do these trials, they are not hard, but they have to be large. And they have to be rigorous and subject to audit. And these are things that we haven’t had any of for ivermectin. On every box you want to check ivermectin data falls short on.
When I spoke to Nobel Laureate Peter Doherty,14 this was at the beginning of the pandemic, we spoke about a paper released by his institute which is the molecular proof of principle for ivermectin. Caly et al. (2020), did an in vitro study that found that there was something like a 5000-fold reduction in SARS-CoV-2.15 Of course, they were using super physiological levels of ivermectin that are not FDA approved and cannot even be replicated in vivo. It feels like that’s where it’s kind of gone wrong.
The dosing is a big deal. There’s been so many drugs, one of the famous ones was resveratrol, that would make you live forever, if you drink 10 cases of wine every day, in order to get enough resveratrol. And that totally was a bust. And whenever you have supra physiologic doses that can never be achieved in human beings, as the only real biological activity marker, that’s’ a problem. There are so many drugs - when you repurpose them in a screen, all the drugs that could have antiviral activity for SARS-CoV-2, the list is very, very long. However, at doses, the potency, that you could actually give the medicine in a pill form, it starts to get narrow; very few. And one of those just recently, it appears to have clicked with the Merck drug. And there are a couple others that are in the process, with Pfizer and Roche. So, I think we’re going to get there. But the dose support work that you’re getting at for ivermectin, was a terrible reach, we would never be able to achieve that amount of drug in vivo. And, interestingly, some of the trials that are thrown into the bouillabaisse, which is what this is, are very low doses of ivermectin, and even the highest doses are low relative to what had a putative level of antiviral activity in the Caly et al. in vitro study.
It’s a tenfold increase on the FDA approved level. I do want to talk to you about Israel and about Delta. I don’t really understand this that well, but the escape mutations and the reduction in the effectiveness of the vaccines to protect against infection are down to something like 39%. I know you were initially against boosters to some extent, but what’s our future look like with this? With more variants coming out that are more infectious and possibly even more lethal. What are we looking at? Constant boosters?
Delta is pretty bad. Delta is something that won’t make it easy for another version of this virus to compete with; it’s so hyper-transmissible, and it also has some immune evasion features. So, to be able to beat Delta, and come up with another global strain, it’s not going to be easy. There hasn’t been one yet that has mounted any competitiveness with Delta, but we may see that because we don’t have global containment of the virus. And there’s a chance for it to evolve further, but hopefully, we won’t see it. Now, let’s say we just stay with Delta as our circulating virus around the world, which is pretty much the case, the only continent that was holding out till recently was South America, and that’s also being taken over by Delta. But everywhere else, it’s Delta, almost 100%. So back in late June in Israel, where they had previously gotten their cases down to almost zero, that is they got it down to one per million, or 10 cases in the entire country of Israel. So, it looked like they had beaten this virus, after having really had a tough road. Then Delta started and they had a huge surge. Because there was a double hit, they’ve been very aggressive in getting the vaccine to their population early. So, they were set up for waning immunity.
Now, we knew that the vaccines weren’t going to stay effective for years, we knew there would be a third shot needed, likely maybe at one year, or two years, at some point. We didn’t know it’d be six months. That was the big Israeli realization, when they first came out with that and said: ‘Oh my gosh, protection has dropped from 95% to 40% against symptomatic infections.’ At first there was denial among the medical community. Nobody wanted to see that. So, the double whammy was both that they had gotten off to a very fast start, they had a lot of people then who were at the six-month waned immunity period, and they also had Delta.17 If we never had Delta, if they just had Alpha, these breakthrough infections would have probably still been much lower. It’s this combination of a very contagious form of the virus with the waning of immunity that was expected. It really basically was like a perfect storm.
And you add into that, that in Israel they gave Pfizer, at three weeks spacing, which led to a not optimal response of the Beta, the B and T cell immune response. So that now has been largely squashed by the boosters. They used boosters of the Pfizer, the same dose, the same original vaccine in millions of people. And they’re well on their way to getting back to that one case per million people, which is the ultimate - we can’t do much better than that. And I think what we’ve learned already, people over 60 need to get a third shot, that probably applies to all vaccines, or with Johnson & Johnson, that would be the second dose. But an additional dose is going to be needed around six months for people over 60. If we want to suppress symptomatic infections, instead of just hospitalizations and deaths, then we have to go down to much lower ages, possibly as low as age 20 or 18. That’s the big question: how aggressively do you want to suppress symptomatic infections because they’re going to crop up with more exposure to Delta, if we don’t give a third shot.
It seems that that’s a balance then because even though there’s a decrease in approximately 39% for the ability to stop infection, there’s still an 89 to 93% protection rate against hospitalization and death.
It’s really a little lower than that. But if you zoom in on the people over age 65, then it drops down, and for the people in their 70s it dropped from 95 to 85, which is substantial. So, the point I am getting at, is that most of the hospitalizations and deaths occur in people over age 60. So that’s where you see the big bang of the booster.
Because the immune response is just not going to be as good with older people, even with a good vaccine, they’re just not going to be able to produce antibodies the same way.
Exactly. So then with the younger age group it’s two things going on. One, they make better antibody and cellular responses; B and T cell, and they don’t have as much of a risk to wind up in hospital or die. So, for those people as you get younger and younger, the benefit of an additional shot is lower. But it is consistent about the symptomatic infections. We just learned that data this week from Israel. There’s one other point - if we get containment of the virus, where it’s at very low levels, then the need for these additional shots is much lower, especially in younger healthy people. So, a lot of this story about the additional shots is dependent on us getting our global vaccination rates way up, achieving containment, and the unknown as to whether neutralizing antibodies at high levels is going to be required to prevent infections and transmission. That is still out there, dangling, because we finally have spacing between vaccinations; now that we’ve given a six month third dose, and we have this really good cellular immune response generated - that might be enough to carry us years. We’ll have to see.
If you’ve got something as infectious as Delta doesn’t it become sort of a pandemic of the unvaccinated? But then the unvaccinated can also affect the vaccinated if you’ve got a significant proportion of them. If we thought 70:30% - if we had 30% unvaccinated, we would get away with it at Alpha or Beta, we’re not going to get away with it at Delta. I’m wondering whether if we vaccinate everyone say from down to 16 years old, then doesn’t it becomes a pandemic of children? The virus then starts to circulate in really young children and become potentially more infectious and deadly in children? That’s the concern.
I haven’t been a fan of the pandemic of the unvaccinated just because we’re all in this together. And as you said, aptly, people who are vaccinated are not necessarily durably protected. So, they’re involved. And they can transmit, maybe not as frequently, but if you’re vaccinated, and you get a breakthrough infection, you may transmit before you have any symptoms, or you may never get symptoms, and you may be capable of transmitting particularly with Delta, because it’s such high copies of the virus that you harbor in your nose and upper airway. And then you get to the children. Now, even if we were to get 80% of the total population, and there’s some more people that have prior COVID who have immunity - it still may not be as ideal as if those people got one dose of a vaccine - but then you start getting up to the 90% ballpark. And with the children basically then you get the drag effect of having most of the population – you’ve built up this great Delta immunity wall. We don’t have that yet. We’re seeing it maybe in places like Spain and Portugal and the UAE, where they are at 80% of the population vaccinated and prior COVID, unlike Singapore, which had almost no prior COVID. So that may be the ticket to getting containment, Israel may get that now because they’ve gone through so much to get through this recent Delta wave.
The Delta problem changed the dynamics. We need 90% - 95% of a Delta wall of immunity; a combination of some type of vaccination, plus prior COVID in people who didn’t get vaccinated, and particularly if it’s within the last six months or a year of that prior COVID. And then the kids will basically benefit even without having to necessarily get vaccinated. But like in the US, we’re so short; we’re at 56% of the total population. We need those kids vaccinated to be part of the 90% because they are a vector of transmission. Places that have done really well, like Spain or UAE, it’s not as vital for them to get young children vaccinated as it is in the US.
However, the safety profile hasn’t been established for certain subgroups, has it? So, children are one, pregnant women are another, and then there are the immunocompromised. Are we going to be able to get vaccination in those subgroups without an appropriate safety profile?
I think the pregnancy thing has played out. Pregnancy is an immunocompromised state. And right now, in the UK, 1 in 5 of the intensive care unit patients with COVID are unvaccinated pregnant women.19 So, it’s very serious matter. And we know that the safety has been assured and efficacy is short. And so pregnant women do benefit from getting vaccinated. The real immunocompromised patients are the ones that have an autoimmune disease or are taking drugs that are basically interfering with their immune system. That’s tricky, because they’re variable, and we need to probably do lab tests to see that they are really getting protection. So that one’s a bit of a wildcard because it’s quite heterogeneous. I think the benefits of vaccination, though, are much bigger than the average person is appreciating. Because it’s not just the individual, of course, it’s the ability to break the chain.
And then there’s the children, you’re right, we don’t have the safety data we would like. Let’s say we saw in the teenagers that the myocarditis cropped up. And that wasn’t expected. We didn’t know that was going to happen, we still don’t know the mechanism of it. And most of those are boys, most of them do really well. It’s mild, it’s self-limiting. The number of cases is, let’s say, 1 in 50,000. But if you get down to teenage boys, it gets higher, but almost always, they recover well. And it’s usually the second dose. Now, what if that was even more common in children? We don’t know. And the only study we have is with Pfizer with 5 to 11 years old.20 And it’s only 1500 people who got the vaccine. Now we’re back to like ivermectin numbers. But now we’re talking about safety issues. And if it’s 1 in 50,000, or 1 in 10,000, and you only have 1500 people studied, you can get a misread. So, there wasn’t any myocarditis in the 1500 children in that study. But we need more data to be certain about that.
In relation to the instances of myocarditis from the mRNA vaccines, it has been suggested that there may be some degree of molecular mimicry between the spike protein and self-antigens.21
Everything under the sun has been touted as a putative mechanism, and we have nothing yet to rule in or out. It’s very elusive. I think that there was the idea that somehow the mRNA was getting into a vein during the injection, but that doesn’t explain why it’s just boys. And then why the second shot, and the age thing? There are so many unknowns here, whether it’s an actual autoimmune, proinflammatory response. This mimicry. I’ve heard testosterone being put forward as a factor. Well, there’s young women getting myocarditis, so testosterone doesn’t do this. Why is there an imbalance of the genders? It’s puzzling. The good thing about it is if you get COVID, the chance of you getting the real deal myocarditis is relatively high, much higher than if you get it from the vaccine, which is very mild if it occurs, and self-limiting.21
So COVID of the heart is not a good thing; from the infection. COVID caused myocarditis of the vaccine, even though we don’t know why it occurs, I think we can at least say it’s not likely to be of a durable, adverse impact. The rarity of myocarditis from the mRNA vaccines being a problem is notable.
What are the comparable rates between myocarditis from COVID versus myocarditis from the vaccine?
If you just looked at all people, without segmenting teenagers or older people, it’s more than a 10-fold increase in myocarditis from COVID than you would ever get from a vaccine. And it was a New England Journal of Medicine paper from Israel that found this and others have confirmed it.22 It’s orders of magnitude difference. And it’s also a different type of myocarditis from COVID. It’s a much more worrisome heart problem that you get through COVID infection, then when you get it through the vaccine.
People talk about getting natural immunity through catching COVID versus some type of artificial immunity from vaccines. The issue is that people don’t take into account that after previous pandemics the increase in neurological illness, things like Parkinson disease, have skyrocketed. So COVID is not something that you want to go out and catch to get natural immunity because you don’t really know what’s down the track for you.
So, I think this is a really important topic, the so-called prior COVID immunity, or natural immunity ...
The problem we’ve got is none of it is long term.
The immunity that you get from a COVID infection, in some people, can be quite durable. You just don’t know that until it’s too late - when you actually wind up getting a reinfection. Even prior COVID - what some people like to call natural immunity - I don’t think it’s natural to get COVID. I don’t think anybody wants to get COVID. And just like I don’t want to have a chicken pox party to get chicken pox, you don’t want to have a COVID party. The issue here is the immunity you get is very different. With COVID infection you’re getting exposed to the entire virus, you’re getting different antigens that you’re making antibodies to, and different cellular immunity. It’s a very different from you just getting the spike protein to fight against. So, it does have, in some people, more durability and more breadth. The best of all, you can’t beat this, is you get COVID, you have a good immune response, and then you get one dose of vaccine. That’s unbeatable. That’s better two doses of any vaccine known to mankind. That’s hybrid immunity.23 But again, you don’t want to get COVID. It’s only if you had missed an opportunity of getting the vaccine, because when you get COVID, there’s a wildcard. The wildcard is what you’re getting at which is long COVID.
Long COVID is a mosaic of many things. Some of the constituent symptoms are brain fog, and cognitive impact. Obviously, fatigue is a central part of this, but also breathing difficulty, and many other things. Now, recent studies have shown that this is not uncommon at all, more than 10% of people who get COVID, even young, healthy people are getting long COVID symptoms. Diverse, debilitating symptoms, and they often can’t return to work, or if they do go back to work, they’re troubled. They really have limitations. So, this is the legacy of the COVID pandemic; there is going to be millions of people around the world who have long COVID. And who knows how long it will last for?24
Well even beyond long COVID. What we’ve seen from previous pandemics is that there’s a correlation after the pandemics with people developing severe neurological illnesses.
To pinpoint that further, there’s one really important study that came out of the UK. So, in the UK they have the Biobank. And they have taken hundreds of thousands of UK citizens who volunteer to participate and a large number had a brain scan. And by happenstance, they had it before the pandemic. Then they repeated their brain scans, if they had COVID, or they didn’t have COVID, and they saw marked grey matter loss in the COVID group.25 And it gets to your point, which is that it takes a long time after losing brain cells to see the impact. And the fact that it’s already been documented from that UK study, that’s one of the most worrisome studies we’ve seen about COVID. Beyond the deaths, and the sickness that induces, is the implications of what it could do to some people’s brain. Young, healthy people who happen to have brain hits or involvement. So, this is yet another reason why we don’t want people to get COVID. Many will wind up unscathed, of course. But what about the people who unknowingly, have this hit to their brain, which we still need to learn a lot more about?
I wanted to address some of the claims that were made in Bret Weinstein’s DarkHorse podcast with Dr. Robert Malone and Steven Kirsch.26 So, the first one is that the spike protein that’s produced by the mRNA vaccine is cytotoxic. And then, the claim is that the transmembrane domain that is supposed to anchor the spike protein to a localized spot, fails, or can fail to some extent, and that the spike protein then cleaves, and then Steven Kirsch talks about a Japanese study that shows the distribution of the spike protein throughout the body, bloodstream, the ovaries and in bone marrow.27,28 Tell me what do we make of this? What evidence is there for this?
It’s all false. It’s all unacceptable lying; making things up. For example, Bret Weinstein on one of his podcasts said that the reason people get headaches post vaccination is because the mRNA from the vaccine crosses the blood brain barrier, and that’s what’s causing it. That’s ridiculous. This is what, in many ways, has ruined the American vaccination campaign, why we’re sitting at 56% fully vaccinated instead of 80 or 90%. It is this kind of fabrication. Now, I want to make sure that your listeners know that Dr. Malone, who claims he’s the inventor of mRNA vaccines is a charlatan; he’s not the inventor of mRNA vaccines. He’s already admitted to that. So, anything he says is suspect. And for whatever reason, he’s on a campaign to take down the mRNA vaccines that he says he was the inventor of - when he wasn’t the inventor. He had some involvement with the delivery of nanoparticles with mRNA.29 But he was not the inventor of the vaccines. And he continues to make false assertions, and team up with people like Bret Weinstein and others, to make stuff up. And all this stuff is made up. It’s unacceptable, and it’s scaring people from getting the vaccines.
I suppose the thing to be aware of is that SARS-CoV-2 is cytotoxic.30
There is no evidence that the that mRNA vaccines Pfizer and Moderna specifically, are cytotoxic. No evidence. To say this sort of thing is just outrageous. There’s never the comparison with COVID itself, which, as we’ve already discussed - what it can do to the brain, what it does do to cells, how it hijacks the cells. So, these things have scared the public and their listeners and their followers from getting vaccinated. And this complete sham of inventing the vaccines so that that supposedly commands respect when it’s an absolute lie. It’s unimaginable that this has been happening. This is what has been happening here in the vaccine world. Yes, people are making false assertions. And you can never keep up with it. Because if it isn’t that, then it’s that it causes infertility or it causes cancer. It’s a gene therapy, it’s experimental, the list goes on, it’s infinite attempts to take down the vaccines, and there’s no basis for it. These vaccines, the mRNA in particular, have been given now to hundreds of millions of people, and the number of people who’ve had any very serious untoward events, adverse outcomes, is miniscule; it’s almost nil.
The thing that may have contributed to the vaccine hesitancy, is the skipping of the animal experimentation. The shortest period for vaccine development prior to this was the Ebola vaccine, which took five years. Do you think that this and then the emergency authorization by the FDA led to more hesitancy?
It took 30 years to have the mRNA platform, and that’s with mRNA delivered by nanoparticles to get into muscle cells to then start the factory of the immune response. It took 30 years - not one year. The point being is that it took a long time. The animal studies were done in non-human primates; macaques. And it was done in the largest clinical trials in the history of vaccines, 40,000 participants in one trial, 35,000 in another trial, these were conducted in a compressed way. I’ve already alluded to the fact that one thing that was done to move things fast, was to do the three week dosing of Pfizer and the four week dosing of Moderna. I would have loved to see that done 8 or 12 weeks, because it would have had an even better immune response. But remember, we were going into a crisis of existential threat to a large proportion of people. They needed to go fast. And they didn’t want to wait 8-12 weeks and thought the 3 or 4 weeks was going to be enough. That was the only thing rushed.
When it came down to the FDA to adjudicate whether these vaccines are safe and effective, they actually took great pains to delay the Pfizer to make sure the trial was complete. Because at one point, under the pressure of the Trump administration, they were trying to get vaccine emergency approval, on the basis of the first interim analysis of 32 events. 32 events! They wanted the administration of Trump and Pfizer to get approval. Well, the first thing the FDA said was, ‘No, you have to finish that darn trial, and then we’ll look at the data,’ and then maybe we’ll give you an emergency approval. That’s what happened. So, this was not rushed. This was done in a rigorous way, thank goodness, because if it had been rushed, and if Trump had gotten his way to have the October surprise, and at Pfizer the CEO Albert Bourla, kept talking about getting the results out in October, if they had gotten it on the first interim analysis of 32 events, that would have been a nightmare. But since it was done right, this accusation that the trial was done too fast - it’s complete balderdash. It’s malarkey. It’s upsetting because it was actually done in a very rigorous way.
I know that at the beginning of the rollout of the vaccines that they were monitoring for things like antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE).31 But that turned out to not be an issue. But they’re the sorts of things that you look at with vaccines. Your claim is that if you’re going to see something it’s within two months of a vaccine administration.
We’ve seen everything we’re going to see with these vaccines - we saw it in the first two months. And that even includes the myocarditis that we discussed. It was seen in the first couple of months, when it’s introduced to the population at large. So, there’s not going to be any surprises. We talked about some of the pluses of a natural infection during our conversation. Let’s just be truthful about all this. And unfortunately, a lot of the damage has been done. Too many innocent minds have been inculcated with the fabrications, and disinformation. And I say dis not misinformation, because some of the perpetrators of this lack of evidence and fabricated stuff, did it purposely - to advance their own agendas. And we’re suffering because we can’t fix it now. It’s embedded. They’re programmed now to have a total aversion to getting vaccinated in the United States, and we suffer the most of any country because of that.
1. #256 - A Contagion of Bad Ideas. Sam Harris. Accessed December 17, 2021. https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/256-contagion-bad-ideas
2. Bryant A, Lawrie TA, Dowswell T, et al. Ivermectin for Prevention and Treatment of COVID-19 Infection: A Systematic Review, Meta-Analysis and Trial Sequential Analysis to Inform Clinical Guidelines. Open Science Framework; 2021. doi:10.31219/osf.io/dzs2v
3. Davey M. Fraudulent ivermectin studies open up new battleground between science and misinformation. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com /australia-news / 2021 / sep / 25/fraudulent-ivermectin-studies-open-up-new-battleground-between-science-and-misinformation. Published September 24, 2021. Accessed December 13, 2021.
4. Reardon S. Flawed ivermectin preprint highlights challenges of COVID drug studies. Nature. 2021;596(7871):173-174. doi:10.1038/d41586-021-02081-w
5. Topol EJ. Failing the Public Health — Rofecoxib, Merck, and the FDA. N Engl J Med. 2004;351(17):1707-1709. doi:10.1056/NEJMp048286
6. Merck and Ridgeback’s Investigational Oral Antiviral Molnupiravir Reduced the Risk of Hospitalization or Death by Approximately 50 Percent Compared to Placebo for Patients with Mild or Moderate COVID-19 in Positive Interim Analysis of Phase 3 Study. Merck.com. Accessed December 13, 2021. https:// www.merck.com / news / merck-and-ridgebacks-investigational-oral-antiviral - molnupiravir - reduced - the - risk-of-hospitalization-or-death-by-approximately - 50 - percent - compared - to-placebo-for-patients-with-mild-or-moderat/
7. Merck and Ridgeback Biotherapeutics Provide Update on Results from MOVe-OUT Study of Molnupiravir, an Investigational Oral Antiviral Medicine, in At Risk Adults With Mild-to-Moderate COVID-19. Merck. com. Accessed December 14, 2021. https://www.merck.com/ news/merck-and- ridgeback - biotherapeutics-provide-update-on-results-from-move-out-study-of-molnupiravir-an-investigational-oral-antiviral-medicine-in-at-risk-adults-with-mild-to-moderate-covid-19/
8. Lawrence JM, Meyerowitz-Katz G, Heathers JAJ, Brown NJL, Sheldrick KA. The lesson of ivermectin: meta-analyses based on summary data alone are inherently unreliable. Nat Med. 2021;27(11):1853-1854. doi:10.1038 /s41591-021-01535-y
9. ‎Bret Weinstein | DarkHorse Podcast: COVID, Ivermectin, and the Crime of the Century: DarkHorse Podcast with Pierre Kory & Bret Weinstein on Apple Podcasts. Apple Podcasts. Accessed December 14, 2021. https://podcasts .apple.com/us/podcast / covid-ivermectin-and-the-crime-of-the/id147158152 1?i=1000523859023
10. #1671 - Bret Weinstein & Dr. Pierre Kory.; 2021. Accessed December 14, 2021. https://open.spotify.com/episode/7uVXKgE6eLJKMXkETwcw0D
11. Chamie J. Real-World Evidence: The Case of Peru. Causality between Ivermectin and COVID-19 Infection Fatality Rate.; 2020.
12. Chamie-Quintero JJ, Hibberd J, Scheim D. Sharp Reductions in COVID-19 Case Fatalities and Excess Deaths in Peru in Close Time Conjunction, State-By-State, with Ivermectin Treatments. Social Science Research Network; 2021. doi:10.2139/ssrn.3765018
13. Indian States Turn to Ivermectin in COVID Crisis. Published May 18, 2021. Accessed December 13, 2021. https://www.medpagetoday.com/special-reports/exclusives/92644
14. Peter Doherty : COVID 19 – The Crown | troublemag. Accessed December 14, 2021. http://www.troublemag.com/peter-doherty-covid-19-the-crown/
15. Caly L, Druce JD, Catton MG, Jans DA, Wagstaff KM. The FDA-approved drug ivermectin inhibits the replication of SARS-CoV-2 in vitro. Antiviral Res. 2020;178:104787. doi:10.1016/j.antiviral.2020.104787
16. Cascella M, Rajnik M, Aleem A, Dulebohn SC, Di Napoli R. Features, Evaluation, and Treatment of Coronavirus (COVID-19). In: StatPearls. StatPearls Publishing; 2021. Accessed December 13, 2021. http://www.ncbi. nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK554776/
17. Levine-Tiefenbrun M, Yelin I, Alapi H, et al. Viral loads of Delta-variant SARS-CoV-2 breakthrough infections after vaccination and booster with BNT162b2. Nat Med. Published online November 2, 2021. doi:10.1038/s 41591-021-01575-4
18. The Janssen Ad26.COV2.S COVID-19 vaccine: What you need to know. Accessed December 13, 2021. https://www.who.int/news-room/feature-stories/detail/the-j-j-covid-19-vaccine-what-you-need-to-know
19. Among England’s most critically ill covid patients, 1 in 5 is pregnant and unvaccinated. Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/ 2021 / 10 /11 /england - pregnant - women - unvaccinated - covid /. Accessed December 13, 2021.
20. Walter EB, Talaat KR, Sabharwal C, et al. Evaluation of the BNT162b2 Covid-19 Vaccine in Children 5 to 11 Years of Age. N Engl J Med. Published online November 9, 2021. doi:10.1056/NEJMoa2116298
21. Bozkurt B, Kamat I, Hotez PJ. Myocarditis With COVID-19 mRNA Vaccines. Circulation. 2021;144(6):471-484. doi:10.1161/CIRCULATION AHA.121.056135
22. Barda N, Dagan N, Ben-Shlomo Y, et al. Safety of the BNT162b2 mRNA Covid-19 Vaccine in a Nationwide Setting. N Engl J Med. 2021;385(12): 1078-1090. doi:10.1056/NEJMoa2110475
23. Callaway E. COVID super-immunity: one of the pandemic’s great puzzles. Nature. 2021;598(7881):393-394. doi:10.1038/d41586-021-02795-x
24. Higgins V, Sohaei D, Diamandis EP, Prassas I. COVID-19: from an acute to chronic disease? Potential long-term health consequences. Crit Rev Clin Lab Sci. 2021;58(5):297-310. doi:10.1080/10408363.2020.1860895
25. Douaud G, Lee S, Alfaro-Almagro F, et al. Brain imaging before and after COVID-19 in UK Biobank. medRxiv. Published online August 18, 2021: 2021.06.11.21258690. doi:10.1101/2021.06.11.21258690
26. ‎Bret Weinstein | DarkHorse Podcast: How to save the world, in three easy steps. on Apple Podcasts. Apple Podcasts. Accessed December 14, 2021. https://podcasts.apple.com/si/podcast/how-to-save-the-world-in-three-easy-steps/id1471581521?i=1000525032595
27. Washington D of C 1100 CANS 1300B, Dc 20036. PolitiFact - No sign that the COVID-19 vaccines’ spike protein is toxic or ‘cytotoxic.’ @politifact. Accessed November 8, 2021. https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/ jun/16/youtube-videos/no-sign-covid-19-vaccines-spike-protein-toxic-or-c/
28. Health Feedback. COVID-19 vaccines don’t affect ovaries or fertility in general; the vaccines are highly effective at preventing illness and death. Health Feedback. Published June 24, 2021. Accessed November 8, 2021. https:// healthfeedback.org / claimreview / covid-19-vaccines-dont-affect-ovaries- or - fertility-in-general - the-vaccines - are-highly-effective-at-preventing-illness-and-death/
29. Dolgin E. The tangled history of mRNA vaccines. Nature. 2021;597(7876): 318-324. doi:10.1038/d41586-021-02483-w
30. Meckiff BJ, Ramírez-Suástegui C, Fajardo V, et al. Imbalance of Regulatory and Cytotoxic SARS-CoV-2-Reactive CD4+ T Cells in COVID-19. Cell. 2020;183(5):1340-1353.e16. doi:10.1016/j.cell.2020.10.001
31. Lee WS, Wheatley AK, Kent SJ, DeKosky BJ. Antibody-dependent enhancement and SARS-CoV-2 vaccines and therapies. Nat Microbiol. 2020;5(10):1185-1191. doi:10.1038/s41564-020-00789-5
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Eric Topol is the Founder and Director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, Professor, Molecular Medicine, and Executive Vice-President of Scripps Research. As a researcher, he has published over 1,200 peer-reviewed articles, with more than 315,000 citations, elected to the National Academy of Medicine, and is one of the top 10 most cited researchers in medicine. His principal scientific focus has been on the genomic and digital tools to individualize medicine.
In 2016, Topol was awarded a $207 million grant from the NIH to lead a significant part of the Precision Medicine (All of Us) Initiative, a prospective research program enrolling 1 million participants in the US. This is in addition to his role as principal investigator for a flagship $35M NIH grant to promote innovation in medicine. He was the founder of a new medical school at Cleveland Clinic, Lerner College of Medicine, with Case Western University. He has over 500,000 followers on Twitter (@EricTopol) where recently he has been reporting insights and research findings for COVID-19. Besides editing several textbooks, he has published 3 bestseller books on the future of medicine: The Creative Destruction of Medicine, The Patient Will See You Now, and Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again. Lastly, Topol was commissioned by the UK 2018-2019 to lead planning for the National Health Service’s integration of AI and new technologies.
Black Politicized Lives Matter
References
By Heather MacDonald
On May 25, four Minneapolis police officers arrested a man for passing a counterfeit $20 bill.  One of the officers kept his knee on George Floyd’s neck and shoulders for eight minutes while Mr. Floyd was handcuffed on the ground and pleading that he couldn’t breathe. Mr. Floyd died of a heart attack during the arrest.  
The next day, Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey announced that whatever the investigation into Mr. Floyd’s death revealed, being black in America should not be a death sentence.  Mayor Frey’s interpretation of Mr. Floyd’s horrifying end - that it was a function of his race - instantly became universal. That idea was coupled with the claim that Mr. Floyd’s death was representative of an epidemic of racially biased police killings of black men.  
Together these two claims triggered an explosion of violence in Minneapolis and across the country, destroying thousands of livelihoods, turning city streets into war zones, and ripping apart the very foundation of law and order. Police officers were shot at, slashed, and assaulted with bricks and bottles; their precinct houses and cruisers were firebombed.  Courthouses were vandalized.  Firefighters let public and private property burn to the ground rather than risk being attacked by the rioters.  Professional thieves used stolen cars as missiles to hurtle into stores which they then cleaned out through the shattered glass.   
The flames of that terrible week have burned out, but the attack on civil order continues.  Monuments to the nation’s Founders have been torn down and defaced; anarchists colonized portions of Seattle and New York with impunity. Violence has become the response of choice to any criminal justice decision the activists do not like. In mid-July 2020 vandals tried to torch the Georgia Department of Public Safety as part of ongoing protests against the police in Atlanta; in Salt Lake City, vandals broke windows of the District Attorney’s office and pepper sprayed police officers after the district attorney declined to prosecute an officer-involved shooting. Riots broke out in Kenosha, WI, Philadelphia, and Brooklyn Center, MN, among other locations, following police shootings.  
Courthouses and police precincts remain favored physical targets. In Portland, Antifa thugs have hurled bombs at the federal courthouse; they have tried to blind federal agents with lasers. 
And across the country, police officers are routinely attacked as they try to make a lawful arrest. Ambush assaults on officers rose 91% in the year following Mr. Floyd’s death.  
The unchecked anarchy of those riots and their long aftermath have sent a clear message to criminals: no one is controlling the streets.  Gang shootings and homicides have spiked nationwide as a demoralized police force pulls back from discretionary stops and arrests.  In the weeks following the Floyd riots, homicides were up by 100% in Minneapolis, 200% in Seattle, 40% in St. Louis, 240% in Atlanta, and 182% in Chicago. The year 2020 likely saw the largest percentage increase in the nation’s history.1 At least four dozen children under the age of 18 were fatally shot in drive-by shootings, nearly all of them black.
We have been here before.  In 2015 and 2016, homicides in the U.S. saw their largest two-year increase in nearly 50 years, following the police shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014. Brown’s death fueled the first iteration of the Black Lives Matter movement. Cops backed off from proactive policing, having been relentlessly told that they were racist, for example, to question someone hanging out on a known drug corner at 1 am hitching up his waistband as if he had a gun. As a result of this decline in discretionary enforcement, another 2000 blacks lost their lives in 2015 and 2016, compared to 2014 numbers.2–4  
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The rapid rise of crime over the last year and a half makes that first version of what I have called the Ferguson Effect look like child’s play. Today’s Ferguson Effect 2.0, or better, the Minneapolis Effect, has been far worse, since the Black Lives Matter narrative that policing in the U.S. is lethally racist has been amplified by every mainstream institution in the country.  
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A lot is riding on whether that narrative about the police is correct—not just thousands of lives, but the very possibility of a civilized society. Essential criminal justice practices are being rapidly dismantled in the name of fighting alleged law enforcement bias.  So is it true, as U.S. President Joe Biden routinely announces, that every time a black person leaves his house, his family members need to fear for his safety from the police? It is not.   The idea that the police are wantonly killing black men is an optical illusion, created by selective coverage from a politicized press. That optical illusion is then reinforced by an elite establishment dedicated to the idea that racism is America’s defining trait.  
There are three types of evidence bearing on the Black Lives Matter claim about police racism: the raw numbers on police shootings and deaths, individual cases like Mr. Floyd’s, and academic research.  
The raw numbers are these: Every year the police fatally shoot about 1000 people, the vast majority of whom are threatening the officer or bystanders with deadly force. About 50% of those police fatalities are white and about 25% are black. Anti-police activists look at that 25% number and proclaim: police bias, since blacks are about 13% of the population.  
That is the wrong benchmark, however. The decisive issue in assessing police activity is the choice of a benchmark. Every article you read, every news story you watch in the mainstream media, will compare police stops or arrests to a population benchmark, because that is the only way that the Black Lives Matter narrative can be sustained. But law enforcement actions must be measured against crime, not population ratios, because policing today is data-driven. Officers are deployed to where people are most being victimized, and that is in minority neighborhoods. And it is in minority neighborhoods where officers are most likely to interact with armed, violent, and resisting suspects.  
Here are the victimization data: Nationwide, blacks between the ages of ten and 43 die of homicide at thirteen times the rate of whites, according to the CDC. In Minnesota blacks of all ages die of homicide at 12 times the rate of whites. In Chicago’s four most violent districts, the homicide rate is 26 times higher than in the safest districts.5
One might think that the Black Lives Matter activists would care about such loss of black life. They ignore those black deaths, however, because the victims are killed overwhelmingly not by the police, not by whites, but by other blacks. 
Here are the criminal offending data: In the 75 largest U.S. counties, which is where most of the population resides, blacks constitute around 60 percent of all murder and robbery defendants, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, though they are only 15% of the population in those counties. Nationwide blacks commit homicide at eight times the rate of whites and Hispanics combined. In Chicago, blacks commit about 80% of all shootings and homicides, though they are less than a third of the population. Whites commit about 2% of all shootings and homicides in Chicago, though they, too, are less than a third of the population.
In a typical year, blacks in St. Louis commit all or nearly all homicides, though they are less than half of the population.  In New York City, blacks commit about 75% of all shootings, on average, though they are 23% of the city’s population. Whites commit less than 3% of all shootings in New York City, though they are 34% of the city’s population.  
These crime disparities have enormous consequences for police use of force. The biggest determinant of officer behavior is civilian behavior. The greater the chance that officers confront armed and resisting suspects, the more likely they are to escalate their own use of force.  And that chance is far higher in black communities. As discussed below, blacks are actually shot less by the police than their crime rates would predict, and whites are shot more. The percentage of white and Hispanic homicide victims who are killed by a cop is three times higher than the percentage of black homicide victims who are killed by a cop.  
So that 25% or so share of fatal police shootings each year comprised of black victims - when measured against a crime benchmark - does not support the Black Lives Matter narrative. 
What about the individual case?
Mr. Floyd’s death was immediately portrayed as what is known in literary theory as a synecdoche—a part that stands in for a whole, in this case, the whole of anti-black police violence. But if we conclude from that one case, however shocking, that the police are biased against black men, we could just as easily conclude from other individual cases that the police are biased against white men. 
Take the death of Tony Timpa, which adumbrated the death of Mr. Floyd. In 2016, the 32-year-old schizophrenic called 911 in Dallas to report that he was off his medication, frightened, and needed help. Three Dallas police officers responded and kept Mr. Timpa face down on the ground for 13 minutes with a knee to his back, all the while joking about Mr. Timpa’s mental illness. Mr. Timpa was handcuffed and had not resisted or threatened the officers. He pleaded for help more than 30 times, exclaiming that the cops were killing him. Eventually he stopped moving or making any sound, as the officers continued their wisecracks. After Mr. Timpa was loaded into an ambulance, an officer said: “I hope I didn’t kill him.” Mr. Timpa was already dead from homicide caused by physical restraint and cocaine.  
Very few Americans outside of Mr. Timpa’s family know his name. His death did not make international news or spur widespread riots.  Because Mr. Timpa was white, his death did not fit the Black Lives Matter narrative and thus was of no interest to the media.  
That same year, a cop in Mesa, Arizona, unleashed a barrage of gunfire from his AR-15 rifle at a 26-year-old man in a motel who had been reported as having a gun.  The victim was down on his hands and knees in the corridor outside his motel room, trying to comply with the conflicting commands that a sergeant was screaming at him, and begging “Please don’t shoot me!”  Like Mr. Timpa, the victim, Daniel Shaver, was white.  
In 2015, the year that Black Lives Matter became a national phenomenon, a 50-year-old white man in Tuscaloosa involved in a domestic violence incident ran at the officer with a spoon and was fatally shot. A white 25-year-old male in Des Moines led the police on a car chase and walked quickly towards the officer when he got out of the car and was fatally shot.  A white 21-year-old male in Akron escaped from a grocery store robbery on a bike and didn’t take his hand out of his waistband when commanded to do so and was fatally shot. None of these victims was armed.  
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No one knows these men’s names, either, because they don’t help the narrative. Had any of these victims been black, however, there is a good chance that they, too, would have become international causes célèbres.  If the press focused monomaniacally on white victims of police shootings, rather than ignoring them, the public would think that we were living through an epidemic of police shootings of whites. The widespread perception that questionable police shootings occur exclusively or almost exclusively against black males is a function of selective coverage.  
Let’s look more closely at unarmed victims of fatal police shootings. According to the Washington Post’s data base of fatal police shootings, there were 18 unarmed black victims of fatal police shootings in 2020 and 26 unarmed white victims of fatal police shootings. The Washington Post defines unarmed generously, to include suspects beating an officer with his own gun or fleeing a car stop with a loaded semi-automatic pistol in their cars.  
Those 18 allegedly “unarmed” black victims of fatal police shootings make up .2% of all black homicide victims, assuming conservatively a black death toll in 2020 of around 8,300 blacks—more than all white and Hispanic homicide victims combined. Those 18 “unarmed” black victims make up an even smaller percentage of the country’s 40 million or so blacks - .000007%.  Neither ratio is large, to say the least.  
The claim that the death of George Floyd was the result of a pattern of police racism is pure supposition with no supporting evidence. 
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What do academic studies say about the question of systemic police bias? I could cite a 2019 paper from the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences for the proposition that there is no racial disparity in police shootings once violent crime is taken into account. I will not do so, however. The authors retracted that study in July 2020,6 because I had cited it verbatim in congressional testimony and in several articles. The authors, a professor at Michigan State University and a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Maryland, had come under enormous pressure from the criminology profession to disavow their study thanks to its entry into public consciousness on the “wrong” side of the policing and racism question.  
As it turns out, the authors forgot to retract another article of theirs from 2018 which reaches the identical conclusion—that violent crime, not race, determines police shootings.7 That 2018 study analyzed two years of fatal police shootings from 2015 and 2016. About 1050 whites and 500 blacks were killed by the police in those two years. Calculated against population ratios, blacks were 2.5 times more likely to be killed by police than whites. This 2.5 figure surfaces regularly in the mainstream media as proof of police racism. But as always crime is the proper benchmark for policing, as the authors of the 2018 and now retracted 2019 studies well understand. When one compares fatal police shootings to homicide reports and arrests, the likelihood of being shot, in the authors’ words, flips completely. Whites are about 3 times more likely to be fatally shot than blacks, once their homicide rates are taken into account.  There is also no evidence of bias in fatal police shootings when benchmarked against overall violent crime rates.
Other studies have reached the same conclusion.  Harvard economist Roland Fryer has found no racial discrimination in police shootings—officers in 10 large cities and counties were more likely to shoot a suspect without first being attacked if the suspect was white than if the suspect was black. An analysis by the Center for Policing Equity also concluded that whites were disadvantaged compared to blacks when it comes to lethal force.  An economist at Maryland's Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation concluded that if blacks are killed by officers at a rate higher than their population numbers, it's because of blacks’ higher rate of arrest, not their skin color—again, a question of the benchmark.  
So, a robust body of empirical work disproves the racism charge. What about the counterevidence? What little there is concerns non-lethal police force. Roland Fryer also analyzed the forms that New York police officers fill out after stopping a suspect. He found that blacks were 21 percent more likely than whites to have an officer use non-lethal force on them, such as an officer placing his hands on a suspect or drawing his weapon.  
But Mr. Fryer’s study made some questionable assumptions. He categorized suspects as “perfectly compliant” with an officer’s instructions, for example, based only on the fact that the officer had not checked off any boxes on the stop form regarding suspect behavior.  The absence of a check mark is not the same thing as an affirmative judgement of perfect compliance, as Mr. Fryer himself acknowledged in an email to me.  
Other studies suggest that blacks resist officer orders at a higher rate than whites, which would produce any disparities regarding officer use of nonlethal force. A 2005 paper by criminologists at the California State University randomly sampled 400 police reports from a Southern California police department—200 cases where the suspect resisted and 200 where the suspect complied.  It found that resistance was more likely in high crime areas, and, as the inevitable corollary of this fact, that blacks suspects were more likely to resist than white suspects. In fact, race was one of the most significant predictors of resistance, with black suspects being four times as likely to resist than whites.8  
This finding accords with studies from 1995 and 2001 that officers who come into contact with non-white suspects are assaulted at a higher rate and that most assaults on officers occur by suspects with criminal histories.  
Given the lack of racial disparities in police shootings, those who argue that officers use non-lethal force disproportionately against blacks have the burden of showing that any disparities in non-lethal force are not the product of suspect resistance. The proponents of the bias thesis have not met that burden.9  
But with the current tidal wave of hatred crashing down upon the police, further delegitimating their authority, suspect resistance will go up.  That resistance will increase the chance of officer use of force, which, if videotaped and stripped of the civilian behavior that preceded it, will trigger new waves of civil violence.  
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Car stops are another enduring topic in the case against cops. Studies claiming bias in traffic stops as usual use the wrong benchmark: population. The relevant benchmark is the rate at which different groups break traffic and equipment laws. There was a short period in the early 2000s when a criminologist could still study such matters and keep his job, but that window quickly closed.  Before it did, New Jersey and North Carolina speeding studies showed that blacks speed more—on the New Jersey Turnpike, at twice the rate of whites, a disparity that increases over 90 miles an hour.  
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, an office of the Transportation Department, has a program based on the “nexus of crashes and crime.” For decades, research has found that neighborhoods with the highest rates of fatal accidents also have the highest rates of violent crime.  It is a truism of policing that “criminals are bad drivers,” says former Milwaukee Police Chief Edward Flynn. “They don’t follow traffic laws or update their vehicle registration. Years ago, I learned that expired inspection stickers were the quickest way to find a warrant fugitive.”  
Given the higher rates of driving and equipment infractions in the black population, a higher rate of car stops is no proof of bias in enforcement. Many black cops report that if they stop a black driver, the first thing out of the driver’s mouth is: you only stopped me because I’m black. The cop will respond: no, I stopped you because you ran that red light or were driving 25 miles over the speed limit.  
The charge that blacks are at daily risk from white supremacy extends beyond police civilian interactions to civilian-on-civilian interactions. Basketball star LeBron James has tweeted: “We’re literally hunted EVERYDAY/EVERYTIME we step foot outside the comfort of our homes!” 
This, too, is a sentiment at odds with the data. In the universe of all interracial violence between blacks and whites, blacks commit 88% of that interracial violence, whites 12%. These numbers exclude homicide, since they are based on victim self-reports. But adding homicide would not change the proportions.  
This black on white violence manifests itself in flash mobs, whereby youth rampage through downtown business districts assaulting passersby and looting stores; wilding; the knock-out game; and the usual brutal armed robberies. Two such robberies in Minneapolis in August 2019 were typical. In one, about a dozen people on the Target Field Plaza beat and kicked a man while ripping off his pants and shoes and stealing the contents of his pockets.  They then jumped on the victim like a trampoline, hit him with planting pots, and ran him over with a bike.  
In the second incident, a man using his cell phone outside a downtown bar was kicked and punched by a group of youths until he was unconscious. The mob then stripped him of iPhone, wallet, keys and cash. 
Then there are the gratuitous assaults. In New York in 2020, even before the George Floyd riots, a 92-year-old woman was slammed into a fire hydrant in Manhattan’s Gramercy Park, hitting her head; a 78-year-old woman was punched in the head in Brooklyn; and an 80-year-old man was knocked to the ground, dragged, and robbed in the Bronx. During the August 2020 riots in Kenosha, a 70-year-old man tried to intervene in the arson and looting of the historic Danish Brotherhood building. One of the looters hit him on the side of the head with a plastic bottle filled with cement, breaking his jaw in three places and slicing his scalp. In March 2021, Zayvion Perry, 16, and Adriel Riley, Jr., 14, doused a 53-year-old man with gasoline as he sat in his apartment in Rochester, NY, and set him afire. The man died of his burns several days later.  
The vicious beatings of elderly Asians that gained media attention in 2021 have been portrayed as the work of white supremacists.  In fact, they are overwhelmingly committed by blacks.  
If any of the victims mentioned above had been black and their assailants white, these, too, would have been international scandals, given nonstop coverage by the world’s press as proof of America’s savage white supremacy.  But just as we turn our eyes away from black-on-black crime, we are just as adamant about looking the other way when it comes to black-on-white and black-on-Asian crime. 
~
The press routinely omits the race of unapprehended crime suspects in its news coverage—a practice at odds with the public good--and has started foregoing mug shots of arrestees, since such descriptions and photos are said to give the public a mistaken impression of who commits most street crimes. Actually, mug shots and suspect descriptions give an accurate sense of urban violence. This squeamishness about even acknowledging the reality of black crime is not consistent with an alleged regime of white supremacy.  
The narrative about police-civilian violence is also the reverse of the truth. Police officers are far more likely to be killed by a black criminal than an unarmed black is to be fatally shot by a police officer. As of September 8, 2021, four “unarmed” blacks were slain by police officers since the start of the year, according to the Washington Post. The Post’s “unarmed” category includes violently resisting crime suspects who are pummeling officers on the ground and refusing to comply with orders after being tased.  Those 4 unarmed blacks represent .00000008 of the nearly 47 million self-identified blacks,10 or less than 1/100 of one person killed per 100,000 blacks.  
Fifty police officers have been murdered in 2021 as of September 3, 2021.11 In 2019, there 694,195 were sworn officers in the U.S.,12 before the rush of retirements following the George Floyd riots.13 Conservatively using the 2019 headcount, those 50 officers represent a rate of 7 officers killed per 100,000 on the job, or 875 times the rate at which blacks are killed by cops.  
Historically blacks have made up over 40% of cop killers nationwide – 43% between 2005 and 2013.14 In 2019 blacks nationally were over 37% of all cop killers whose race was known.15  Conservatively estimating that 40% of the cop killers this year have been black, 20 officers have been killed by a black suspect in 2021, for a rate of nearly three cops per 100,000 officers killed by a black.  A police officer is 375 times as likely to be killed by a black suspect as an unarmed black is to be killed by a police officer.  
Attacks on the police have been rising. Through late June 2021, ambush assaults on officers were up 91% compared to the same period in 2020. Ambush attacks on police officer are up 91% in 2021 compared to previous years.16,17 Those assaults will continue to increase, as the political establishment and the media fuel anti-cop hatred further. 
Meanwhile, there is hardly a single aspect of the criminal justice system that is not being undone to avoid disparate impact on blacks. Felonies are being reclassified as misdemeanors to lessen the number of blacks sent to prison. Prosecutors are declining to prosecute low level offenses like public drinking, disorderly conduct, graffiti, and turnstile jumping. Bail is being eliminated. Gang databases are being purged. Undercover police units that get illegal guns off the street are being disbanded. Because computers are allegedly as racist as people, valuable crime-fighting tools like facial recognition technology and analytical crime software are being mothballed. Universities and school districts are severing their ties with pariah police departments. The chancellor of the University of California, Los Angeles, apologized profusely for allowing the Los Angeles Police Department to use a university parking lot for a staging area during the local George Floyd riots. Such a practice threatens the school’s marginalized voices, the chancellor said, and would not be repeated.  
Officers are demoralized and despairing. In no other profession are you condemned as a racist by the country’s elites from the day you step on the job. Retirements were up 45 percent from April 2020 to April 2021 in 200 police departments surveyed by the Police Executive Research Forum; resignations were up 18 percent. 
The Riverside, Ill., police department usually gets over 200 applicants for its police exam; in 2020, it had 62- its lowest turnout in 42 years. The Portland Police Bureau lost more officers to retirement in August 2020 alone than in all of 2019. The Asheville, NC, police have stopped responding to low-level crimes because they have lost about a third of their staff to resignations and retirement. Seattle’s response times to the highest-priority calls have plummeted thanks to resignations by younger officers and the inability to recruit replacements. 
New York Mayor Bill de Blasio cancelled two future police academy classes as part of New York City’s defunding movement. He needn’t have bothered. Those may be the last fully staffed police classes the city can muster. Officers are telling potential recruits to avoid the job.  
And now, with shameless hypocrisy, the anti-cop brigades are blaming the police for pulling back from precisely the types of enforcement that they so roundly condemn as racist.  The Brooklyn Borough President and a city council member groused to the New York Times in 2020 that the police had not responded to complaints about illegal dice games, loud music, and other public order infractions. Had the police taken action, of course, they would have risked more charges of racism.  
But people who live with street disorder understand that it is the breeding ground of violent crime; it is out of those rowdy gatherings of hundreds of youth on street corners that shootings often emerge.  
~
The law-abiding residents of high crime communities have been the initial victims in this growing wave of lawlessness. These are the people whom the press never seems to talk to, people like an elderly cancer amputee in the Mount Hope section of the Bronx who told me: “Please, Jesus, send more police”. The only time she felt safe to go down to her building’s lobby was when officers were there, because it was otherwise colonized by trespassing youth selling drugs and smoking weed. “As long as you see the police,” she said, everything’s A-OK. You can come down and get your mail and talk to decent people.”  These are the people, who, like this vulnerable senior citizen, invariably beg for more police protection and can’t understand why the criminal justice system can’t keep the dealers off the streets and locked away. These good bourgeois citizens are of no interest to the activist press, the only people who listen to their pleas are the police.  
Nor do the black toddlers who have been gunned down in their bedrooms, front yards, and parents’ cars over the last two years carry any import to the Black Lives Matter movement, since their assailants are of the wrong race and do not wear a badge.  
In one week in July 2021, at least 6 black children under the age of 12 were killed nationally in drive by shootings. In Minneapolis, six children 10 or younger were shot in June and July 2021, including a nine-month-old baby and two three-year-old boys. A six-year-old girl and a nine-year-old girl died of their head wounds; a ten-year-old boy, also shot in the head, will likely be a vegetable for life.  
In Chicago over Fourth of July weekend 2021, a five-year-old girl, a six-year-old girl, a 12-year-old girl, and 13-year-old boy were shot; several days earlier a month-old infant was critically wounded and a nine-year-old girl was shot in the head.18–20 The nation turned its eyes away because none of those children were shot by a cop; they were killed by other blacks. 
~
The only thing that will slow this false narrative about police racism is if white children start to be gunned down in drive-by shootings. The allegedly anti-racist press ignores young black victims but goes into crisis mode if white children are shot, as the reaction to those rare school shootings show. Cumulatively, there are several Newton, Connecticut’s, every year in the black community - only the police pay consistent attention.
1. Lopez G. 2020’s historic surge in murders, explained. Vox. Published March 25, 2021. Accessed December 19, 2021. https://www.vox.com/22344713/ murder-violent-crime-spike-surge-2020-covid-19-coronavirus
2. Expanded Homicide Data Table 1. FBI. Accessed December 19, 2021. https: //ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2016/crime-in-the-u.s.-2016/tables/expanded-homicide-data-table-1.xls
3. Expanded Homicide Data Table 2. FBI. Accessed December 19, 2021. https: //ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2015/crime-in-the-u.s.-2015/tables/expanded_ homicide_data_table_2_murder_victims_by_age_sex_and_race_2015.xls
4. Expanded Homicide Data Table 2. FBI. Accessed December 19, 2021. https: //ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2014/crime-in-the-u.s.-2014/tables /expanded-homicide-data/expanded_homicide_data_table_2_murder_victims_by_age_ sex_and_race_2014.xls
5. Sweeney SC Annie. Violence spike of 2020 widened familiar safety gap between city neighborhoods, University of Chicago Crime Lab analysis shows. chicagotribune.com. Accessed December 19, 2021. https://www. chicagotribune.com / news / criminal-justice / ct-2020-homicide-rate-spike-safety-gap-20210729-3lau7u2mijgaxjkvfkqqnvooee-story.html
6. Retraction for Johnson et al., Officer characteristics and racial disparities in fatal officer-involved shootings. Proc Natl Acad Sci. 2020;117(30):18130-18130. doi:10.1073/pnas.2014148117
7. Cesario J, Johnson DJ, Terrill W. Is There Evidence of Racial Disparity in Police Use of Deadly Force? Analyses of Officer-Involved Fatal Shootings in 2015–2016. Soc Psychol Personal Sci. 2019;10(5):586-595. doi:10.1177/1948550618775108.
8. Belvedere K, Worrall J, Tibbetts S. Explaining Suspect Resistance in Police-Citizen Encounters. Crim Justice Rev. 2005;30:30-44. doi:10.1177/073 4016805275675
9. Fachner G, Carter S. An Assessment of Deadly Force in the Philadelphia Police Department. :188.
10. Tamir C. The Growing Diversity of Black America. Pew Research Center’s Social & Demographic Trends Project. Published March 25, 2021. Accessed December 19, 2021. https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2021/03/25/ the-growing-diversity-of-black-america/
11. CDE :: Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted. Accessed December 19, 2021. https://crime-data-explorer.app.cloud.gov/pages/le/leoka
12. Table 44. Table 74. FBI. Accessed December 19, 2021. https://ucr.fbi.gov /crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-2019/tables/table-74/table-74.xls
13. Mourtgos SM, Adams IT, Nix J. Elevated police turnover following the summer of George Floyd protests: A synthetic control study. Criminol Public Policy. n/a(n/a). doi:10.1111/1745-9133.12556
14. Table 44. Table 44. FBI. Accessed December 19, 2021. https://ucr.fbi.gov/leoka/2013/tables/table_44_leos_fk_race_and_sex_of_known_offender_2004-2013.xls
15. FBI Releases 2019 Statistics on Law Enforcement Officers Killed in the Line of Duty. Federal Bureau of Investigation. Accessed December 19, 2021. https:// www.fbi.gov / news / pressrel / press-releases / fbi-releases-2019-statistics-on-law-enforcement-officers-killed-in-the-line-of-duty
16. Pagones S. Ambush attacks on police officers up 91% in 2021 compared to last year, group says. Fox News. Published July 1, 2021. Accessed December 19, 2021. https://www.foxnews.com/us/ambush-attacks-police-officers-law-enforcement
17. Law Enforcement Officers Shot in the Line of Duty: 2020 Year-End Summary. Published online 2020:9.
20. Rosenberg-Douglas MG Katherine. Girl, 6, shot early Monday in same Chicago neighborhood as 5-year-old girl about 8 hours earlier. chicagotribune.com. Accessed December 19, 2021. https://www.chicago tribune.com/news/breaking/ct-chicago-shootings-girl-shot-child-20210705-q7kz6us24bdjbi5kbybqma7jyy-story.html
~
Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and a New York Times bestselling author. She is a recipient of the 2005 Bradley Prize. Mac Donald’s work at City Journal has covered a range of topics, including higher education, immigration, policing, homelessness and homeless advocacy, criminal-justice reform, and race relations. Her writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, and The New Criterion. Mac Donald's newest book, The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture (2018), argues that toxic ideas first spread by higher education have undermined humanistic values, fuelled intolerance, and widened divisions in our larger culture.
Making Evolutionary Sense of Sex and Gender
Why sex?
Sex chromosomes are nothing but trouble
How did sex chromosomes evolve to be so odd?
Genes and sexual development
Sex and career choices
Evolution of sexual behaviour
Sex and gender
Sex, gender and sport; there is no level playing field
Why are we so obsessed with sex and gender?
References
By Jennifer A. Marshall Graves
The genetics of sex and gender is full of contradiction. That’s why I love it. Sex development and expression breaks all the evolutionary laws of survival of the fittest. Y chromosomes that self-destruct, men who love other men and forgo having kids, men and women who believe they were meant to be the other sex and will do anything to make sex change a reality.
Nor are humans alone in their confusion. The natural world is full of sexual contradiction. Sex chromosomes with mixed messages, sex change, fierce female moles and nurturing male emus, gay sheep.
Like it or not, men and women are very different genetically, anatomically and behaviourally. But within each sex there is tremendous variation, so that for most traits distributions overlap. There are short men and tall women, fierce females and nurturing males.
We take the male/female divide for granted, but when you think about it, sex doesn’t seem to make evolutionary sense. Sex is expensive, requiring animals to attract a mate and fight off competitors as well as making sperm and eggs, the ultimate waster of time and energy. And anyway, our genes would be better off if we cloned ourselves, as do many plants – and even some lizards. That way all our genes would make it into the next generation, rather than having to go halves on offspring as we do.
Generations of geneticists have puzzled over this, and there are many theories.1 Mostly these assume that there must be some very big advantage in combining varieties of our 20,000 genes.
Sex throws together two genomes, and there is a mechanism to mix them up each time a man or woman make sperm or eggs. A process called recombination takes place as the first step in sorting out a single copy of each chromosome for sperm or eggs. Recombination literally splices one part of mum’s chromosome 1 to the other part of dad’s chromosome 1, so that most chromosomes in the egg or sperm are patchworks of mum’s and dad’s gene variants.
Why could this be important? The classic explanation was that recombination continually creates new combinations of variants that could do well in new environments. A more recent refinement is that, specifically, new combinations of proteins on the surfaces of our cells bamboozle would-be pathogens that are always bombarding us.2 This idea receives support from studies of animals like cheetahs and Tasmanian Devils that are running out of genetic variability, and seem to be very sensitive to being wiped out by a pathogen that sweeps through a colony of near-clones. This probably explains why female-only species of lizards evolved rather recently; they don’t last long.
I’ll start from the start with sex genes and chromosomes, which break all the rules of proper function and evolution.
As most people know, women have two copies of a medium-sized chromosome called the X, and males have only a single copy (that’s why it’s called the “X for unknown;” its name has nothing to do with its shape). Men also have an extra small chromosome, called the Y, which women completely lack. So, men and women have different genomes.
The genome, a metre or so of DNA carrying about 20,000 genes, is chopped up into 23 handy sized DNA molecules that are bound with protein and bunch up when the cell divides so we see them as “chromosomes” (that is “staining bodies”) under the microscope. We – and other mammals – carry two copies of the genome, one from mum and one from dad. That’s why chromosomes come in pairs; two copies of the biggest chromosome 1, two copies of chromosome 2 etc, in both males and females. That’s called diploidy, and it is generally considered to be a good thing because if some accident befalls a gene, say on chromosome 1, there is a backup copy. In fact, if you have only a single copy of any of the 22 ordinary chromosomes, you don’t even make it to be born.
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Sex chromosomes are different in many ways. The X looks normal enough, with more than 1000 genes that encode all sorts of functions including housekeeping enzymes, visual pigments, blood clotting factors – not at all dedicated to femaleness. It is its differential dosage in males and females that causes problems.
The first problem is that males have only a single copy, so men have no backup if any X-borne gene is mutated (witness the much greater frequency of boys with colour blindness or diseases like haemophilia and mental retardation). The second problem is the dosage difference between the sexes, which is hard on genes that must interact with genes on other chromosomes in a 1:1 way. To avoid problems with this dosage difference, there is a complex system that genetically inactivates the genes on one or other X in cells of females. If this doesn’t work, you die.
As well as their single X, men have a male-specific chromosome called the Y. A pathetic little chromosome bearing hardly any genes, it seems to be composed mainly of junk DNA, simple sequences repeated over and over so it binds fluorescent molecules and literally glows in the dark. It contains hardly any genes; only 27 in the region that is present only in males. Several have amplified into many copies, though some (or most) of these copies have been disabled by mutation.
The Y may look a bit pathetic but one of its 27 genes determines that the embryo that bears it is male. This gene, called SRY (Sex Determining Region on the Y),3 directs other genes to turn a little “genital ridge” of cells in the embryo into a testis. The testis makes male hormones, and the embryo develops into a baby boy. In XX embryos with no SRY the genital ridge develops as an ovary and the baby is born a girl.
The Y has a peculiar set of genes. Its 27 genes are a very specialised set. Several are dedicated to male functions like making sperm, and others seem to be there because they are necessary in a double dose in males as well as females.
Nor does the X have a standard set of genes. There are a disproportionate number dedicated to male reproduction. The reason for this seems to be that because genes on the X are present in a single copy in men, they are exposed rapidly to selection – those that advantage males will do better. Harder to explain is that there are five times as many genes on the X as you’d expect that are involved in intelligence;4 perhaps they accumulated because females preferred to mate with smart males who had smart variant genes on the X. Darwin called this sexual selection, and it can lead to very rapid evolution – perhaps explaining how human brains doubled in size over just a few million years.
One curious factor is that some genes are good in one sex but not the other. Genes for making sperm are not much use in a female, and genes for making eggs are no use in a male. There are even some genes that are good for one sex but bad for the other - these are called “sexually antagonistic,” and are well known from studies in a range of animals including fruit flies.5
So, sex chromosomes don’t work very well. Like many peculiarities we observe in nature, they are better understood in terms of evolution, than of function.
Isn’t evolution supposed to get rid of things that don’t work well and favour ever better solutions? Well, no. Evolution, rather than working to some grand design, does not know where it is going and simply patches things up so they more-or-less work. Here I’ll explain how our sex chromosomes came to be so peculiar – and are getting more damaged all the time.
The X and Y chromosomes look very different, and bear very different sets of genes, so you will be surprised to discover that they evolved from a perfectly normal pair of chromosomes, like chromosome 1, that had nothing to do with sex.6 The first evidence for the autosomal origin of the human XY pair was that the very top bit of the X and Y is the same. When the chromosomes pair and sort themselves out into sperm, the X and Y pair up in this little region, and recombination (the breaking and rejoining of pieces of the X and Y) takes place. The rest of the Y does not pair with the X or anything else – it is all alone in the world.
Another curious thing is that most of the genes on the human Y, even those with male-specific functions in sperm (even SRY itself), have copies on the X from which they obviously evolved.7 So, the conclusion is that the Y chromosome started off with the same 1000+ genes as the X.
Indeed, we know from studying many animals, that our X and Y were once an ordinary chromosome pair; they still are in birds and turtles, which have quite different sex genes and sex chromosomes. In birds sex chromosomes are the other way around, ZZ specifies male and ZW female; a sex gene on the Z chromosome called DMRT1 operates via dosage difference; two copies specifies male and one copy female. Even platypus have different sex chromosomes, more like birds than like other mammals.
How did this happen? It all started with the evolution of SRY, the sex determining gene, which evolved from an ancient gene with functions largely in the central nervous system. A simple rearrangement that repositioned this gene so it worked in the embryonic gonad gave it new powers, to switch on other genes in the testis determining pathway. So, a respectable brain-determining gene became a testis determining gene.
The acquisition of a sex determining gene was the kiss of death for this proto-Y chromosome, and led to the loss of nearly all its active genes. There are many ideas about why genes get lost from the Y, and people write books on this. Put simply, the Y chromosome suffers from being always in a testis. The testis is a dangerous place to be because making sperm takes many cell divisions, each one an opportunity for a gene mutation to take place. The Y also suffers from being alone in the cell because recombination can’t take place to restore a good Y chromosome by patching together the good bits of two mutated Y chromosomes.
The process of gene loss is still going on, as we see from the many men who are infertile because part of their Y chromosome has been deleted. So how rapid is gene loss and what is the future of the Y? We can date the start of our sex chromosomes to about 160 million years ago because they are not shared outside mammals, or even by platypuses, from which we diverged 180 million years ago. So, we can calculate that if the remaining genes on the Y continue being inactivated and lost at the same rate, the whole Y will be gone in about 6 million years.8
What will happen when the human Y disappears in 6 million years? Well, providing humans survive that long (which seems increasingly unlikely), a new sex gene on another chromosome may take over. This has already happened in two groups of rodents, and in each, a new sex determining system has driven a wedge between species. So, if you come back in 6 million years, you may find no humans – or several hominid species. Scary thought!
Sex chromosomes are the posterchild of the evolutionary principle I call “Dumb Design.” No sensible creator would ever have designed sex chromosomes that cause so much genetic havoc and are well on the road to self-destruction.
The Y may be small and peculiar, but it packs a developmental wallop. We knew this 60 years ago when it was discovered that babies born with unusual combinations of sex chromosomes were male if they had a Y chromosome and female if they didn’t, no matter how many X chromosomes they had. And babies with parts of a Y were male only if they had the top bit of the Y, implying that a gene near in this region directed male development of the foetus.
Indeed, a gene was discovered on the Y in 1990 that directs male development of the embryo. SRY turns on other genes that instruct a ridge of cells on the embryonic kidney to become a testis. It’s a complicated pathway of at least 60 genes, full of checks and balances, that turns on or off genes. So, you have SRY activating a gene that in turn activates other genes in the testis pathway, and as well inhibits genes in the ovary pathway. Likewise, in the absence of SRY, a gene in the ovary pathway activates other genes in this pathway, and also supresses a gene in the testis pathway.9 It’s a real pushmi-pullyu.
The embryonic testis makes male hormones (androgens), and these hormones direct the development of male genitals of a baby boy, and continue to exert their effects after birth in morphology, muscle strength and fat distribution, hair growth, voice pitch and behaviour, and, after puberty, the production of sperm. In the absence of SRY, other genes turn on to differentiate the same ridge of cells to become an ovary, which makes female hormones that direct female development and egg production.
The genetic differences between men and women go far beyond just this one gene, or the pathway of sex determination, and may exert their effects independently of hormone production. There are another 26 genes on the male-specific part of the human Y, and some of these encode proteins that are needed for making sperm.
Surprisingly, looking at which of our 20,000 or so genes are turned on in different tissues shows astonishing differences between men and women. Fully one third of our genome (more than 7000 genes) is expressed differently in men and women in one tissue or another. And not just in breasts and gonads, but other supposedly neutral tissues like liver and kidney.10 These differences are likely to underpin many of the differences, long known but only recently acknowledged, in the susceptibility of men and women to many diseases, and the different efficacy of treatments.11
And most shockingly, many genes are expressed differently in the brains of men and women.12 Add to this the observation that the male-specific SRY gene is expressed in the brain and seems to have a role in the susceptibility of men to Parkinson’s disease.13
There have been fierce arguments over decades as to whether sex differences extend to the brain and behaviour. Do men have superior spatial ability or women superior verbal ability? Are men on average more aggressive and risk-taking? I am not qualified to take sides in these debates, but will just comment that it would be remarkable if brain development did not respond differently to the demonstrated differences in gene activity in men and women.
A great deal has been written and discussed about the role of sex differences in abilities, career choice and progression, and very many schemes have been enacted to increase women’s participation in STEM. In science, it is obvious that sex is a major factor in choice of study as early as primary school, and for decades there have been wails of dismay about the low enrolment of young women into science, particularly engineering, computer science and maths. There are programs on programs (many in which I have enthusiastically participated) to lure girls into science during school and university, and to keep them there during their careers. Drop-out rates are higher for women, and we talk about “the leaky pipeline” that delivers few women into senior positions.14
My own path through science might look very straight and confident, and when asked, I would aver that I did not suffer from discrimination – at least while I was a modest junior academic (things got nastier as I became more senior). However, subtle discouragement and discrimination was there at every turn, and the temptation to leave the pipeline was presented many times. It seemed so normal that it had no name.
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I remember the occasion, in sixth grade, when our class was asked what careers we would choose. Most of the little girls wanted to be air hostesses and the little boys’ firemen. I learned how to spell “architect,” which served me well over the next decade. But my (girls’) school did not teach maths in the final year (modern history was deemed more suitable for young ladies), and I was one of only two girls in my final year university physical chem class (guaranteeing exclusion from the study groups and cheating consortia). Biology was a better mix, and I was in awe of a very brilliant woman lecturer “Mrs Mayo,” the wife of “Dr Mayo,” another lecturer – only later did I discover that both had DPhils from Cambridge.
Postgraduate research was in quite a close-knit little group, but the pattern was still exclusion from corridor cricket and late-night excursions to buy “floaters” at the Adelaide Town Hall.
After a PhD at the University of California, appointment as the only woman in a blokey department in Melbourne rapidly taught me not to accept the classic female roles (one of my lucky breaks was to reject an early invitation to organize the departmental Christmas party), and to observe closely how my male colleagues came to amass their space and equipment and technical help. The real turning point came when I became pregnant; a point at which well-bred young women were expected to politely resign their tenured jobs for a lifetime of casual demonstratorships – the biggest source of leaks to the pipeline. Fortunately, I could not succumb because I was at the time sole breadwinner while my husband studied.
Negotiating first a teaching and research career, building up a lab of enthusiastic young people gave me some immunity from the quiet sexism of Academia, but winning the L’Oreal-UNESCO For Women in Science prize in 2006 made me realise that being good at my job is not enough.
This is when I started taking seriously efforts to remove sexism from academia. I have spent a major part of my 50 year career on various women in science committees, institutional, Australian, and international. For 40 of these years, we produced report after report, saying much the same thing. We must remove barriers to employment of women. We must make STEM education more female friendly. We need good role models, good mentors for young women in science. But only in the last decade has there been an appetite to do something to enact plans to attract more women into science and keep them there. It is quite thrilling to me to see the fruits of our efforts in programs like Science in Australia Gender Equity (SAGE)15 modelled on the Athena Swan program that strongarms and rewards institutions to make practical changes, not just in words and covenants, but on the ground.
But what is the end-point of these schemes? Can we measure progress toward this endpoint? The simple answer has been that we should not rest until enrolments in computer science are 50% women, and until our professors of physics are 50% women. Oh, and our nurses, too, and primary school teachers of course. On this measure, we are a long way behind, with women constituting only about 15% of engineering enrolees, and 10% physics professors.
But is 50% realistic? And is it desirable? We simply don’t know whether girls’ preference for arts and sociology is purely social, or is at least partly genetically determined. It is obviously at least partly social (for instance women make choices more compatible with running a household and bringing up kids) and I would like to see redress on workload balance between partners. But I would hate to insist on a 50:50 distribution of men and women in engineering and physics just to make up the numbers.
Sex is essential for reproduction, so it is a big part of “Darwinian fitness” that drives the success of our species, any species. (Fitness is not measured as strength or health, but simply as the number of descendants who inherited our genes). This means that any trait that increases the chances of leaving children will be selected. And any trait that increases the chances that the children will leave children. Conversely, any variant that means that the bearer has fewer or less healthy and fertile children will be ruthlessly expunged by natural selection.
These traits can be anything; favourable variants that make eggs longer-lived, sperm more active. Or that enhances success in attracting a willing partner who will help bear your genes into the next generation. “Mate choice” covers all the factors that go into selecting a mate, including being attracted by outward signs of fertility (at the core of men’s fascination with breasts and hips), and being turned off by a smell that denotes a too-close genetic relationship. There is evidence that this information is delivered via the many variants at the Major Histocompatibility Complex (MHC) (called Human Lymphocyte Antigen, HLA in humans), a large region of the vertebrate genome that contains a set of very variable genes that code for cell surface proteins involved in adaptive immunity.16 Then come all the factors that go into attracting a mate, including elaborate mating displays if you’re a fly or a bird, or appearance and behaviour in mammals including humans.
Geneticists are always interested in conditions that are common even though they would not seem to fulfill the criteria of evolutionary fitness, and sexual behaviour offers several that have defied logic.
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One of these is male homosexuality, which, by any reckoning, is common in all ages and all cultures, even those that impose drastic social sanctions. In 1998 the first convincing study was published showing that a gene variant (“gay gene”) on the X chromosome was associated with homosexuality.17 This caused a furore in the conservative South of the USA, where homosexuality was seen as a “lifestyle choice,” and a genetic factor was incompatible with the dictum that “God cannot create a sinner.” However, corroborative evidence of several “gay genes,” detected by different strategies, makes it clear that homosexuality is at least partly driven by genetic variants.
This is not at all surprising. Almost every trait you can think of, including other behaviours (like toilet flushing and belief in a god18), is at least partly genetic. Much evidence comes from twin studies; identical twins show more concordance in the behaviour than fraternal twins (and it may be even more because recent research shows that identical twins may not be as genetically identical as we supposed because of mutations occurring in one or the other after the developing egg is split into two).
Homosexuality is also common in other species, including many mammals. In fruit flies, a single mutation in a gene changes mating behaviour in males so that they direct their flap-flap, tap-tap mating displays to other males.19 And indeed, variants in many genes affect fly mating. We are no different, not even that much more complicated.
What is surprising is how common homosexuality is, given that gay men have far fewer offspring than straight men. You would think that gay genes would not make it in a competition for Darwinian fitness.
Many years ago, during an interview with Phillip Adams alongside a gay men’s rights activist, I suddenly twigged. Maybe homosexuality is a typical sexually antagonistic gene variant. The gay gene, I surmised, was really a “male-loving” variant of a mate-choice gene present in everyone. In a male it will lean toward homosexual partnering, and few offspring. But the same “male-loving” gene variant in his female relatives will push his sisters and aunts to partner earlier and compensate by having more children. So, this gene variant is overall successful, and is kept in high frequency in the population by positive selection in women.20
If this were true, you would expect to find the number of children mothered by the female relatives of gay men to be higher than average. And a few years later, studies in Italy confirmed that it is, indeed, 30% higher, enough to offset the fewer children born to gay men.21 I would predict that the same argument can be made for lesbian women, although there are few data. They simply have a preponderance of “female-loving” variants of a gene or genes. You might expect their male relatives to share these “female loving”
variants, to partner earlier and have more kids.
I would be surprised if there were not tens or hundreds of genes, variants within which affect mate choice in both men and women. I see them as typical “sexually antagonistic” genes that in one sex curtail reproduction, but in the other sex boost it. So, evolution works in sometimes counter-intuitive ways to produce a spread of normal variation that we see in sexual behaviour, just as in visible traits like height.
Sex and gender are quite different concepts, and it is important to differentiate them. Sex is the different biological and physiological characteristics of males and females, such as genes, chromosomes, hormones, reproductive organs. Natal sex refers to the biological sex you were born with. Gender is how you identify yourself within (or even outside) the broad swathe of maleness or femaleness.
Sex, as I have discussed, is controlled by genes whose effects have been channelled by evolution into two alternative developmental pathways that yield male or female development. This is why sex is referred to as “binary,” although there are a few individuals in whom development lies between or outside these two channels. Biological sex is pretty hard to change in mammals including humans; you can change the outward manifestations and even the hormones, but genes and chromosomes are unreachable.
~
But nature throws up variants in several ways. For a start, there are significant numbers of children born with a mutation in one or other of the 60-odd genes that translate the presence or absence of SRY into development into a man or a woman. Some of these variants – for instance a mutation in SRY itself, or a mutation in the molecule that responds to male hormone – produce physically normal girls, who discover that they have a Y chromosome only when they fail to menstruate at puberty and prove to have no functioning ovary and only half a vagina. And there are boys with two X chromosome who possess an SRY gene that has been transferred to the X chromosome.
Other mutations are harder to deal with as they produce babies with some intermediate characteristics that can change during development, so sex is uncertain and advice on sex of rearing is fraught. Children with a block early in the gonad differentiation pathways have “streak” gonads that have not developed in either direction, and they develop outwardly as female. At the other end of severity, some variants are downright life-threatening unless treated.
Although it is not possible to repair the genes or chromosomes of these children, some parents, fearful of bullying and exclusion, opt for genital surgery. Not surprisingly, many of these children with Disorders (or “Differences”) of Sexual Development (DSD) grow up feeling discontented with their parents’ choices, and tell heart-rending stories of deception and a lack of acceptance. Patient groups advocate leaving decisions till puberty, but this leaves a DSD child vulnerable and means surgery is less satisfactory. In some countries in which treatment is not available, DSD children (and often their families) face discrimination, neglect and even death. There is no right answer; the practice today is to minimise any treatment until the child is old enough to make decisions on this aspect of their lives, and avoid removing any genital tissue.22
Unlike sex, gender is anything but binary.23 Rather than being channelled into two alternative pathways, gender is a broad spectrum, in which a person may consider themselves at any point, regardless of natal sex. A person may define themselves as cisgender (same as natal sex), transgender (different from natal sex), non-binary or even gender-neutral.
Whereas it’s hard to change biological sex, there are many ways of crossing gender lines, and this has always held great fascination across many cultures. History, literature, opera is replete with stories of women posing as men, and men posing as women to fight or avoid wars, woo or escape lovers. My personal favourite is watching a woman sing the role of a man posing as a woman in Der Rosenkavalier.
On the more serious side, there are people, young and old, whose sex chromosomes and genes, and sexual development is biologically standard, but who are convinced, often from an early age, that they were born the wrong sex. In severe cases of “gender dysphoria,” patients have an intense wish to transition to the sex of choice, and may opt to undergo surgery. The rates of male-to-female transition is 1/200, and female-to-male is 1/400, quite high compared to biological variants.
~
Again, treatment is fraught. Children who profess to be transgender are at least accorded respect and listening, but the concern is now that being gender fluid has become quite trendy for high school students. Caution has been urged in rushing major surgery and treatment with puberty blockers because at least half change their minds at puberty.
Again, there is some evidence that gene variants play a part in gender dysphoria. Several studies implicate “the usual suspects,” including genes involved in hormone pathways. This sort of variation is not unusual for any trait, morphological or behavioural. The puzzle, again, is why gender dysphoria is so common when transwomen and transmen are infertile unless they preserve their eggs or sperm, so do not commonly hand down their gene variants.24,25
I wonder whether these genes, too, may be classic “sexually antagonistic” variants. I suggest that there are variants of these genes that predispose to femininity or masculinity, and everyone inherits a mixture that affects their gender identity. At one extreme are women and men who inherit a lot of feminine-leaning traits; the men may become transgender and have no children while their female relatives who share the same variants partner earlier and have more children. Conversely, among people who inherit masculine leaning traits, manly men may have more children, compensating for female-to-male transmen who have few.
As transgender becomes more accepted and transmen and transwomen more frequent, there are issues to sort out. Some are relatively easy, like labels for toilets, some just take understanding and getting used to like use of appropriate personal pronouns. Others are insoluble.
One of the insoluble issues is the status of DSD people and transwomen in elite sport. Like it or not, men have, on average, significantly greater muscle strength, heart function and lung capacity than women, and sex tests have been a part of the Olympics for a century to prevent men gate-crashing women’s athletic events. Originally a sex test was the presence of a sex chromatin body (the inactive X chromosome) in the cheek epithelial cells. This was rightly decried as discriminating against women with only a single X, so gave way to (expensive and slow) chromosome tests, then to direct screening for the presence of the SRY gene. But this was pointed out to discriminate against girls having a Y chromosome but a mutant SRY or androgen receptor. Indeed, XY girls with an AR mutation are overrepresented in elite sport; not because they have an androgen advantage (although their bodies make testosterone, it cannot be utilized by the cell), but because they are taller courtesy of a growth gene on the Y chromosome.
Some of the high-profile cases have concerned women who are not intersex or transgender at all, but simply have traits that put them way ahead. The most celebrated is that of an Indian runner with extremely high levels of testosterone; although by any test she is female, her testosterone levels are naturally higher even than the average for men. Undoubtedly this gives her an advantage of muscle strength and sustainability. But to me it seems that banning her from competition makes no more sense than banning an ultra-tall basketballer (or a horse like Phar Lap with an enormous heart for that matter).
Adding to this confusion are now significant numbers of transwomen who were born and grew up as XY males but have had sex change surgery, androgen suppression and estrogen therapy.
Understandably, it is very important for transwomen to feel accepted as women in the community, and sport has always been an effective means of achieving identity and acceptance. Many transwomen speak movingly of the importance of their hockey or water polo team to their sense of self.
Yet a growing number of sporting organizations are now under pressure to ban transwomen from competing in women’s sport, citing (incontrovertible) evidence that the presence of androgen early in their lives as boys gave them a permanent advantage in strength, heart and lung performance, even if they take androgen-suppressing drugs. Bodies such as the Olympic committee are tying themselves into knots trying to be fair.26
So how can we create a level playing field? It seems to me that the playing field can never be level. Elite athletes, although they invest enormously in training and coaching, are bound to be on the extremes of many distributions, and we can’t ban them all. Perhaps we need to compete in categories like children’s sport (e.g., Under 14 C grade basketball) or the Paralympics (e.g., Triathlon PT1). I look forward to representing Australia in the Over-80 medium height low androgen Olympic netball team.
Sex is, of course, the most dramatic normal variation between humans. It’s the first thing you notice about a new acquaintance.
Many of these problems I have discussed are problems only because we are so intolerant of difference. What’s the big deal? We are not freaked out by differences in height or facial characteristics or intellectual ability, yet parents are horrified if their newborn is diagnosed with a DSD. Paediatricians and genetic counsellors have told me that parents of DSD kids are often traumatised beyond reason. “I’d rather my baby had a serious heart problem,” one new mother was heard to remark. Often the rush to surgery is fuelled by fears that DSD children will be routinely bullied for their anatomical differences – fears that, sadly, are not misplaced. Children can be very cruel.
Perhaps the fears of parents of DSD children are intensified by primal distress that their own genes will not be passed on to future generations; parents are looking at the end of their lineage.
Why are we so intolerant of differences in sexual development? Why are we resistant to the ideas of variation in sexually different traits? They are not terribly rare in humans, and also occur throughout the animal kingdom. Examples abound in nature of females that act like males; for instance, female hyenas and moles aggressively claim the top spot in the hierarchy as the result of high androgen levels that drive male-like genitals as well as aggression. Or emus in which it is the male that incubates the eggs and takes care of the chicks.
And why are we so appalled – and so titillated – by the concept of changing sex? Plenty of other animals do it routinely. There are whole species of fish that start out one sex then transition to the other when they get big enough. Some start off female, then transition of males when they get big enough to defend a harem. Others start of as males and transition to females when they are big enough to lay a lot of eggs. My favourite is the blue wrasse, a fish species in which a dominant (blue-headed) male guards a harem of demure gold-striped females. If this male is removed, the biggest female becomes male. She changes her behaviour in minutes, colour in hours, and by 10 days has swapped her ovaries for testes that are making sperm.27 What a ride!
If we look around, we see that humans occupy a tiny spot in the grand panoply of sexual differences in morphology and behaviour. We can do a lot by removing rampant discrimination against minorities that occupy outlier positions on distributions of sexual traits. This has happened remarkably rapidly for gay men and women in most western countries, although there are still nations that sanction homosexuality.
But other problems arise with suspicions that people could use transgender as a means of infiltrating – and even attacking – women, for instance in restrooms or prisons. Or claiming a physical advantage on the track. Everything can be abused, and we have to guard against siding with the perpetrators, as well as the victims, of sexual discrimination.
~
Maybe we are programmed by the evolutionary necessity to find a good mate to provide a superior genome for our kids and hopefully some parental care. And maybe we are programmed by the evolutionary necessity to evaluate the competition, comparing ourselves and anxiously assessing the chance that our genes will make it into the next generation – increasing our Darwinian fitness. It may not be sensible to ignore these biological imperatives, but like other traits evolution endowed us with (like our lethal love of sugar, which evolved so we would choose ripe and nutritious fruit), we can learn to control our urges and rationalise our choices to such an extent that we can celebrate the enormous variation in all aspects of human sex and gender.
1. Hartfield M, Keightley PD. Current hypotheses for the evolution of sex and recombination. Integr Zool. 2012;7(2):192-209. doi:10.1111/j.1749-4877. 2012.00284.x
2. Hamilton WD, Zuk M. Heritable true fitness and bright birds: a role for parasites? Science. 1982;218(4570):384-387. doi:10.1126/science.7123238
3. SRY gene: MedlinePlus Genetics. Accessed January 17, 2022. https:// medlineplus.gov/genetics/gene/sry/
4. Morton NE. Genes for intelligence on the X chromosome. J Med Genet. 1992;29(1):71. doi:10.1136/jmg.29.1.71
5. Cox RM, Calsbeek R. Sexually antagonistic selection, sexual dimorphism, and the resolution of intralocus sexual conflict. Am Nat. 2009;173(2):176-187. doi:10.1086/595841
6. Charlesworth B. The evolution of sex chromosomes. Science. 1991;251 (4997):1030-1033. doi:10.1126/science.1998119
7. Graves JAM. Sex chromosome specialization and degeneration in mammals. Cell. 2006;124(5):901-914. doi:10.1016/j.cell.2006.02.024
8. Aitken RJ, Marshall Graves JA. The future of sex. Nature. 2002;415(6875): 963. doi:10.1038/415963a
9. Graves J. What makes you a man or a woman? Geneticist Jenny Graves explains. The Conversation. Accessed January 17, 2022. http://the conversation.com / what-makes-you-a - man - or-a-woman-geneticist-jenny-graves-explains-102983
10. Graves J. Not just about sex: throughout our bodies, thousands of genes act differently in men and women. The Conversation. Accessed January 17, 2022. http://theconversation.com/not-just-about-sex-throughout-our-bodies-thousands-of-genes-act-differently-in-men-and-women-86613
11. Institute of Medicine (US) Committee on Understanding the Biology of Sex and Gender Differences. Exploring the Biological Contributions to Human Health: Does Sex Matter? (Wizemann TM, Pardue ML, eds.). National Academies Press (US); 2001. Accessed January 17, 2022. http://www.ncbi .nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK222288/
12. Vawter MP, Evans S, Choudary P, et al. Gender-Specific Gene Expression in Post-Mortem Human Brain: Localization to Sex Chromosomes. Neuropsychopharmacol Off Publ Am Coll Neuropsychopharmacol. 2004;29 (2):373-384. doi:10.1038/sj.npp.1300337
13. Pinares-Garcia P, Stratikopoulos M, Zagato A, Loke H, Lee J. Sex: A Significant Risk Factor for Neurodevelopmental and Neurodegenerative Disorders. Brain Sci. 2018;8(8):E154. doi:10.3390/brainsci8080154
14. The STEM Gap: Women and Girls in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. AAUW : Empowering Women Since 1881. Accessed January 17, 2022. https://www.aauw.org/resources/research/the-stem-gap/
15. Science in Australia Gender Equity | SAGE. Science in Australia Gender Equity (SAGE). Published May 22, 2018. Accessed January 17, 2022. https://www.sciencegenderequity.org.au/
16. Chaix R, Cao C, Donnelly P. Is mate choice in humans MHC-dependent? PLoS Genet. 2008;4(9):e1000184. doi:10.1371/journal.pgen.1000184
17. Hamer DH, Hu S, Magnuson VL, Hu N, Pattatucci AM. A linkage between DNA markers on the X chromosome and male sexual orientation. Science. 1993;261(5119):321-327. doi:10.1126/science.8332896
18. The God Gene: How Faith Is Hardwired into Our Genes: Hamer, Dean H.: 9780385720311: Amazon.com: Books. Accessed January 17, 2022. https:// www.amazon.com / God-Gene-Faith-Hardwired-Genes/dp/03857203 19
19. Khamsi R. Fruitflies tap in to their gay side. Nature. Published online June 2, 2005. doi:10.1038/news050531-9
20. Graves J. Born this way? An evolutionary view of “gay genes.” The Conversation. Accessed January 17, 2022. http://theconversation.com/born-this-way-an-evolutionary-view-of-gay-genes-26051
21. Camperio-Ciani A, Corna F, Capiluppi C. Evidence for maternally inherited factors favouring male homosexuality and promoting female fecundity. Proc Biol Sci. 2004;271(1554):2217-2221. doi:10.1098/rspb.2004.2872
22. Graves J. Boy, girl or …? Dilemmas when sex development goes awry. The Conversation. Accessed January 17, 2022. http://theconversation.com/boy-girl-or-dilemmas-when-sex-development-goes-awry-49359
23. Richards C, Bouman WP, Seal L, Barker MJ, Nieder TO, T’Sjoen G. Non-binary or genderqueer genders. Int Rev Psychiatry Abingdon Engl. 2016;28(1):95-102. doi:10.3109/09540261.2015.1106446
24. Graves J. How genes and evolution shape gender – and transgender – identity. The Conversation. Accessed January 17, 2022. http://theconversation.com /how-genes-and-evolution-shape-gender-and-transgender-identity-108911
25. Foreman M, Hare L, York K, et al. Genetic Link Between Gender Dysphoria and Sex Hormone Signaling. J Clin Endocrinol Metab. 2019;104(2):390-396. doi:10.1210/jc.2018-01105
26. Pape M, Storr R, Bekker S. A win for transgender athletes and athletes with sex variations: the Olympics shifts away from testosterone tests and toward human rights. The Conversation. Accessed January 17, 2022. http://the conversation.com / a-win-for-transgender-athletes-and-athletes-with-sex-variations - the - olympics-shifts - away-from-testosterone-tests-and-toward-human-rights-172045
27. What we learn from a fish that can change sex in just 10 days. Accessed January 17, 2022. https://theconversation.com/what-we-learn-from-a-fish-that-can-change-sex-in-just-10-days-129063
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Jenny Graves is an evolutionary geneticist who exploits our distant relationship to Australian animals to discover how animal genes and chromosomes evolved, and how they work. She uses this unique perspective to explore the origin, function and fate of human sex genes and chromosomes, (in)famously predicting the disappearance of the Y chromosome.
Jenny studied at Adelaide University (BSc, MSc) and the University of California Berkeley (PhD). She lectured at La Trobe University, then at ANU she founded and directed the Comparative Genomics Group and an ARC Centre of Excellence. She returned to La Trobe as Distinguished Professor and Vice Chancellor’s Fellow.
Jenny has produced three books and more than 400 research articles. She received the international L’Oreal-UNESCO prize (2006), appointment as Companion of the Order of Australia (AC 2010) and the Prime Minister’s Prize for Science (2017). She was elected to the Australian Academy of Science (1999), and the US National Academy of Science (2019).
Stories and Data: Reflections on Race, Riots, and Police
References
By Coleman Hughes
Originally Published in City Journal
The brutal death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers has sparked protests and riots around the United States. We have witnessed humanity at its finest and at its ugliest. Citizens of faraway nations have expressed solidarity with black Americans; police officers have marched alongside protesters; protesters have defended businesses against looting and destruction. At the same time, rioters have burned down buildings and looted businesses; protesters have been pepper-sprayed and beaten; cops have been shot and run over with cars.
At the root of the unrest is the Black Lives Matter movement, which began with the acquittal of George Zimmerman in 2013 and rose to national prominence in the wake of Michael Brown’s death in 2014. My view of BLM is mixed. On the one hand, I agree that police departments too often have tolerated and even enabled corruption. Rather than relying on impartial third parties, departments often decide whether to discipline their own officers; the legal doctrine of qualified immunity1 sets what many say is an unreasonably high bar for civilians bringing civil-rights lawsuits against police officers. Bodycams (which increase transparency, to the benefit of both wrongly treated police suspects and wrongly accused police) are not yet universal. In the face of police unions that oppose even reasonable reforms, Black Lives Matter seems a force for positive change.
On the other hand, the basic premise of Black Lives Matter—that racist cops are killing unarmed black people—is false. There was a time when I believed it. I was one year younger than Trayvon Martin when he was killed in 2012, and like many black men, I felt like he could have been me. I was the same age as Michael Brown when he was killed in 2014, and like so many others, I shared the BLM hashtag on social media to express solidarity. By 2015, when the now-familiar list had grown to include Tamir Rice, Laquan McDonald, Sandra Bland, Freddie Gray, and Walter Scott, I began wearing a shirt with all their names on it. It became my favorite shirt. It seemed plain to me that these were not just tragedies, but racist tragedies. Any suggestion to the contrary struck me as at best, ignorant, and at worst, bigoted.
My opinion has slowly changed. I still believe that racism exists and must be condemned in the strongest possible terms; I still believe that, on average, police officers are quicker to rough up a black or Hispanic suspect2 and I still believe that police misconduct happens far too often and routinely goes unpunished. But I no longer believe that the cops disproportionately kill unarmed black Americans.
Two things changed my mind: stories and data.
First, the stories. Each story in this paragraph involves a police officer killing an unarmed white person. (To demonstrate how commonly this happens, I have taken all of them from a single year, 2015, chosen at random). Timothy Smith was killed3 by a police officer who mistakenly thought he was reaching into his waistband to grab a gun; the shooting was ruled justified. William Lemmon4 was killed after he allegedly failed to show his hands upon request; the shooting was ruled justified.5 Ryan Bolinger6 was shot dead by a cop who said he was moving strangely and walking toward her; the shooting was ruled justified.7 Derek Cruice was shot in the face8 after he opened the door for police officers serving a warrant for a drug arrest; the cops recovered marijuana8 from the property, and the shooting was ruled justified. Daniel Elrod robbed a dollar store, and, when confronted by police, allegedly failed to raise his hands upon request (though his widow, who witnessed the event, insists otherwise); he was shot dead. No criminal charges were filed. Ralph Willis was shot dead9 when officers mistakenly thought that he was reaching for a gun. David Cassick was shot in twice in the back by a police officer while lying face down on the ground. Six-year-old Jeremy Mardis was killed10 by a police officer while sitting in the passenger seat of a car; the officer’s intended target was Jeremy’s father, who was sitting in the driver’s seat with his hands raised11 out the window. Autumn Steele12 was shot dead when a police officer, startled by her German shepherd, immediately fired his weapon at the animal, catching her in the crossfire. Shortly after he killed her, bodycam footage revealed13 the officer’s despair: “I’m f------ going to prison,” he says. The officer was not disciplined.
For brevity’s sake, I will stop here. But the list goes on.
For every black person killed by the police, there is at least one white person (usually many) killed in a similar way. The day before cops in Louisville barged into Breonna Taylor’s home and killed her, cops barged into the home of a white man named Duncan Lemp,14 killed him, and wounded his girlfriend (who was sleeping beside him). Even George Floyd, whose death was particularly brutal, has a white counterpart: Tony Timpa.15 Timpa was killed in 2016 by a Dallas police officer who used his knee to pin Timpa to the ground (face down) for 13 minutes. In the video, you can hear Timpa whimpering and begging to be let go. After he lets out his final breaths, the officers begin cracking jokes16 about him. Criminal charges initially brought against them were later dropped.16
At a gut level, it is hard for most people to feel the same level of outrage when the cops kill a white person. Perhaps that is as it should be. After all, for most of American history, it was white suffering that provoked more outrage. But I would submit that if this new “anti-racist” bias is justified—if we now have a moral obligation to care more about certain lives than others based on skin color, or based on racial-historical bloodguilt—then everything that I thought I knew about basic morality, and everything that the world’s philosophical and religious traditions have been saying about common humanity, revenge, and forgiveness since antiquity, should be thrown out the window.
You might agree that the police kill plenty of unarmed white people, but object that they are more likely to kill unarmed black people, relative to their share of the population. That’s where the data comes in. The objection is true as far as it goes; but it’s also misleading. To demonstrate the existence of a racial bias, it’s not enough to cite the fact that black people comprise 14 percent of the population but about 35 percent17 of unarmed Americans shot dead by police. (By that logic, you could prove that police shootings were extremely sexist by pointing out that men comprise 50 percent of the population but 93 percent17 of unarmed Americans shot by cops.)
Instead, you must do what all good social scientists do: control for confounding variables to isolate the effect that one variable has upon another (in this case, the effect of a suspect’s race on a cop’s decision to pull the trigger). At least four careful studies have done this— one2 by Harvard economist Roland Fryer, one18 by a group of public-health researchers, one19 by economist Sendhil Mullainathan, and one20 by David Johnson, et al. None of these studies has found a racial bias in deadly shootings. Of course, that hardly settles the issue for all time; as always, more research is needed. But given the studies already done, it seems unlikely that future work will uncover anything close to the amount of racial bias that BLM protesters in America and around the world believe exists.
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All of which makes my view of Black Lives Matter complicated. If not for BLM, we probably would not be talking about ending qualified immunity, making bodycams universal, increasing police accountability, and so forth—at least not to the same extent. In fact, we might not even have a careful national database on police shootings. At the same time, the core premise of the movement is false. And if not for the dissemination of this falsehood, social relations between blacks and whites would be less tense, trust in police would be higher, and businesses all across America might have been spared the looting and destruction that we have seen in recent weeks.
But isn’t this the price of progress? Isn’t there a long tradition of using violence to throw off the shackles of white supremacy, going back to the Haitian revolution and the American Civil War? Didn’t the urban riots of the late 1960s wake Americans up to the fact that racism did not end with the Civil Rights Act of 1965?
To start, any analogy to slave rebellions or justified revolutions can be dismissed immediately. Taking up arms directly against those enslaving you is one thing. Looting21 clothing stores or destroying22 grocery stores is something else entirely. We must be careful not to confuse the protesters with the rioters. The former are committed to nonviolence. The latter are simply criminals and should be treated as such.
As for the riots of the late 1960s, progressives should not praise them for shocking Americans into action without also noting that they helped elect23 Richard Nixon president, which progressives certainly did not intend; that they directly decreased the wealth24 of inner-city black homeowners; and that they scared capital away from inner cities for decades, worsening the very conditions of poverty and unemployment that the rioters were supposedly protesting.
What’s more, the case for violence rests on the false notion that without it, little progress can be made. Recent history tells a different story. In 2018, the NYPD killed five people,25 down from 93 people in 1971. Since 2001,26 the national incarceration rate27 for black men ages 18-29 has gone down by more than half. Put simply, we know progress through normal democratic means is possible because we have already done it.
In a perfect world, I would like to see the yearly number of unarmed Americans killed by police decrease from 55 (the number in 2019) 5517 to zero. But the more I think about how we would achieve this, the less optimistic I am. At a glance, copying the policies of nations with very few police shootings seems like a promising path. But on closer inspection, one realizes how uniquely challenging the American situation is.
First, America is a huge country—the third largest in the world by population. That means that extremely low-probability events (such as police shootings) will happen much more frequently here than they do elsewhere. For instance, if America were the size of Canada, but otherwise identical, about six unarmed people would have been killed by police last year, not 55.
Second, America is a gun country, which makes policing in America fundamentally different than policing in other nations. When cops pull someone over in the United Kingdom, where the rate of gun ownership28 is less than one-twentieth the American rate, they have almost no reason to fear that the person they’ve stopped has a pistol hidden in the glove compartment. That’s not true in America, where a cop gets shot just about every day.29 So long as we are a gun country, American police will always be liable to mistake a suspect’s wallet or smartphone for a gun. And we will not be able to legislate that fact away—at least not completely.
A third factor (not unique to America) is that we live in the smartphone age. Which means that there are millions of cameras at the ready to ensure that the next police shooting goes viral. Overall, this is a good thing. It means that cops can no longer reliably get away with lying about their misbehavior to escape punishment. (And that the claims of those accusing police in such situations will face objective video scrutiny.) But it also means that our news feeds are perpetually filled with outlier events presented to us as if they were the norm. In other words, we could cut the rate of deadly shootings by 99 percent, but if the remaining 1 percent are filmed, then the public perception will be that shootings have remained steady. And it is the public perception, more than the underlying reality, that provokes riots.
Combine all three of these observations and one arrives at a grim conclusion: as long as we have a non-zero rate of deadly shootings (a virtual certainty), and as long as some shootings are filmed and go viral (also a virtual certainty), then we may live in perpetual fear of urban unrest for the foreseeable future.
The only way out of this conundrum, it seems to me, is for millions of Americans on the Left to realize that deadly police shootings happen to blacks and whites alike. As long as a critical mass of people view this as a race issue, they will see every new video of a black person being killed as yet another injustice in a long chain dating back to the Middle Passage. That sentiment, when it is felt deeply and earnestly, will reliably produce large protests and destructive riots.
The political Right has a role to play as well. For too long, “All Lives Matter” has been a slogan used only as a clapback to Black Lives Matter. What it should have been, and still could be, is a true movement to reduce the number of Americans shot by the police on a race-neutral basis. If the challenge for the Left is to accept that the real problem with the police is not racism, the challenge for the Right is to accept that there are real problems with the police.
If the level of discourse among our public officials stays where it currently is—partisan and shallow—then there is not much hope. In a worst-case scenario, we may see a repeat of the George Floyd riots every few years. But if we can elevate the national discourse, if we can actually have that honest and uncomfortable conversation about race that people have been claiming to want for years, then we might have a chance.
1. Special Report: For cops who kill, special Supreme Court protection. Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-police-immunity-scotus-specialrep-idUSKBN22K18C. Published May 8, 2020. Accessed January 1, 2022.
2. Fryer RG. An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force. J Polit Econ. 2019;127(3):1210-1261. doi:10.1086/701423
3. Twitter, Email, Facebook. Judge rejects request to seal body camera videos, dismiss suit by family of man shot by San Diego police. San Diego Union-Tribune. Published September 3, 2018. Accessed January 1, 2022. https:// www.sandiegouniontribune.com / news/public-safety/sd-me-sdpdshooting-2 0180831-story.html
4. Ferrise A, cleveland.com. Akron police officer fatally shoots man. cleveland. Published September 25, 2015. Accessed February 6, 2022. https://www. cleveland.com/akron/2015/09/man_killed_in_officer-involved.html
5. Akron police shooting ruled justififed. wkyc.com. Accessed January 1, 2022. https://www.wkyc.com/video/news/local/akron/akron-police-shooting-ruled -justififed/95-2261430
6. Des M. Officer inside patrol car fatally shoots unarmed man. Accessed February 6, 2022. https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/crime-and -courts / 2015 / 06 / 10/fatal-officer-shooting-ryan-bolinger-dancing-man-vanessa-miller/71010592/
7. Kauffman ME and C. Des Moines will pay $225,000 to family of unarmed man killed by police officer. Des Moines Register. Accessed January 1, 2022. https://www.desmoinesregister.com / story/news/crime-and-courts/2017/11/ 17/des-moines-pay-225-000-family-unarmed-man-killed-police-officer/873877001/
8. Another day, another drug raid fatality - The Washington Post. Accessed January 1, 2022. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2015 /03/06/another-day-another-drug-raid-fatality/
9. New details released in Stillwater homicide, officer shooting. Oklahoman.com. Published January 30, 2015. Accessed January 1, 2022. https:// oklahoman.com / article/5389230 /new-details-released-in-stillwater-homicide-officer-shooting/
10. Autistic 6-year-old shot, killed during police pursuit in Louisiana, report says. Accessed January 1, 2022. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/autistic-6-year-old-shot-killed-during-police-pursuit-in-louisiana-report-says/
11. Civil lawsuit in Jeremy Mardis shooting death settled. Accessed January 1, 2022. https://www.thetowntalk.com/story/news/2018/03/30/civil-lawsuit-jeremy-mardis-shooting-death-settled/465467002/
12. Dog in police shooting ruled not vicious. Accessed January 1, 2022. https://www. desmoinesregister.com / story / news / 2015 / 02/26/dog-police-shooting-vicious-burlington/24078037/
13. Report sanitized to justify Iowa cop’s shooting of mother, family says. Accessed February 6, 2022. https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news /investigations/2018/10/18/autumn-steele-burlington-iowa-police-shooting-records-show-cover-up/1286178002/
14. News ABC. Lawyer: Man killed by officer was asleep when police fired. ABC News. Accessed January 1, 2022. https://abcnews.go.com/US/wire Story/lawyer-man-asleep-police-fired-house-killing-69587748
15. The Dallas Morning News. Dallas Police Body Cameras Show Moment Tony Timpa Stopped Breathing.; 2019. Accessed January 1, 2022. https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=_c-E_i8Q5G0
16. Tony Timpa death: Dallas police body cam footage shows officers mocking a man who later died - CNN. Accessed January 1, 2022. https://edition. cnn.com / 2019 / 08 / 02/us/dallas-police-body-cam-footage-captures-death/ index.html
17. Fatal Force 2019 - Washington Post. Accessed January 1, 2022. https:// www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/national/police-shootings-2019/
18. Miller TR, Lawrence BA, Carlson NN, et al. Perils of police action: a cautionary tale from US data sets. Inj Prev. 2017;23(1):27-32. doi:10.1136/ injuryprev-2016-042023
19. Police Killings of Blacks: Here Is What the Data Say - The New York Times. Accessed January 1, 2022. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/18/upshot/ police-killings-of-blacks-what-the-data-says.html
20. Johnson DJ, Tress T, Burkel N, Taylor C, Cesario J. Officer characteristics and racial disparities in fatal officer-involved shootings. Proc Natl Acad Sci. 2019;116(32):15877-15882. doi:10.1073/pnas.1903856116
21. ‘Please, I Don’t Have Insurance’: Businesses Plead With Protesters - The New York Times. Accessed January 1, 2022. https://www.nytimes.com/2020 /05/31/us/minneapolis-protests-business-looting.html
22. Looters attack groceries in impoverished neighborhoods - CNN Video. Accessed January 1, 2022. https://edition.cnn.com/videos/tv/2020/06/06/ looters-attack-groceries-in-impoverished-neighborhoods.cnn
23. Wasow O. Agenda Seeding: How 1960s Black Protests Moved Elites, Public Opinion and Voting. Am Polit Sci Rev. 2020;114(3):638-659. doi:10.101 7/S000305542000009X
24. Collins WJ, Margo RA. The Economic Aftermath of the 1960s Riots in American Cities: Evidence from Property Values. J Econ Hist. 2007;67(4):849-883.
25. Use of Force Report. NYPD.
26. Prisoners in 2001. Bureau of Justice Statistics Bulletin.
27. Prisoners in 2017. US Department of Justice.
28. Guns in the United Kingdom — Firearms, gun law and gun control. Accessed January 1, 2022. https://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/region/united-kingdom
29. Officer Involved Officer Injured in 2019 | Gun Violence Archive. Accessed January 1, 2022. https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/reports/officer-shot? year=2019
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Coleman Hughes is an American writer and podcast host of Conversations with Coleman. His writing focuses on race, public policy, and applied ethics. Coleman’s writing has been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, National Review, Quillette, The City Journal, and The Spectator. Born and raised in northern New Jersey, Coleman briefly attended the Juilliard School to study jazz trombone before dropping out as he discovered a passion for applied ethics and public policy at Columbia University, where he graduated with a B.A. in Philosophy. He was formerly a fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and a fellow and contributing editor at the City Journal. In December 2020, Hughes was listed on the Forbes 30-under-30 list for 2021 in the Media category. Coleman is currently working on his book ‘Racialized,’ which will be published in 2022.
In Defense of Free Speech
References
Based on an interview with the late James Flynn
Originally published in Trouble magazine’s Deep Trouble Podcast
Mark Halloran: I wanted to start with a question about your father who I read was a Socialist Democrat. I think the story about being locked out of the factory when the workers voted for William Jennings Bryan, was a pretty powerful one. And how he helped Eugene Victor Debs; the president of the American Socialist Party, out of jail after he was branded a traitor by President Woodrow Wilson. I was interested in the influence your father has had on your life politically, and in terms of your work?
James Flynn: Well, he doesn’t, I think influenced my life as directly as going to the University of Chicago. It’s true that I was raised in a household where I had a father who had a favorable view of the Democrats, particularly insofar as they were behind the trade unions and the workers. I think also of equal importance was going to the University of Chicago, being in about the only atmosphere under their policy, where to be progressive was actually in fashion.
I think what I took away from your book; In Defense of Free Speech: The University as Censor,1 was the right-wing power within universities at the time that you were a young academic seeking tenure, and how that affected your career. And you talked about the power that was wielded by conservatives within universities and how that’s very different from the power
that’s wielded by far-left groups within universities today.
Well, that it (right-wing power) is more vicious, as it extends off campus. Not that some of the left-wing groups don’t resort to saying that they’ll beat up your family and your kids, but they don’t usually. And they may have the power to bounce you from university. They don’t usually have the power that was operative during the McCarthy period, where if you were working class person, they could prevent you from getting into a public housing project. Or if you’re a teacher, you had to take a loyalty oath to teach in New York City schools. Or they could try and get you banned from any government employment or harass your relatives. So, in that sense, it was much more serious. They had more weapons. I’ve heard right-wingers excuse this by saying, ‘Oh, we were just against the communists,’ but they quite consciously used that as a club to say socialists are communists, and therefore we’ll beat up on them. And liberals are really communist sympathizers, and we’ll beat up on them as well. There were a few screw balls who thought of all this as an anti-communist crusade. But the right-wing in general was very pleased to see that they could effectively immobilize virtually their entire opposition by linking them to communism.
I know that you said that nothing the left has done within universities in the last 50 years, approaches the totalitarian regime that the right ran when it was running universities.
So, they were in control, effectively throughout much of American history. There is the Red Scare after World War One, and America had heads of universities who considered themselves as devout Protestants who wanted to get rid of atheists. And they, of course, were terribly anti-gay. So, there was about 100 years really, from the time of the Civil War up through the Korean War, where you had mainly right-wing control of universities and people who were liberal or left had to suffer the consequences. Mine (University of Chicago) was one of the few where students were protected by Robert Hutchins, the chancellor, because he was always a good civil libertarian. And while his views were conservative, he was very dedicated to academic freedom, and tried to protect the students or staff wherever he could. So, I didn’t have much problem as a student at Chicago. I only faced problems when I faced the outer world, which was still under the control of the right-wing and most universities were right-wing at that time.
People say to me, ‘Oh, that’s a fight between the right and the left.’ You’ve lived long enough that you don’t trust the right-wing - you know if they were in control, they’d be persecuting us. And indeed, they try to when they can. Sometimes they invite speakers in the hope they will be banned. So, they’ll have a cause célèbre. And other times if someone on campus actually takes a left-leaning position, they try to get them banned. And my answer to that is dual. First, why give them ammunition? Why make it appear that they have free speech on their side by giving them so many cases that they can legitimately prosecute? Why not starve them of ammunition? And the reason, of course, is that most of the left don’t believe in free speech, either. They’re pretending they do now, some of them, because they’re suffering from this persecution, just as the right are pretending that they believe in free speech, because they see that their people are being outed. But it’s very rare to find people who aren’t involved in this type of culture war between the right and left, and are willing to forbear doing to the other side what they feel is being done to them.
Reading your book, it made me think that I wonder when the university had really ever been a place where you had freedom of speech?
It varies so much from place to place. As I say, in one chapter, Chicago today is a much more secure place from left-wing persecution than either Harvard is or Princeton. And certainly more so than these universities or Yale. Remember, the better the university, the more they have people who actually don’t like persecution and violation of free speech. So, what would leave you reasonably safe at Harvard or Chicago exposes you to the mob, if you teach at some place that is less elevated than that, and also depends a good deal as to whether people on campus spend all their time organizing protests and persecuting people who don’t agree with them. Middlebury is the case; I don’t think the people who run Middlebury really wanted to run Charles Murray off campus.3 Indeed, they made every effort not to, it was the students who played along with the townspeople and declared him essentially a non-person. That’s not true everywhere, you’re not going to find that type of student militant behavior at, let’s say, Fairleigh Dickinson.
The valuing of free speech seems like a rare thing, because when I thought about it, everyone is susceptible to groupthink. And when the majority of people are of one political leaning, that’s going to control the way that everybody communicates within the group.
Oh, yes, of course, their motives are pure. The conservatives wanted to protect America when it was being confronted by the Soviet Union against internal communists, and wanted people to rally to the flag. Today - and here’s progress - thanks to cognitive gains over the 20th century, most young students are much less racist and sexist than they were 50 years ago. And indeed, many of them just get angry if you allow people who take a conservative view on race to speak. They have been told that these people have no academic standing, and there’s no reason to let them speak and you must make the university a place where everyone feels safe. And just having Charles Murray on campus can be sufficient, apparently, to convince people at Vassar that they have to have counselling. Just knowing he is there, even if they know they’re not going to be in contact with him. And if they have black friends, they think ‘How can anyone be so insulting as to listen to somebody who has supposedly a reasoned case, that Jensen just might be right about race, IQ and genes?’4 So, a lot of it is misguided fervor by the ignorant. Now, of course they have a perfectly good formula for staying ignorant - if you never hear what the other side has to say you can’t marshal your evidence and reasons to refute them. The more you hold something as blind faith, the more you find it intolerable to debate it.
To some extent you make the distinction between right opinion and right knowledge. And so, you and the students of Middlebury who ejected Charles Murray, kind of have the same worldview, in that there is no genetic difference between racial groups that would underlie a difference in terms of IQ.
They very well may be correct, but they’re totally incapable of arguing to that conclusion. If you’re lucky, historically, you are filled by your parents and the media and your fellow students with views that are less vicious than other views. And that’s progress. But sadly - you’re right on the distinction between knowledge and right opinion - right opinion is happening to be, as an accident of history, correct. Knowledge is knowing what the other side has to say, and being able to beat them in a contest of ideas. And I think you probably found chapter three of my book the most telling. I remarked that if I were a student at Middlebury and had been forbidden to read the works of Jensen and Murray and Richard Lynn,7 how uneducated I’d have been, I would have been just a well-meaning liberal, who thought it was bad to be bad to blacks. But I would have missed out completely on all I’ve learned about black subculture in America. All I’ve learned about race and IQ. All I’ve learned about what it would take for a humane society to operate. And all that I’ve learned about how to make a case that women are as intelligent as men. If you don’t argue against your opponents, if you just declare them beyond the pale of reason, you miseducate yourself, you can’t possibly formulate a coherent position in favor of your views. But the main thing is, when you talk to me, you have the impression that you’re talking to a person who has learned a great deal about the black experience in America, who has learned a great deal about cross cultural data, who knows something about the relationship between IQ and education. And that is essentially because I read Jensen and Murray and Lynn, and wasn’t prevented from being exposed to the terrible nature of their published work.
The problem is that there are other factors at work. Students today just read much less broadly and in depth than they used to, despite the fact that more go to university, fewer adults are reading serious history or literature. And to a degree they don’t realize they’re like mediaeval serfs who are captive in the bubble - that their experience is dictated by the mass media and the politicians. That makes them much more malleable and makes it a lot easier to get them to march off to war. So, although they have profited from a century of gain in cognitive ability, you have to marry that with knowledge. In order to get anywhere, you can’t marry it with increasing ignorance and expect things to improve, and to take a position on free speech that systematically keeps you ignorant is not the answer.
It’s interesting that point because what you’re known for, and I remember you from my undergraduate psychology degree, is something called the Flynn effect.8
That’s right. I’ve always cautioned people against thinking that the Flynn effect settles the race and IQ debate. Although, of course, it’s used as a club to do that. I’ve always said, ‘Yes, it takes us part of the way; it shows that the environment can really have a great deal of effect on IQ, setting genes aside.’ But you still have to make a detailed case, that the environmental gap that separate white and black in America today is analogous to the gap that separates the generations. It doesn’t let you off the hook.
When I heard the original interview between Charles Murray and Sam Harris,9 I immediately thought Murray doesn’t understand the Flynn effect. And then I found out – he named the Flynn effect.
He coined the term Flynn effect, which was a good boon for me, it opened doors that otherwise wouldn’t have been open. He quite rightly said that the mere fact that over 100 years, we have made enormous environmental progress, and may have raised average IQ by 30 points, doesn’t mean that in a given time and place, those same environmental differences separate black and white. And of course, Jensen made what seemed to be a powerful point - you’re still run into people who don’t even realize this - that when you equate black and white people today for socioeconomic status (SES), that doesn’t eliminate the IQ gap. And even worse, because that’s far more important, that doesn’t eliminate the educational achievement gap. To answer that question, you have to undertake a very searching inquiry into the limits of SES, and the nature of black subculture. And even if the race and IQ gap didn’t exist, you learn an awful lot from doing that.
Everyone who can read history with an unbiased eye and isn’t full of either right-wing or left-wing nonsense knows that in America, that Chinese people of a certain SES, when equated with Irish people of a certain SES, set up a far more educationally efficient home. You don’t, when you walk into an Irish restaurant, see an Irish kid asleep over his books and when he wakes up, he goes on reading the next passage - he is likely to be out playing sport. And when you enter a Jewish home, it’s quite different to entering a Polish home. These groups are separated by important cultural differences that have a transcendence of SES. Today, it’s respectable to say all it’s all SES. Then you can say you can’t blame blacks for being poor - that lets them off the hook. Instead, you have to give an intelligent attempt to show that subculture is important. If you do this though, you’re accused of blaming the victim, you’re saying black culture is to blame for blacks not achieving educationally. To think that anyone is to blame for the history of their ethnic group is insane. I’m not to blame for the fact that when the Irish came to America, they had never picked up farming skills and were let loose in alien cities. That they have a history of violence; that many people’s highest aspiration was to be the best street fighter on the block. Am I supposed to be blamed for how the Irish were treated in England and the oppression that they faced in America?
SES doesn’t capture. Historically, when you consider that during slavery, black people were considered to be three quarters human under the Constitution, and post slavery, black lives, were essentially being criminalized - that you could be imprisoned for looking at a white woman the wrong way.
Yes, of course. As I’ve said in my material, which I wouldn’t never have developed if I hadn’t been arguing with people like Jensen and Lynn, that, of course, a black kid from an upper middle-class home will have an advantage over a black kid from the home where everyone is high on some type of narcotic. No doubt. You remember my use of Elsie G. Moore’s study?10 She was the one who looked at black children, all of whom were adopted by either white or black professional parents. Even though all the mothers had 16 years of education; the black and white mothers, even though the fathers were all professionals, or semi-professionals, by the age of eight and a half the black kids adopted by the white professional parents were 13 IQ points above the black kids adopted by black families. Well, that hasn’t got to do with race. No one sorted them by race or genes before adoption. And when she observed the mothers, the white mothers were universally encouraging, saying ‘That’s a good idea. Let’s try this.’ The black mothers were universally censorious saying ‘You’re not that dumb. You can do better than that.’ It turned out that the white professional mothers had a much more positive attitude to problem solving than the black professional mothers.
I was also the first one to analyze, Han Eysenck’s data with the half black kids in Germany during the occupation of Germany, and they did as well as white kids left behind by American servicemen.8,11 What was the difference? There was no black subculture in Germany. They were just dark-skinned acculturated Germans. They faced prejudice. But they didn’t face the subculture, which differs widely between groups in terms of encouraging cognitive performance.
If I was going to be the devil’s advocate, and perhaps take Charles Murray’s side of the argument, there’s the obvious thing in terms of the sample sizes being very small. Therefore, it’s hard to draw any conclusions. The other thing is that, as you pointed out, the African American fathers who were enlisted in the Army had to pass cognitive tests.
And I had to study it, and then allow for that. And when I did that, I said, ‘Well, you could make a case that due to the weeding out of less intelligent black fathers, that really the results show about a three-point genetic gap. Now you have to take into account that although you didn’t live under a black subculture, your mother was convicted on the face of it of sleeping with the enemy! If you want to go into wild speculation, you would have to conclude that 12 points of the IQ gap between black and white are due to subcultural factors, and only three points are due to genetic factors - and even those three are up for grabs. Being persecuted isn’t pleasant. That means that if it were true in America, then the blaming of anti-black sentiment, as the main cause of the race-IQ gap and achievement gap, is four-fifths mistaken, as four-fifths of it lies in the substance of black subculture. Now, they’re not to blame for that - they came up from slavery. But it means that just giving them a pot of money that equals them with whites is not going to be universally effective.
Now, it could be that as we learn more and more about the human genome, I think it would be remarkable if we came up with a conclusion that more than two or three points was genetic. The difference between twins and singletons is four points, and no one runs around fighting in the streets over that. You remember, I published data that shows that blacks have gained five points than whites over one generation. And the gap is no longer 15 IQ points, it’s nearer 10.8 And if that happens another generation these people are going to have a lot less to argue about, aren’t they? If blacks ever cut the IQ gap to five points, how much time are we going waste on this?
When I first read about the Flynn effect, I thought, ‘Is it really likely that IQ is going to increase by about a standard deviation; up to 15 IQ points, in fifty years. Really, statistically, it’s more likely that things will regress towards the mean. And then recently, I discovered the reverse Flynn effect.12
That’s right. I wrote an article on that which was published in Intelligence a few years back.8 And I say there’s nothing about the Flynn effect that’s written in the stars like the law of gravity. The reason the Flynn effect has occurred is that over the 20th century, most people have been exposed to more cognitively demanding environments. And if that is no longer true, than they won’t make gains. Not only won’t they make IQ gains, which is trivial, they won’t make gains in terms of developing critical intelligence. There’s nothing written in the stars. I think there’s every indication that today young people are having a much harder time finding intellectual challenge at universities.
I’ve read that IQ peaked at around the mid 1990s.13
Yes, in Scandinavia among young adults, in Holland, it looks like it’s stalled, but without regressing. If you look at Germany, there’s an amazing difference; they’re gaining still on vocabulary, but losing in spatial visualization. If you look at America, although they seem to be gaining a bit on all fronts, and you have to look at it by age group, elderly people in practically every advanced society are making big IQ gains over their parents at an elderly age. They’re being stimulated, exercising more and have a better diet. So, you have to look at it by group, my feeling is that during the school years, we’ve reached a point where for reasons we can’t really manipulate, most young people, particularly males, are interacting less successfully with a school environment. So, I would be very surprised to see data that shows IQ gains in that age group. I think we’re still in a position where the world of work is making a few more cognitively demanding jobs than it used to. So, we would see more moderate gains there. Therefore, you have to ask not only what country you’re dealing with, but what age group you’re dealing with. They did a wonderful study of Ravens. And they found that when they compared modern kids in Scotland with kids in the 1930s, they didn’t gain much at school, because in Scotland at that time, years of schooling were pretty universal. But what they did find was that later on, after their school years, they made profound gains on the Ravens.
My point was that the 500,000 Danish men declined below pre 1991 levels. It seems like IQ tests may no longer be matching the environment for
selecting out what’s important in terms of intelligent behavior.
Yes, the intelligent thing is to read widely, think hard, argue with your opponents and develop critical intelligence. That’s always been the really important thing.
Could it change, though?
Yes, that can change. And I’m afraid it’s not necessarily changing for the better. That is, I’m afraid that young people are reading less. Apparently, all the studies of American schools show that even in terms of occupational skills, kids are losing critical intelligence, and they barely even read the course material any longer. A majority of courses are now given in America by adjunct professors who can be fired at will and have terrible conditions. And they’re desperately trying to publish despite being overloaded. And so, they make a hedonic pact with the students. They say to the students, ‘We won’t ask much of you, as long as you give us good write ups,’ and the students follow. There’s a great correlation between how favorably they are reviewed and how easy a course is. And they have relapsed to where they’re now reading probably no more than five or eight hours a week as compared to thirteen in the past. So, they say to the lecturer, ‘Go ahead, give us a coursebook, give us something that all we have to do is memorize a few chapters from and we can get an A, then we’ll write you a good reference’ and the beleaguered lecturer thinks, ‘God, if I assign a demanding essay, think of all the marking I’ll have to do. I better spend what little time I have on trying to publish in a professional journal.’ So, you have a situation in which students and staff corrupt each other.
Yes, I’ve been in that situation. I meant that perhaps what is required from the environment for intelligent behavior changes. So, I’m thinking that as technology develops and people have access to information all the time, then they don’t need to develop general knowledge as measured by tests like the WAIS.
Well, you have to know something to take advantage of the internet rather than be corrupted by it. If you just set sail on it almost any screw ball could influence you. How can you know why there was a terrible war in Nigeria if you don’t know that a war even happened? You’re never going to put in to your Google. How can you know what were the causes of the war in Nigeria? You’re ignorant that the war ever took place.
Many people seem to think that they are making use of the visual world if they merely garner a lot of helter-skelter information on what immediately interests them. That’s not the way to proceed. I try and show how academics in some ways are their own worst enemies, they too can be dogmatic and persecute academics who have a minority view. And I also try to point out that people who train teachers are not innocent of the fact that the students that these teachers teach, come to university without the equipment to do well. So, it’s not all a matter of academics being beaten up by other people - they beat up on themselves. And sometimes the students they turn out, send them a clientele that’s not promising. But the major thing is something that almost no one will deny, but no one likes to face. And that is all of those who curtail free speech turn, what should be a contest of ideas, into a contest of strength. All those kids at Middlebury showed was that they were more powerful than Charles Murray. None of them could have argued with him.
It’s a case of might is right.
Yes. It’s a case of might is right. When you’re on top, you’ll bully whoever you disagree with. And that turns it into a test of strength. You still pay an incredibly heavy price for that, in terms of remaining intellectually naive, but at least you’re not likely to be thrown out of university. When the pendulum swings back again, we’ll see what all these people think of this notion that the administration and alumni and students can bounce anyone they take a dislike to.
You’ve faced criticism as well, because of your work on race and IQ.
I’m a racist. I blame the victim because I talk about subcultures. And I say black subculture is an important element that has to change if blacks are to have better educational achievement. I would say the same about Maori subculture. Certainly, this was true of Irish subculture of my own group. I’m not there just saying, ‘Oh, we are persecuted. We were turned down for jobs. We were not given housing.’ Which is all true, by the way. Irish in America, when my father was young, he faced ‘No Irish Need Apply.’ They would advertise a job and they would say ‘No Irish Need Apply, Colored Man Preferred’ because they thought of blacks as being less violent than Irish were. So, they were turned down unjustly for jobs and Jews were kept from going to Harvard because they were Jewish. And of course, Chinese today are kept from going to Harvard because they’re Chinese.
You take exception in your book to particular departments within the university. Some of the departments that you have an issue with are things like Women’s Studies and Black Studies.
Within the university there are academic fashions, and people outside the academic fashion often find no home there. I name those departments, in particular, because they don’t just have a sort of intellectual party line, based on too narrow a research agenda. They have an ideology that defines the ideal student, and the ideal student in a Black Studies department is someone who flirts with the revolutionary left, and has no time for reading conservative black scholars, like Thomas Sowell and others, that he would learn a great deal from. So, they actively corrupt their students by demanding not only that they be intellectually in fashion, but by demanding that they be ideologues of a particular persuasion.
You take exception with some of the ideas within these departments such as trigger warnings.
Yes - that’s the latest outrage. Every lecturer should comb through their lectures and find the slightest thing that might upset anyone. At Chicago university they say that people go to university to get upset. They go there to seek out ideas that upset them and think about those ideas. There was a terrible thing, I think it was at Vassar, where a group of women got together and said, ‘One of the worst things about having Charles Murray come to campus is the time students have to spend to think about how to refute him.’ As if that were something bad rather than something good.
Your book made me wonder whether you thought there were any limits to free speech at all?
There are limits to free speech in the sense that even John Stuart Mill said you can’t stand up on a balcony and shout ‘Fire!’ That can’t in any way be described as political or religious debate. That’s just a way of trying to get people killed by panic. And you certainly couldn’t have people stand in front of a black hostel of a campus with Ku Klux Klan signs and when they walked across campus to go to class be pursuing them with racial epithets. We all know that this is forbidden - of course there are limits. What is not, however, to be included within free speech limits is refusing to allow things to be said, just because they upset people. It’s one thing to persecute people and render their whole educational experience dysfunctional. Of course, you can’t allow that anywhere - anymore than you can allow them to tackle them when they cross campus or try and burn their books. You don’t allow people to shriek racial epithets. But when you have serious people who have a serious case to argue, to treat those books, as if they were shouting racial epithets, is weird. You take the fact that speech is not a total absolute, and then you run to the conclusion that anything that upsets anyone isn’t covered by free speech.
Free speech is always placed within the limits of inciting violence.
You can always twist free speech into a mere incitement to violence. But there’s no evidence that in most of these cases on campus that any of these banned speakers or banned textbooks, resulted in black or women’s studies students being confronted with people shouting sexist or racist epithets. What was obnoxious about these books was that they made a case that students disagreed with but didn’t know how to refute.
There was a part in your book where you said ‘If I were the university president, I would allow the KKK to come in and distribute flyers and even hold their rallies.’
My view is that anyone who is presented with a flyer, they can either read it or crumple it up. They don’t have to pay any attention to it. If I were a university president and the Klu Klux Klan wanted to put up flyers on a notice board, I would say, ‘Are you sure this is really worthwhile? Why don’t you hold a meeting off campus where the authorities can deal with the problem? These flyers are just going to be snatched off the bulletin boards. And I’ll have to pay the cost of having someone watch to see that they’re not snatched away. And what exactly do you think you’re going to accomplish with this?’
I think there are some ideas that are really not worth discussing.
Yes. Well, as I say, no one has to read a flyer. I don’t read most flyers I see on bulletin boards - I can immediately see they’re nonsense. And what’s the problem with a student seeing some stupid flyer in favor of the Klu Klux Klan? I would assume that he would think ‘Sad that there are so many ignorant people around.’
I think there are limits in terms of allowing groups to come to speak at a university. You wouldn’t allow a pro-pedophilia group or Islamic State to come and speak.
I would kill them by ignoring them. Why the hell does anyone have to pay attention to the fact that they want to give a lecture on campus - just study your chemistry. However, since their visits to campus so often create a riotous situation, I would say to them, ‘Public schools of our state cannot forbid you to hold a meeting, find a Public school 10 blocks off campus and hold your meeting there. And at least the university won’t have to bear the cost of giving you security – the local cops will do it.’
In America the right-wing media predominantly focusses on the university protests. However, it really seems it’s a very small percentage of the university itself.
Look at how uncritical people are being at present about the climate debate. I was amused when a person whose intelligence I respect said ‘Well now at least we know what we’ve got to do.’ That, by the way, is now the message of the oil and coal companies ‘Oh, it’s not our fault all you have to do is not use oil and coal and junk your cars’ when they know full well that that will never happen. It lets them off the hook. It’s a wonderful idea that if everyone tomorrow threw their car into the Leith and walked to work and didn’t eat meat, and didn’t engage in air travel - wouldn’t we be better off? The fossil fuel companies think ‘Gee, that’s a good way to have people think, if they think that way we’re off the hook and we can go right on making our cars and using oil.’ I published a book called No Place to Hide14 on climate change. The only way to deal with it is by concerted action. Of course, you want people to walk, and of course you want people to not drive expensive, gas guzzling cars. But the only way to handle it is to actually have a situation where you do something to manipulate the climate, to hold down temperature until we discovered safe fuels, which is going to take us a few generations. I’m often appalled when, even the best students, say, ‘All we have to do is force the politicians to be better people.’
It’s a generational difference, isn’t it? There’s an ideological difference between your life experience, and the young people who are part of departments such as Black Studies and Women’s Studies.
There is a difference, but there’s also no difference in a certain respect. And that is, right from the day I was born, politicians and the media tried to brainwash me with what they thought would make me a complacent citizen. That still holds true – however all the forces at work may be more powerful now. I grant you that the internet may be a much more powerful influence than the daily newspaper was when I was a kid.
You take exception to departments within universities that are ideologically driven. And you in your book criticize postmodernism.
Yes, there’s that nonsense. The problem is that so many kids now go to university just wanting to gain a vocational advantage. And of course, you can be a very good surgeon, and still know nothing about climate change, know nothing about the role of money in American politics. That is, you have none of the critical attitudes you need to improve the society. But you’re very good at cutting on the brain. And you’re very good at building a bridge. You’re very good at programming a computer. So, there is a shift away from the humanities and critical thinking to this overwhelming ethos; where vocational advantages is the main purpose of the university.
I think there should be in every university a minor in critical thinking. You wouldn’t make it compulsory, but every student may take it along with their major. And in it you would have a curriculum that would be designed to encourage critical intelligence, where you spent your time learning some history and reading some literature and taking some philosophy. And learning enough social science and economics to argue with these people. I don’t have any notion that I’m going to be successful in preaching that. Although I make a few in roads at least when I teach my courses, where I try to integrate disciplines in a way that makes students more critical.
It might be that universities are losing their purpose.
They have always lost their purpose to some degree. They were started to train people to be clergymen. That was their original vocational setup. And then people started realizing universities could teach people vocational skills so that they could earn a living. There was a period of course, when universities were flooded to some degree, by upper class people, some of whom just wanted to drink and run around, but others of whom considered themselves to be reflective, genteel types. And, many of them, since they had we’re going to inherit money, would take things like Latin and Greek and philosophy and literature. Now, that group is mainly gone. And what you’ve got to do is to raise an awareness within universities, that part of their purpose is to teach critical thinking and not just vocationally valuable skills.
There’s a difference between the departments in terms of their ideological focus…
Some of them are much worse than others. The ones that really indoctrinate you in America are Black Studies, Women’s Studies and Teacher Training. And then on the heels of those are departments are the ones where you can’t discuss the race-IQ debate, departments where you can’t discuss Israel versus Palestine, departments where you can’t imply that different cultures are at different stages of development. They all have a certain bias against these views. And then there are a few departments, ideally philosophy, history and literature, which would be more open, but they’re not necessarily. They can always be infected by postmodernists.
You mention Jordan Peterson, who has really found his fame through saying that the issue with the culture within universities is related to some version of what he calls a neo-Marxist postmodernism.
It’s not just neo-Marxists. Yes, everyone tries to get in on the party; feminists, Marxists, God-knows-who will all go around mouthing that there are an infinite number of interpretations of the universe, and the people who try to rationally grapple with the universe are merely trying to get more powerful than people who don’t. He tends to link it to Marxism. There are Marxists who do that. But there are many Marxists who follow Marx, who said that there is objective truth out there, there’s an understanding of the dialectic of history, and why one society evolves into another, and what the impediments are, in terms of realistic evidence that working people suffer. Marx wasn’t a postmodernist. He merely thought that many dogmas were historically relative, which is true, and that you could improve on that by becoming a learned person, and by recognizing which dogmas were merely suited to the ideology of a time and then try to find a sociology and a history that transcends that.
His contention, seems to be, that the Marxism part is changed from being about the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, and instead focusses on different groups within society and the power interactions between these groups.
Anyone who is willing to look at reality will see that different groups vary in power, nothing particularly bizarre about that. I’d far prefer to argue with a Marxist who thinks that truth is possible, and is trying to argue for a position that you have to see ideas in a sociological context to deal with them, which is a truth of sociology, and who is convinced that history moves in terms of the invention of devices that serve human needs better, like the factory system. At least, you can bring evidence to bear because they assert something that’s falsifiable. It’s not falsifiable to go around and say ‘Everything is just a point of view.’ How can you falsify something like that? Except to say, if you think carefully, no one believes it. Cultural relativism is a strange beast in itself. In my book, Fate and Philosophy15 you’ll see how quickly I deal with it. Almost no one is really a cultural relativist, you’d have to be a very peculiar person to say that you equally appreciated the music of all different cultures. Such a person never goes to a concert, because they’re torn in fifty different directions. But there’s a lot of muddled thinking out there. And the less we have free speech, and the more we have people making it a test of strength, the more that muddled thinking will flourish.
If you look at the ideological bent of Black Studies and the activism it produces, it may seem extreme. But it’s been in response to something. It’s been in response to a history of white supremacy; a history of slavery.
The history of white supremacy should be looked at very carefully in the light of facts and evidence that shouldn’t be clouded by a lot of self-serving myth. There was a period after slavery, that for peculiar sociological reasons, black families tended to be more stable than white families. So, to now just run around and scream black family instability is a legacy of slavery needs more examination.16,17 There are many that question why women have a lower income on average than men. It’s a very complex problem. As Erich Fromm said, ‘For almost any person, who is in any way disadvantage, the best instrument is the truth. They have difficulty mustering the same power as their oppressor. But once they can become convinced that truth is on their side, they have an extra string to their bow.’ Discouraging the notion that truth is possible - that’s not the way forward.
1. My Book Defending Free Speech Has Been Pulled. Quillette. Published September 24, 2019. Accessed February 6, 2022. https://quillette.com/2019/ 09/24/my-book-defending-free-speech-has-been-banned/
2. A Book Too Risky To Publish: Free Speech and Universities | Academica Press. Accessed February 6, 2022. https://www.academicapress.com/node/ 382
3. Information on Charles Murray Visit. Middlebury. Accessed January 26, 2022. https:// www.middlebury.edu / newsroom / information - on-charles-murray-visit
4. Sowell T. Arthur Jensen and His Critics: The Great IQ Controversy. Change. 1973;5(4):33-37.
5. Carl N, Woodley of Menie MA. A scientometric analysis of controversies in the field of intelligence research. Intelligence. 2019;77:101397. doi:10.1016 /j.intell.2019.101397
6. Panofsky A. Misbehaving Science: Controversy and the Development of Behavior Genetics. University of Chicago Press; 2014. Accessed February 5, 2022. https:// press.uchicago.edu/ucp / books / book/chicago/M/bo16124298. html
7. Lynn R. Race differences in intelligence: An evolutionary analysis. Published online January 1, 2006.
8. Flynn JR. The “Flynn Effect” and Flynn’s paradox. Intelligence. 2013;41(6):851-857. doi:10.1016/j.intell.2013.06.014
9. #73 — Forbidden Knowledge. Sam Harris. Accessed January 26, 2022. https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/73-forbidden-knowledge
10. Moore EG. Family socialization and the IQ test performance of traditionally and transracially adopted Black children. Dev Psychol. 1986;22(3):317-326. doi:10.1037/0012-1649.22.3.317
11. Colman AM. Race differences in IQ: Hans Eysenck’s contribution to the debate in the light of subsequent research. Personal Individ Differ. 2016;103:182-189. doi:10.1016/j.paid.2016.04.050
12. Teasdale TW, Owen DR. A long-term rise and recent decline in intelligence test performance: The Flynn Effect in reverse. Personal Individ Differ. 2005;39(4):837-843. doi:10.1016/j.paid.2005.01.029
13. Robson D. Has humanity reached ‘peak intelligence?’ Accessed February 5, 2022. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190709-has-humanity-reached-peak-intelligence
14. No Place to Hide. Potton & Burton. Accessed February 5, 2022. https://www. pottonandburton.co.nz/product/no-place-to-hide/
15. Flynn JR, Flynn J. Fate & Philosophy: A Journey Through Life’s Great Questions. Awa Press; 2012.
16. Bodenner C. “The Breakdown of the Black Family,” Cont’d - The Atlantic. Accessed February 5, 2022. https://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2015/10/the-breakdown-of-the-black-family-contd/410155/
17. Besharov DJ, West A. African American Marriage Patterns.
~
Professor James R. Flynn has combined political and moral philosophy with psychology to clarify problems such as justifying humane ideals and whether it makes sense to rank races and classes by merit. Emeritus Professor Flynn has been profiled in Scientific American and ran for the New Zealand Parliament in 1993 and 1996 as Alliance candidate for Dunedin North. Research Interests include humane ideals and ideological debate; classics of political philosophy; race, class and IQ. He was Head of Department from 1967 to 1996.
Vale James Flynn
First and foremost, thank you to Steve Charman who recorded and edited all excerpts for each of the interviews. Thank you also to Steve and Melissa Proposch for supporting me to develop the Deep Trouble Podcast which was hosted by Trouble Magazine and which served as inspiration for the current book. Lastly, thank you to all the authors and interviewees for contributing to this project, in particular Heather Heying, Gad Saad, Nicholas Christakis, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Peter Boghossian, for reviewing multiple drafts of the essays and interviews included in this book.

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Iconoclast: Ideas That Have Shaped The Culture Wars

Edited by Mark Halloran Ph.D.

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Iconoclast: Ideas That Have Shaped The Culture Wars

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Iconoclast: Ideas That Have Shaped The Culture Wars

Edited by Mark Halloran Ph.D.

Academica Press Washington~London

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Iconoclast: Ideas That Have Shaped The Culture Wars

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Halloran, Mark (author) Title: Iconoclast : ideas that have shaped the culture wars | Halloran, Mark. Description: Washington : Academica Press, 2022. | Includes references. Identifiers: LCCN 2022939776 | ISBN 9781680532661 (hardcover) | 9781680532678 (paperback) | 9781680532685 (e-book) Copyright 2022 Mark Halloran

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Contents Iconoclasm: A Very Brief History of the Culture Wars .................................................... vii References ........................................................................................................ xix Mark Halloran On COVID19 and Times of Plague ................................................................ 27 References ......................................................................................................... 49 Based on an interview with Nicholas Christakis Postmodernism and the Failure of Moral Triage.......................................... 55 References ......................................................................................................... 73 Based on an interview with Peter Boghossian Me, She, He, They: Reality vs. Identity in the 21st Century ......................... 77 References ......................................................................................................... 93 Heather Heying On Free Speech Absolutism and the Deontological Pursuit of Truth ......................................................... 97 References ....................................................................................................... 119 Based on an interview with Gad Saad Let Us Prey: On Islamic Immigration in Europe and Women’s Rights .................................................................... 125 References ....................................................................................................... 141 Based on an interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali On DarkHorse, Ivermectin and Vaccine Hesitancy .................................... 143 References ....................................................................................................... 158 Based on an interview with Eric Topol Black Politicized Lives Matter ...................................................................... 163 References ....................................................................................................... 176 Heather Mac Donald

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Making Evolutionary Sense of Sex and Gender .......................................... 179 References ....................................................................................................... 195 Jennifer A. Marshall Graves Stories and Data: Reflections on Race, Riots, and Police ........................... 199 References ....................................................................................................... 205 Coleman Hughes In Defense of Free Speech ............................................................................. 209 References ....................................................................................................... 226 Based on an interview with James Flynn Acknowledgments .......................................................................................... 229

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Iconoclasm: A Very Brief History of the Culture Wars ‘Culture war’ – even the term itself has historically been contentious and divisive. In America, it originated and gained popular usage in the 1920s, to describe the conflict between urban and rural America; between those who possessed liberal, progressive values and those who held to traditional, conservative beliefs.1 In the 1990s, the term was reintroduced into the cultural zeitgeist by University of Virginia sociologist James Davison Hunter, with the publication of Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America.2 Hunter argued that on a number of defining issues – abortion, gun ownership, separation of church and state, homosexuality etc., society had been divided into two warring factions – however these factions were not designated by the traditional markers of nominal religion, ethnicity, social class, or political affiliation but rather by two incommensurate ideological world views.2 Then, in April 2015, two months before Donald Trump officially launched his bid for the US presidency, historian Andrew Hartman published A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars. In the book Hartman recounts the history of the culture wars of late 20th century America, where the New Left of the 1960s; the radical antiwar, feminist, Black Power activists, overturned much of the racism and conventional gender and sexual biases of ‘normative’ America. In the conclusion, Hartman tells us that the ‘culture wars are now history.’3 Alas, much like Francis Fukuyama’s prognosis of ‘The End of History’4* the end of the modern culture wars seems nowhere in sight. ~ This book contains many of the ideas that have shaped the culture wars of the last two decades. Iconoclast, as a title, may seem somewhat hyperbolic. * The political theorist Francis Fukuyama posited that the end of the Cold War and the seeming triumph of liberal democracy marked the end point in human history.

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I know that the term had been used in reference to the New Atheist writer; the late Christopher Hitchens,5 but perhaps it is best reserved for historical figures of the magnitude of Galileo. Regardless, this is a book about ideas and the conflicts that come with expressing those ideas. It is also a very brief history. So let us now examine, fleetingly, some of the events that have shaped the latest culture wars. ~ In October 2015, sociologist and physician Nicholas Christakis and his wife Erica Christakis, who is a lecturer in early childhood studies, apologised for the hurt they had caused students and resigned from their positions as CoMasters of Silliman College, Yale. This occurred due to student protests instigated by an email that Erica had sent to all Silliman students in regards to Halloween costumes. Erica’s email was in response to an earlier email by Yale’s Intercultural Affairs Committee which warned students to avoid wearing inappropriate and culturally insensitive costumes for Halloween. In recent years, it had become common practice for universities to send out such emails – this had been in response to students wearing offensive costumes and blackface.6 Erica enquired in her email if students wanted to hand over these decisions to university administrators. Erica stated that ‘American universities were once a safe space not only for maturation but also for a certain regressive, or even transgressive, experience; increasingly, it seems, they have become places of censure and prohibition.’ This resulted in an open letter, which 740 students signed, criticising Erica and Nicholas for downplaying the concerns of students of colour.6 In the aftermath, Nicholas Christakis decided to engage the students in a civil discussion. This resulted in 2-hour long debate where Christakis was surrounded by an angry crowd of protesting students, which was filmed from multiple angles, and subsequently became viral on social media.7 Christakis discussed the events on an episode of the then Waking Up podcast with Sam Harris titled Facing the Crowd.8 Harris commended Christakis for his patience and calmness in the face of truculence of the students. Harris wondered at one point how Yale students, who he stated are ‘objectively some of the most privileged people who have ever lived ... Whatever the colour of their skin’ could have acted this way. Christakis defended the students, saying that the ideas that the students expressed in relation to social constructionism had some merit; only they had been taken too far. Christakis had argued with the

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students in favour of the values of classical liberalism and human universality. In Iconoclast I discuss with Christakis the importance of free enquiry to the mission of the university and his book Apollo’s Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live.9 We discuss the evidence for the lab leak hypothesis, the issues surrounding the racialization of the American healthcare system, and his idea that the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests were not only a direct result of the murder of George Floyd and a history of racialized police violence in America, but also by the anxiety of living in a time of plague. Christakis’s view is that whether it is the January 6, 2021 Capitol Hill riots, or BLM, no-one should have been gathering in the streets to protest during the pandemic. ~ Evergreen State College is a public liberal arts and sciences college in Olympia, Washington which drew national attention in 2017. Evergreen had a tradition – the annual Day of Absence, which was based on the idea from a 1965 play of the same name by Douglas Ward Turner, whereby minority students and faculty would spend the day off campus to discuss campus issues and to highlight their contribution via their absence.10 Following the election of Donald Trump, Evergreen decided to reconceptualised the event, stating that undocumented migrants on campus were in fear of deportation, and wanted to hold a symbolic event that reaffirmed that students belong on campus. Therefore, instead of minority students and faculty leaving the campus they asked that white people leave the campus. After the policy was announced, Bret Weinstein, faculty member and evolutionary biologist, sent an email in protest of the change which read: There is a huge difference between a group or coalition deciding to voluntarily absent themselves from a shared space in order to highlight their vital and under-appreciated roles ... and a group or coalition encouraging another group to go away. The first is a forceful call to consciousness, which is, of course, crippling to the logic of oppression. The second is a show of force, and an act of oppression in itself.

Protest activists stated that students were angered by Weinstein’s emails but this was not what triggered the protests.11 In May 2017 police apprehended two black students from their dorms at midnight due to a non-physical altercation in the cafeteria that day – the white student was not taken in for questioning. The protesters claim Weinstein came out of his classroom and

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confronted the students who were protesting this, agitating them, and when the police arrived they believed that Weinstein had called them. Weinstein then appeared on right-wing commentator Tucker Carlson and the protesters claimed that Weinstein failed to correct Carlson who stated that white people were being forced to leave campus and that the protest was in regards to Weinstein’s email alone.12 Weinstein and his wife, the evolutionary biologist Heather Heying, tell a different version of events.13,14 They tell the story of the new college president George Bridges, who, on taking the position, significantly increased administration and fostered an environment of radical political ideology. Bridge’s consistent acquiescence to the extreme demands of student protestors created an environment where the protestors were embolden to take control of the campus. Film of Bridges essentially being denigrated and humiliated by protestors is harrowing viewing.15 Weinstein and Heying left their positions with the college and filed a $3.8 million suit against the college alleging that the college had ‘permitted, cultivated, and perpetuated a racially hostile and retaliatory work environment.... Through a series of decisions made at the highest levels, including to officially support a day of racial segregation, the college has refused to protect its employees from repeated provocative and corrosive verbal and written hostility based on race, as well as threats of physical violence.’ Weinstein and Heying were awarded $500,000 and the college admitted no liability and rejected the allegations of the tort claim.10 In Iconoclast Heying writes about non-binary identity and the reality of the pronoun ‘they’ in an essay that came about in response to an article written by Anne Fadiman for Harper’s Magazine titled “All My Pronouns.”16 Heying argues for the distinction between biological and sociological categories and that linguistic terms have to be tethered to the reality of humans being a sexually dimorphic species. † ~ On March 2, 2017, Charles Murray, a social scientist and fellow at the American Enterprise Institute was scheduled to give a talk at Middlebury college. Murray was the co-author, with the late Richard J. Hernstein, of the

† In Iconoclast world-renowned geneticist Jenny Graves, who infamously contended that the Y chromosome may be disappearing, also writes about the evolution of sex and gender.

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controversial New York Times bestseller The Bell Curve which was released in 1994;17 a book about the stratification of American society based on intelligence, which contained a chapter on race and IQ. A crowd of 400 protestors, predominantly students, filled the Wilson Hall in McCullough Student Center, carrying signs and chanting slogans. This caused Murray and the moderator of the event, Middlebury College Professor Allison Stanger to relocate to a locked room where they could conduct the Q&A via video link. After the completion of the talk, Murray and Stanger walked to their cars, where they were surrounded by angry protestors, who tried to block their path. During this altercation, Stanger was injured and required medical treatment for a concussion.18,19 Middlebury had become the latest flashpoint in the intensifying culture wars on college campuses. Major news outlets such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal condemned the actions of the protestors, and schools such as Middlebury gained a reputation as being intolerant of liberal values and essentially anti-intellectual safe spaces which were hostile to conservative thought.19 In the aftermath, Murray appeared on an episode of Sam Harris’s podcast titled Forbidden Knowledge, where they discuss his research on race and IQ and the protests at Middlebury.20 Harris faced extensive criticism from the left-wing media outlet Vox for giving a large platform to Murray, which they contended allowed him to spread pseudoscientific ideas about race and IQ – specifically that black and Hispanic people in the US are genetically predisposed to having lower IQ scores than whites and Asians.21,22 Harris then entered into an email exchange and debate with Vox journalist Ezra Klein who, validly, criticised Harris for not having an in depth knowledge of intelligence research, and also accused him of engaging in a kind of ‘anti-woke’ identity politics in relation to his collusion with Murray during their interview.23 In debating Harris, Klein drew on the work of the late intelligence researcher James Flynn, whose work focussed on the environmental causes for racial differences in IQ.24 In my interview with Flynn in regards to his book In Defence of Free Speech: The University as a Censor25 he says that Murray is ‘a serious scholar… That doesn’t mean that I agree with him!.’ In regards to the protests at Middlebury, Flynn differentiates between right opinion and right knowledge. ‘All those students at Middlebury proved was that they were more powerful than Charles Murray,’ Flynn told me, ‘none of them could have argued with him.’ Flynn wondered how the far

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left would feel, upon forfeiting the right to free speech, when the pendulum on censorship eventually swung the other way? In regards to Harris and Klein’s debate, Harris rejected Ezra’s assertion that he is influenced by identity politics of any kind, stating that he would come to the defence of Murray in the same way that he would come to the defence of his friend Ayaan Hirsi Ali, when she comes under attack from left-wing idealogues.23 ~ Ayaan Hirsi Ali rose to prominence after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the US. Hirsi Ali had started working as a researcher for a think tank for the Dutch Labour Party, and the attacks served as the catalyst for her public criticisms and disavowal of her old faith. Two years later, Hirsi Ali was elected to the Dutch parliament for the centre-right party The People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy.26 Then, on November 2, 2004 Hirsi Ali’s friend and collaborator, the film maker Theo von Gogh was assassinated by Mohammed Bouyeri, a Dutch-Moroccan Islamist. Von Gogh had directed a film called Submission: Part 1, written by Hirsi Ali, which provided a strong critique of the treatment of women in Islam. Hirsi Ali had been living under armed guard since 2002, and was embroiled in a series of scandals relating to the government costs for her protection and her application for asylum. In 2006 she resigned from parliament, after the Dutch government tried to revoke her citizenship, and moved to the US where she established the AHA Foundation – a not-for-profit that fights for the rights of women and girls.26,27 Hirsi Ali has faced cancellation multiple times. In 2014 Brandeis University cancelled its plans to give her an honorary degree due to her criticisms of Islam,28 and in 2017 she cancelled a speaking tour of Australia and New Zealand with Think Inc. due to security concerns and ‘a succession of organizational lapses’ by the event organiser.29 She has been listed by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a well-respected entity known for its advocacy against discrimination and its classification of hate groups, as an anti-Muslim extremist.30,31 In an interview for Iconoclast I discussed with Ayaan her book Prey: Immigration, Islam and the Erosion of Women’s Rights.32 We discuss the central thesis of the book, that a wave of immigration from Islamic countries has led to an increase in sexual violence towards women in Europe, and a winding back of women’s rights. We also discussed her criticisms of woke feminism, her advocacy for reformation within Islam and her thoughts

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on a problematic verse in the Koran; the Surah An Nisa: 4:34, which seems to advocate the use of domestic violence to discipline disobedient wives. ~ University of Toronto psychology professor and clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson was first catapulted into the stratosphere of the cultural zeitgeist in October 2016, due to film of him interacting with student protestors and arguing with them about his refusal to use new gender pronouns, which subsequently went viral.33 Peterson then went on to be interviewed by Cathy Newman from Channel 4 News, to discuss his book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote for Chaos, where, in a fiery exchange, they discuss the patriarchy, the gender pay gap, campus protests and transgender rights. Newman’s antagonistic interviewing style, where she appeared determined to misrepresent her guests views, and Peterson’s ‘gotcha’ moment where he defends the right to free speech (leaving Newman briefly speechless), increased Peterson’s fame enormously and made him seemingly the voice speaking up against woke feminism and what he termed the ‘Postmodern neoMarxism’ of left-wing idealogues.’34,35 Peterson and Gad Saad, a Lebanese-born Canadian Professor of Marketing at the John Molson School of Business at Concordia University, appeared before the Canadian Senate in 2017, to debate the introduction of Bill C-16, a piece of legislation which sought to include gender identity and expression within federal human rights protections.36,37 Peterson argued that the concept of gender identity and expression were too broad and that the legislation to make people use gender-neutral pronouns would constitute compelled speech that would elevate the failure to use a preferred pronoun to ‘hate speech.’38 Saad argued that the concept of gender fluidity meant that a person’s gender identity could change daily, and quoted from a flyer produced by Harvard’s Office of BGLTQ which stated ‘Fixed binaries and biological essentialism constitute transphobic misinformation that is tantamount to systemic violence.’36 The Transgender Rights Bill (Bill C-16) was passed and officially became law on June 19, 2017.39 In a wide-ranging conversation for Iconoclast, I discuss with Gad his book The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas are Killing Common Sense.40 We discuss his work within the field of evolutionary psychology and his commitment to free speech absolutism, as well his adherence to deontological principles. We also discuss how adherence to these principles became a point

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of contention which caused the rift with Sam Harris, who in Gad’s view, with his support of Trump’s removal from Twitter, violated the principle of free speech in the pursuit of political expediency.41,42 ~ The Grievance Studies Affair (or Sokal Squared) was an academic hoax orchestrated by the philosopher Peter Boghossian, James A. Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose – to illustrate the corruption and bias occurring within ‘grievance studies’ fields in universities. Conducted over 2017 to 2018 the project involved submitting 20 hoax papers to academic journals in race, queer, cultural, gender, sexuality and fat studies fields to see if they would pass through peer review and be accepted for publication.43–45 By the time the trio had come forward to reveal their hoax in October 2018, due to an investigation by The Wall Street Journal46 which revealed that the author on one of the papers, Helen Wilson, didn’t exist, 4 papers had been published and another 3 had been accepted for publication, whilst 6 had been rejected and 7 were under review. The papers argued for ideas such as the existence of rape culture in urban dog parks,47‡ how males penetrating themselves anally with sex toys can lead to a reduction in transphobia, and included a feminist paper which was really just an excerpt from Mein Kampf rewritten with feminist language.44,48,49 The trio stated that they were trying to raise awareness that certain academic disciplines had been compromised by their underlying philosophies of postmodernism and critical theory, and that these areas of study were producing some dangerous and morally corrupt ideas that did not tether with reality.44 In their book Cynical Theories Pluckrose and Lindsay state that woke activism is driven by an ideology now taught within universities that they call ‘applied postmodernism.’50 In Iconoclast, I am in conversation with Peter Boghossian, where we discuss some of the philosophical underpinnings of postmodernism, why speech isn’t violence and the problem with the idea of cultural appropriation. According to Boghossian the far left’s current focus on controlling language within institutions, based on ideas from poststructuralism, is intended to manufacture different outcomes. He says that terms such as ‘anti-racism’ and

‡ This paper received special recognition from Gender, Place and Culture – the journal that published it.

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‘diversity, inclusion and equity’ simply don’t mean what most people think they mean – they have been changed to architect new outcomes. ~ On May 25, 2020, George Floyd, a 46 year old black man, was murdered by Derek Chauvin, a 44 year old white man who was a 19-year veteran of the Minneapolis police department. Chauvin, after apprehending Floyd on the suspicion of possessing a counterfeit $20 bill, had knelt on his neck for over 9 minutes, while Floyd was lying face down and handcuffed in the street - in spite of Floyd’s repeated protests that he couldn’t breathe.51–54 The incident had been filmed by bystanders and caught on security cameras and the following day the footage was made public, resulting in all four officers involved in his death being fired.55 Minneapolis Major Jacob Frey upon seeing the footage of Floyd’s death released a public statement saying that: ‘Being black in America should not be a death sentence.’56 The murder of George Floyd was the catalyst for worldwide protests against police racism and brutality, with protesters calling for greater accountability for police.57,58 In 2016, Heather Mac Donald, the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute,59 gave a talk at Hilldale College in regards to her book The War On Cops.60 In this speech she stated that black on black crime was a far greater threat to black Americans than police violence. She stated that: ‘There is no government agency more dedicated to the proposition that black lives matter than the police,’ and that ‘We have been talking obsessively about alleged police racism over the last 20 years in order to not talk about a far larger problem: black on black crime.’61,62 Then, in April 2017, Mac Donald was invited to give a speech at the Athenaeum at Claremont McKenna College, which resulted in 250 protestors blocking the entrance to the building and disrupting the event with chants of ‘Black Lives Matter.’63 Campus officials, fearing for the safety of students, faculty, staff and guests instead decided to live stream the event.62,64 In her essay for Iconoclast Mac Donald once again explores these themes in relation to the politics of BLM, and the hyper focus on the small number of police killings of unarmed black men. This seems to come about due to a confluence of factors: protestor and political advocacy, institutional support, the media focus which causes an availability heuristic about the prevalence of

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these killings,65§ and a general social unwillingness to confront difficult truths about the crime rate in some black communities. Additionally, writer and commentator Coleman Hughes, who originally stated he was in support of BLM, discusses part of the reason he walked away from the movement in a reprint here of his City Journal article Stories and Data.66 Hughes, whilst acknowledging that police departments have issues with corruption and a lack of accountability, stated that he discovered that the central narrative of BLM is false; that racist cops are killing unarmed black people - from stories and data. He recounts the story of Tony Timpa, a white man who was killed by Dallas police officers in 2016, in almost identical circumstances to George Floyd. Although criminal charges were initially brought against the police officers involved in the Timpa killing, they were later dropped.67 Hughes ends the article by opining that if we can’t lift the national public discourse above where it currently is, we may see repeats of the George Floyd riots occurring regularly in the future.66 ~ In early June 2021, Bret Weinstein began making claims about the antiparasitic drug ivermectin, stating it was a highly effective prophylaxis and treatment for COVID19. On his DarkHorse Podcast he hosted Dr Pierre Kory (M.D) from the Front Line COVID19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCA),69 in an episode titled COVID, Ivermectin, and the Crime of the Century, where Weinstein and his guest stated that ivermectin was ‘99% effective’ in treating COVID19, and that if the drug were distributed widely it would ‘end the pandemic in a month.’70 Weinstein and Kory then appeared on the Joe Rogan Experience Podcast where they argued that pharmaceutical companies were supressing the data on the effectiveness of ivermectin as they wanted to bring new designer drugs onto the market rather than using relatively cheap, repurposed drugs to treat COVID19.71 In the weeks following the episode of Rogan’s podcast there was a massive increase in demand for ivermectin as a COVID19 treatment, with the CDC reporting that 88,000 prescriptions were written in a single week in mid-august compared to 15,000 in the week prior to the podcast.72,73 This was in spite of a trial by Edward Mills of McMasters § John McWhorter discussed this in his Quillette article Racist Police Violence Reconsidered where he states that the media creates an availability heuristic; a cognitive bias that involves people thinking phenomena is more prevalent based on their ability to recall examples of the phenomena.

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University conducted in Brazil, that was larger than all other ivermectin trials put together, showing that ivermectin’s benefits in treating COVID were too small to detect.72,74 Weinstein also interviewed Steve Kirsch and Dr Robert Malone, who was touted as being the inventor of mRNA vaccine technology, in an episode of The DarkHorse Podcast titled How to Save the World in Three Easy Steps.75 In this episode Weinstein’s guests made a series of claims about the safety of the vaccines, including that the spike protein produced by the vaccines was cytotoxic and that the transmembrane domain, which is supposed to anchor the spike protein to a localised site, fails, and the spike protein is then distributed throughout the body and accumulates in the ovaries, bone marrow etc.75 The podcast was then taken down by Youtube, who were enforcing their COVID-19 medical misinformation policy.76 The podcast was also subject to a rebuttal published in Quillette authored by Claire Berlinski and Yuri Deigin, who sought to address misinformation about the effectiveness of ivermectin and the safety of the vaccines.77 There was a response to the article from Weinstein and Heying on their podcast78 and a war of words between Quillette editor Claire Lehmann and Weinstein on Twitter.79–82 Sam Harris, a friend of Weinstein, interviewed Eric Topol, who is a professor of molecular medicine at The Scripps Research Institute, on an episode of his podcast titled A Contagion of Bad Ideas, where Topol characterised Weinstein’s position on mRNA vaccines as ‘Totally irresponsible. It’s reckless. It’s sick. It casts unnecessary doubt... It’s taking people who want to believe in a conspiracy, or who don’t know what to believe, and making vaccines look like they are intended to harm. With no evidence whatsoever.’83 Youtube demonetized Weinstein and Heying’s channel due to their claims about ivermectin, and they subsequently moved their broadcasts to Odysee; an alternative video sharing platform.84 In a conversation conducted on October 14, 2021 for Iconoclast, I spoke with Eric Topol and we discussed the research on ivermectin, the Delta variant, and the claims made on the episode of The DarkHorse Podcast featuring Dr Robert Malone. In regards to ivermectin we discussed issues in relation to power and experimental design, as well as the fraudulent studies that had to be excluded from the meta-analysis. Topol also restated his belief that the views expressed on The DarkHorse Podcast constitute wilful disinformation about ivermectin and COVID19 vaccines and have, to some extent, led to the increase vaccine hesitancy currently occurring in the US.

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~ This book contains some of the most important ideas that have shaped the current culture wars. It is not, however, a story about left versus right, or ‘antiwoke’ versus ‘woke.’ It is a book about the cultural transmission of ideas, and how we converse with one another. Eric Weinstein coined the term Intellectuals of the Dark Web (IDW)85 to describe an informal group of ideologically and politically disparate thinkers that now include Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson, Bret Weinstein, Ben Shapiro, Douglas Murray and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who have come together and found common ground in their opposition to identity politics and cancel culture. They have also come together to thresh it out in the realm of ideas. However, with Sam Harris handing in his ‘imaginary membership to this imaginary organization’86 due to some members extending ‘the principle of charity’ to Trump in regards to his claims of voter fraud, the IDW seems to have disintegrated.87 So, are our political and ideological differences too incommensurate to allow us to cross the divide, and has COVID19 shown us that some ideas are too dangerous to discuss? We live in the age of social media, the advent of which has led to the mass democratization of opinion, which makes it increasingly difficult for many to discern truth from error.88 On social media, people seem divided; civility is low, and everything is hyperpartisan. The old gatekeepers; the traditional media, with their inherent flaws and biases, are receding into the distance and are almost gone – trust in institutions is low. The voice of one may now be broadcast and influence countless others, regardless of the veracity of the claims. We are in a double bind: any moderation can be viewed as cancellation; of censorship and suppression of free speech – and invite the descent into conspiratorial thinking. So, what if I told you that the only way out of this is to continue to have these conversations? What if, all we have left, is to try and speak to one another? And to listen. Mark Halloran Ph.D February 2, 2022

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15. Best of Evergreen. Student Takeover of Evergreen State College.; 2017. Accessed January 29, 2022. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bO1agIl Llhg 16. Fadiman A. All My Pronouns: How I learned to live with the singular they. Harpers Mag. 2020;August 2020. Accessed December 31, 2021. https:// harpers.org/archive/2020/08/all-my-pronouns-the-singular-they/ 17. Herrnstein RJ, Murray CA. The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. Free Press; 1994. 18. Information on Charles Murray Visit. Middlebury. Accessed January 26, 2022. https:// www.middlebury.edu / newsroom / information-on-charlesmurray-visit 19. Gee T. How the Middlebury Riot Really Went Down. POLITICO Magazine. Accessed January 26, 2022. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/ 05/28/how-donald-trump-caused-the-middlebury-melee-215195 20. #73 — Forbidden Knowledge. Sam Harris. Accessed January 26, 2022. https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/73-forbiddenknowledge 21. Nisbett ET Kathryn Paige Harden, and Richard E. Charles Murray is once again peddling junk science about race and IQ. Vox. Published May 18, 2017. Accessed January 30, 2022. https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/5/18/ 15655638/charles-murray-race-iq-sam-harris-science-free-speech 22. Klein E. Sam Harris, Charles Murray, and the allure of race science. Vox. Published March 27, 2018. Accessed January 26, 2022. https://www.vox. com / policy-and-politics / 2018/3/27 / 15695060/sam-harris-charles-murrayrace-iq-forbidden-knowledge-podcast-bell-curve 23. Klein E. The Sam Harris-Ezra Klein debate. Vox. Published April 9, 2018. Accessed January 26, 2022. https://www.vox.com/2018/4/9/17210248/samharris-ezra-klein-charles-murray-transcript-podcast 24. Wilby P. Beyond the Flynn effect: new myths about race, family and IQ? The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/sep/27/james-flynn -race-iq-myths-does-your-family-make-you-smarter. Published September 27, 2016. Accessed January 30, 2022. 25. James Flynn : Free Speech and Universities | troublemag. Accessed January 30, 2022. https:// www.troublemag.com / james-flynn - free-speech - anduniversities/ 26. Ayaan Hirsi Ali: “If you disagree with the left, you’re punished.” New Statesman. Published September 9, 2021. Accessed January 27, 2022. https://www.newstatesman.com/encounter/2021/09/ayaan-hirsi-ali-if-youdisagree-with-the-left-youre-punished 27. The AHA Foundation - Founded by Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Published October 18, 2018. Accessed January 30, 2022. https://www.theahafoundation.org/ 28. Brandeis Cancels Plan to Give Honorary Degree to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Critic of Islam - The New York Times. Accessed January 27, 2022. https://www. nytimes.com/2014/04/09/us/brandeis-cancels-plan-to-give-honorary-degreeto-ayaan-hirsi-ali-a-critic-of-islam.html

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29. Hunt E. Ayaan Hirsi Ali cancels Australian tour citing security concerns. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/apr/03/ayaan-hirsi-alicancels-australian-tour-citing-security-concerns. Published April 3, 2017. Accessed January 27, 2022. 30. ayaan-hirsi-ali.jpg | Southern Poverty Law Center. Accessed January 30, 2022. https://www.splcenter.org/file/10036 31. Sign the Petition. Change.org. Accessed January 30, 2022. https://www. change.org/p/southern-poverty-law-center-remove-maajid-nawaz-and-ayaan -hirsi-ali-from-the-splc-s-list-of-anti-muslim-extremists 32. Ali AH. Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women’s Rights. HarperCollins; 2021. 33. 44. The Video Which Made Jordan Peterson Famous.; 2016. Accessed January 27, 2022. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-nvNAcvUPE 34. Channel 4 News. Jordan Peterson Debate on the Gender Pay Gap, Campus Protests and Postmodernism.; 2018. Accessed January 26, 2022. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMcjxSThD54 35. Jordan Peterson Is Not Entirely Wrong about “Postmodern Neo-Marxism.” Areo. Published January 9, 2020. Accessed January 30, 2022. https:// areomagazine.com / 2020 / 01 / 09 / jordan-peterson-is-not-entirely-wrongabout-postmodern-neo-marxism/ 36. Gad Saad. Full Testimony at the Canadian Senate (THE SAAD TRUTH_421).; 2017. Accessed January 30, 2022. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=4WqryoEJqZg 37. Jordan B Peterson. 2017/05/17: Senate Hearing on Bill C16.; 2017. Accessed January 26, 2022. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnIAAkSNtqo 38. Jordan Peterson and Bill C-16: What does each side argue? Accessed January 26, 2022. https://www.globalviews360.com/articles/jordan-peterson-and-bill -c-16-what-does-each-side-argue 39. Canada: Senate Passes Landmark Transgender Rights Bill. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 20540 USA. Accessed January 30, 2022. https:// www.loc.gov / item/global-legal-monitor/2017-09-11/canada-senate-passeslandmark-transgender-rights-bill/ 40. The Parasitic Mind - How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense. Regnery Publishing. Accessed January 22, 2022. https://www.regnery.com /9781684512294/the-parasitic-mind 41. Sam Harris. There’s an important debate to have about the wisdom of kicking Trump off @twitter. I still believe that it should have happened years ago and that we’ve paid a terrible price for the delay. But for the moment, all I want to say is: Thanks, @jack. @SamHarrisOrg. Published January 9, 2021. Accessed January 30, 2022. https://twitter.com/SamHarrisOrg/status/134770 0391874420736 42. Gad Saad. @SamHarrisOrg Are you going to publicly eat your words regarding supporting that Trump be banned from Twitter? Deontological principles should NEVER be sacrificed at the altar of tribal hate. Whenever you are ready to sit down for a chat, you know where to find me. I don’t need

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apple.com/us/podcast/covid-ivermectin-and-the-crime-of-the/id1471581521 ?i=1000523859023 #1671 - Bret Weinstein & Dr. Pierre Kory.; 2021. Accessed December 14, 2021. https://open.spotify.com/episode/7uVXKgE6eLJKMXkETwcw0D Piper K. The dubious rise of ivermectin as a Covid-19 treatment, explained. Vox. Published September 17, 2021. Accessed January 20, 2022. https:// www.vox.com / future - perfect / 22663127 / ivermectin-covid - treatmentsvaccines-evidence CDC. Cases, Data, and Surveillance. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Published February 11, 2020. Accessed January 17, 2022. https:// www.cdc.gov / coronavirus /2019-ncov/covid-data/investigations-discovery/ hospitalization-death-by-race-ethnicity.html August 6, 2021: Early Treatment of COVID-19 with Repurposed Therapies: The TOGETHER Adaptive Platform Trial (Edward Mills, PhD, FRCP). Rethinking Clinical Trials. Published August 11, 2021. Accessed February 1, 2022. https:// rethinkingclinicaltrials.org / news / august - 6 - 2021 - earlytreatment-of-covid-19-with-repurposed-therapies-the-together-adaptiveplatform-trial-edward-mills-phd-frcp/ Bret Weinstein | DarkHorse Podcast: How to save the world, in three easy steps. on Apple Podcasts. Apple Podcasts. Accessed December 14, 2021. https://podcasts.apple.com/si/podcast/how-to-save-the-world-in-three-easysteps/id1471581521?i=1000525032595 COVID-19 medical misinformation policy - YouTube Help. Accessed February 1, 2022. https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9891785?hl= en Looking for COVID-19 ‘Miracle Drugs?’ We Already Have Them. They’re Called Vaccines. Quillette. Published July 6, 2021. Accessed December 14, 2021. https://quillette.com/2021/07/06/looking-for-covid-19-miracle-drugswe-already-have-them-theyre-called-vaccines/ Bret Weinstein | DarkHorse Podcast: #87: We Must Drive this Virus to Extinction (Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying DarkHorse Livestream) on Apple Podcasts. Apple Podcasts. Accessed February 1, 2022. https:// podcasts.apple.com / au / podcast/87-we-must-drive-this-virus-to-extinctionbret-weinstein/id1471581521?i=1000528685411 Claire Lehmann. You may dislike the style and tone of the article we published, but that does not change the simple fact that what @HeatherEHeying and @BretWeinstein have been saying regarding vaccines & COVID is both faulty & irresponsible https://t.co/FGESXXfyrr. @clairlemon. Published July 8, 2021. Accessed February 1, 2022. https://twitter.com/clairlemon/status/1413021640250707968 Claire Lehmann. @BretWeinstein @colwight You are *not* qualified to contradict the published research via podcast. If you are so sure of your expertise and the veracity of your claims then follow the normal scientific process. Write your hypotheses down, test them, & share your method with

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the world. @clairlemon. Published July 4, 2021. Accessed February 1, 2022. https://twitter.com/clairlemon/status/1411539943285944328 Claire Lehmann. @BretWeinstein @HistoryBound @mtaibbi Don’t patronise me. Your rhetoric is fuelling vaccine hesitancy, and you know it. You need to fix what you are creating. @clairlemon. Published July 3, 2021. Accessed February 1, 2022. https://twitter.com/clairlemon/status/141122954 6968350722 Claire Lehmann. @BretWeinstein Have you told your legion of followers that the ivermectin hype was based on fraud yet? @clairlemon. Published November 9, 2021. Accessed January 29, 2022. https://twitter.com/ clairlemon/status/1458165606960664577 Sam Harris. A Contagion of Bad Ideas: A Conversation with Eric Topol (Episode #256).; 2021. Accessed January 20, 2022. https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=7jQfNzk_CFk Merlan A. The Ivermectin Advocates’ War Has Just Begun. Vice. Published July 1, 2021. Accessed January 20, 2022. https://www.vice.com/en/article /y3d5gv/ivermectin-covid-treatment-advocates-rogan-weinstein-hecker Weiss B, Winter D. Opinion | Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/08/opinion /intellectual-dark-web.html. Published May 8, 2018. Accessed January 20, 2022. Critical Thoughts. Sam Harris Cancels His Membership To The Intellectual Dark Web.; 2021. Accessed February 1, 2022. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=vPc7r9LRxBE Freedom Pact. Why Did Sam Harris Leave The Intellectual Dark Web? | Bret Weinstein & Dave Rubin Respond.; 2021. Accessed February 1, 2022. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4SagZ06ecc Olaniran B, Williams I. Social Media Effects: Hijacking Democracy and Civility in Civic Engagement. Platf Protests Chall Networked Democr. Published online February 27, 2020:77-94. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-365257_5

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On COVID19 and Times of Plague Based on an interview with Nicholas A. Christakis Your arrow for my tears – Homer, The Iliad Mark Halloran: I want to focus on your book Apollo’s Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live,1 but I did want to speak to you first about the culture of Yale. I know that you’ve been prominent in the free speech debates, both at Harvard and Yale, and you were involved in a fairly notorious incident a few years ago, in relation to Halloween costumes.2 And recently, there was a speech given at Yale by a visiting psychiatrist which was about ‘The Psychopathic Problem of the White Mind.’3 In terms of the cultural moment that we’re having, what is your best explanation of this? Nicholas Christakis: First of all, I would say that elite universities in rich democracies, like the United States, are, in some ways, a hallmark of our civilization. They are remarkable institutions that are worth protecting and worth preserving. And their mission, in my view, is the preservation, production and dissemination of knowledge. That’s the mission of the university; that’s what it’s supposed to do. That’s not the mission of courts. That’s not the mission of the legislature. That’s not the mission of the market. All those institutions have other missions. But the mission of a university is the preservation, production and dissemination of knowledge. Therefore, we want a set of circumstances that optimizes the furtherance of that mission. And that requires, in my view, a deep commitment to classic liberalism, which involves a set of principles that, among other things, address the importance of free and open expression. And it’s not just about protecting individuals from the actions of the institution or protecting citizens from the actions of the government, as the first amendment does in the United States. It’s about the affirmative effort of everyone in a university to create a culture

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in the university (or in the wider society), that privileges free and open expression. That is the sort of culture that universities should strive for. If you’re so confident in the truth of your ideas: engage with your opponents and win the battle of ideas. Don’t silence them. And this, of course, goes back to the classic J.S. Mill, statement: ‘He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.’ * How can you actually be sure in your beliefs if you do not engage with people who oppose your beliefs? In fact, your opponents are providing you a service. This is why, for example, in the martial arts, you bow to your opponents before you spar. You’re grateful to them for helping you become better. That’s how you become better - by sparring with them. And, I would suggest, the same goes with intellectual sparring. The fundamental commitment, in my view, at any serious university - and in fact, my belief is that this commitment is also wise and helpful for our broader society - is to free and open expression. This is crucial to the production of knowledge. Universities do basic research for generations. The fact that we have mRNA vaccines that are available to us right now to face the COVID19 pandemic, which has depended on 30 years of basic research that came before it, is an illustration of this. It is not only because we are rich countries. It is also because we want scientists to seek and speak the truth. Unlike what happens sometimes in other authoritarian countries, as in Stalinist Russia, or nowadays in Communist China, where oftentimes, scientists there will be shut up. Their speech about what they’re seeing or discovering is sometimes quashed. So those commitments to free expression are crucial to our ability to be rich and powerful, to produce knowledge that ultimately drives our ability to be wealthy and strong. So, these are deep and fundamental and important commitments to free and open expression that we should have in our institutions and in our broader society. Incidentally, I discussed the reasons and ways we evolved to learn from each other, precisely to derive such benefits, in my book Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society.4 Therefore, with respect to the specific example you gave of this visiting professor who was invited to campus at Yale, and I think the title of her talk, was this something like ‘the psychopathic tendency of the white mind?’ The Psychopathic Problem of the White Mind.

* From John Stuart Mill’s 1859 essay On Liberty.

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Yes, I myself would not have invited her to come to give a talk. I would regard that title, and the description of the talk, as ideological. But I would not prohibit anyone else on campus from inviting such a person to give such a talk, nor, if such a person were invited, would I oppose her speaking. I would not say she should be disinvited either, after having been invited in the first place. However, I would push back powerfully at her ideas, which I reject as racist and as incoherent. And I would ask: why would an institution whose fundamental mission is the preservation, production, and dissemination of knowledge, why is this institution devoting so much effort to an ideological project such as instantiated by this person? I would regard that ideological project as being separate from the fundamental mission of the university. Universities during the McCarthy era had the problem of conservatism and also almost criminalizing left-wing thought. There was a right-wing suppression of free speech, but the issue for you is that you’re trying to create a dialogue. It’s been described in lots of different ways in terms of postmodernist thought, identity politics etc. Really, when I watched you in the video with the students, where you’re trying to communicate with them, it occurred to me that you’re trying to create a dialogue and dialectic, and they were more interested in a monologue. Yes, well, I generally do not discuss the events of 2015,5 because they are so in the past now. My commitment to liberalism is very long standing, and goes back decades. But I’m politically on the left. Of course, not that that matters. But I think of myself as a classical liberal. But then you look at the danger of this illiberalism in society because you brought it up in your book Apollo’s Arrow. You talked about hospital administrations and bureaucracies trying to silence healthcare workers. I once spoke with the late intelligence researcher, James Flynn, and I said to him, I wonder if the university has ever stably been a place of free expression and thought? Like all institutions, some institutions fail to honor their fundamental commitments. For example, the judiciary is supposed to be an impartial arbiter of justice. But we know that sometimes judges are corrupt. It’s less common in our society than in some others, but even in our society, this happens. So, we have the fundamental commitment of equal justice under law. But any institution is capable of failing to honor its commitments. And so, you’re

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absolutely right that universities do, from time to time, fall down on their commitments. And as you pointed out, this occurred during the McCarthy era. But I would hope they would not. And I think it requires vigilance on the part of the citizenry and on the part of responsible leaders of our institutions to honor those commitments. But it’s difficult. The reason we create principles is so that, when we’re stressed, we don’t have to act impulsively. We are guided by principles. It relates back to your work in terms of being quite optimistic in terms of human nature. Where you discuss the qualities of compassion, love, collaboration you state that these are fundamental human qualities. But I always feel as though they’re tied to their opposites: cruelty, hate, xenophobia. Yes, but here’s the thing: the benefits of a connected life must have outweighed the costs. Otherwise, we would have evolved to live as isolated individuals. So, you’re absolutely right. When I come near you, I expose myself to the risk of violence, cruelty, and mendacity. And that’s true. But equally when I come near you, I expose myself to the benefits of being connected. I can learn from you, you can teach me, we can work together and cooperate to achieve greater objectives. The way I discuss this in Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society is similar to what Steven Pinker is saying. In the last 200 years, driven by technological advances in Europe (such as the steam engine) that were in turn built upon scientific discoveries related to physics and chemistry, and coupled with a shift in ideological commitments (such as those advanced by the Enlightenment philosophers on the equality of human beings and on the importance of democratic principles – which also, to be fair, were not uniformly applied everywhere, but were, nevertheless, the principles), the world has become a more peaceful, healthy, and rich place. Driven by technology and philosophy, the world became better. And Steven is right about that. But my argument is that we do not necessarily need to rely on historical and technological forces to provide an account of a good life and why human beings are capable of living in peace with each other. What I’m arguing is that more powerful, more ancient, deeper forces are at work propelling a good society. And in fact, the arc of our evolutionary history is long, but it bends towards goodness.

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So, what I look at is our history over the last 300,000 years, not just the last 300 years. How has evolution shaped us and endowed us with these wonderful qualities? For example, the capacity for friendship. Like other animals, we mate with each other. But we also befriend each other: we form long-term, non-reproductive unions with other members of our species who are unrelated to us. This is exceedingly rare in the animal kingdom. We do it. Certain other primates do it; elephants do it; and certain whale species do it. In addition to that, we cooperate with unrelated individuals; we’re altruistic to people who are not our kin. Sometimes we work together in order to achieve objectives we couldn’t do on our own. And we also learn from each other; we teach each other things, which is at the root of our capacity for culture. This is extremely rare. We have all these wonderful qualities which have been shaped by evolution. My argument is that evolution has shaped a good society – not just history and technology in the last few hundred years. We tend to focus on the Enlightenment as though the Enlightenment is the only wellspring of those ideas. You can find universality of human experience within African philosophy and you can find some of the tenets of the Enlightenment within the Islamic Golden Age. But I would say that the problem is the tendency for humans to form in-groups and out-groups, and we’re very good at collaborating within an in-group, but our tendency is to vilify and to see the out-group as the Other. And this tendency has developed as ethnonationalism. Yes, but I discuss these ideas, again, in Blueprint at length. There’s a fundamental question about whether animosity towards the out-group was actually required for the emergence of cooperation in the in-group. In other words, must we be warlike without in order to be peaceful within? And there’s a lot of debate about this. It’s unclear. Many evolutionary models seem to suggest that ‘Well, no, what’s required at a minimum is indifference to the out-group, not hatred.’ It’s one thing to say ‘Our group is terrific’ and to not care about other groups. That’s completely different than going to war with those groups or burning them in ovens. That’s a completely different kettle of fish. Now I should hasten to add I am not a genetic determinist; nothing I’m saying should suggest that culture and history don’t also play a role in shaping us to be good. But we are social animals and we have been for many hundreds of thousands of years.

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I think we will move on to Apollo’s Arrow. I spoke to Nobel Laureate Peter Doherty,6 and we talked about COVID emerging through zoonotic transfer. † Essentially, in bats, probably to pangolins, or some other sort of intermediate host. Now, the theory which seems to be taken much more seriously, even Dr. Fauci7 has talked about it, is the lab leak hypothesis. And I wondered what you thought of that? In Apollo’s Arrow, I said that, most likely, it was a zoonotic leap, but that we could not exclude the lab leak hypothesis. The consensus among expert geneticists is that this is not an engineered pathogen, nor was it a modified pathogen (though some disagree). The latter possibility is a little harder to be certain about, but it seems very unlikely. Nobody thinks it was a deliberate lab leak, either, by the way. Thus, the competing hypotheses are: did it come from an animal and jump to humans? Or was it an accidental lab leak of a naturally collected pathogen? The latter hypothesis would be that a naturally collected pathogen had been brought to the lab for study and then it escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. If I had to bet, I still think zoonotic leap is more likely. Why? Well because SARS 1, in 2003, was a zoonotic leap, and so we have a nice precedent there. We also know many others zoonoses, from HIV to Zika virus. We know that influenza viruses do this – this is very common. And bats are often an origin of zoonotic diseases. So, I still think that a zoonotic leap is more likely, but we cannot exclude the lab leak hypothesis. There has been some evidence for the lab leak theory, too. There’s been some leaks from the US government that suggest that some healthcare workers were sick in the Wuhan Institute of Virology around the time when we know that the virus might have been leaking.8,9 Whether that’s true or not, who knows? I suspect our intelligence agencies know a lot more than we do. And the Chinese have not acted in a transparent way to dispel the lab leak theory. If it was not a lab leak, what do they have to hide? Why wouldn’t they share more information so we could dispense with that theory? So that is a little suspicious. On the other hand, this has been so politicized and no doubt there is sensitive research being done in this institute, and they no more would like foreigners snooping through their elite research institutes than the Australians or Americans would. Maybe it’s not overly suspicious. In other words, maybe † Zoonotic transfer refers to the transmission of disease from an animal host to a human.

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their failure to comply simply reflects the politicization of this, and ordinary sensitivities about defense technology? I don’t know. I do not find it inconceivable that it’s a lab leak. But I also don’t find it overwhelmingly likely. I think we’ll have to wait to see. I know that when COVID first emerged that the ‘Bat Woman’ of Wuhan, Shi Zhengli, ran the genome on all of the coronaviruses in her lab and was relieved to find that none of them matched.10 Though since then they haven’t been able to detect SARS-CoV-2 to in any bats in the area or any intermediate species. In Apollo’s Arrow you cited a paper by Andersen, which was about the proximal origins of SARS-CoV-2.11 You stated ‘Well, it’s unlikely to be a recombinant construct; a genetically modified construct, because of random mutations.’ But then later there was a rejoinder to that paper, which looked at all of these really unusual features to SARS-CoV-2, one of them being that usually the spike protein is a mutational hotspot.12 I wondered if that information as well as the information about researchers from the Wuhan Institute becoming sick on November 19, mysteriously, starts to lean it another way? No, I don’t think so. Not yet. I mean from what’s publicly available, I still think that, more likely than not, it was a zoonotic leap. And I have colleagues who have been to Wuhan and vouch for the care shown there. But it’s impossible at present to exclude the lab leak hypothesis. And there are some leaks of intelligence information that are relevant, as I noted earlier. My own lab has used some data we have on mobility in China, based on cell phone tracking, to trace back when we thought patient zero first would have occurred.13 We put the earliest date of patient zero in early October. So, who knows how that fits in with the other information that’s publicly available? If these people were sick in the Wuhan lab in mid-November, then maybe they got it from somewhere else? I don’t know. Now, it’s exceedingly unlikely that the people working in a virology lab were infected with the virus from some non-virology lab source. It strains credulity. But the point I’m making is that we don’t know. I don’t think it’s irresponsible to ask. I think we do need to ask. And I want to de-politicize this. I’m willing to go where the data leads. If, in the end, it winds up being a lab leak, so be it. If it winds up being a zoonotic leap, so be it. There is a truth out there, and, hopefully, we will find it.

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Is it part of the issue of silencing that we talked about earlier? Because it was originally written off. I know Bret Weinstein spent a lot of time on it,14 but originally it was written off as sort of just a conspiracy theory. I don’t know who wrote it off as a conspiracy theory. I thought the idea that it was an engineered virus that was deliberately leaked struck me as extremely unlikely from the beginning, for obvious reasons. The Chinese couldn’t control it. And it would be a really stupid virus to engineer if you were going to engineer a weapon; you would prefer that it kill young people, not the elderly. So, there was a whole host of reasons that that struck me as nuts. But the lab leak theory didn’t strike me as nuts. It’s not nuts; it’s possible. It’s just not likely, in my view, given the current data. The mechanism that I could think of was taking a coronavirus, and passaging it through human cell lines. That might optimize a virus to us. It’s quite likely that the Chinese were doing such gain-of-function research in Wuhan, as do we. Every rich nation that has a bioweapons program is doing such research. Or forget bioweapons; people do that kind of work even for non-weapons type research. I think it is likely they were doing such work. There was a US Senate inquiry recently with Dr. Fauci. The Obama administration had actually ceased gain-of-function research with coronavirus in 2014.15 And Fauci had written in a paper in the American Scientific Institute stating that we need to do this research.16 Even though it’s dangerous, it could possibly trigger a pandemic – the research benefits outweigh the potential costs.17 And then he re-instigated this research in 2017. First of all, in that recent testimony, by Fauci, I think he was very careful to talk about NIH (National Institutes of Health). You think that the American military is not doing gain-of-function research? I’m sure that cannot be true. I don’t know for a fact, but I seriously doubt that. Second, the fact that we were giving money to scientists in Wuhan is totally normal and correct. In fact, it is precisely because that act was politicized, and that funding was stopped, that we’d lost one of our best contacts and access to what was actually happening in that lab. Think how great it would have been if we had collected even more bat information and more viral species information.

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That particular scientist ‡ who the Trump administration demonized, who had actually gone to these caves in China and had really good bilateral relations with Chinese scientists,18 he was exactly the sort of person we need in our current situation, trying to figure out the origin of the virus. I myself have many Chinese colleagues who are terrific scientists and who I have good relationships with. We want those kinds of connections. In fact, during the peak of the Cold War, even though America and Russia were at odds, both nations saw it as useful to have their physicists talking to each other, or have cultural institutions and their artists talking to each other. This type of human or other professional interaction is valuable. And we see the value when now we’ve completely lost any ability to obtain samples of RNA in the case of this virus, from China. So, I don’t agree, I don’t think there’s anything suspicious at all about the fact that we were funding research in China. It was in our own national interest. And we do that with all kinds of countries for all kinds of topics. I don’t know if we were funding gain-of-function research in an actual bioweapons lab in Wuhan. I think that’s a misrepresentation. I’m not sure about this, but my understanding is that we were supporting some research, and that also, elsewhere in that same Institute, they were doing gain-offunction work. 200 researchers at the Cambridge Working Group came out against this type of gain-of-function research in 2014.19,20 Obviously, we probably shouldn’t be doing gain-of-function research with coronaviruses? Why coronaviruses? What about Ebola? Or other pathogens? There are many deadly viruses. So, any of those viruses? Should we be doing that type of research or doing it under very, very specific conditions? This is not my area of virology, this level of detail. Although, for what it’s worth, when I was 20, I worked in a virology lab in Paris, under Jorge Peries, and we studied coronaviruses and other enzootic viruses. On one hand, I generally would be against restricting research. I would not proscribe any particular topic. In fact, if anything, that goes against my liberal principles. I ‡ Peter Daszak is the president of research organization EcoHealth Alliance which partnered with the Wuhan Institute of Virology. NIH cancelled funding for EcoHealth in April 2020 after president Donald Trump told a reporter the US would no longer fund the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

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don’t want rules that prohibit scientific inquiry. On the other hand, we can discuss certain limits. So yes, if you’re asking me, as a citizen, do I want gainof-function research with viruses done at every Tom, Dick, and Harry’s laboratory? No, absolutely not. There was concern when the Wuhan Institute of Virology was built; there was a paper, I think, in the journal Science or Nature that expressed concern that this Biosafety Level 4 (BSL-4) laboratory in China was not, in fact, up to international standards of safety.21 There were some scientists, years ago, who were concerned about this. Of course, you can easily imagine that the Chinese would, in their own national interest, want to build these labs just like the Iranians want to build nuclear weapons. And we would want ideally to try to help them to do it safely, just like how we helped the Russians decommission their nuclear weapons after the collapse of the Soviet Union. It’s in our interest to do that. I think that once you’re funding particular types of gain-of-function research ... Hold on; we have not established that. I seriously doubt that American money was being used to fund gain-of-function research in Wuhan. Do you have an article you could show me where it says that? That was the allegation in the senate inquiry.22 That was a deceptive allegation, if I’ve understood it correctly. I think what he was saying is: ‘This institute is doing gain-of-function research,’ and distinctly ‘You are funding the collection of bat species.’ But those are different topics, right? I doubt we are sending American dollars to foreign adversaries to fund the development of weapons. I can’t imagine that was being done. Is gain-of-function research with viruses about weaponization? Gain-offunction research doesn’t have to be about the development of a weapon. It can be just about understanding the virus can’t it? You create different constructs to try and get a better understanding of the virus. Yes, and the particular senator § who was interacting with Fauci is not particularly reliable on many of these topics. I think he is extraordinarily § Senator Rand Paul cross examined Dr Fauci during the senate inquiry.

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politicized when he discusses such matters.23 I do not believe he was seeking the truth in that setting. I think he was trying to make political points. And I have very low regard for that – either on the right or on the left. For example, the same senators voted down a proposal to have a commission to investigate the truth of the insurrection on January the 6th at our Nation’s Capital. These individuals are not truth seeking, which is what I regard as important. Whether you’re on the right or the left, politically, is of little interest to me. But I am deeply interested in a commitment to the truth. This particular man is not, in my judgement, very credible on this particular point. In Apollo’s Arrow you were talking about delays in action when coronavirus migrated into the US. Yes, we were very slow in responding as a nation, and here I do think a lot of responsibility falls at the White House. Of course, many Democratic governors were incompetent as well, including Governor Cuomo in New York. I, along with a number of other epidemiologists, were releasing public statements to abort the St. Patrick’s Day parade in March of 2020, for instance. They were having a parade in New York City in March! And the mayor of New York is a Democrat, and so is the governor. So, I think there was a lot of incompetence in leaders and a lot of denial, both in leaders and in the citizenry. I discussed this in Apollo Arrow, because this is not new. Denial is a feature of plagues and has been for thousands of years. But here’s the thing: I expect more from our government. The fact is that the White House was engaged in willful mendacity, which we now know, because we know the National Security Agency was briefing the President from back in November of 2019 about this.24 And the fact that the President politicized this to the point where the President was focused on how the pandemic was going to affect his election prospects, and for many, many months, as I document in the book, was making preposterous statements - this was very concerning to me. He made countless statements known to any epidemiologist that were just wrong: ‘Oh, it’s going to go away, it’s going to go away, it’s going to go away.’25 Nobody with any knowledge of respiratory pandemics thought it was going to go away. Or the president was saying that you could inject yourself with bleach and other such crazy statements.26 And these are highly irresponsible statements coming from the President of the United States. So, absolutely, he can be held to account for this incompetence.

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I think that, from the moment the virus was loose in our species and arrived on our shores, and I said this in 2020, we were going to lose a couple of hundred thousand lives. But, through our incompetence, we have lost many more hundreds of thousands of lives than we needed to lose. We did not need to be so incompetent. And some people say, ‘Well, other leaders in other countries were equally bad.’ Okay, fine. I’m not particularly jingoistic, but I think the United States of America should be better. I don’t think we should be just as incompetent as other countries. Your prediction was, which is sort of coming to fruition, somewhere between 500,000 and a million deaths. I wonder whether this is the consequence of a post-truth President to some extent? Yes. I made that prediction when I finished writing Apollo’s Arrow in August of 2020, when there were still only something like 120,000 deaths. I think some of the excess deaths, beyond the minimum (that is, several hundred thousand deaths), can rightly be blamed on the incompetence of the previous administration. I think that’s true. But I don’t just think it’s just the far-right that has these kind of post-truth commitments. It’s the far-left as well, and this goes back to the point you were making earlier in our conversation. My primary devotion is to the truth. Of course, I also am a political person; I vote, I donate to causes, I have political beliefs. But when it comes to questions about the world, I try, insofar as I possibly can, to see the truth, not to come to it with an ideological commitment – to the extent that I can. And this is also why I like to argue with people about scientific topics, because that brings you closer to the truth, in my view. We started this conversation about the woman on the far-left discussing “the problem of the psychopathic white mind.” And now there are the coronavirus denialists, on the far-right. These people, all of them, are not dealing with the reality. They’re just not. In terms of reality, if you look at China, 1.4 billion people, and the last report that I saw, it was just over 4000 deaths from COVID19. They’ve basically come out and said, ‘Well, this is the strength of the Communist government.’ We’re enacting Maoist principles to keep people safe. Look at the propaganda victory we’ve handed them! New Zealand did well; some of the other island nations did well; South Korea did well; Australia has done well.

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But there are only 5 million people in New Zealand. You have to take into account the population size as well, in terms of how you analyze this. Of course. These are rich island nations; and other similar nations, like Iceland and England, did not do well. I think New Zealand acted swiftly and got lucky. I think Australia has done really well too. And I think a lot will now be down to how rapidly the Aussies and the Kiwis can vaccinate their populations; if they bring the same commitment and tenacity to vaccination and achieve very high levels of vaccination, then, when the history of this pandemic is written, Australia and New Zealand will be seen as having done it the best. Now, in China, their vaccines are not as good. But I fear that the Chinese are going to win some propaganda victories. And this may be why, if it was a lab leak, why they’re fighting so hard to avoid that coming out. Because, if it was a lab leak, it would subvert any claims to how great the Chinese system is with respect to coping with the epidemic. You mentioned the St. Patrick’s Day Parade before, and I know in Apollo’s Arrow you wrote about the Black Lives Matter protests, which were sparked by the murder of George Floyd. You used the history of plagues to say that the protests were also due to the anxiety around the pandemic itself; the lockdowns, the unemployment rate, a sense of hopelessness. That drives human behavior. Is it impossible, regardless of how just the cause may be, to justify a protest during a pandemic? I went on record during the protests in the summer of 2020 as saying that I thought it was irresponsible to assemble large groups of people when there was a serious contagion afoot.27 Now, since then, my laboratory has done some research looking at, for example, the voting behavior during the primaries that took place in the spring.28 And we found, surprisingly to me, that, in those elections, turning out to vote did not seem to change the trajectory of the epidemic locally, for a period of a few weeks. Now we think that’s for a number of reasons. People line up outside, and voting is a relatively quiet behavior. You’re not screaming; you’re indoors very briefly. Often, polling places are large, aerated spaces. Prevalence of the virus was also relatively low at the time. I’m not prepared just yet to discuss similar analyses with the protests with the BLM protests or the Trump rallies that we are still doing. We are trying to quantitatively understand: do the assembly of people for political purposes change the trajectory of the epidemic? And I expect my lab to publicly answer that question before too long.

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Still, when the BLM protests were taking place, I and a few other epidemiologists expressed a concern that it was irresponsible to encourage them. Yet still other epidemiologists took a different view.29 And I found their position to be intellectually inconsistent. Two months earlier, they had opposed the right-wing protests, for example, in the Wisconsin State Legislature. And they had opposed Orthodox Jewish weddings that had large numbers of people in New York assembling. They had opposed small family funerals. But then, suddenly, when the cause was different, they thought that was okay. And sometimes they said, ‘Well, these people protesting at BLM events were masked, or they are outdoors.’ And other times they said, ‘Well, this cause is a health-related cause, so this is different and we must weigh the public health considerations.’ So, they said, ‘Yes, we might lose some lives due to the extra deaths from coronavirus, but we’re going to save more lives by mitigating the adverse health implications of the racializing of our healthcare delivery system’. But I did not find those arguments compelling. They were too inconsistent. I don’t think the virus cares why people are assembling; it is just prone to kill us when we do. Now, I think that it’s important to return to a different part of your question, which relates to what was going on with the January 6, right-wing insurrection at the nation’s capital where we had people storming the Capitol.30 Several people died. As I discussed in the book, plagues are a time when people search for meaning. And it’s not hard to imagine why. When death is afoot, when a deadly contagion is circulating, when people are cooped up at home, it gives them time to reflect: what’s the meaning of life? What kind of life do I want for myself? What kind of what kind of society is a good society? People ask these questions. And this search for meaning has been reflected in many phenomena during times of plague for thousands of years. For example, a rise in religiosity is very typical; people become more religious during times of plague.31 And that happened in the United States during this plague, as various surveys showed. Also, plagues change people’s occupational preferences. We’ve seen a boom in applications to medical school, and nursing school during this during this period.32 It also changes people’s attitudes towards their occupation, for example, truckers suddenly see themselves as essential workers; they’re performing a very important function in society, keeping goods moving when everyone else is stuck at home. And it gives many people a kind of connection to their work and the meaning they didn’t previously have.

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My argument about the BLM protests in the summer of 2020 is that they were driven not just by the history of racialized police violence in our country, nor just by the economic hardship that the pandemic imposed, as you mentioned, nor just by the fact that people were at home and idle, but also by a search for meaning. People were trying to say ‘I care about a just society.’ Now fast forward to the right-wing insurrection on January 6, and we see something similar. What struck me about the storming of the Capitol is how few of those people made any attempt to conceal their identity, because they thought what they were doing was good! They did not see a reason for secrecy, nor did they see themselves as undercutting the foundations of our democracy. They saw themselves as engaged in some kind of patriotic act. I think the search for meaning has been affecting our political experience during this pandemic. You touch on the idea that people will view the other side as evil but each side views itself as good. I don’t view any side here as perforce evil. Some people have that belief. I think what we need is healthy political parties, and a spirit of compromise. So, I think we need healthy, fact-based political parties that are engaged in a kind of rough-and-tumble political interaction in our legislatures, and, right now, I see threats, both from the far-left and the far-right, to that kind of political life in our country. And that concerns me. In terms of the racialization of the health care system - I was really interested in this because it seems like a wicked problem to me. Because you’re citing the research in terms of who’s going to be more susceptible, and you were talking about American hospitals where they got to the point where they’re overwhelmed. They’re in a position of approaching battlefield triage. And so certain people based on their demographic are more susceptible and you use the example of men and women. That women because they have 2 X chromosomes produce more progesterone and estrogen, and this may affect ACE2 levels and be protective.33 The point was that you noted that all the research (e.g., the epidemiological research, critical fatality rates) said that black Americans, Hispanics, people in minority groups were at higher risk of fatality from COVID. I wondered whether you’re at this difficult point of triage, where you make a decision about someone, and it ends up being a racialized decision?

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No, you don’t need to perforce take into account race or gender when assigning scarce treatments. And, thankfully, we avoided battlefield triage in this country. To my knowledge, there was no situation in which someone was taken off a ventilator and someone else was put on it. There were cases in Italy where this happened, I think; there was a case of an elderly priest ** who insisted that he be taken off a ventilator and that the ventilator be given to a younger person (and I think he died),34 when Lombardy collapsed in February of 2020.35 To my knowledge, there were no such cases in the US. But many people were talking about it, and all the protocols I saw said that those decisions would, of course, be made on clinical grounds, that is to say, the likelihood of survival, if resources were scarce, and not on demographic grounds. And some people were outraged by this possibility of triage, but I thought that outrage partly reflected an inability in the United States to imagine that resources were not limitless. We’re so used to being such a rich country and have deluded ourselves into thinking that there is never any scarcity or allocation. On the race thing, it’s unclear, and this is a challenging statistical issue. If you take into account the risk of chronic disease and obesity, and income and poverty, after accounting for those features, you will typically find that black people are be no more likely to die than white people. Actually, I have to go further back. There are two distinct issues; there’s the probability of becoming infected, and then, conditional on being infected, the probability of dying. So, there was no doubt that race played a role in the probability of acquiring the virus. For example, because of differences in occupation, on average, across racial and ethnic groups, white people may have been more able to work at home than black people, on average. Therefore, black people were out and about and more likely to encounter the virus.36,37 That’s the first step. The second step is, given that you’re infected, are you or are you not more or less likely to die compared to other infected people of a dissimilar ethnic background? There, the question becomes ‘Well, does that relate intrinsically somehow to your race or ethnicity?38 Or does that instead relate to your body size, or your other illnesses and so on?’39,40 ** The priest was Father Guiseppe Berardelli who refused the respirator when he arrived at hospital as he could not tolerate it.

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This, in turn, goes into an even more deep and complicated question, which is how you see the potentially causal role of race and ethnicity with respect to health. Because, let’s say that, after accounting for whether someone is obese and has diabetes, being black does not affect whether they die from COVID. Someone else might say, ‘Well, no, but that’s how being black causes you to die from COVID!. It is because you’re black that you’re more likely to be mistreated or be in a situation in which you gain weight or whatever else. So, it’s not fair for you to control for that.’ This is a statistical issue and has to do with something called the ‘causal model’ that you have of how race and ethnicity might affect health outcomes. I’m interested in that because I think, like I said, it’s a wicked problem. I understand models that control for extraneous variables. But the issue would be, and critical race theorists would say, that the higher death rate is evidence of a racialized health care system, because if black people or Hispanic people or immigrants are at higher risk of diabetes, obesity or cardiovascular disease, that is due to an intergenerational issue in terms of oppression or stigma and discrimination. You can see how complicated that is? Yes, but I think you’ll have to unpack each step of that reasoning. For example, it’s quite possible that, in the coming months, we may find that being a Republican or being a white evangelical is a risk factor for dying from COVID. In fact, we’re already seeing that, because vaccine uptake is so low in those groups. We made a big push to make sure that we did not exclude minorities and poor people in our society, which was correct in my view. We rightly made a push in our society to make sure that we didn’t have allocation of vaccines that preferentially advantaged any particular ethnic or racial or economic group. But some of the risk groups are not just defined in the ways that you might think. Right now, we have a problem where there’s undervaccination among white evangelical Christians, and Republicans in rural areas.41,42 And my argument would be, we should make an equal push to try to reach those people. I care about all my fellow citizens; I don’t just care about my fellow citizens who share my political views. I care about all human beings and their lives. And I feel so sad for the people who think that the vaccine is a kind of conspiracy of Bill Gates to put in a nano chip that monitors you; those people are deluded, and we need to reach them, and help them to see that it’s in their interest to be vaccinated. And incidentally, in this case, we all benefit when

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more people are vaccinated. It’s in our collective interest to vaccinate as many people as possible. In Apollo’s Arrow you talked about Russian and Chinese bots on social media. You were talking about these governments essentially enflaming racial division in America in relation to the pandemic. But I wonder if it went beyond that, I wonder if a lot of the issues that you see in terms of the culture wars may be also enflamed by this espionage. We know the Russian government has been engaged in in all kinds of shenanigans in our society, one of which has been to support gun rights, for instance. The Russians have been very eager for there to be widespread availability of weapons. We know that they were connected with the National Rifle Association (NRA).43 Apparently, for quite a long time, they’ve been interested in this because they would want us, of course, to be at each other’s throats in a lethal way. So absolutely, our enemies are acting in a way to subvert our ability to work together. Now, nation states have been doing this forever. I wish we were not that way. I would love for us to live in peace among ourselves and with everyone in the world. But I’m not surprised that this type of intervention and misinformation occurs. I think I read that the Chinese were engaged in some kind of misinformation campaign about the Pfizer vaccine.44 I think Russia also tried to do that in Africa during the HIV epidemic, to suggest that it was an American weapons program that started HIV. I suspect our own intelligence agencies also do some such things. I don’t like any of this. But I’m clearly not an apologist for the Russian or Chinese efforts. Not at all. I deplore those efforts. It seems as though when variants emerge in different populations, like the Indian variant, it produces slightly different symptoms. And I wondered whether it’s an interaction between the virus and the lineage of the people that it’s infecting? I’ve seen no evidence of that whatsoever. For example, with respect to the so-called UK variant, India variant, Brazil variant, South Africa variant, and some variants in the United States that have emerged: to my knowledge, these are not related in any material way to the nature of the populations. I think it’s idiosyncratic. What we also see around the world is that, when it comes to certain types of mutations that are advantageous to the virus, the

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virus rediscovers them repeatedly. There’s one particular mutation, it’s called the N501Y.45 These are lineages that have a particular mutation in a particular spot.46 This has been repeatedly discovered by the virus because it’s advantageous to the virus to be able to spread more easily. In other words, the virus is exploring the so-called Darwinian fitness landscape and is trying to find how it can be more infectious, how it can get (so to speak) more of itself to be around in subsequent generations. Over here, it stumbles on this mutation, and then, by convergent evolution, somewhere else, it stumbles on the same mutation. So, we’re seeing the virus, again and again, rediscover certain particular mutations that advantage it. I do not think that this relates to the kinds of things that you were alluding to (though there is some evidence of some modest ethnically based variation in natural immunity to the virus, which I discuss in Apollo’s Arrow, too). As you have more variants, and it’s a fairly stable virus, it’s supposed to become less lethal, isn’t it? In general, the theory is that, with time, pathogens tend to become less lethal, because, from a Darwinian perspective, they don’t ‘want’ to kill us. From the point of view of the virus, if it infects you, sickens you rapidly, and kills you rapidly, then those variants of the virus that do that don’t have as much chance to spread. That was the issue with SARS1 and MERS; that it was too fatal. That was one of their qualities, as I discussed in Apollo’s Arrow, but there were some other interesting biological differences between these various coronaviruses. For example, SARS1 did not have much of a capacity for asymptomatic spread, which was a huge difference with SARS2.47 In the case of SARS1, you could see who was sick and isolate them; but with SARS2 now, people who aren’t manifestly sick are out and about spreading it. In theory, viruses that are too rapidly fatal are bad, like Ebola, for instance. Ebola outbreaks often burn out because it just kills its victims, like a forest fire, just burning intensely, just consuming everything. Whereas, with viruses that are milder, you’re out and about and spreading it. Therefore, the argument is that the mild strains of the virus will come to predominate, and people will be exposed to a mild strain, gain immunity, and then, if they were exposed to a more serious strain, fight it off.

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Now, first of all, it’s important to note that this is a theory. Second, in the short term, the virus can do any damn thing it wants. And right now, what we’re seeing, in the short term, is the emergence of variants, such as Delta, that are in fact more lethal, about 30% deadlier, and also more infectious, about 30 or 40% more so.48 There is a higher R-0 ††, going from about 3 to 4. So, yes, these variants are concerning. But others may soon emerge which are milder. And the thing that I would be most focused on is whether we see evidence that any new variants that are emerging fully evade the vaccines. And so far, we have not seen evidence that there are any variants which materially evade the vaccines, especially the mRNA vaccines, at least not in most people. You must be very surprised by the fast emergence of the vaccines, because in Apollo’s Arrow you’re talking about the Ebola vaccine taking five years. When I wrote the book, in the spring and summer of 2020, there were already 120 vaccine candidates under evaluation and several phase 3 trials. And I discussed all that in the book. I said that, even if the vaccine were to emerge in the first quarter of 2021, it wouldn’t change the course of the epidemic very much. And I explain why in the book, for reasons having to do with herd immunity and so on. The vaccine miraculously did emerge in the last quarter of 2020, about two months earlier than I sort of expected, but not enough to make a big difference in the overall trajectory of the epidemic, in terms of its timing. In the forecasts contained in the book – namely, that the first phase of the pandemic would last into 2022, and that it would be roughly 2024 before we really put the pandemic behind us – this is what I foresaw. These vaccines are amazing; it’s amazing that we’ve been able to develop them; they are definitely very useful and helpful. But whether they are changing the trajectory of the epidemic in the United States, from what it would have been, is a little unclear, because we’re already have 630,000 deaths as you and I speak, and we’re going to have many more – surely above one million excess deaths due to the COVID19 pandemic in the USA before it is all over. So, it’s great that we have the vaccines, and on an individual level, it’s very great. At the population level, I don’t know how many lives will have †† R-0 is the basic reproduction number which is the measure of the transmission potential of a disease.49

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been spared because of the vaccine; it’s probably a very large number, but it’s not like it stopped the epidemic cold or modified its temporal course, in terms of phases of the pandemic, too much. In Apollo’s Arrow you talked about the rapid development of vaccines. Obviously, they usually go through a long period of development and safety trials. Are there still, for you, any concern about not having that longitudinal data in terms of safety? Not really, no. I think about the annual influenza vaccines that we release without randomized controlled trials (RCT) – which is done under a certain provision where we know enough about the biology that we’re not worried that each season’s influenza vaccines did not have a full scale, randomized controlled trial. And with respect to the COVID19 vaccines, we did do phase 3 RCTs. But, perhaps more important, we now know, after the administration of the vaccine to hundreds of millions of people, that they’re exceedingly safe. What we don’t know is whether, after five or ten years, the vaccines would still be seen as so safe. But there’s no way to know that at all, except to wait five or ten years. But, in the meantime, we can rely on basic biology and be confident about safety over the long-term. So, we have no reason to suspect that they would cause problems, we have seen no evidence of material risks in the short term. Therefore, I think one’s risk of death from COVID is much higher than the possible risk of death from some unknown thing that could occur over a very long-time horizon. So, I think these vaccines are very safe. And I use the development of the vaccines, the fact that we humans banded together to make vaccines, as an illustration of our goodness in the book. We human beings have banded together to create this knowledge over decades. And then, acutely over just a few months, thousands of people volunteered for trials, thousands of scientists and doctors from countries all over the world shared information. And I see much evidence that human beings have been acting in keeping with our good nature that we discussed earlier, in relation to my work in Blueprint, where we’ve cooperated. We have been teaching and learning from each other. Furthermore, ironically, in order to confront the pandemic, we banded together to live apart. As you may know about me, I’m optimistic in my personality, and I’m also optimistic about human beings. And so, if you’ll let me, I’ll take the liberty to quote from Albert Camus The Plague. He writes this book in the

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1940s and sets it then in a town in North Africa called Oran that is afflicted by a plague. We think that he had based this on a cholera outbreak in similar towns 100 years earlier, or on the bubonic plague in prior centuries (the book mentions what are called ‘rat falls’ which are typical of bubonic plague). And one of the protagonists in the book is a man by the name of Dr. Rieux. And this is a line from the book that stays with me, because I think that this applies very much to our current predicament, in my view: Dr. Rieux, resolved to compile this chronicle, so that some memorial of the injustice and outrage done them might endure. And to state quite simply, what we learn in time of pestilence, that there are more things to admire in men and women than to despise.

And that’s very much how I see the world: there are more things to admire in us than to despise.

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14. Bret Weinstein | DarkHorse Podcast: Bret Weinstein and Yuri Deigin: Did Covid-19 leak From a Lab? on Apple Podcasts. Apple Podcasts. Accessed January 16, 2022. https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/bret-weinstein-andyuri-deigin-did-covid-19-leak-from-a-lab/id1471581521?i=1000477267706 15. Jr DGM. White House to Cut Funding for Risky Biological Study. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/18/us/white-house-to-cutfunding-for-risky-biological-study.html. Published October 18, 2014. Accessed January 16, 2022. 16. Fauci AS. Research on Highly Pathogenic H5N1 Influenza Virus: The Way Forward. mBio. 2012;3(5). doi:10.1128/mBio.00359-12 17. Markson S. Anthony Fauci backed virus experiments ‘despite pandemic risk.’ The Australian. https://www.theaustralian.com.au/world/anthony-fauci -backed-virus-experiments-despite-pandemic-risk/news-story/3c604681cfcb feda88bac25e372a1b8a. Published May 28, 2021. Accessed January 16, 2022. 18. Subbaraman N. ‘Heinous!’: Coronavirus researcher shut down for Wuhanlab link slams new funding restrictions. Nature. Published online August 21, 2020. doi:10.1038/d41586-020-02473-4 19. Burki T. Ban on gain-of-function studies ends. Lancet Infect Dis. 2018;18(2):148-149. doi:10.1016/S1473-3099(18)30006-9 20. The Cambridge Working Group. Accessed January 16, 2022. http://www. cambridgeworkinggroup.org/ 21. Cyranoski D. Inside the Chinese lab poised to study world’s most dangerous pathogens. Nature. 2017;542(7642):399-400. doi:10.1038/nature.2017.214 87 22. C-SPAN. Complete Exchange between Sen. Rand Paul and Dr. Anthony Fauci.; 2021. Accessed January 16, 2022. https://www.youtube.com/watch ?v=JBqXYpO1QpE 23. Dance A. The shifting sands of ‘gain-of-function’ research. Nature. 2021;598(7882):554-557. doi:10.1038/d41586-021-02903-x 24. News ABC. Intelligence report warned of coronavirus crisis as early as November: Sources. ABC News. Accessed January 16, 2022. https:// abcnews.go.com / Politics / intelligence-report-warned-coronavirus-crisisearly-november-sources/story?id=70031273 25. All of the times President Trump said Covid-19 will disappear. Accessed December 30, 2021. https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2020/10/politics/ covid-disappearing-trump-comment-tracker/ 26. Coronavirus: Outcry after Trump suggests injecting disinfectant as treatment. BBC News. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52407177. Published April 24, 2020. Accessed January 16, 2022. 27. Nicholas A. Christakis. Essay by @JuliaLMarcus & @gregggonsalves re “hypocrisy” re COVID19 & protests is a bit loose in couple of spots, IMHO, but I think it’s thoughtful. I agree with most of it. But a key issue is that protesters impose risks on others, not just themselves. https://theatlantic. com/ideas/archive/2020/06/public-health-experts-are-not-hypocrites/612853

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/45/. @NAChristakis. Published June 12, 2020. Accessed January 17, 2022. https://twitter.com/NAChristakis/status/1271556624164012036 Feltham EM, Forastiere L, Alexander M, Christakis NA. No increase in COVID-19 mortality after the 2020 primary elections in the USA. ArXiv201002896 Stat. Published online October 8, 2020. Accessed January 16, 2022. http://arxiv.org/abs/2010.02896 CNN MS. Over 1,000 health professionals sign a letter saying, Don’t shut down protests using coronavirus concerns as an excuse. CNN. Accessed January 17, 2022. https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/05/health/health-careopen-letter-protests-coronavirus-trnd/index.html Capitol riots timeline: What happened on 6 Jan one year ago? BBC News. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-56004916. Published January 6, 2022. Accessed January 18, 2022. NW 1615 L. St, Washington S 800, inquiries D 20036 U 419 4300 | main202 419 4349 | fax202 419 4372 | media. How COVID-19 Has Strengthened Religious Faith. Pew Research Center’s Religion & Public Life Project. Published January 27, 2021. Accessed January 23, 2022. https://www.pew forum.org / 2021 / 01 / 27/more-americans-than-people-in-other-advancedeconomies-say-covid-19-has-strengthened-religious-faith/ Medical school applicants and enrollments hit record highs; underrepresented minorities lead the surge. AAMC. Accessed January 17, 2022. https://www. aamc.org / news-insights / medical-school-applicants-and-enrollments-hitrecord-highs-underrepresented-minorities-lead-surge Newson L, Manyonda I, Lewis R, Preissner R, Preissner S, Seeland U. Sensitive to Infection but Strong in Defense—Female Sex and the Power of Oestradiol in the COVID-19 Pandemic. Front Glob Womens Health. 2021;2:651752. doi:10.3389/fgwh.2021.651752 ‘Fake news’ aside, friend says priest dead of coronavirus was still a ‘special person.’ Crux. Accessed January 17, 2022. https://cruxnow.com/covid19/2020/03/fake-news-aside-friend-says-priest-dead-of-coronavirus-wasstill-a-special-person Cereda D, Manica M, Tirani M, et al. The early phase of the COVID-19 epidemic in Lombardy, Italy. Epidemics. 2021;37:100528. doi:10.1016/j. epidem.2021.100528 Goldman N, Pebley AR, Lee K, Andrasfay T, Pratt B. Racial and ethnic differentials in COVID-19-related job exposures by occupational standing in the US. PLOS ONE. 2021;16(9):e0256085. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.025 6085 Asfaw A. Racial Disparity in Potential Occupational Exposure to COVID19. J Racial Ethn Health Disparities. Published online August 5, 2021. doi:10.1007/s40615-021-01110-8 CDC. Cases, Data, and Surveillance. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Published February 11, 2020. Accessed January 17, 2022. https:// www.cdc.gov / coronavirus / 2019-ncov/covid-data/investigations-discovery /hospitalization-death-by-race-ethnicity.html

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39. Gupta R, Agrawal R, Bukhari Z, et al. Higher comorbidities and early death in hospitalized African-American patients with Covid-19. BMC Infect Dis. 2021;21(1):78. doi:10.1186/s12879-021-05782-9 40. Yancy CW. COVID-19 and African Americans. JAMA. 2020;323(19):18911892. doi:10.1001/jama.2020.6548 41. Bokemper SE, Gerber AS, Omer SB, Huber GA. Persuading US White evangelicals to vaccinate for COVID-19: Testing message effectiveness in fall 2020 and spring 2021. Proc Natl Acad Sci. 2021;118(49). doi:10.1073/ pnas.2114762118 42. The Red/Blue Divide in COVID-19 Vaccination Rates. KFF. Published September 14, 2021. Accessed January 17, 2022. https://www.kff.org/policywatch/the-red-blue-divide-in-covid-19-vaccination-rates/ 43. Stone P. NRA in crisis: how the gun group became ensnared in the Russia inquiry. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/mar/ 01/nra-russia-investigations-gun-lobby. Published March 1, 2019. Accessed January 17, 2022. 44. Russia, China sow disinformation to undermine trust in Western vaccines: EU | Reuters. Accessed January 17, 2022. https://www.reuters.com/world/ china/ russia - china -sow-disinformation-undermine-trust-western-vaccineseu-report-says-2021-04-28/ 45. Huang H, Zhu Y, Niu Z, Zhou L, Sun Q. SARS-CoV-2 N501Y variants of concern and their potential transmission by mouse. Cell Death Differ. 2021;28(10):2840-2842. doi:10.1038/s41418-021-00846-4 46. Lu L, Chu AWH, Zhang RR, et al. The impact of spike N501Y mutation on neutralizing activity and RBD binding of SARS-CoV-2 convalescent serum. EBioMedicine. 2021;71. doi:10.1016/j.ebiom.2021.103544 47. Lango MN. How did we get here? Short history of COVID-19 and other coronavirus-related epidemics. Head Neck. 2020;42(7):1535-1538. doi:10. 1002/hed.26275 48. Here’s what we know about Delta now, after months spent fighting it. ABC News. https:// www.abc.net.au / news / 2021-09-29/covid-delta-variant-whatthe-science-says/100497804. Published September 28, 2021. Accessed January 17, 2022. 49. Admin. Epidemic theory (effective & basic reproduction numbers, epidemic thresholds) & techniques for analysis of infectious disease data (construction & use of epidemic curves, generation numbers, exceptional reporting & identification of significant clusters). Health Knowledge. Published June 20, 2010. Accessed January 17, 2022. https://www.healthknowledge.org.uk/ public-health-textbook/research-methods/1a-epidemiology/epidemic-theory.

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~ Nicholas A. Christakis, MD, PhD, MPH, is the Sterling Professor of Social and Natural Science at Yale University. His work is in the fields of network science, biosocial science, and behavior genetics. He directs the Human Nature Lab and is the Co-Director of the Yale Institute for Network Science. He was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2006; the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2010; and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2017.

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Postmodernism and the Failure of Moral Triage Based on an interview with Peter Boghossian Mark Halloran: I wanted to start off with the Grievance Studies Affair * and discuss some of the criticisms. And I think that in discussing the criticisms, I feel like we can talk about some of the ideas that don’t really get explored. And I’d be interested to see what you think the heart of the problem is. Peter Boghossian: This is the way I think about it: The Grievance Studies Affair exposed the problem, and Cynical Theories † explains the problem. So, it was point to the problem, corrupt scholarship,1 explain the problem, and now each of us are doing something different. Helen is engaging with people who have been damaged by woke ideology. James Lindsay is more on the front lines, fighting – and he has a nonprofit, New Discourses.2 I’m fully immersed in the culture war in an attempt to change the moral mind. I wanted to talk about the criticisms. The first one: journals with higher impact factors were more likely to reject the papers, and secondly the chances were better if the manuscripts were allegedly based on empirical data.3 They’re two of the most significant ones. The idea, I think, is that there is an issue with peer review across academia. So, there’s a replication crisis in psychology and a similar crisis also occurs within biological sciences. So, I wonder how you respond to that? I think Helen Pluckrose said it best, if you have rats in your house, and

* The Grievance Studies Affair, also known as ‘Sokal Squared.’ The three authors; Peter Boghossian, James A. Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose submitted hoax papers to academic journals in fields such as cultural, queer, race, fat and sexuality studies to determine if they could pass peer review. † Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity (Pluckrose & Lindsay, 2020).

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you’re saying, ‘I have a problem, there’s rats in my house,’ and someone else comes along and says, ‘Well, wait a second, the neighbor’s house has cockroaches,’ that’s totally irrelevant to the fact that you have rats in your house. So, there is a problem in these disciplines. People have known that there’s been a problem in these disciplines for a long time. And to make the criticism that ‘Well, all disciplines have problems so why should we attempt to either intrude upon the academic freedom or do anything about our problem when other people have problems as well?’ Okay, other people have problems, fine. There’s a replication crisis in psychology. Perhaps how you deal with that problem tells you more about whether or not the discipline is based in reality or not, and whether there are actual corrective mechanisms for it. I think there’s a deeper problem in relation to this. Because there’s often the quotation that comes up: ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.’ That’s from Audry Lorde’s 1984 piece. ‡ I think that’s the best way to explain the problem to people. So, if you reject the ideas of science, and you say that these ideas are simply the ideas of white males and therefore they’re problematic, then you have to reject all the ideas that come from that. You have to reject falsification and you have to reject the idea of avoiding tautologies. How do you conduct research? One of the things that folks want to do, it’s called Research Justice §, is to forward certain citations. So, Research Justice involves the forwarding of the citations of non-white men. Black trans females, for example, would be forwarded, whereas white male citations would not. And the problem with that? Or do I actually have to explain that that’s the most insane, fucking deranged idea? But among the problems with that, are that you cut off knowledge and you cut off avenues of potential research; medical research, telecommunications, transportation, etc. It’s one of the most dangerous and pernicious ideas we have now: that your immutable characteristics limit or enable you to have access to the truth. And that idea is a social, cognitive and

‡ The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House (Lourde, 1984). § Research Justice (RJ) is defined as a ‘strategic framework that seeks to transform structural inequities in research.’

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epistemological toxin. Because once you say that, then all of society almost necessarily collapses - you have no common bond. It’s like when folks resort to their lived experience. This has a long pedigree in the literature, but it’s come up now quite a bit. I can’t speak for Australia, but in the US, you hear so many college students say ‘In my lived experience...’ Well, who gives a fuck about your lived experience? I want to know what the data is. What’s the evidence? If there’s a conflict between one’s lived experience and the data, you have to defer to the data. I’d read about postmodernism and social constructionism back in my undergraduate degree, and so I started to read Foucault and I found one place where we really agreed, which is where he says that the methods of the natural sciences such as physics, biology, and chemistry, translate imperfectly to disciplines like the humanities, sociology, and psychology. And so, what has happened with these academic disciplines is they’ve hothouse themselves, they’ve argued amongst themselves with these ideas, in a little bit like what happened to Freudian psychoanalysis. What they were talking about mostly was literature and philosophical ideas that had some truth. But it wasn’t science. Once you uncouple yourself from empiricism, you can start to wander off in multiple directions. So, you can do Gender Studies and call it literature or some type of ethics or philosophy. But I don’t think you can call it research. They call it action research, ** which is a fancy way of saying that this doesn’t universalize; it’s not generalizable, it’s hyper-localized. But I think that the key in understanding these disciplines is that they promote moral ideas, and that it’s what Sokal †† calls fashionable nonsense.4 They are morally fashionable ideas. And if you want to publish a paper in a journal that goes against the zeitgeist, it’s almost impossible. And so, what we have is, and this is funny that this is actually a postmodern notion in and of itself, like a reality tunnel ‡‡; we have a funneling of domains of thought that are untethered to ** Action research is a methodology utilised in the social sciences that seeks to combine research with ‘taking action’ to produce transformative change. †† The physicist Alan Sokal wrote a hoax now known as ‘The Sokal Affair.’ In 1996 Sokal submitted a scholarly hoax to the postmodern cultural studies journal Social Text titled: Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity. ‡‡ Reality tunnel is the theory that each individual interprets the world differently due to experiencing reality through a set of subconscious psychological filters formed from beliefs and experience.

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reality. They’re kind of floating out there, but they’re extremely well layered upon themselves. When I was in the New Atheist movement, I read texts by N.T. Wright. It’s an astonishing exegesis of the Bible and the resurrection of Jesus. But it’s all built upon other people who have these experiences, and it’s layers of self-reinforcing madness. It’s just like an architectonic structure of mass delusion.5 So, what we have in these fields is morally fashionable nonsense. It’s idea laundering.6 And they’re not only informing public policies. When you look at society and the madness we see now, it’s because entire generations of people; probably a full generation and a half, depending on how you want to parse it, have been taught by ideologues. They’ve been taught that certain moral impulses these ideologues have are true. They’re tested on articles and journal materials, and then they get out of college and I think Jordan Peterson has said, five to seven years later, then not only do they go in the workplace, but they ascend in managerial capacity and administrative duty. And the consequence of that is they then institutionalize what they’ve been taught in schools because they think it’s true, but it’s not true. It’s completely untethered to reality. When you’ve talked about this, you’ve talked about it developing from critical theory and postmodernism. The thing that stood out for me from a philosophical perspective was that postmodernism embeds its causal reality within language and culture. That’s one of the reasons why you see—primarily on the left—the idea that if you change the institutions you can change the outcomes. It’s very structuralist, you see that in Saussure. §§ It’s complicated, because there are many variables that go into play. But one of those is with this new phenomenon now. And you mentioned that in the Grievance Studies content, you see a kind of biological denialism. Eric Weinstein posed a fantastic question: ‘When there’s a conflict between gender studies and biology on which side do you err?’ So that’s really a litmus test for this whole thing. When you have a kind of biological denialism, what you have to have instead is a manufactured importance of language, and the institutions that govern the

§§ Ferdinand de Saussure was a Swiss linguist, semiotician and philosopher whose theories laid the foundation for linguistics and stated that the linguistic system in each individual’s brain are constructed by experience.

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structure of society. For example, it’s the opposite of Tim Urban’s idea of an Idea Lab; there’s a concerted effort to control speech. And the idea is that if you can control speech, then you can help control outcomes. This is a sophisticated but hollow notion. If you can’t root something in biology, or you can’t root it in theology, then what are you rooting it in? Well, you can’t root it in anything because that’s postmodernism, right? It’s an incredulity toward meta-narratives. *** It’s a skepticism of a God’s eye view. So, what are you rooting it in? Well, you’re rooting it in power-knowledge, ††† as Foucault calls it, and you’re rooting it in the language people use. And they’ve been incredibly successful with the terms they’ve used: diversity, equity, inclusion, anti-racism. These words simply don’t mean what people think they mean. They’ve been changed to manufacture different outcomes. When I first encountered the idea, it took me a lot of thinking to get out of the solipsism of language. That the only reason that you refer to an object as the thing that it is, is because that’s what your culture and your language has taught you. ‡‡‡ But of course, if you moved across time into a different episteme §§§ or different zeitgeist, it would be completely unfettered, and so that it’s all utterly relative. That’s interesting because when I read Feyerabend Farewell to Reason. **** It’s a play on words: ‘Farewell, fare well to reason.’ French *** Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge formally introduced the term ‘postmodernism’ into the philosophical lexicon. Lyotard asserted that science has tried to distinguish itself from the narrative knowledge of myths and legend, and in fact even displaces the metanarratives of philosophy. Lyotard defines postmodernism as an incredulity to meta-narratives. ††† Foucault (1980) also viewed language as not communicating truth about reality but rather that knowledge only receives its form from power sources within the dominate culture - what he termed pouvoir-savoir - ‘power-knowledge.’ ‡‡‡ Postmodernism is a sociocentric system and a monism, in that it embeds its causal reality in language and culture. This results in a form of solipsism; that is that there is no objective reality knowable due to the constraint of local socio-cultural interactions and language. §§§ In The Order of Things Foucault defines an episteme as being discontinuous between historical periods and incommensurate with one another, with one episteme replacing the other through a mysterious process of quasi-religious and cultural revolution. **** Paul Karl Feyerabend was an Austrian born philosopher of science. He was known for arguing for anarchism in science as a more humanitarian system and his

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postmodernists tell me these ideas translate better in the French, I don’t read French so I’ll take their word for it. But there is unquestionably some truth in the consequences of having captured the meanings of words. I’m very interested in the practical aspect of how we solve this problem. That’s one of the things that FAIR (Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism)7 is doing. It’s headed by Bion Bartning, and I’m a founder and currently on the board of advisors. Bion is trying to reclaim certain terms. I don’t know if it’s going to work, but I’m incredibly sympathetic to that project. He wants to reclaim antiracism, which is currently a ubiquitous term, but I will say that there was a lot of truth to the idea that if you can control - this is kind of Orwellian in a sense - if you can control the language, you can control people’s cognitions. And if you can control certain words which have a positive valence and people want to be associated with those words for a whole host of reasons but personal entity is chief among them, you can control outcomes. I had a friend who is a teacher at a very expensive private school tell me that a student said to him that genitalia is a social construct. And I think it is a social construct - in the same way that cyclones are. Right. And that’s one of the reasons that we did The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct.8 If you think in terms of everything being a social construct, then where does that leave you? Well, that leads to the position of the Brazilian educator, Paul Freire †††† who stated that the purpose of education is to develop a critical consciousness, or conscientização, and to eliminate oppression. And when you think in those terms, and there’s no grounding again, there’s no grand explanatory mechanism like science or Christianity, then it becomes easy to understand why using words and defining words in certain ways is essential to navigating social power hierarchies. Foucault has been acknowledged as having really taken the philosophical idea of power, and extending it: to the institutional, political, personal, diffuse, structured, non-structured. It’s everywhere, it’s in the criminal justice system, it’s in every personal interaction. rejection of the use of universal methodological rules for scientific enquiry. His book Farewell to Reason (1987) was a collection of essays arguing against the use of scientific rationalism. †††† Paulo Reglus Freire was a Brazilian educator and philosopher whose book Pedagogy of the Oppressed is a foundational text in critical pedagogy.

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He’s saying that power differential; it’s not that there is no objective truth, which is a common mistake, it’s just that it’s all mediated, and you can’t really get there to external reality because you use language. ‡‡‡‡ And then you’re dealing in a kind of anti-Socratic idea.9 When you wed your personal identity, particularly in terms of identity politics, to your ability to access the truth, not only is that limiting, but it makes any kind of liberation, particularly social liberation, impossible. I would argue that they’ve got it dead wrong. I don’t believe this should be the purpose of education. I think the purpose of education should be orientated toward the truth.10 Jonathan Haidt talks about the telos of the educational institution. And briefly, institutions have changed their mission from truth seeking enterprises because of applied postmodernism and postmodernism, to instruments of social change in that they basically teach people how to recognise these individual power structures and power differentials and then disrupt them. Henry Giroux writes about that again, building off the work of Paulo Freire. These are notions now that you see institutionalised. Not only institutionalised, actually, I’m going to go beyond that. You see them as the North Star of almost every college and university in United States right now. This is within a very short period time - we’re talking literally five years. The president of Portland State §§§§ just sent out an email saying, and he said it twice: ‘Racial justice is his highest priority.’ Let’s linger on that for a second. His highest priority. Not teaching excellence, not financial solvency. The university has gone bankrupt. They’re talking about laying people off. And he’s still sending emails and making pronouncements about racial justice being the highest priority. It’s astonishing. That’s the power of language, though, isn’t it? This is the problem I think you face, is that racial justice sounds like a good thing? Well, it is a good thing. Racial justice. It’s that you’d have to modify the word justice with anything, right? Why would you have to modify it with anything?

‡‡‡‡ Language according to Foucault is also comprised of signs, signifiers and representations which have no relationship to an objective reality. §§§§ President Stephen Percy stated in January 2021 his top strategic priority was racial justice.

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You mean there is just justice? Well, there are different elements of justice. I would say that there’s the lowercase social justice, there’s natural justice… That’s a more philosophical conversation. Broadly, Socrates would say that justice is anything that participates in the good. I love The Republic, it is one of my favorite, if not my favorite book of all time, but that topic, which Dan Dennett calls the topic of abiding significance ***** is really wrestling with what justice means.11 And it’s an anathema to even think in those terms, to talk about the immutable trait someone has and say; ‘Well, you’re a man, you can’t have access to that.’ What are you talking about? I feel like often the simple kind of narrative that comes up about this, is that all of the ideas of science, and even philosophical ideas like individualism and universality, come from the Enlightenment. And then when this is critiqued by postmodernists, or Marxist feminists, they say, ‘It’s white male ideas.’ However, all of those values can be found in Islamic culture during the Arabic transmission, it can be found in African philosophy ††††† etc. Well, of course, it’s even more of a problem; it’s a derangement syndrome. Let’s say that we’re not going to put a ridiculous restriction on this conversation, and then someone says something ridiculous, and we want to engage it, to borrow a phrase from Christians ‘in good faith.’ Okay, what’s the problem with that? It all came from white guys. So what? No, I mean, I actually am asking a sincere question. So why is that a problem? I don’t think it’s necessarily a problem. But if you allow that to be problematized in terms of the history and the history is wrong ... First of all, that’s the whole idea; it is to problematize everything and find grievances in everything. But that assumes that their identity was responsible for falsification, as opposed to falsification being a fundamental guiding principle of scientific inquiry. So, one would have to make an argument why that would be the case, and there’s nothing you could do, because there’s no

***** Daniel Dennett’s theory of abiding significance states that much of contemporary philosophy is of no abiding significance, or in other words, a waste of time. ††††† Ubuntu from African philosophy is a form of humanism that emphasises universality.

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reasonable argument that you could make. You’re not talking about the culture or the philosophy they develop. You’re talking about inventing and discovering things. It’s not about belonging to a period like the Enlightenment - it doesn’t belong to white guys. I did an event with Faisal Saeed Al Mutar, at Portland State University titled ‘Are Western Values Worth Defending?’12. And it’s an incredibly important concept. And if you watch that video, it’s crystal clear that everybody has access to Enlightenment values and the tools and the fruits of the scientific method. I thought that where we would have disagreement is in relation to the idea that gets spoken about a lot now, which is speech is violence. You have said, ‘Well, speech is violence is a category error.’ And I’m not sure I think that’s true. I think speech can be violent. I think I said it’s a category mistake, that’s a term that comes from the philosopher Gilbert Ryle. ‡‡‡‡‡ It confuses categories, like three is not in the tactile field. So, Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff wrote a wonderful piece in The Atlantic about it, and they actually perfectly captured my views.13 Why do you think speech is violence? If I make a threat to kill, and the other person believed it, and I never acted upon that, that’s not to say the other person wasn’t traumatized by that threat. So, I think the problem is what people would call concept creep, or what I would call extrapolation. So microaggressions, the claim could be, are a kind of speech violence. So it goes: ‘I’m going to punch you in the face you four-eyed bastard’ to ‘I hate you,’ to ‘We should be colorblind.’ The threshold for violence is continuously lowered. But in every case, the answer is always more resilience. I guess in the highest case, the answer is a gun and Brazilian jujitsu! But barring that, the answer is always ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me.’ I just read a tweet from Paul Graham §§§§§ about that the other day, and it would seem to me that it’s inevitable if there’s a homeostasis, if there’s a balance, and you take care of the big things, and you always have ‡‡‡‡‡ Gilbert Ryle introduced the term category mistake in his 1938 article Categories. It is a semantic or ontological error where something belonging to one category is presented in another category. §§§§§ Paul Graham is an American computer scientist, essayist and venture capitalist. In his 2008 essay How to Disagree he proposed a ‘disagreement hierarchy.’

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to be offended, or outraged at something, then the threshold is continually lowered and so you’re always outraged about smaller and smaller things; the minutiae of life. I think that could very well be a universal human constant. So, resilience has to be a value. Again, back to ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me.’ Think about this: when you say ‘Sticks and stones will break my bones,’ you’re saying that physical violence can get me for sure. You can smash my head with a rock, but names will never hurt me. So, it’s a value you’re taking upon yourself, as opposed to ‘I’m offended’ when you want someone else to stop. You are ceding power to everybody around you with that switch from the old mantra that we grew up with, sticks and stones, to the new, ‘I’m offended, that’s a microaggression.’ You’re actually making yourself more brittle and more fragile. As my friend Douglas Murray says: ‘Part of the problem is that there are not enough Nazis, so we have to invent them.’ Everybody’s a Nazi if they say something I don’t like. How many Nazis do you think are actually running around? I mean, actual Nazis? I don’t think there are any left. My mentor was interred at Buchenwald, and he died at 98 years old about five years ago. World War II ended in 1945. I think they use Nazi to mean very bad person, but how many actual skinheads and neo-Nazis do we have running around? So, we need to invent more Nazis. And then the most Orwellian thing of all, is when you profess to be an anti-fascist, and you act exactly like a fascist. This is sort of a personal question, but you live in Portland. And it seems as though this is the epicenter for woke ideology. What’s happened in Portland that this has really taken hold? And what are your experiences? Because you’ve obviously decided to come out against this, because you’ve recognized that it’s stifling. It’s totally worse than stifling. So why Portland? That’s a very complicated question. I think it has to do with intellectual homogeneity. It’s really a political monoculture here. It has to do with the university continuously cranking out utter madness and stamping it with an academic imprimatur. And they have been for years and all of the University of Oregon system as well, it’s beholden to some pretty vicious ideologies. It was a fertile ground for breeding bad ideas. And when you cull intellectual diversity out of the mix, the problem becomes more extreme, because the more deranged your ideas, the more normative they become. Many if not most faculty at Portland State do not inform students of the other side of an argument, because it’s

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racist, or homophobic, or however they’ve construed it. As just one example, take Martha Nussbaum’s criticism of Judith Butler.14 If something goes against the narrative, it’s not taught, even if the counterview is espoused by a woman and one of the world’s leading philosophers, like Nussbaum. ****** Again, along with the theme of this conversation, one becomes more brittle and more fragile, instead of developing the cognitive and emotional capacity to deal with arguments they don’t like and the intellectual capacity to argue against those ideas. And there are some monstrously bad ideas floating around. And the most important thing is that we have to retain our ability to call them out. And once we lose that, we’ve lost everything. There’s the kernel of truth inside each idea that you’ve talked about. For instance, if you take an idea, like victim blaming, this has come from a time when women could be blamed for their own sexual assault. Still today, if you look at India, Pakistan, South Africa… And the same thing can be said with cultural appropriation, you can simply see that as cultural theft. So, I’m taking indigenous art from indigenous people and not paying them and not recognizing them for it. That’s not what people mean when they use the term cultural appropriation. No, but that is probably where it started and if the idea isn’t clear then it creeps. Or people just problematize things and their taught to find grievances in everything. There’s a place here in Portland where white business owners had a taco stand, and then some people went crazy, because the owners culturally appropriated Mexican food. That’s a derangement. How would you have fusion in culture? How do you have anything? You literally couldn’t exist! You couldn’t speak English, because that’s an appropriation, you couldn’t wear clothes, because you’ve appropriated that from another time. You couldn’t cut your ****** Martha Craven Nussbaum is an American philosopher and the current Ernst Fruend Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago.

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hair, you couldn’t fill your cavities; there’s literally nothing you could do. You couldn’t even be in a mud hut, because mud huts are appropriated! So, there’s literally nothing you could do, you would be dead, the whole society would be extinguished. If you took Foucault and the idea of power and a cultural narrative, for instance British colonial ideas around the criminalization of homosexuality. So, if he says, ‘Well, you’ve got to really be a little bit suspicious about a culture that criminalizes homosexuality and what’s considered a cultural norm.’ So, even that is, to borrow a turn of phrase, ‘problematic.’ I was just reading about the laws against homosexuality, I don’t know if you want to call it the Palestinian territories, Gaza maybe is the most neutral, and these laws are draconian. †††††† And when was the last time you heard any of the wokester’s criticize that? Just a few years ago, and we know this, not only was this not a secret, people were screaming out about it from the rooftops. And we have unequivocal testimony of Yazidi women who had been sold by Islamic State; literal, actual physical slaves - actual sexual slaves.15 We know that - that’s a fact. Did you see a single protest on a college campus about the female sexual slavery of the Yazidis? No, not one. Zero. Did you even hear of one person carrying a sign: ‘Free the Yazidis’? No. So the question is, why? Isn’t the narrative of postcolonial studies basically: ‘If ISIS or Taliban soldiers are enslaving women, that’s only because the West created it?’ It’s just intellectually exhausting to me to try to make a better argument for the unhinged ideas of people who are uneducated and uninformed. I would circumvent all of that and say it’s a grotesque failure to morally triage. What would be the gold standards of bad? The gold standard of bad would have to be genocide. One right down from that, but not very far down, would be institutionalized slavery. And so, you can formulate a kind of a hierarchy: not paying your parking ticket is low down, stepping on an ant that runs across your floor, maybe that’s not even an issue? Maybe if you’re a Jain it is. And so, if you have a hierarchy, the failure to criticize the institutionalized slavery

†††††† According to Amnesty International Section 152 of the Penal Code in Gaza ‘criminalizes consensual same-sex sexual activity and makes it punishable by up to 10 years’ imprisonment.’

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of Yazidi women while at the same time screaming at the top of your lungs about gender disparities in conferences is a failure to morally triage. It’s also a failure to be honest about the nature of the problem. The problem here is that some of the ideas have infiltrated from people like the Foucault, Gayle Reubin or Judith Butler. I don’t really know how many gay, bisexual or trans people would actually know where these ideas come from? It’s not like with queer theory, that there’s a small group of activists, and then they talk among themselves. It’s that there’s been a cultural shift. And these ideas which weren’t heard of are normative now. And the Overton window ‡‡‡‡‡‡ has shifted.16 So, the whole idea about how we think about these things has changed, and many of those ways are very, very good. But some are certainly not good. Homosexuality was first decriminalized in the United States in the 1960s. However, up until 2003, there were still some American states, Texas was one, where homosexuality was still criminalized. And so, you can see that these ideologies might be driven by anger about real injustice. The idea is, of course, there have been injustices historically, and some of those injustices persist. And those injustices have to be dealt with, and they have to be dealt with honestly. If you believe that moral values are rationally drivable, then certain things follow from that; certain pedagogical methods,17 certain dialectical methods ... You want conversation,18 you want debate, you want to talk - let the best ideas win, sunlight is the best disinfectant, etc. But if you don’t believe that, you believe that these ideas are artefacts of culture, or you believe that they are historical accidents, and then certain methods also follow on from that as well. And those tend to be more totalitarian, more speech restrictive, etc. I think that’s one of the things you see happening now is that you see a denigration of and a turning away from reason. So certain things follow from that with necessity. And that gets back to the idea that speech is violence. If you say ‘You feel unsafe,’ someone said something, and then everybody then has to shut up. Another

‡‡‡‡‡‡ The Overton window, also known as the ‘window of discourse’ was named after political analyst Joseph P. Overton and constitutes the range of political policies acceptable to the public at any given time.

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word for that is an inclusive space - you’ve created an inclusive space. And the reason that the space was inclusive is because an inclusive space is a welcoming space. And the only way you can create a welcoming space is when people don’t feel offended. And the only way you can make sure that people aren’t offended is if you restrict speech. So, an inclusive space restricts speech. I wanted to talk about where the ideas go wrong. For instance, Foucault’s idea around questioning the criminalization of homosexuality. Good idea. But then if you extrapolate that and you say: ‘If a society is oppressive, and they’ve criminalized homosexuality, they’ve also criminalized pedophilia. §§§§§§ So is pedophilia just another oppressed identity?’ That gets back to the rationally derived value again, and so there are rules you can use to rationally ascertain that pedophilia is bad - you can rationally derive that. There are a metrics that you can operationalize in psychology, for example. But even beyond that, I think that there’s another key thing that may be worth exploring, which is whether or not a lot of this ideology and the manifestations of the ideology come because people do not at their core believe in the emancipatory power of human reason. The Enlightenment values; live by our own lights, human flourishing, the idea that through reason and science we can figure things out, we don’t need God figures, we can construct systems outside of ourselves that bring about our flourishing. Many of the postmodernists would call that a narrative. It’s not a narrative. It’s not merely a story we tell ourselves. There’s something liberating and powerful about human reason; it is unprecedented in its ability to improve our lives in demonstrably meaningful ways. I suppose that there are norms that are developed that are good norms, because you can tell from consequences. That’s called instrumental rationality, when you use rationality as an instrument to achieve some end. And I don’t think anybody is at the point of denying consequences. I think that what they think is that they weigh the consequences of different actions and different institutions differently different structural advantages is a term you’ll hear frequently.

§§§§§§ Foucault in 1978 radio interview argued for the removal of the age of consent and decriminalization of paedophilia. Foucault has also been accused of sexually abusing children during his time in Tunisia.19

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If you go back to postmodernism, and the idea that things are embedded in language. So, I can create two narratives which are: I step off the Empire State Building, and I’ll plummet to my death, or I’ll step off the Empire State Building and I’ll fly. So, they’re both narratives developed through language, but they have very different consequences. In that case, that’s such an extreme example. People who make those arguments wouldn’t make that claim because one narrative is demonstrably false. And the idea behind this project is that there’s a kind of egalitarianism of narratives. Foucault talks about power-knowledge, and that’s why in Fat Studies for example, they don’t like the word obesity as they think it’s a medical narrative. ******* They prefer the word fat. So, there are these competing narratives, but they would never use a narrative like that, in which to borrow a turn of phrase from the philosopher Walter Kaufmann, ††††††† every individual rational agent would not agree that the idea behind the narratives are all equally true. Often narratives are more complex, but they still lead to different consequences. Example: Lysenko’s genetics, which ends up killing millions of people because it’s based on Stalinist ideology. They crushed Mendelian genetics, which is the true narrative. So, you can develop truth and objective reality through speech, which undermines the whole project. Yes. In those cases, the question is again: how are you making the judgement that one of those is true? How you adjudicating that? And you need some ultimate arbiter adjudicating - in that case it would be science. Which is again, a grand narrative, which is a contradiction, which is what Habermas’s critique of Derrida and Foucault was; it’s a performative contradiction. ‡‡‡‡‡‡‡ It just doesn’t hold up. I said to one of my best friends, Matt Thornton,22 ‘You know this is just really sophisticated nonsense.’ And he said, ‘No, it’s not.

******* For example see Michael Hobbs article Everything You Know About Obesity is Wrong.20 ††††††† Walter Arnold Kaufmann was a German-American philosopher who was a renowned scholar and translator of Fredrich Nietzsche. ‡‡‡‡‡‡‡ From Jurgen Habermas Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. An example of a performative contradiction would be the statement ‘There is no such thing as truth.’ However, the propositional content of the statement is in contradiction with presuppositions of asserting it (e.g., if the statement is taken to be ‘true’ then truth exists).21

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There’s nothing sophisticated about it.’ And the more I thought about that, the more profound that was to me. There’s just nothing sophisticated about this. It’s not even sophistry. It’s just silly. I wonder whether identity politics, tribalism, is sort of the norm that people can revert back to easily? Like it’s evolutionary. You are not the first person who has said that - that idea has been floating around for a while. It has a long pedigree. Before it was easy to determine who was part of your tribe because you could see people on the basis of some characteristic like skin color. My mentor grew up in Nazi Germany, he was interred at Buchenwald, and he had black curly hair, and he would straighten it. This was during Kristallnacht. §§§§§§§ But the idea is, before, in tribalism, you could see differences with people. But now it’s more in terms of people’s ideological beliefs. In fact, I’m working with two guys right now, two people in Portland, black Jews, and I would say we’re in identical moral tribes. We have identical causes, and yet I’m not black, and I’m not Jewish. Those traditional markers in this age are no longer there. There’s a quote by Crenshaw that for African Americans, other people of color, gays, lesbians… Identity politics has been a source of strength, community and intellectual development. You’d probably disagree with that? I don’t disagree with that. I’m sure that that’s true. There’s a lot of community support, particularly if one is marginalized, and getting together with other people who are marginalized, and if nothing else, commiserating about what bastards your oppressors are. There’s a lot of truth to that. That doesn’t mean it should be an ought, right? We need to create conditions so that people don’t have to do that. Does social justice activism just mean missionary now? I don’t know. I think there is a kind of a zealous, somewhat of a proselytizing nature in activism. That’s what makes it activism. And I also think that there’s a certainty embedded in the whole concept of activism. The

§§§§§§§ Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass). On November 9-10th 1938 the Nazi leadership launched a series of pogroms against the Jewish people in Nazi Germany. It was named after the broken glass that littered the streets after vandalism of Jewish homes, businesses and synagogues.

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question is: is this certainty warranted by the evidence? Epistemology must come before anything else. And that should always be one’s first priority. And if we can figure out that then we can figure out if one’s activism is justified. I’ve read that the only two disciplines that took up postmodernism and social constructionism in the early 80s, were education and social psychology. It was the only places it took root in the university. One of the reasons we’re in this catastrophe right now is because of colleges of education, and to have this conversation without mentioning colleges of education, you’re doing your readers a disservice. Because the primary way that this propagates is through college of education. Let’s talk about that very briefly. To get a teaching certificate, I can’t just walk into a classroom - even with all my teaching experience and publications - I can’t just walk in and teach. You need to have a teaching certificate. Colleges of education and the standard pedagogical models are woke. It’s like a woke indoctrination factory. They’re minting teachers and giving them their imprimatur and then sending them out to K through 12 to teach. The problem is replicating itself. Dr. Robert Asher has some fantastic material on this that I’d highly recommend.23,24 I think political correctness in the 90s was kind of like SARS-CoV-1. It seems like it’s really strong, but not very virulent. And then you move on to about 2015. And you’ve got a complex series of things that go on with the uptake of social media and so woke is SARS-CoV-2 - it’s highly infectious. It’s hard to say because it was creeping and then there was an explosion. It’s also hard to say because I’m in the belly of the beast at Portland State. I saw the transformation around 2015. I saw it at the same time in the sceptic and atheist movement, which were canaries in the coal mine with Social Justice. I was just at a conference in Bozeman, Montana, and Wilford Reilly ******** who I find to be an utterly fascinating, fearless thinker, and he said, ‘Woke is a mind virus of the lower upper class.’ And I thought, ‘Wow, that’s exactly right.’ I think your analogue works well. Part of it is - and I think one thing that’s very helpful to think about in relation to this - is to break it down into discrete ways of thinking about the university and the educational ******** Wilford Reilly is an American political scientist and author of Hate Crime Hoax: How the Left is Selling a Fake Race War.

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system. Because you’re right, it didn’t just happen overnight. And then all of a sudden, the censoriousness and illiberalism; the not teaching and not exposing people to different ideas, the hyper rigid orthodoxy surrounding certain positions about race, sexual orientation and gender. Positions which have literally no evidence behind them. Not only do they have no evidence behind then, there’s actually evidence against them. When you really start to think about that - that’s the next level of systemic derangement. And I think concurrent with that, there were changes in the culture, and there was the weaponization of certain offices of diversity, equity and inclusion, that made sure people stayed in line. There’s no due process there. The university system has, again as Jonathan Haidt says, abandoned its telos of truth and turned into an instrument of social change.

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References 1.

2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12.

13.

14. 15.

Academic Grievance Studies and the Corruption of Scholarship. Areo. Published October 3, 2018. Accessed January 3, 2022. https://areomagazine. com / 2018 / 10 / 02 / academic-grievance-studies-and-the-corruption-ofscholarship/ New Discourses. New Discourses. Accessed January 3, 2022. https://new discourses.com/ Lagerspetz M. “The Grievance Studies Affair” Project: Reconstructing and Assessing the Experimental Design. Sci Technol Hum Values. 2021;46(2): 402-424. doi:10.1177/0162243920923087 Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity. Accessed December 10, 2021. https://physics.nyu.edu/ faculty/sokal/transgress_v2/transgress_v2_singlefile.html Boghossian P, Lindsay J. Deluded Departments. Philos Mag. 2019;(87):1417. doi:10.5840/tpm20198781 ‘Idea Laundering’ in Academia - WSJ. Accessed February 6, 2022. https://www.wsj.com/articles/idea-laundering-in-academia-11574634492 FAIR – Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism. Accessed February 6, 2022. https://www.fairforall.org Lindsay J, Boghossian P. The conceptual penis as a social construct. Cogent Soc Sci. 2017;3. doi:10.1080/23311886.2017.1330439 Boghossian P. Socratic Pedagogy, Race, and Power. Educ Policy Anal Arch. 2002;10(3). Peter Boghossian, forthcoming lecture, March 19, 2022, University of Antwerp. Boghossian P, Lindsay J. Chmess, Abiding Significance, and Rabbit Holes: The Problem of Philosophical Progress. In: Philosophy’s Future: The Problem of Philosophical Progress. ; 2017:61-74. doi:10.1002/9781119210 115.ch5 Faisal Saeed Al Mutar at Portland State University, “Are Western Values Worth Defending?” The AHA Foundation. Published November 8, 2017. Accessed December 6, 2021. https://www.theahafoundation.org/faisalsaeed- al - mutar - at - portland - state-university-are-western-values-worthdefending/ Lukianoff JH Greg. It’s a Really Bad Idea to Tell Students Words Are Violence. The Atlantic. Published July 18, 2017. Accessed December 6, 2021. https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/07/why-its-a-bad -idea-to-tell-students-words-are-violence/533970/ Nussbaum MC. The Professor of Parody. New Repub. Published online February 22, 1999. Accessed February 6, 2022. https://newrepublic.com /article/150687/professor-parody Otten C. Slaves of Isis: the long walk of the Yazidi women. The Guardian. https:// www.theguardian.com / world / 2017 / jul/25/slaves-of-isis-the-long-

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walk-of-the-yazidi-women. Published July 25, 2017. Accessed December 6, 2021. Boghossian P, Lindsay J. Is the Unthinkable the New Acceptable? | Free Inquiry. Published March 30, 2017. Accessed January 3, 2022. https://secular humanism.org/2017/03/cont-is-the-unthinkable-the-new-acceptable/ Boghossian P, Lindsay J. The Socratic method, defeasibility, and doxastic responsibility. Educ Philos Theory. 2018;50(3):244-253. doi:10.1080/00131 857.2017.1343111 Boghossian P, Lindsay J. How to Have Impossible Conversations: A Very Practical Guide. Hachette Books; 2019. Guesmi H. Reckoning with Foucault’s alleged sexual abuse of boys in Tunisia. Accessed December 10, 2021. https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions /2021/4/16/reckoning-with-foucaults-sexual-abuse-of-boys-in-tunisia Hobbes M. Everything You Know About Obesity Is Wrong. The Huffington Post. Accessed December 10, 2021. https://highline.huffingtonpost.com/ articles/en/everything-you-know-about-obesity-is-wrong/ The philosophical society. Accessed January 5, 2022. https://www.philo sophicalsociety.com/Archives/The%20Performative%20Contradiction.htm The Gift of Violence. Thornton, M. | Independent Publishers Group. Accessed February 6, 2022. https://www.ipgbook.com/the-gift-of-violenceproducts-9781634312301.php How Ed Schools Became a Menace. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Published April 8, 2018. Accessed February 6, 2022. https://www.chronicle .com/article/how-ed-schools-became-a-menace/ Look Who’s Talking About Educational Equity. Quillette. Published August 12, 2020. Accessed February 6, 2022. https://quillette.com/2020/08/12/lookwhos-talking-about-educational-equity/

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~ Dr. Peter Boghossian is a Founding Faculty member at the University of Austin, Texas. Peter has a teaching pedigree spanning more than 25 years and 30 thousand students. He focuses on bringing the tools of professional philosophers to people in a wide variety of contexts and helping others think through what seem to be intractable problems. His articles can be found in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Philosophers’ Magazine, Scientific American, Time Magazine, Skeptic, National Review, and elsewhere. Peter’s most recent book is How to Have Impossible Conversations. His can be found on online at Substack, Twitter and his webpage: https://peterboghossian.com

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Me, She, He, They: Reality vs. Identity in the 21st Century

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Me, She, He, They: Reality vs. Identity in the 21st Century By Heather Heying A few years ago, I had a curious exchange with a friend’s young child. We were admiring his pet from a distance, and I asked him “Is your cat male or female?” He considered this for a moment, then replied, “I don’t know. Maybe both?” “Can’t be.” I told him. “Cats aren’t like that.” At which, with no hesitation, the young boy declared, “you’re a liar!” It seems unlikely that a child of the 20th century—or the 19th, or 18th— would have been convinced that a cat could be both male and female. There are occasional, very rare developmental mix-ups—on which, more below— but no mammal species makes a go of it by being a hermaphrodite.1* Even very casual observers of cats (and humans) easily conclude that there are two functional types, male and female, and that they do not show up in the same individual. Some other animals do things differently, of course. Banana slugs are simultaneous hermaphrodites, meaning that single individuals have both male and female reproductive parts at the same time, like the child’s fictional cat. Many reef fish are sequential hermaphrodites, having the capacity to switch from one sex to the other, although there are limits, in terms of both direction and frequency. It is the rare fish, for instance, that can switch sex from male to female, while individuals in many species go the other direction—bluehead

* Older systems of nomenclature have sometimes conflated individuals with Disorders of Sexual Development, or intersex people, with being “hermaphrodites,” but as is argued persuasively here, this is both confusing and damaging: Dreger, A.D., Chase, C., Sousa, A., Gruppuso, P.A. and Frader, J., 2005. Changing the nomenclature/ taxonomy for intersex: a scientific and clinical rationale. Journal of pediatric endocrinology and metabolism, 18(8): 729-734.

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wrasse, for instance, start out female, and can become male later on. But mammals? Nope. We are not hermaphrodites. Sex is real, and ubiquitous. Sex, in this usage, is shorthand for “sexual reproduction,” which is the raison d’être for there being distinct sexes. In our lineage, sexual reproduction has an uninterrupted history of at least 500 million years; it may well be closer to two billion years.2† Furthermore, sex is binary, at least among all plants and animals. Sex is not, at its most fundamental, about chromosomes or hormones, about breasts or facial hair, about behavior or fashion. Sex, at its most fundamental, is about DNA from multiple individuals being brought together to create a zygote. But DNA isn’t sufficient for a new life—you also need cellular machinery like mitochondria and ribosomes. Without this cellular machinery—the cytoplasm—no zygote will be formed. Cellular machinery is big, though, compared to DNA. Someone’s got to bring it if sex is going to work. So, some sex cells—gametes—are big because they contain the requisite cellular machinery. Those big gametes are eggs. That’s one of the two large problems posed by reproducing sexually: from whence to source the cellular machinery. The other is how to find a partner. Trade-offs being what they are, big cells are slower than small cells. Eggs being big (for cells), they therefore also tend to be slow or entirely sessile. So, it falls to the other type of gamete to move around its environment, looking for eggs. This other type of gamete is largely devoid of cellular machinery. It’s called pollen in plants, sperm in animals. Eggs are large and cytoplasm rich and sessile; sperm are small and stripped down and fast. Two types of gametes; two sexes.3–5‡ † Sex evolved once, in the last common ancestor of all eukaryotes, between one and two billion years ago (for a brief review of the evidence and further investigation of what was required for sex to evolve see Goodenough, U. and Heitman, J., 2014. Origins of eukaryotic sexual reproduction. Cold Spring Harbor Perspectives in Biology, 6(3): a016154). There have been a small number of reversals in the trait since then, but likely not in our lineage. In vertebrates, which evolved ~500 million years ago, there have been no reversals in sexual reproduction. ‡ There is a rich scientific literature on the evolution and maintenance of sex, specifically anisogamy. Three important contributions include: Smith, J.M., 1971. What use is sex? Journal of theoretical biology, 30(2): 319-335. Parker, G.A., Baker, R.R. and Smith, V.G.F., 1972. The origin and evolution of gamete dimorphism and the male-female phenomenon. Journal of theoretical biology, 36(3): 529-553. Rose, M.R., 1982. A physiological barrier for the maintenance of anisogamous sex. Journal of theoretical biology, 94(4): 801-813.

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In much of life on Earth, in nearly all plants and animals, and in absolutely all mammals, which includes humans, sex is real and ubiquitous. In his masterful compilation and analysis of the anthropological literature, Donald Brown writes that all cultures “have a sex terminology that is fundamentally dualistic, even when it comprises three or four categories.6 When there are three, one is a combination of the two basic sexes (e.g., a hermaphrodite §), or one is a crossover sex (e.g., a man acting as a woman). When there are four there are then two normal sexes and two crossover sexes.” Brown’s “crossover sex” is now referred to as the umbrella term “trans.” Trans has emerged in many cultures, but it has never been common—not nearly so common as homosexuality, for instance. And Brown’s “hermaphrodites” have more recently been called intersex, who are now often referred to as having a Disorder of Sexual Development (DSD), although here we begin to run into problems. The distinction between people with DSDs and trans people is sometimes hard to parse, the boundaries between them sometimes fuzzy. Some people who actually have DSDs may never have them diagnosed, and may live as trans people, thus belonging in both categories. Both categories are indeed real, and—in contrast to sex itself—very, very rare. In a few places, Western science has discovered a mechanism which explains a relatively high rate of unusual sexual presentation. In the village of Las Salinas in the Dominican Republic, for instance, some number of people are understood to be machihembras ** —intersex, in fact, but presenting as female through childhood until puberty transforms them into decidedly more male in appearance. The molecular explanation for this particular DSD is, in part, that mutations in the 5α-reductase type 2 gene (which is autosomal, not on a sex chromosome) affect the steroid 5α-reductase 2 isoenzyme, which in turn causes a dihydrotestosterone deficiency, which in turn inhibits development of male typical characteristics such as external genitalia.7 We should all be grateful for the scientists who are driven to discover molecular pathways like the one above, but for most of us, the human side of the story is more compelling. In Las Salinas, Felicita was a little girl who enjoyed going to birthday parties with her sister until, as she approached puberty, she came to prefer playing with boys. During adolescence, as her § Again, the term “hermaphrodite” should be reserved for individuals who are functionally both male and female, either simultaneously or sequentially, not merely showing phenotypic characters of both sexes. See Dreger et al. 2005. ** Also known as the güevedoches, which translates as ‘penis at twelve.’

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sister’s body became rounded and fuller, Felicita’s shoulders broadened, and she grew strong and tall. Like most children with 5α-reductase deficiency, she had looked like and been raised as a girl, until puberty revealed that for her, the truth was more complicated. Felicita was a machihembra.8 Las Salinas is not the only place on Earth in which a DSD has come to be explained by scientists, a DSD which explains, in retrospect, the relatively high number of people in those communities who transition from female to male during puberty. Las Salinas is not unique, but it, like DSDs and transness more generally, is very rare. Those individuals who can or will or have or might make eggs are female. Those individuals who can or will or have or might make sperm (or pollen) are male. This is a true binary, which DSDs make more difficult to parse, but DSDs are the extreme exception. They are, indeed, disorders.9†† Sex is not assigned at birth. Sex is observed at birth. A baby born with ambiguous genitalia or an undiagnosed DSD may be observed to be the sex that they are not, and that observation is therefore in error. Development is complicated, but the fact of anisogamy—two different types of gametes, not three or five or thirteen, but two, which come together to create a new life— is true. Furthermore, development being complicated means that sometimes, some of the manifestations of your sex will be out of sync with your actual sex: hence the idea of being “born in the wrong body.” Again, sex is not, at its most fundamental, about chromosomes or hormones, about breasts or facial hair, about behavior or fashion. But if your sex chromosomes determined your sex accurately with regard to gamete type and primary sex characteristics, but ran into some hiccups as your brain was being formed, or as your secondary sex characteristics were developing, you might well feel— as some do—very much at odds with the body you are in. Of course, you might also feel that way during adolescence regardless. The vast majority of people who feel uncomfortable in their own bodies as those bodies transform from child to adult are not trans.10 †† Some have argued for the term “Differences” rather than “Disorders,” a debate I will not explore here, except to say that any difference in sexual development which renders an individual sterile can be understood to be a disorder. This is an observation, not a moral judgement. Less extreme divergences from the norm in sexual development might appropriately be referred to as differences, and probably exist on a continuum with some DSDs.

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Let me be clear: We are dealing with the interface between long standing products of evolution, subtle matters of humanity which have blurry borders, and a brave new world of technological modifications that has yet to stand any test of time. That leaves all of us, even those who are thoroughly versed in the facts and logic of sex and sexuality grappling with new and genuinely difficult questions. No one has yet worked out the solutions that best resolve all of the tensions. ~ Sex is real and ubiquitous. Trans is real, but extremely rare. In the 21st century WEIRD world (those countries that are Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic)11,12 however, both of those points are increasingly taken as hostile to individual autonomy. To simultaneously observe that sex is real and everywhere, and that trans is real and rare, seems to guarantee running afoul of someone’s ideology. Some will insist that anybody who says they are trans is trans. Others that sex is an artifact, perhaps of the patriarchy, perhaps of society writ large. Lurking just below the surface is the belief that speech creates reality: claims of truth become the truth. You can be freed from the very concept of sex, just by believing that you are. Such emancipation! As Libby Emmons so cogently points out,13 modern instantiations of transgenderism, like transhumanism, imagines a split between body and mind. “Transgender practice,” writes Emmons, “is the ultimate biohack. The claim that one has been born into the ‘wrong’ body is a total rejection of mind-body unification, and a statement that mind and body can be so disparate that the body must be thoroughly altered to match the mind’s perception of how it ought to be.” There is something in this line of thinking that believes that if I want it hard enough, it will be so. To a degree, believing that you are the master of your own fate is empowering. It can open doors that might not even be recognized as doors had you not insisted on something that others find hard to believe. But sex isn’t like that. We do not change underlying reality by thinking about it differently, nor does it fail to apply to us if we are unaware of it. Ignorance of the physical laws of the universe does not make them go away, unlike what you may have inferred from the Road Runner cartoons. Gravity is not the product of our minds—or of the minds of animated coyotes. Gravity is a product of the

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universe. Sex is not a product of our minds either. Rather, sex is the product of our entire evolved beings. We are fully embodied, and cannot be otherwise. There is no essence of the human experience that can be distilled, from brainwaves or neuron maps or genomics or anything else. We exist at the interface with the world in which we live, in which we have evolved for three and a half billion years. This concept of a fundamental duality within each of us, between body and mind, in which they are independent of one another, both struggling for primacy—it’s wrong. And it’s reductionist. Somehow it manages to fall prey both to the postmodern notion of reality as a social construct, and to the reductionist model currently imposed on so many modern institutions, including much of science, medicine, and nutrition. Too often, those who apply reductionist thinking imagine that if you come upon a complex system, and succeed in naming some of the parts in that system and counting them, then you have come to know not just those parts, but in fact have mastery over the whole system. Viewing ourselves through a reductionist lens inhibits our ability to see ourselves, and others, as whole, complete beings. In doing this we fail ourselves—trans or not—by fooling ourselves into seeking solutions that serve only isolated facets of our being. Reductionism is at odds with emergence, though. Complex systems are emergent: in complex systems, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. ~ Childhood is a time of exploration. It is a time to learn rules, to break rules, and to make new rules. Humans have the longest childhoods of any organism on the planet, and we are born with more potential than we will use.14 Our potential fades with time—note for instance the ability to pick up a new language in childhood, and the increased difficulty when the same attempt is made even in young adulthood. So, childhood is a time of exploration and of practice, of assessing the world and testing boundaries. In childhood we come to understand what is real and what is not, what is changeable and what is not, and how different the world is from that in which our elders came of age. Adolescence, therefore, when children transform into adults, can be challenging and difficult under the best of circumstances. The 21st century WEIRD world has left many bereft of choice, lacking in passion or insight to contribute in a way that feels meaningful. Coming of age can be filled with angst, but this historical moment goes well beyond what is

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common. The blame for the widespread failure to find meaning in existence can be placed in several additional courts: Currently fashionable parenting styles “protect” children from risk and experience. Screens are replacing social engagement in real life. Schools are ever more broken, teaching compliance and obedience to the new orthodoxies, as they actively punish rigor and extrapolation, critical and independent thought.15 Prescription drugs are being used widely to treat disengagement, hyperactivity, and anxiety—a “corrective,” in part, for the fact that some children resist underwhelming or toxic school experiences.16,17‡‡ And falling economic prospects make things like owning your own home an ever more distant dream for most young people. Add to this the recognition among many that our economic and political systems are decohering. The rate of change is accelerating so fast that even the near future will not look anything like the past.14 All of these contribute to the ever-greater number of people who arrive at the cusp of adulthood with the bodies of adults, but either the minds of children, or an overwhelming sense of futility, or both. Enter into this minefield the expectation that everyone is their own brand, and should be, at all moments, declaring themselves as that brand. How to distinguish yourself, if you don’t know what you’re good at, can’t seem to care about anything, and wouldn’t know how to find out? If you have grown or are growing into the body of an adult but still have the mind of a child, and have emerged into a world seemingly bent on incoherence, what is there to do? Some will lash out at the system; this is a time-honored response to feeling disenfranchised from the status quo, although its modern manifestations have a different character from those of the past. Others strive for what they already know, seeking comfortable lives in which past markers of success—a stable family, job, and home—are the totality of their goals. Those who would make their mark on the world - as scientists, or artists, explorers, or healers - are more adrift than ever, unless they choose one of two

‡‡ This conclusion is based on years of conversations with college students, and is also supported both by research on the drugs in question (see e.g., Whitaker, R., 2010. Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America. Random House Digital.) and on best practices for educating children (see e.g., Gray, P., 2013. Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life. Basic Books.)

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routes. They can join the establishment, get the appropriate degrees, get jobs with or appeal for funding from the appropriate entities, and become ever more beholden to those entities. They may well find their thoughts converging with what everyone else thinks. They’re not engaging in a craven embrace of orthodoxy; it’s simple survival. Or they can gamble on becoming “influencers,” many of whom are a caricature of the creative lifestyle, a kind of hedonistic embrace of all that is frivolous, fleeting, and decadent. Successful influencers make a “good living” doing this, but are they living a good life? Within the last decade, an additional route to social belonging, to feeling like you have a place in an incoherent, unforgiving, and uncaring world, has been to declare yourself trans. Jazz Jennings “came out” as trans at five years old, was encouraged to transition by a family that has been described as “supportive” in some quarters, began doing media appearances at the age of 6, and catapulted into a life of fame in 2013, at the age of 11, when interviewed on 20/20 by Barbara Walters.18 Jazz is hardly the only person who has found fame in being trans. But out of the limelight, many thousands of other young people are transitioning, often to the celebration of their immediate peers (and social media contacts), but to the consternation of their families.19 Over the last several years, the number of people declaring themselves trans has increased by a factor of twenty (see data from the U.K.20 and the Netherlands,21 and find more at statsforgender.org22). Furthermore, historically, the very low number of trans people has been biased towards MtF (Male to Female): young men transitioning into transwomen. But that has recently reversed.23 In one year alone in the U.S.—from 2016 to 2017—the percentage increase in FtM “gender confirmation” surgeries, in which young women are surgically modified into transmen—was 289%.24 This is not subtle. And it is not organic. As with eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa, social contagion is likely playing a powerful role, as evidenced in part by the rapidity with which trans identity spreads through female friend groups.25 One additional deeply unfortunate possibility, which might partially explain the rise in trans-identification, is that our hyper-novel world is indeed driving an increase in DSDs. For instance, atrazine, a widely used herbicide and known endocrine disrupter, is detectable in rainfall even in regions where it is not actively applied. Frogs that are exposed to atrazine in lab experiments,

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even in low doses, do not develop normally. Furthermore, exposure to other endocrine disrupters is known to have perplexing effects on amphibians, such that at some doses only females are produced, and at slightly different doses only males are produced. And in the wild, hermaphroditic frogs are more common in areas with atrazine use or contamination.26 Frogs may be more susceptible to environmental chemicals than are humans, in part because they breathe through their skin, easily taking in toxins through that massive organ. But imagining that we are immune to the effects of known endocrine disrupters is naïve at best. An increase in endocrine disrupters in the environment may be contributing to the uptick in declarations of transness among the young.27 Even if this is true, however—even if the chemicals that we are practically bathing in now have effects on people that are similar to the effects they are known to have on frogs—this is no justification for wilting in the face of declarations from children. We owe Jazz Jennings and the many thousands of less famous children futures that are as full of potential as possible. Most of the young people who are now declaring themselves trans are not trans. But declaring yourself something you are not can help a person feel, if nothing else, very much alive, at least during that period of time when everyone around them is celebrating their bravery for “coming out” as something that they are not. It will be a fleeting high, and unsustainable, but as with the rush that comes with many illicit drugs, the costs are not easy to see in the moment. ~ Into this landscape arrive those who would defend the use of new pronouns in children in order to be “inclusive” or “kind.” We do not try to be inclusive or kind to an anorexic who insists that, at 5’8” and 82 pounds, she is fat. We do not try to be inclusive or kind to a schizophrenic who insists that he is working with the King of Siam to save the world from the lizard people. Nor should we try to be inclusive or kind to a child who wakes up Tuesday and declares himself Spiderman, come Wednesday he’s a T. rex, and on Thursday he’s a princess. Given that we don’t embrace the child’s fantasy on Tuesday or Wednesday, what makes Thursday different? “Kind,” in this case, is a euphemism for: accede and cater to the fantasy. And this kindness is no kindness at all.

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Children are in the act of figuring out what the world is. They check their experience against what the trusted adults say, a sibling’s interpretation against that of a friend, today’s experience against last week’s. Childhood is when we learn how to be, and discover what we can be. Free and wide-ranging exploration will include ideas that are out of this world. Adults should allow children their fantasies, within reason, but not allow them to believe that fantasies are real as they approach adulthood. Affirming the delusions of a dangerously thin girl who thinks she’s fat is not kind. Affirming the delusions of a girl who believes that her interest in “boy stuff” makes her a boy is also not kind. We owe people who are stuck in a fantasyland of reality-denial a correction. We owe them compassion and truth. We don’t owe them a celebration of their confusion and naivete. In fact, such celebrations actually do harm. We have all seen pronouns in profiles and email signatures. Most of us will have been asked to announce our pronouns in meetings or zoom calls or classrooms. We are told that this is simply about respect. I don’t buy it, and neither should you. ~

Look At Me! The newest kid on this block is “non-binary.” Announcing yourself as non-binary literally requires nothing on the part of the person “coming out,” but now they may well get accolades for doing so. Google “non-binary in Hollywood” and be regaled with assurances from the famous and almost famous that because they don’t entirely feel like a woman (or a man) all the time, they are therefore non-binary. The concepts of “man” and “woman” are as ancient as humans. Remember the universality of “sex terminology that is fundamentally dualistic” in human cultures.6 The fact that every human culture to ever exist correctly recognizes that there are two sexes, should not be surprising, given that—again—male and female go back several hundred million years in our lineage alone, perhaps two billion years. Gender is the software of sex. Gender norms flow from the sexual binary, but they are far more fluid, their boundaries less rigid, their expressions infinite. Remember the sex-switching reef fish? Not only do they switch sex, they switch gender, too. Female bluehead wrasse produce eggs (sex) and are

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docile, neither defending territories nor approaching conspecifics (gender); once switched into males, however, the same individuals now produce sperm, and are both active and aggressive in inspecting both sites and individuals that come near them.28 Gender follows from sex, but it is far more labile. Gender is not a binary. Because of what sex is and how it manifests in humans, men have traditionally been more likely to have power—at least, overt, outward facing, society-level power. And women have been more likely to use covert means to achieve their goals, working behind the scenes, using social rather than physical means to diffuse tension.29 Is it possible to move beyond those gender norms now, in the WEIRD world? I believe that we can. But observe that the very manifestation of so much of trans-ideology hinges on those very gender norms. Here is the (devout Christian) mother of a boy describing how she “knew” that what she actually had was a daughter, “I tried so hard to force her into wearing clothes with camouflage and superhero patterns, and I even gave her severe, flat-top haircut.”30 But the child was having none of it. So instead of recognizing that this boy, at least for now, had little interest in traditional, stereotypical gender norms, the mother decided that her boy was in fact a girl. And here is Dr. Diane Ehrensaft, a clinical and developmental psychologist, explaining how you can tell if a preverbal child is transgender: “I have a colleague who is transgender. There is a video of him as a toddler – he was assigned female at birth – tearing barrettes out of then-her hair. And throwing them on the ground. And sobbing. That’s a gender message.”31 A baby girl tears barrettes out of her hair, thus indicating that she is actually a baby boy. Well, that’s certainly one interpretation. In Harper’s Magazine in 2020, Anne Fadiman,32 Writer in Residence at Yale, argued in favor of the singular they for people who view themselves as outside of the binary. It may at first seem that we owe such people this much at least. No, we do not. What we owe people is resistance to foolishness. This foolishness is not the next civil rights battle. It’s a battle for fantasy over reality, for a fragmented and fractured human experience over an integrated one, for a reductionist understanding of ourselves over a holistic one. In Fadiman’s telling, one big rift between linguists is between the prescriptivists, who favor rules and standards (“this is how people should talk”) and descriptivists, who favor popular usage (“this is how people actually talk”).

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What fails to be included in this categorization scheme, of course, is whether language is accurately representing reality. From my scientific perspective, it looks very much like this scheme— prescriptivists vs. descriptivists—is an incomplete solution set. At least one category is missing from the analysis. In all the discussion among linguists about pronoun usage in English, I have never seen an analysis that asks: “what is actually true?” What is actually true is that we have two sexes. Gender is somewhat more complicated, but male and female, man and woman—these refer to biological realities that do not change no matter what we say about them. One year after Fadiman’s piece, writer Michael Waters33 made a similar argument in The Atlantic Monthly: “Today’s gender-neutral Englishlanguage pronouns make space not just for two genders, but for many more, serving as a way for people who fall outside the binary of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ to describe themselves.” And in the New York Times, linguist John McWhorter,34 who has written brilliantly on adjacent topics, fell prey to the same incomplete logic in September of 2021. Arguing, again, on behalf of the singular “they,” he imagines that he understands the complaints: “Why does language have to change all the time, with all we have to think about?” This, I contend, is not the objection that most of us have. The next example that he gives is the shift, in English, from a preponderance of double, and even triple, negatives, in Shakespeare’s time, to a rejection of such usage. The difference, I hasten to point out, is that double and triple negatives are entirely a human construct, with effects on communication and clarity, but in no way reflecting underlying reality. Our pronouns, in distinct contrast, refer to a reality that we do not change simply because we change the way that we talk about it. I have always called adults by the pronouns that they wish to be called by. Never in my experience as a college professor was I asked to use brandnew pronouns. I did have trans students, and their cross-sex pronoun preferences posed no problems in our classrooms. But children’s flights of fancy, their fantasies that could be their greatest strength as they imagine all of the ways to be human, should never be cemented into permanence. That risks turning their greatest strength into their greatest tragedy. The adults in their worlds are doing them a great disservice—which is putting it mildly. One of the oddities of this moment, and of these ideologies, is that they

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simultaneously complexify what is simple (e.g., the binary of sex), and simplify what is complex. The former is surprising for its utter lack of connection to reality, both easily observable reality and deep historical reality. The latter—the simplification of the complex—is, unfortunately, such a banal instinct that it is very common through human history. We simplify the complexity of the world in order to feel in control, in order to feel like gods. Left to our most banal devices, we are, again, reductionists, seeking single answers with easy cures for complex problems. Suffer from tonsilitis? Rip them out! Feeling anxious? Take a pill! Wishing for freedom from restrictive gender norms? Declare yourself a man! Or better yet: declare yourself non-binary! Trans people are real but rare, but nonbinary people? This is just a fiction, a sign of a society that has forgotten to check its beliefs with reality, a society so wealthy, insulated, and comfortable that it has, too often, forgotten that reference to an objective reality is actually a necessary precursor to making things happen in the world. At the end of her essay in Harper’s, Fadiman argues that there are five reasons to use the singular they, “from most conservative to the most revolutionary.” The striking thing about this list, to me, is that the situation that Fadiman thinks is most conservative, likely to be accepted by a larger fraction of people than any other, is using they “only for nonbinary people.” This presumes that “nonbinary” is a real category. But just as a cat can’t be both male and female, or neither male nor female, the same is true for people. If you like, go ahead and throw gender norms out the window; but don’t conflate the norms of your culture with underlying biological reality, which is what the language, and our pronouns, are actually describing. As I was writing this essay, I saw a young woman wearing a sweatshirt that said “anti-gender roles club.” Yes to that. Yes to freeing ourselves of the now unnecessary baggage that has been entrenched by social norms. Let us free ourselves from that part of our expectations that we can free ourselves from, without pretending that we, men and women, are the same. But as I was writing this essay, I also saw a piece in a Science magazine headlined “Why I came out as non-binary to my PhD lab.”35 We are not told what kind of science the author is allegedly learning how to engage in. What we are told is that “I knew that if I wanted to survive graduate school, I needed to be open with my lab mates” about the use of “gender-neutral/non-binary pronouns.”

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I’ll match that anecdote with one of my own: When I was in graduate school (as it happens, at the very same institution, but many years earlier), becoming a credentialed scientist, it never occurred to me that my peers or advisor needed to know the inner workings of my psychology in order for me to survive. Nor was it in fact the case. In fact, in order to do my research— which entailed, among other things, contending with aggressive lemurs and errant spice boats and cyclones, while living in a tent on a remote island off the coast of Madagascar—I needed to not succumb to my own psychology. I was in the field, and in grad school, to do science, not to engage in group therapy. The “non-binary” category seems to be evidence of either deep mental confusion, or deep narcissism, or perhaps both. The author of the “Science Careers” piece continues that, in the six months since informing said lab mates, “The word ‘she’ has slipped out in conversations more times than I can count, and every time, it feels like a knife is being stabbed into my stomach.” We all have preferences about what we want to be called. Perhaps a nickname from childhood has stuck around past its use-by date. Perhaps you prefer your middle name to your first. When I was a college professor, I was happy to have students call me by my first name, but a few preferred to use a title, in which case “Dr. Heying” was fine too. But occasionally a student would call me “Mrs. Heying.” As I told them—gently, privately—that wasn’t fine by me, because while it was true that I was married, my marital status had no bearing on my role as their professor, whereas my academic degree did. So I bristled slightly at being addressed as “Mrs.,” especially (but not only) in an academic setting, and I told the students why, but you know what I didn’t do? I didn’t harangue the students, nor did I dwell on a mistake that was clearly trivial. If being misgendered feels like “a knife is being stabbed into your stomach,” I’m pretty sure that you need to get out more. Some “first-world problems” are real challenges which would nevertheless not rate on a list of complaints had the complainant want of food, shelter, or clean water to drink. Spending hours navigating an automated customer service system to get to a real person, or facing the newest round of software updates that have broken a once functional system—these are legitimate first world problems. Other first world problems, though? They are fabricated. Out of confusion. Or for attention. As the inimitable Douglas Murray observes,36 he has yet to hear the distinction between coming out as non-binary and simply shouting “Look at me!”

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~ We need science, and we need scientists. One of the things that will get in the way of both things is allowing the institution of science to fall prey to ideology that patently makes no sense. When one of the two most influential science journals in the world publishes a self-indulgent piece on the visceral pain experienced by a “non-binary” grad student upon being misgendered, while truly important scientific issues remain uninvestigated or patently botched, it all seems a lost cause. Add to this that medical schools are now falling down the rabbit hole as well: a professor apologizes for referring to pregnant women (because men can apparently get pregnant; or so tomorrow’s doctors are being taught); another one insists that biological sex is a “social construct;” while others get lambasted for referring to breastfeeding instead of “chestfeeding.”37 So too is the American Medical Association. In their guide to “Advancing Health Equity: A Guide to Language, Narrative and Concepts”38 jointly produced with the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), they argue that sex is assigned at birth; that transitioning between sexes is possible in humans; and that while “two-spirit” people (from the Ojibwe) have bodies that “simultaneously house a masculine spirit and a feminine spirit,” the “gender binary” is nonetheless “colonial.” Medicine and its practitioners are losing their collective grip on reality, and on science, and are failing the very people they purport to be trying to help. And yet. Consider this: A smart and capable young person approached me with this true story. A natal female who had transitioned to male, Ronny (a pseudonym) grew alarmed at having doors close as womanhood receded in the rear-view mirror. Realizing that “passing” as female was no longer possible, Ronny settled on non-binary as a result. Ronny does not seem confused to me. Ronny is not in denial of reality. Ronny does seem sad, and almost resigned. And Ronny arrived here, in part, because of a mainstream narrative that assures people that if they don’t fit regressive stereotypes of what it means to be male or female, if they are butch women or feminine men, or if they are attracted to members of their own sex, then they are actually a different sex than they’ve been told. Well, no. Ronny was manipulated and misled by a system, and is left with an array of bad choices. At this point, nonbinary may well be the right choice for Ronny.

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I grew up with Ms. Magazine, and Title IX, and Mary Tyler Moore throwing her hat into the air on a Minneapolis street, beamed into my living room every week without fail. Mary Tyler Moore’s hat throw was an expression of such unbridled freedom and possibility that it filled me, as a little girl, with joy every time that I saw it. I did not view it this way then— and it was apparently not the intention—but her joyous hat throw could be seen as an homage to the trope of the bride throwing her bouquet to the single women in attendance at her wedding. The single women fight to receive the bouquet in hopes that it would give them the luck they want, to land a man, to become the next woman on the altar. But Mary Tyler Moore’s exuberant hat throw was not a rejection of marriage; we do not need to throw out the old in order to embrace the new. Rather, it was a celebration of the additional opportunities afforded by a world that was opening up to the reality that women are just as varied as men, just as skilled and flawed, with just as much capacity for both passion and tragedy. Just as—but not the same as. Equal to under the law—but not identical to. Sex is real and ubiquitous and fixed. DSDs are real and very rare. Transsexual people do not exist, but transgender people do. But feeling out of step with gender norms does not make you trans. Also, feeling out of step with gender norms is neither wicked, nor should it be noteworthy. Feeling out of step with gender norms certainly should not warrant the creation of fictional new categories, like non-binary, unless the point is to keep the rest of us on our toes. To that little boy who would have us believe that his cat might be both male and female—and to the legions of people who would have us believe that their sex is a matter of choice—I say this: Your beliefs are not merely wrong, they are acutely disempowering. This marks a step backwards for all of us individuals who are gender non-conforming: the girls who like to play in the mud and with numbers, and the boys who like to save injured birds and discuss their feelings. It therefore marks a step backwards for society, because allowing all humans to find their skills and interests and passions, rather than constrain them to stereotypes, is fundamental.

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17. Gray P. Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life. Basic Books/Hachette Book Group; 2013:xii, 274. 18. 20/20 Interview of Jazz Jennings by Barbara Walters in 2013: https://youtu.be/bJw3s85EcxM - Google Search. Accessed December 31, 2021. https:// www.google.com / search?q=20%2F20 + Interview+of+Jazz+ Jennings+by+Barbara+Walters+in+2013%3A+https%3A%2F%2Fyoutu.be %2FbJw3s85EcxM&rlz=1C5CHFA_enAU881AU881&sxsrf=AOaemvLA ULkoTEzNy7ETqA0nvQihban-5Q%3A1640930053648&ei=BZvOYY-cJ4 KdseMPscaWgAQ&ved=0ahUKEwjPssvnrI31AhWCTmwGHTGjBUAQ4 dUDCA8&uact=5&oq=20%2F20+Interview+of+Jazz+Jennings+by+Barbar a+Walters+in+2013%3A+https%3A%2F%2Fyoutu.be%2FbJw3s85EcxM& gs_lcp=Cgdnd3Mtd2l6EAM6BwgjEOoCECc6DQguEMcBEK8BEOoCEC dKBAhBGABKBAhGGABQpQ1YpQ1gsxBoAXACeACAAdwBiAHcAZ IBAzItMZgBAKABAaABArABCsABAQ&sclient=gws-wiz 19. Digital Catalog - Irreversible Damage. Accessed December 31, 2021. https://catalog.simonandschuster.com/TitleDetails/TitleDetails.aspx?cid=29 984&pn=1&isbn=9781684512287&FilterBy=3&FilterVal=Regnery+Publis hing&FilterByName=Imprint&ob=0&ed=&showcart=N&camefrom=&find =&a=mkcndtsfxa 20. Number of referrals | GIDS. Accessed December 31, 2021. https://gids.nhs. uk/number-referrals 21. Wiepjes CM, Nota NM, de Blok CJM, et al. The Amsterdam Cohort of Gender Dysphoria Study (1972-2015): Trends in Prevalence, Treatment, and Regrets. J Sex Med. 2018;15(4):582-590. doi:10.1016/j.jsxm.2018.01.016 22. Stats For Gender. Accessed December 31, 2021. https://www.statsforgender. org/ 23. Zucker KJ. Epidemiology of gender dysphoria and transgender identity. Sex Health. 2017;14(5):404-411. doi:10.1071/SH17067 24. Plastic Surgery Statistics. American Society of Plastic Surgeons. Accessed December 31, 2021. https://www.plasticsurgery.org/news/plastic-surgerystatistics 25. Littman L. Parent reports of adolescents and young adults perceived to show signs of a rapid onset of gender dysphoria. Romer D, ed. PLOS ONE. 2018;13(8):e0202330. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0202330 26. Hayes T, Haston K, Tsui M, Hoang A, Haeffele C, Vonk A. Atrazine-induced hermaphroditism at 0.1 ppb in American leopard frogs (Rana pipiens): laboratory and field evidence. Environ Health Perspect. 2003;111(4):568575. 27. Ca F. Endocrine-disrupting chemicals: elucidating our understanding of their role in sex and gender-relevant end points. Vitam Horm. 2014;94. doi:10. 1016/B978-0-12-800095-3.00003-1 28. Semsar K, Godwin J. Multiple mechanisms of phenotype development in the bluehead wrasse. Horm Behav. 2004;45(5):345-353. doi:10.1016/j.yhbeh. 2004.01.003

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29. Heying HE. Covert vs. Overt: Toward a More Nuanced Understanding of Sex Differences in Competition. Arch Sex Behav. Published online January 7, 2022. doi:10.1007/s10508-021-02278-0 30. Shappley K, R AT to B, ALL. I Let My Daughter Transition at 4 Years Old — And Have Zero Regrets Today. Good Housekeeping. Published April 13, 2017. Accessed December 31, 2021. https://www.goodhousekeeping.com /life/parenting/a43702/transgender-child-kimberly-shappley/ 31. 4thwavenow. Gender-affirmative therapist: Baby who hates barrettes = trans boy; questioning sterilization of 11-year olds same as denying cancer treatment. 4thWaveNow. Published September 29, 2016. Accessed December 31, 2021. https: //4thwavenow.com / 2016 / 09 / 29/genderaffirmative- therapist - baby - who - hates - barrettes-trans - boy-questioningsterilization-of-11-year-olds-same-as-denying-cancer-treatment/ 32. Fadiman A. All My Pronouns: How I learned to live with the singular they. Harpers Mag. 2020; August 2020. Accessed December 31, 2021. https://harpers.org/archive/2020/08/all-my-pronouns-the-singular-they/ 33. Waters M. Where Gender-Neutral Pronouns Come From. The Atlantic. Published June 4, 2021. Accessed December 31, 2021. https://www.the atlantic.com/culture/archive/2021/06/gender-neutral-pronouns-arent-new/61 9092/ 34. McWhorter J. Opinion | Gender Pronouns Are Changing. It’s Exhilarating. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/21/opinion/genderpronouns-they.html. Published September 21, 2021. Accessed December 31, 2021. 35. Roldan B. Coming out. Science. 2020;370(6521):1242-1242. doi:10.1126/ science.370.6521.1242 36. Vacuous liberal ‘wokeness’ is now beyond parody. Accessed December 31, 2021. https:// www.telegraph.co.uk / news / 2019 / 09 / 16 / vacuous-liberalwokeness-now-beyond-parody/ 37. Herzog K. Med Schools Are Now Denying Biological Sex. Common Sense. Published July 28, 2021. Accessed December 31, 2021. https://bariweiss. substack.com/p/med-schools-are-now-denying-biological 38. Advancing Health Equity: A Guide to Language, Narrative and Concepts. American Medical Association. Accessed December 31, 2021. https://www .ama- assn.org / about / ama - center-health-equity/advancing-health-equityguide-language-narrative-and-concepts-0

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~ Heather Heying is a scientist, educator, and author. An evolutionary biologist who has conducted research on the evolution of social systems and sexual selection, from frogs to humans, she earned her PhD in Biology from the University of Michigan, where she earned the university’s top honour for her dissertation. She has a B.A. in Anthropology. Heather has been a visiting Fellow at Princeton University, and before that, was a tenured professor at The Evergreen State College. She resigned in 2017 in the wake of violent campus protests. She architected curriculum that prioritized the scientific method, and exploration of both ecosystems and ideas; and has since been invited to speak about higher ed, the evolution of sex and consciousness, and the culture wars, in venues including the U.S. Department of Justice, the Krishnamurti Institute, Joe Rogan, and Oxford University. Her first book, Antipode, is based on her life in Madagascar while studying the sex lives of poison frogs. Her second book, co-authored with husband Bret Weinstein, is A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century. A New York Times best-seller, the book provides an evolutionary toolkit for living a good and honourable life as a modern ape. She also writes Natural Selections on Substack, and co-hosts with Bret a popular weekly livestream on the DarkHorse Podcast.

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On Free Speech Absolutism and the Deontological Pursuit of Truth Based on an Interview with Gad Saad Mark Halloran: You’ve described yourself as a free speech absolutist. The only other absolutist I’ve spoken to was the late intelligence researcher James Flynn.1 I’ve always been interested in what the limits of free speech are beyond just incitation to violence. So, I wonder what you consider to be the limits of free speech? Gad Saad: I think the best way to answer this question is via a concrete and tangible example. If I were to think of the absolute most offensive thing that someone could utter, especially to someone who is Lebanese Jewish, such as myself, someone who has escaped severe persecution in Lebanon - the worst thing that you could say is the Holocaust never happened. Obviously, I wasn’t personally affected by the Holocaust, but given that it was Jewish people who were affected, I could argue that that is the height of triggering for me; of offending me, of insulting me. And yet, what free speech absolutist means is that I support the right of imbeciles, morons, racists, anti-Semites, and truth negators to engage in the most vile discourse. That’s what free speech absolutism is. So, things like ‘Oh, it’s hate speech, if you criticize a religion - you’re hurting someone’s feeling.’ And that should be the red line. No, it shouldn’t. You could say that Judaism is a bunch of crock, and that’s fine. What you can’t say is there is a synagogue on Wellington and Queen Victoria boulevard - let’s go there and wait for the Jews to come out and beat them up or kill them. That’s incitement to violence. But you could criticize anything, you could mock anything, you could ridicule anything, you could do whatever you want in a free society. Short again of things like defamation, libel - I can’t go on social media and say, ‘I know that Mark is a child killer. And this is not an opinion, I have proof that he is’ and then you could come after me. Short of the usual caveats everything is fair game.

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The issue seems to be that there’s a blurry line in relation to the incitation to violence. But I think about Karl Popper’s criterion of the tolerant society needing to be intolerant of intolerance. And so, there are conversations and symbols of things that are sort of not worth having - like with Holocaust deniers. And I wonder what you thought of that? Let the free market of ideas decide. When I was a doctoral student at Cornell University, there was one person, the name of the gentleman escapes me, who argued under the guise of ‘Let’s just have a debate,’ and who wanted to come on campus, to discuss whether the Holocaust happened or not. And the reality is that most people were not interested in what he had to say, and I can’t remember his name today, because in the battle of ideas - it’s a form of evolutionary epistemology; good ideas eventually get selected, bad ideas eventually lose out. You allow that epistemological Darwinian mechanism to take hold. And I hate to invoke the usual cliches, but if we don’t allow that mechanism then we have a slippery slope: who decides what constitutes out of bound dialogue? For example, when I was going with Jordan Peterson to speak at Ryerson University in 2017, in an event, ostensibly titled: ‘The Stifling of Free Speech on University Campus,’ guess what happened to that event? It was ironically stifled and shut down, and they passed around fliers and posted things on Facebook and on social media saying ‘We don’t want neo-Nazi, white supremacists on campus.’2 They’re including a Lebanese Jew as a neo-Nazi white supremacist because to them, whatever we were going to talk about - which was literally just defending free speech - was beyond the pale. It was unacceptable. It was inciting people. It was triggering. One man’s triggering thing is another man’s joke. So let the ideas get into the ring and let the best one win. John Stuart Mill’s marketplace of ideas *. I wonder whether you end up on a slippery slope either way? I talked about this with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who was quoting Popper in relation to her latest book ‘Prey’ about the issues with Islamic immigration in Europe. If you allow too much tolerance, people aren’t rational actors and you run the risk of the society being overtaken by authoritarians. It’s a double-edged sword.

* The Marketplace of Ideas is the contention that truth will emerge from the open, free and transparent discussion of ideas and that this process results in the culling of inferior ideologies and the ascendancy of superior ideas.

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Don’t get me wrong. I’m not arguing that all ideas can be allowed to flourish. If an idea is inherently built on the subjugation, the eradication or the extinguishing of another group, then we can discuss whether those ideas should be allowed to flourish in a free society. One can argue that there are some religious beliefs that don’t fall under the proviso of religious freedom, because they are seditious, they are literally contrary to freedom, and so that would fit under the not tolerating the intolerable; Popper’s paradox. It’s not as though I’m coming at this from a naive perspective - there are contexts, but again, it has to be under the scope of: are these ideas ultimately seeking to eradicate the voices of others if they were in an ascendancy position? If yes, then I think Popper has a point. The problem is that everything now falls under an incitement to hate. For example, when Donald Trump says on January 6th,3 ‘Okay, folks, why don’t you march down to Capitol Hill and exhibit your displeasure, but make sure to do so peacefully.’ Well, it didn’t matter that he gave that caveat. The fact that he said ‘march down;’ that was an insurrection, that was as bad as Pearl Harbor, that was completely the same as World War II. There was no distinction. January 6th will live on in infamy. I’m still hiding under my desk because I’m so traumatized because of the 75-year-old folks who rushed Capitol Hill taking selfies. Those guys were just military commandos. So, the reality is that all this woke stuff is able to usurp language so that anything I say, even if I say ‘hello,’ that could be construed as a form of incitement to hate. It’s bullshit. The argument that is made in relation to that is that some of his language is warlike language, for example, ‘going into battle,’ whilst his lawyers defended him by saying that he’d asked for the people to march peacefully.4 The issue that you’ve faced is an extension of the idea of incitement to violence to epistemic violence. By epistemic violence you mean? I want to make sure I understand what you mean, because for example, I use the term in describing postmodernism, I call it intellectual terrorism. Not that I literally mean that there is violence, but that it akin to the way that the 9/11 hijackers flew planes into buildings. I argue that postmodernism flies planes of bullshit into our edifices of reason. It’s a metaphor. So maybe you could explain to me what you mean by epistemic violence?

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I took the term from Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay’s book, Cynical Theories. I wonder whether people really do believe in free speech? I know you’ve found a division with people like Sam Harris in relation to Trump’s ability to exhibit free speech on Twitter. I wonder whether even people who present themselves as perfectly rational actors truly believe in free speech? That’s the reason why we had a fallout because I am someone who lives by a strict code. If you read The Parasitic Mind- How Infectious Ideas are Killing Common Sense5 in chapter one, I talk about the two ideals that drive my life: truth and freedom. I live according to an exacting level of purity, to the extent where it’s a punishing code of personal conduct, a pathological code of conduct, whereby to me, I would be tossing and turning in turmoil, if I were not always consistent in my foundational principles. When I look at someone like Sam Harris, who, I facetiously refer to as the ‘Malibu Meditator,’ who built a career on being the dispassionate and rational guy and speaking with a soft voice, because that makes you sound as though you’re more profound, and then he violates every single conceivable deontological principle, when it is politically expedient to do so, that triggers my ire, that upsets me. For many years, I stayed quiet. This is not really about Sam Harris - it’s a larger principle. I stayed quiet because we had a personal relationship, I knew him, we’ve hung out, we’ve had dinner, he’s invited me on his show. But then the number of deontological violations were so great that I started using my satirical approach to mock him, but in a nice way, and he didn’t take well to it. And that to me is hypocrisy and is one of those sins that we need to incorporate within the seven deadly sins; we need to have an amendment to the seven deadly sins. So ‘I believe in presumption of innocence’ - but not for Brett Kavanaugh. Surely, he must have been a gang rapist going up and down the East Coast raping everybody. Now we don’t need to really presume that he’s innocent, because this is not a courtroom. This is not a criminal case. It’s just a job interview. So, he doesn’t deserve that deontological principle. Whether it be Sam Harris, or others - all of my super smart, highfalutin colleagues, all thought that presumption of innocence didn’t apply to someone as supposedly execrable as Brett Kavanaugh.6 Let me give you an example of a deontological approach to this issue. In 1961, I believe, the Mossad was in Argentina trying to find Adolf Eichmann.7 Adolf Eichmann might be considered a slightly nastier guy than Brett Kavanaugh. And yet their deontological position was, ‘We can either put a bullet in his head right now, because we’ve identified him and end this story

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and ensure that we are safe, or we don’t do it this way, he needs to have his day in court at great personal cost, and to ensure the reputation of Israel.’ We will find a way to smuggle him out back to Israel, where he will stand trial. That’s what the deontological principles are. So, someone like Sam Harris who was able to from this side of his mouth, say one thing, and this side of his mouth say something else. I find that vile. I think you quoted Hume, † in your book from memory, talking about how rationality is driven to some extent by emotion and desire. So, we’re all vulnerable to that, aren’t we? We’re all vulnerable to confirmation bias? Here’s what I argue in that chapter; the one where I quote Hume - it’s not that we are just cognitive animals; thinking animals, or just emotional animals – I don’t think that these two systems should be pitted against one another. We’re both. The struggle is to know when to invoke which system. When I am walking down an alley, and I’m taking a shortcut to get home, and I see four young men, loitering, that look suspicious, and my heart starts racing, my blood pressure goes up, I might get a bit of anxiety - that’s my affective system that’s kicking in, but it makes perfect adaptive sense for me to have had that response. On the other hand, if I’m trying to solve a calculus problem during a calculus exam, the triggering of my affective system is not going to help me much. The problem arises when we apply the wrong system at the wrong time. When we are examining which prospective politician might be ideal, you’d like to think that we’re able to activate our cognitive system. And yet, most of the positions that people have taken, vis-à-vis Obama, vis-à-vis Trump, are completely emotionally based. There is an expression in Arabic: ‘To get drunk simply by smelling the cork of the wine bottle,’ meaning that I don’t need to actually go through the heavy lifting of drinking the wine to get drunk, I can simply take a whiff and I’ll get drunk.8 What are we conveying here? When people say ‘I despise Trump; he disgusts me. He’s going to cause a nuclear holocaust. The economy is going to tank. He’s going to institute martial law.’ Those were literal things that were said by guys like Sam Harris and Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman.9 When they’re saying things like that, they are smelling the cork of the wine bottle in the same way. They’ll get drunk “smelling the Obama cork.” Obama † David Hume (1711-1776) is a Scottish Enlightenment philosopher known for his philosophical system of empiricism, scepticism, and naturalism.

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is majestic. He’s got a radiant smile. He is lanky. He speaks with the cadence of a Southern Baptist minister. Every single syllable that he says might be an utter, empty, vacuous platitude of bullshit. But my God, does he intoxicate me; I am getting drunk by smelling the cork of the wine bottle. When you actually try to challenge people with ‘Can you give me five reasons why you hate Trump?’ They’ll respond with: ‘He disgusts me, he’s a brawler, he’s vulgar.’ So, they are using peripheral cues to judge him. It’s not substantive. So that’s the tension between passion and reason that I referenced in chapter 2 of The Parasitic Mind. Activate the appropriate system for the right occasion. It seems as though you’ve got to be vigilant against that. If you wanted to make an assessment of Trump it may be in relation to something like COVID19. For instance, early on in the pandemic, Trump simply saying ‘It will go away’ - that was unhelpful, and damaging, and potentially led to greater loss of life.10 And then you may look at the Trump administration and say: ‘Perhaps the Abraham Accords ‡ were a success.’11–14 However, if I made some sort of ad hominem attack about you, and then I went on to legitimately criticize your work, you may not be as even handed in your response to me, because your emotional system is activated. Of course. But again, you would think that people whose business it is to be nuanced thinkers, to not be black and white, to be rational, to be well reasoned would be able to do this. In The Parasitic Mind, I explained that all of the idea pathogens that I’m discussing in this book originate from academia. It’s not as though if you are highly educated with a PhD from a fancy university this inoculates you against bad ideas - you are the progenitor of those bad ideas. Now, that doesn’t mean that all professors are babbling idiots, but to paraphrase Orwell; it takes intellectuals to come up with really dumb ideas § and so that’s in essence what I find disheartening because you expect better from the supposedly intellectual class. It’s as though we pick a soccer team, but we don’t pick them based on their athletic abilities. It turns out that all the soccer players are babbling, obese people who can’t kick a soccer ball, and that’s what you end up having in universities. That’s why I oftentimes, in a jocular way, I’m righteously ‡ The Abraham Accords is a joint statement between the State of Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States which was reached on August 13, 2020. § The original quote from George Orwell is: ‘Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.’

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indignant at some of my colleagues because of their faux intellectualism. Their posing really upsets me, because I am authentic to a fault. For example, I’m not a Democrat nor a Republican, notwithstanding the fact that I’m not American. I’m not liberal nor conservative - not because I’m trying to be coy, and I don’t want to show you my hand as to which party I belong to. It’s because I truly am an ideas guy. If you were to ask me, ‘What do you think about the death penalty?’ And if I give you an answer, then you’re going to think, ‘Oh, he’s a conservative.’ If you ask me about transgender rights and gay rights, you’re going to think I’m the most socially liberal guy in the world. If you ask me about open borders, you’re going to think, ‘Oh, he’s a conservative.’ I’m neither conservative nor liberal, I judge each idea on its own, and therefore I don’t succumb to tribalism. And that’s why I say in the book: belong to the tribe of truth. Everyone can have a moral tribe can’t they? We do. And it’s tough to extricate yourself from that penchant. We are a coalitional creature. The ability to view the world as us versus them; to view the world as blue team versus red team, is one that is hardwired into the architecture of our minds. I get that. But we’re able to sometimes overcome these Darwinian realities. I have an evolved penchant to eat fatty foods, because I’ve evolved to solve the problem of caloric scarcity and caloric uncertainty; that doesn’t mean that I am doomed because I also have an opposing Darwinian drive, which is, I don’t want to die tomorrow, because maybe I have a Darwinian drive of moral restraint. The fact that it is incontestable that we are a coalitional creature, doesn’t mean that we have to become these tribal idiots. We are pulled by competing Darwinian pulls at any given moment. I felt like that was the heart of it. When I was reading The Parasitic Mind, it reminded me of the conformity experiments ** of Solomon Asch.15 So, I

** The social psychology conformity experiments of Solomon Asch presented participants with a line judgement task where there was an obvious answer – the rationale being if the participant gave the wrong answer it would be due to pressure from the social group to conform. The other participants in the experiment were confederates who would deliberately give the wrong answer in relation to the line length. In the 12 critical trials 75% of participants conformed (to the incorrect majority answer) at least once and 25% never conformed.

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wonder how much of it is simply that people can get indoctrinated into an idea, any idea, through the pressure of the group? It’s interesting that you mentioned Solomon Asch’s experiments. It’s one of the classic examples that I give in any behavioral science or psychology course, whether it be consumer psychology, or psychology of decision making, or evolutionary psychology. The fact that a single person - never mind the actual conformity rates that we see - would succumb to the group pressure to conform for such an unambiguous set of stimuli shows us that in the real world, where the stimuli are not as clear as three lines with another line, how easy it becomes to get people to conform. And I think that’s what makes people who don’t succumb to such pressure such unique individuals. I always tell people don’t be a fence sitter. If you’re able to articulate a good defense for your positions, be a honey badger. Because the honey badger is an animal that is extraordinarily fierce, despite the fact that it is the size of a small dog. So be ideologically fierce, and stand tall in your commitment to defend your deontological foundational principles. But most people, I hate to say it, and I don’t want to sound misanthropic - most people are just abject cowards. If you go ‘boo!’ they’re going to go into a corner and suck their thumb and go into the fetal position. This is why I admire guys like Christopher Hitchens, because whether I agree with him on a position or not, he didn’t suffer fools gladly. If you went after him, you better have your story straight, or he’s going to come hard after you. Not because he’s a nasty guy, but because he just doesn’t suffer fools gladly. I respect that personality trait. The reality is, certainly in academia, we almost by design choose people who are just intellectual cowards, rather than having Navy Seals as academics - these are intellectual warriors, right? Not frivolously combative: you and I have different positions - let’s have a respectful disagreement. Let’s see what happens. Instead, people want to play nice. At departmental meetings it’s unbelievable the number of niceties that people say to each other, because they don’t want to come across as though they might have contradicted what someone else says. Therefore, we have to be so empathetic and apologetic. You could be very nice and polite, but get to the point. So, I don’t appreciate that, maybe it’s partly my Middle Eastern background. No, not maybe - it is the unique combination of genes that make me who I am. I don’t like that. That’s why people sometimes think, ‘Oh, you’re so different when I see you on social media, then when I see you in real life, you’re such a nice and warm person.’ I say, ‘But I’m not on social media?’ And they’re like, ‘No, you seem

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much rougher.’ It’s not a dispositional issue. It’s a situational one. It’s not that I am a violent guy on social media. But if you come at me on social media, I don’t recoil to a corner, I’ll come right back after you. As an analogy, when I tuck my children to bed, I’m very loving. But if you attack me in an alley, I’m less loving. I didn’t suddenly become dispositionally violent. It’s this situation that demanded that I exhibit behavioral plasticity. I respect people who’ve got this fortitude who step into the ring and say, ‘Let’s have at it.’ It’s a beautiful trait. It seems you admire not being too high on agreeableness, even though that probably has an evolutionary benefit in terms of the in-group. James Flynn said to me that in the 30 or 40 years that the left has gained ascendancy within the university, anything that they’d done, and he was critical of it, did not even begin to approach the totalitarian regime that the right ran under regimes like McCarthyism. How would you respond to that? I don’t know what he went through, I can only respond to the current reality. Short of having studied the history of the type of squashing of free speech that might have happened in different eras, I can tell you that the last 40 or 50 years that I’m aware, all of the nonsense comes from the left. As a matter of fact, I can’t think of an industry within intelligentsia that is not overwhelmingly dominated by one political aisle; the left. McCarthyism was a unique short point in history. But let’s talk about now because I don’t know what he went through. There have been many studies that have examined the distribution of political affiliation of professors at universities.16 And the data is just astounding. First of all, if you look across all disciplines, it could be 5 to 1, 10 to 1, 20 to 1 - Democrats to Republicans or Liberals to Conservatives. Let me contextualize this; if you’re comparing the efficacy of two drugs, and you have an odds ratio of 1 to 1.2, it means it’s 20% more effective. And you ran all of the statistical tests that you want, whether it be an effect size, or the p value, you’re going to get a huge effect. That’s 1 to 1.2. In academia we’re talking 1 to 10, 1 to 20. It’s multifold greater than the typical statistical effects that you would see in all the papers that are ever published. Now, depending on the field that you’re in, the more activist the field is, then you have ratios of 44 to 1; sociology and ethnic studies and bullshit studies. Especially when you’re dealing in topics that don’t have absolute scientific veracity. For example, for the theory of evolution we now understand that to be absolutely true, although we are open to its falsifiability, as everything is provisional in science. But that’s within the realm of science.

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When it comes to us discussing in an economics course and a political science course – is the death penalty right or wrong? Are abortion rights right or wrong? What is the optimal fiscal policy? What is the optimal foreign policy? Well, there are very, very compelling arguments on any side for those issues. Now, I may fall on one side ideologically or not. But there are truly very valuable arguments on both sides. So, I can really listen to someone who thinks that the death penalty is a terrible idea, and they might have some objectively good and valid points. Now imagine that you live in an ecosystem where in some departments, the last time that you might have run into a conservative professor was when Baruch Spinoza †† was writing something [i.e., the 17th century]. Well, that’s probably not a good thing. So, I don’t care what James Flynn may or may not have gone through, the academic ecosystem that I live in and that I have known for the past 40 years, is one that is dominated by one political party. And that’s really not good for the flourishing of ideas. I think to some extent you’ve come out as a warrior in this culture war because your discipline; the merger of evolutionary psychology and consumption, is at the epicenter. If there is going to be a discipline that is the flashpoint for ideas of social constructionism then it is going to be that, isn’t it? And that is why you are coming out in such strong defense I imagine? The first hints of the insane departure from reason and reality that I saw in academia, is precisely how you describe it, which was in the pursuit of my scientific work. It was kind of a precursor to the eventual broader culture wars. But idiotic ideas begin in the lab, just like the COVID virus, as far as we know, it starts off in the lab, but then it escapes. These parasitic and moronic ideas begin in some esoteric place in the halls of the ivory tower, but eventually those ideas escape and then they infect everything: journalism, Hollywood, politics, and human resources departments of companies. So, my first exposure to the lunacy came when I was trying to Darwinize these behavioral disciplines. In my case, I truly was fighting against the orthodoxy, because even today - I’m housed in a business school – and the word biology is never uttered in the business school.17,18 Somehow employers and employees and

†† Baruch de Spinoza (1632-1677) was a Dutch philosopher who was one of the foremost exponents of 17th Century Rationalism and an important figure in the Dutch Golden Age.

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consumers and traders and economic agents exist in a supra plane that transcends biology. They are not prone to biological processes. Biology really matters for the mosquito and the zebra and the dog. But ‘What the hell are you talking about Dr. Saad with this biology stuff and consumer behavior? We transcend our biology.’ This is called the human reticence effect.19,20 You’re reticent to apply the exact same evolutionary principles that explain the behavior of 1,999,999 species. But there’s one species where biology and evolutionary principles don’t apply and if they apply to that species, they stop at the neck. So, ‘Oh, you want to use evolution to explain the evolution of opposable thumbs? - I’m with you. You want to explain the evolutionary mechanisms that explain why our kidneys operate the way they do? Okay, I’m still with you. But you want to explain the human mind using the evolutionary framework? What are you some kind of Jewish Nazi?’ So that’s the kind of idiocy that you’d get. Listen, I’ve interacted with editors of top journals in psychology, where they said, ‘Well, come on, evolutionary psychology, that’s just racist pseudoscience?’ And it’s breathtaking. Because what is the alternative game in town? Through what mechanism did the human mind evolve? Well, it’s culture. It’s learning. It’s socialization. Of course, that explains nothing. As I’ve written and as I explain to my students, to explain something through the invoking of culture has zero explanatory power, because I could replace the word culture with the letter ‘X.’ Why do women love tall guys? Because it’s X. Why do men like this type of women? Because it’s X. What needs to be done is to explain why socialization is of that form. So, no one is denying the fact that socialization occurs, and that culture occurs, and that the environment matters. Evolutionists don’t deny the importance of the environment. But there needs to still be an ultimate explanation for the causal mechanisms that result in that socialization process. Otherwise, you’re saying nothing. Still today, I encounter endless babbling buffoons who say, ‘Come on. This is not serious science.’ So, in chapter seven of The Parasitic Mind, I discuss an unbelievably powerful epistemological tool called Nomological Networks of Cumulative Evidence.21–24 If people take nothing away from that particular book other than understanding this powerful tool - although I hope they take every syllable away from it - but if they take nothing else away, that it is such a revolutionary way to construct arguments.

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Nomological networks of cumulative evidence is not a literature review. It’s not a meta-analysis. It’s much more than that. Because what it’s basically saying is I have to provide distinct lines of evidence in support of an argument. Let’s say I want to prove to you that there is a sex specificity of toy preferences; boys prefer certain toys, girls prefer other toys. Or I want to make an argument that men’s preference for the hourglass figure is an adaptation.21 How would I go about proving that point to you? Now I’m going to put on my hat of this nomological network architect, whereby I’m going to try to find data from across cultures, from across time periods, from across disciplines, from across frameworks, from across dependent measures. Imagine triangulation, but on hyper-steroids. It’s an epistemological triangulation. It’s not triangulation, the way you would come up with a way to validate the construct of a personality measure. That is a form of nomological network. But it’s much more than that. I thought it is interesting in terms of sex differences, because now, with the replication crisis in psychology,25 that seems to be undermining this research to some extent … In a sense, a nomological network protects you against the replication crisis. There are two types of replications. When you talk about replication, there is what’s called a direct replication. Let’s say that you have published a paper on facial symmetry. So, now I want to replicate your finding in a direct way, meaning I want to use your exact stimuli, your exact instructions, so I do a direct replication of what you did. A conceptual replication is broader. Let’s say you found that beauty is captured through facial symmetry. Well, is there some alternate way where I can establish that phenomenon using different stimuli? That would be a conceptual replication. So, there are two types of replications. Now a nomological network is not a replication, but what it’s saying is, ‘I can offer you distinct lines of evidence, all of which point to the same incontrovertible, true finding.’ Now, why did I start by saying all this? Because when evolutionary scientists are trying to argue that something is an adaptation, they typically are going to look for multiple lines of evidence to make that argument. Therefore, the evidentiary threshold that evolutionary scientists operate under is astoundingly higher. It has to be because you’ve got the danger when you’re trying to construct an evolutionary theory, that when you extrapolate backwards, you increase

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the error rate. If that makes sense? It does. And that’s why you build those nomological networks. That’s why when people say, ‘Well, it’s unfalsifiable just-so storytelling,’ it really pisses me off, because it is actually doing the exact opposite. When I want to try to prove to you that the hourglass figure is an adaptation, what do I do? I can get you data from radically different cultures. I can go to the Yanomami tribe ‡‡ in the Amazon and show you that they prefer an hourglass figure.26 So already that is way higher in terms of the evidentiary threshold. In most psychology studies, one takes 30 undergrads into their lab, and they’re done, good night, mic drop. I could get you data from across cultures; I could get you data cross-temporally (i.e., across eras). I can show you that there are figurines from 3,000 years ago that possess that waist to hip ratio hourglass figure.21,27 I could get you data from female escorts, as I did in a paper that I published showing you that across 48 countries where women advertise their sexual services online, they tend to advertise the waist to hip ratio that is universally preferred.28 I can get you brain imaging data that shows you that the pleasure center in men’s brains are much more likely to light up when I show you images of an hourglass figure.21,29 The bottom line is that I can get you an astoundingly varied set of data, which makes it incontrovertible that there certainly seems to be very compelling evidence in support of my argument. And yet some idiot will write to me and say, ‘But come on Dr. Saad you just smoke a pipe, while sipping whiskey, and just come up with these fanciful stories.’ Meanwhile, I put myself through the rigor of an astoundingly higher set of thresholds before I prove my point. So that’s why it’s galling, because to me, it’s an attack on the decency of reason. Because you are attacking me for exactly the opposite of what I do. It’s an invalidation, I suppose. I want to get back to that, because I think there’s a point that I’m really interested in, in relation to this. I think what you and other people like Jordan Peterson have struggled with, is that if social constructionism embeds all causation in culture and language, it becomes a form of solipsism, which is maddening to argue against. You’re right. True. I’ll just build on what you just said. When I was laying out all of the idea pathogens in The Parasitic Mind, I wanted to try to come ‡‡ The Yanomami tribe are a group of Indigenous people who live in villages in the Amazon rainforest on the border between Venezuela and Brazil.

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up with some universal mechanism that explains why these varied idea pathogens arise. While different cancers behave very differently, what they all have in common is the unchecked division of cells. At least we can agree that that’s a commonality across all cancers. I wanted to look at what is common to all these idea pathogens. I think what they all do, is that they offer hope, whilst injuring truth. In other words, it’s a consequentialist bent. There is a noble goal of providing people with hope and if in the pursuit of creating a more hopeful world, we murder and rape truth - so be it. You mentioned social constructivism, so let me use it as a telling example. It is a wonderfully, hopeful message to say that, my child, if only I hug him enough, or don’t hug him enough, or whatever the sequence of reinforcement, could be the next Michael Jordan. It’s not a very nice message for me to know that my son was not born with equal potentiality to Michael Jordan; that he could never jump as high as Michael Jordan. That sucks. So, it’s much nicer to construct a narrative of bullshit that makes us all be able to wallow in endless hope - my son could be the next Einstein, he could be the next Jordan, he could be the next Messi. So social constructivism at its root, is a beautiful message perfectly rooted in bullshit. But it’s a beautiful message. The reality is we’re not equal - we may be equal under the law. We’re not equal in potentiality. There is something unique about Lionel Messi that allows him to move on a soccer pitch in ways that you will never be able to. And that’s not because mommy didn’t hug you enough. Now let’s take another one. Cultural relativism suffers from the exact same mechanism. Cultural relativism came about from Franz Boas, §§ the cultural anthropologist ... And Margaret Mead… *** Margaret, his eventual student, who was desperate to extricate the human condition from any biological imperatives, because there are all kinds of cretinous people who misused evolutionary theory. They start off with a noble goal, which is let’s create a worldview where these kinds of ugly realities will no longer happen. And in the service of that noble goal, if we erect 100 years §§ Franz Uri Boas (1858-1942) was a German-born American anthropologist who has been called the ‘Father of American Anthropology’ and whose work is associated with movements such as cultural relativism and historical particularism. *** Margaret Mead (1901-1978) was an American cultural anthropologist whose reports detailing the attitudes towards sex in South Pacific and traditional Asian cultures significantly influenced the sexual revolution of the 1960s.

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of edifices of bullshit, so be it. They are consequentialist, whereas I am, when it comes to the truth, I am pathological as a deontologist. I never sacrifice truth for careerist aspirations. Although, one might argue I’ve had a very successful career, I’ve nonetheless suffered professionally, because I call it like it is, because I simply cannot modulate my defense of the truth. Doesn’t mean I’m impolite. It doesn’t mean by the way, that we’re not all consequentialist at some point. But when it comes to the pursuit of truth, with a capital T, as an epistemological pursuit, never sacrifice your deontological principles. You’ve mentioned deontological ethics quite a few times. It always strikes me as much harder to achieve than what it sounds. Deontological ethics is like the 10 commandments: ‘Thou shalt, thou shalt not,’ but even the 10 commandments are not purely deontological. ‘Thou shall not kill?’ Well, unless I’m at war with the Philistines and then I’m going to kill. Deontological ethics is very difficult to achieve, I think... Well, how about presumption of innocence? Is that a deontological principle that we should always follow? Yes, I think it’s a good principle. But I don’t think that it’s impervious to change; I think that societies can change it, and then we’ll face the consequences for that, whatever they may be … I’m thinking of writing an article where I analogize the current crisis of irrationality in the West with the Fine-Tuning Argument;30 that all of nature’s laws have to be exactly set at a particular place for life to be amenable on Earth. Well, I argue that for a civil, free, and enlightened society to function in the way that it has requires that a set of foundational values be adhered to (the levers of liberty, so to speak). It’s akin to a cosmological Fine-Tuning Argument and that you need the levers of certain foundational principles to be set at the right place. Once you start moving these levers in ways where you are really now saying ‘But the presumption of innocence does not apply to Brett Kavanaugh’ or ‘Oh no, but free speech doesn’t apply if you’re criticizing Islam’ - you start attacking the integrity of the rigidity of some of these levers that are truly non-negotiable, then you end up with the chaos that we’re finding ourselves in. And that’s why I have a chapter in The Parasitic Mind called ‘Non-Negotiable Elements of a Free and Modern Society’ because these are elements that should be pursued from a deontological perspective. Although I realize what you said that, for many things, it’s very hard to be a

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purist deontological person, but for some foundational things, I think those should be non-negotiable. Particularly with the law. The law is not necessarily about justice. It’s about being as polemical as possible and being an advocate. So, there is a deontological principle of innocence until proven guilty. However often, even in recent times, that has occurred, I couldn’t say. You mean that we adhere to that principle? Let’s move away from presumption of innocence. I know you’ve used the example of O.J. Simpson’s trial in the past;31 a trial that is confounded to some extent by social influences. Although I would say in the O.J. Simpson case there wasn’t, I don’t believe, a violation of a deontological principle. Rather, human beings that are part of that system are flawed, and therefore they succumb to their cognitive and emotional biases. The deontological violation would have come whereby we would have said, ‘There is so much astounding evidence to support the fact that O.J. Simpson is guilty, let’s not waste time with taxpayer money, let’s take him out the back and put a bullet in his head’ - that would have been a violation. So, it’s not the outcome, which was grotesque in my view, that proves that there was a violation. There was no violation as he had a fair trial. I have heard that if you took 10 trials that resulted in the death penalty in the US - amassed the totality of evidence of those 10 trials, it would have amounted to a fraction of the evidence that was presented against O.J. Simpson. Yet some bombastic lawyer puts on a glove, and says ‘If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.’ And therefore the 12 jurors say ‘It doesn’t fit, you must acquit.’ The fact that his DNA was on the victims, their DNA was on him, all that must have been a racist cop that planted all these things.32,33 All of that proves the earlier point that we spoke about - we’re invoking our emotional systems as jurors rather than our cognitive systems, regrettably. Interestingly, from the social constructionist perspective, I was thinking about your writings on gender differences. I thought, ‘Well, these are biological but are they immutable to change?’ So, I would think about gender differences possibly like the genes for height, meaning that if you put enough selective environmental pressures on them, you can change height. Whereas

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the gene for limb development is impermeable †††; it takes a very acute toxicity like thalidomide to affect it. And I wondered whether gender differences were like that because I think you can see society changing. And you use Sweden as the example when referencing universal sex-specific toy preferences, but I would use movements like the Kurdish Workers’ Party, ‡‡‡ and the Peshmerga §§§ and say, these are movements now that have 50% female fighters on the front line that are going up against ISIS.36 They’re effective. But of course, that’s a very specific culture. They take Marxist principles when they form their militias, and combat in the 20th and 21st century changed. You can create so much selection pressure - let’s say through quotas. You can see it in different societies such as India which now has 34% of its IT population female.37 So, you can see that cultures and selective deliberate pressure could change things that may even be biological. Well, yes and no. It depends what you’re saying. For example, if you’re saying, with the Peshmerga, how many female fighters there are - that’s just an outcome-based reality. We can change the cultural tradition so that a particular role that women were not allowed to engage in, they now can, but that’s not really where the selection pressures that I talked about in my research on sex differences come from. Here’s one preference that will be impervious to change, unless you had many years of selection pressures. The fact that women are attracted to ambitious, highly driven, status seeking males, is not going to change. Whether we have more women in IT in India or less, or we have more women driving in Saudi Arabia or not, it’s completely irrelevant to the fundamental sex-specific difference when it comes to human mating. As a matter of fact, extraordinarily successful women insist even more on a man being high status; as such the rate at which an adaptation takes before it becomes part of our manifestation of our human nature, depends on a slew of factors.18 For example, the fact that I have 10 fingers is now a fixed trait. It’s not a normal distribution. So, for us to move away from that will undoubtedly take hundreds of thousands or millions of years of a particular ††† The Sonic hedgehog gene is involved in limb development.34 ‡‡‡ The Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) is a Kurdish militant political organization and guerrilla army which is based in the Kurdish majority regions of south eastern Turkey and northern Iraq. §§§ The Peshmerga is a Kurdish branch of the Iraqi Armed Forces and is controlled by two regional political parties; the Democratic Party of Kurdistan and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan.35

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selection pressure, like the mole rat, that lives underground, has now evolved away its visual system; it can’t see. On the other hand, there are some human traits that evolve very quickly in the order of several hundred years, if not thousands of years. For example, the fact that some societies have individuals with a greater propensity for lactose intolerance, that happens very, very quickly. Cultures that have pastoral living as a cultural tradition, end up having lower rates of lactose intolerance, those cultures that don’t have traditional pastoral living have higher rates, that doesn’t take long, it takes them in the order of a couple of hundred to a couple of thousands of years.21,38,39 So, depending on the trait, the selection rate will vary. My feeling is, again, it depends which sex difference you’re talking about. But the most fundamental sex differences that define our differences are not really within the purview of environmental changes within the lifetime of an individual human being. Does that make sense? Absolutely. I was thinking of an example, I can’t remember the name of the village or the small region, but there’s a place in China where it is a purely matriarchal society.40**** Women own everything, run everything, and they’re all the heads of families. So, you have a situation where women who have no choice but to be attracted to men who aren’t ambitious. I don’t know about that particular context - I’d have to look into it. But that example, by the way, actually proves an important evolutionary point, which comes from behavioral ecology. And it’s as follows: there are some things where the human universals are really quite ubiquitous, but the reality is that for many phenomena, we’ve evolved adaptability as an adaptation. Now, that’s actually a really profound point that people might miss so let me just expand on it. The immune system has evolved to have degrees of freedom. If the immune system had only evolved to solve three specific pathogens P1, P2, and, P3, then we’d all be dead long ago, because pathogens mutate very quickly. So as soon as we go from P1 to P,* if the immune system cannot have the plasticity to deal with a new pathogen on the fly, we’d all be dead. The same logic applies for human behavior; humans have evolved the capacity to be plastic in their behavior. That’s exactly what the field of behavioral ecology **** The Mosuo are a small ethnic group numbering 40,000 people who have lived for centuries on Lugu Lake on the borders of Sichuan and Yunnan provinces in Southwest China at the foothills of the Himalayas. The Mosuo are one of the world’s last matrilineal societies and are often referred to as ‘The Kingdom of Women.’

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is all about. Behavioral ecologists study cross-cultural differences as adaptive responses. Therefore, while most cultures practice polygyny; meaning one man with multiple women — about 85% of documented cultures at least allow for the possibility of polygyny,41 all other cultures are monogamous, and there are exceedingly rare cases of polyandrous societies. Polyandrous societies, the most famous of which is Tibetan polyandry, is where one woman is shared by multiple men. †††† Now, an imbecile, who doesn’t understand evolutionary theory says ‘Aha! well now that invalidates evolutionary theory.’ But once you realize that there are very clear evolutionary reasons why the human capacity to change can be channeled this way or that way, depending on varying ecosystems, then you realize that those cultural differences are themselves due to biology. So, without knowing anything else about the Chinese example you gave, I can guarantee you right here with complete swagger and assuredness that there is an evolutionary reason for that reality. I know that you developed a nomological network of evidence to show the link between Islam and the propensity to commit terrorism. I suppose when I thought about the principles of scientific philosophy, I had always considered Islam to be a necessary but not sufficient condition in extremism. If you said it was a necessary and sufficient condition that would mean that every Muslim on the planet would be an extremist. It’s about multiple causation. It seems to be a combination of factors - potentially geographical area, political affiliation, family structure, temperament - all sorts of things that converge to produce someone who ends up in Boko Haram. Yes. In the most basic sense, that’s an obvious statement. This is what I made fun of in the book: this is due to paleo, organic, social, cultural, bio, anthropogenic… So, you can concatenate a bunch of bullshit terms, so that the more you can concatenate, then you move away from what seems to be the very clear causal link. This apparently makes you a nuanced thinker. It’s due to many causes. Well, everything is due to many causes. So that says pretty much nothing. But what we do know is that if you are convinced by a set of doctrines within Islam, and you are a true purist who wishes to exactly abide by those principles, then there is a direct path to you doing bad things. †††† In Tibet the husbands are often brothers, which is known as ‘fraternal polyandry.’

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Now, the reason why most Muslims don’t do that, is because just like in any population, most people are kind. So, what do they do? They shut their eyes to the nefarious parts of their religion. In some instances, they don’t even know that those parts exist. They don’t recognize it, I think. I spoke to a Palestinian refugee who had been in the camps in Lebanon, and their family and their friends had faced persecution from Gemayel’s Christian militia. ‡‡‡‡ Some people had been murdered. Most Christians wouldn’t recognize that as Christianity. Yes. I addressed this in the book, you may or may not remember. When a Muslim commits 37,000 plus terror attacks in the name of Islam since 9/11 alone, and when he says, in taping a video, before he commits that act, ‘I am doing it because of these four Quranic quotes,’ it becomes very difficult to argue that it’s because of solar panels, or because of lack of art exposure, or that it is due to beard bullying, or that Christians also do bad things, which is a form of whataboutism. §§§§ Because I am from Lebanon, I understand those gaslighting dynamics. The massacres that you speak of did not stem from the edicts in the New Testament; the massacres while inexcusable and grotesque, were not being justified theologically. So, details matter. Of course, Christians do all kinds of horrific things. So, there is no monopoly on the evil heart. There are evil people of all faiths and of no faith. When we’re talking about a particular religion preaching love or hate, what we’re saying is, is there something in the canonical textbooks that if adherents of that faith take such edicts seriously, it will cause mayhem? So, let’s build a nomological network of cumulative evidence to evaluate whether Islam is peaceful or not. And I would argue that it’s a pretty convincing nomological network. And if one could come up with a similar network for Christianity, that proves that Christians are more likely to commit violence if they are more religious, then show me that nomological network.

‡‡‡‡ Bachir Pierre Gemayel (1947-1982) was a Lebanese militia commander who led the Lebanese Forces in the Lebanese Civil War. Gemayel was elected President of Lebanon on August 23, 1982, but was subsequently assassinated via a bomb explosion before taking office on September 23, which was perpetrated by a member of the Syrian Socialist Nationalist Party. §§§§ Whataboutism is a form of the tu quoque logical fallacy which is used to try to discredit an opponent’s argument by alleging hypocrisy without refuting the opponent’s argument.

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Well possibly 500 years ago... Well, as I said, there is no monopoly of evil from one ideology. No one is saying that Islam contains the only set of religious doctrines that can result in horrific things. You can find things in the Torah and the Old Testament that has all kinds of horrible things, for instance; ‘Take your insolent children to the gates of the city, and stone them to death.’ ***** But here’s a small detail. We don’t have too many ultra-orthodox Jews today taking their insolent children and stoning them to death at the gates of Jerusalem. Again, historical realities matter. This is why I think nomological networks are so powerful. Many people have read The Parasitic Mind. I’ve never had someone write to me and say, ‘Hey, Dr. Saad, box four in your nomological network is simply wrong.’ And this is why people say to me, ‘How come you don’t get cancelled? How can you say all the things that you do?.’ Because I don’t trigger my emotional system, I let the data speak for itself. And I completely recognize what you said. As a matter of fact, I have more Muslim friends than most people will ever meet in their lives by virtue of me being from Lebanon. So, I don’t need to be convinced of that argument that most Muslims are peaceful. But is Islam a set of ideas where gay life flourishes? Where black dogs flourish †††††? Where Jews flourish? Where irreverent non-Muslims’ flourish? No. And there’s about 1400 years that supports that idea. Here’s another one that we hear: ‘But Professor, what about the Andalusia love fest? ‡‡‡‡‡ Weren’t Jews, Christians, and Muslims living beautifully then?’ And ‘What about you Professor? You lived in Lebanon peacefully?.’ Yes, I lived in Lebanon peacefully, until I had to put on my

***** Deuteronomy 21: 18-21: ‘18 If someone has a stubborn and rebellious son who does not obey his father and mother and will not listen to them when they discipline him, 19 his father and mother shall take hold of him and bring him to the elders at the gate of his town.20 They shall say to the elders, “This son of ours is stubborn and rebellious. He will not obey us. He is a glutton and a drunkard.” 21 Then all the men of his town are to stone him to death. You must purge the evil from among you. All Israel will hear of it and be afraid.’ ††††† According to Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj black dogs are unclean and the manifestation of evil, and their very presence voids some of the good deeds performed by a Muslim.42 However, according to Khaled Abou el Fadl the majority of Islamic scholars consider this idea to be a pre-Islamic Arab myth falsely attributed to the prophet Mohammed.43 ‡‡‡‡‡ Al-Andalus was the Muslim ruled area of Iberian Peninsula; these former Islamic states were based in modern Portugal and Spain.44

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running shoes and run really fast so I don’t get my head decapitated from the rest of my body. You are healthy, until you have a fatal heart attack. You didn’t know that you’re going to die. It’s not as though Islam leads to a neverending orgiastic killing field 24 hours a day - killing everybody in sight. But does it create societies that are congruent with the enlightened liberal values that we cherish in the West? I think the data are pretty clear there.

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14. Biden, the Abraham Accords and carrying forward Trump’s legacy. Accessed December 30, 2021. https://www.trtworld.com/opinion/biden-theabraham-accords-and-carrying-forward-trump-s-legacy-49998 15. Asch SE. Studies of independence and conformity: I. A minority of one against a unanimous majority. Psychol Monogr Gen Appl. 1956;70(9):1-70. doi:10.1037/h0093718 16. Table 2 . Political identification of college professors by field (%). ResearchGate. Accessed December 30, 2021. https://www.researchgate.net/ figure/Political-identification-of-college-professors-by-field_tbl1_40823273 17. Saad G. Evolutionary Psychology in the Business Sciences. Springer Science & Business Media; 2011. 18. Saad G. The consuming instinct. What Darwinian consumption reveals about human nature. Polit Life Sci J Assoc Polit Life Sci. 2013;32(1):58-72. doi:10.2990/32_1_58 19. Gad Saad. Human reticence effect: evolutionary principle is used to explain mating behaviour of salamander. Good work professor. Same principle /2. @GadSaad. Published April 23, 2015. Accessed December 30, 2021. https:// twitter.com/GadSaad/status/591317253041291264 20. Ranney, M. A., & Thanukos, A. (2011). Accepting evolution or creation in people, critters, plants, and classrooms: The maelstrom of American cognition about biological change. In R. S. Taylor, & M. Ferrari (Eds.). Epistemology and science education: Understanding the evolution vs. intelligent design controversy (pp. 143–172). New York: Routledge. 21. Saad G. The Epistemology of Evolutionary Psychology Offers a Rapprochement to Cultural Psychology. Front Psychol. 2020;11:579578. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2020.579578 22. Schmitt DP, Pilcher JJ. Evaluating evidence of psychological adaptation: how do we know one when we see one? Psychol Sci. 2004;15(10):643-649. doi:10.1111/j.0956-7976.2004.00734.x 23. Saad G. (2020). Building a global database of nomological networks of cumulative evidence. - PsycNET. Accessed December 30, 2021. https://doi. apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Febs0000223 24. Saad G. On the Method of Evolutionary Psychology and Its Applicability to Consumer Research. J Mark Res. 2017;54(3):464-477. doi:10.1509/jmr .14. 0645 25. Replication Crisis | Psychology Today Australia. Accessed December 30, 2021. https://www.psychologytoday.com/au/basics/replication-crisis 26. Saad G. Beauty: Culture-Specific or Universally Defined? | Psychology Today Australia. Accessed December 30, 2021. https://www. psychology today.com/au /blog /homo-consumericus/201004/beauty-culture-specific-oruniversally-defined 27. Hudson MJ, Aoyama M. Waist-to-hip ratios of Jomon figurines. Antiquity. 2007;81(314):961-971. doi:10.1017/S0003598X00096046 28. Saad G. Advertised Waist-to-Hip Ratios of Online Female Escorts. Int J ECollab. 2010;4:40-50. doi:10.4018/jec.2008070103

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29. Platek SM, Singh D. Optimal Waist-to-Hip Ratios in Women Activate Neural Reward Centers in Men. PLOS ONE. 2010;5(2):e9042. doi:10.1371/journal. pone.0009042 30. Landsman K. The Fine-Tuning Argument: Exploring the Improbability of Our Existence. In: Landsman K, van Wolde E, eds. The Challenge of Chance: A Multidisciplinary Approach from Science and the Humanities. The Frontiers Collection. Springer International Publishing; 2016:111-129. doi: 10.1007/978-3-319-26300-7_6 31. Gad Saad. Let us hope that OJ Simpson & Noble Victim @JussieSmollett join their efforts in finding the common culprit across their 2 tragedies: Killer in the OJ case is also the racist homophobe who attacked Noble Jussie. There was a citing of him at the corner of Unicornia & Munchausen. @GadSaad. Published March 26, 2019. Accessed January 22, 2022. https://twitter.com/ GadSaad/status/1110620106420297729 32. Five Things That Suggest O.J. Simpson Killed His Ex-Wife And Ron Goldman. NewsOne. Published June 12, 2019. Accessed December 31, 2021. https://newsone.com/1334425/five-reasons-why-we-know-o-j-did-it/ 33. Why the Civil Case Against O.J. Simpson Would Never Be Enough | Vanity Fair. Accessed December 31, 2021. https://www.vanityfair.com/magazine /1997/04/dunne199704 34. Tickle C, Towers M. Sonic Hedgehog Signaling in Limb Development. Front Cell Dev Biol. 2017;5. Accessed January 22, 2022. https://www.frontiersin. org/article/10.3389/fcell.2017.00014 35. Wilgenburg WV, Fumerton M. Kurdistan’s Political Armies: The Challenge of Unifying the Peshmerga Forces. :10. 36. Jessica Trisko : Women at War | troublemag. Accessed December 31, 2021. https://www.troublemag.com/jessica-trisko-women-at-war/ 37. IANS. India Far Ahead Of US, Europe In Women’s Tech Equity; Female IT Employees Form 34 Per Cent Of Total Indian Workforce. Swarajyamag. Accessed December 31, 2021. https://swarajyamag.com/insta/india-farahead-of-us-europe-in-womens-tech - equity-female-it-employees-form-34per-cent-of-total-indian-workforce 38. Laland KN, Odling-Smee J, Myles S. How culture shaped the human genome: bringing genetics and the human sciences together. Nat Rev Genet. 2010;11(2):137-148. doi:10.1038/nrg2734 39. Moya C, Henrich J. Culture–gene coevolutionary psychology: cultural learning, language, and ethnic psychology. Curr Opin Psychol. 2016;8:112118. doi:10.1016/j.copsyc.2015.10.001 40. Booth H. The kingdom of women: the society where a man is never the boss. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/apr/01/thekingdom - of - women - the - tibetan - tribe - where - a-man-is-never-theboss. Published April 1, 2017. Accessed December 31, 2021. 41. Henrich J, Boyd R, Richerson PJ. The puzzle of monogamous marriage. Philos Trans R Soc B Biol Sci. 2012;367(1589):657-669. doi:10.1098/rstb. 2011.0290

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42. SearchTruth. 10. The Book of Transactions (Kitab Al-Buyu`) - Sahih Muslim - 0 - 3813. SearchTruth.com. Accessed January 23, 2022. https://www.search truth.com/book_display.php?book=10&translator=2&start=0&number=3813 43. “Dogs in the Islamic Tradition and Nature” (Article Included). Scholar of the House. Accessed January 23, 2022. http://scholarofthehouse.stores.yahoo .net/dinistrandna.html 44. Gómez-Rivas C. Law and the Islamization of Morocco under the Almoravids: The Fatwās of Ibn Rushd al-Jadd to the Far Maghrib. BRILL; 2014.

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~ Dr. Gad Saad is Professor of Marketing at Concordia University (Montreal, Canada), and former holder of the Concordia University Research Chair in Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences and Darwinian Consumption (2008-2018). He is the co-recipient of the 2015 President’s Media Outreach Award: Research Communicator of the Year (International), which goes to the Concordia University professor whose research receives the greatest amount of global media coverage. Professor Saad has pioneered the use of evolutionary psychology in marketing and consumer behaviour. His works include The Consuming Instinct: What Juicy Burgers, Ferraris, Pornography, and Gift Giving Reveal About Human Nature; The Evolutionary Bases of Consumption and Evolutionary Psychology in the Business Sciences, along with 75+ scientific papers. His Psychology Today blog and YouTube channel have garnered 6.9+ million and 24+ million views respectively. His podcast The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad is available on all leading podcast platforms. In addition to his scientific work, Dr. Saad writes and speaks about idea pathogens that destroy logic, science, reason, and common sense. His fourth book The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense was released in October 2020 and is an international bestseller.

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Let Us Prey: On Islamic Immigration in Europe and Women’s Rights Based on an interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali Mark Halloran: I have the impression that you’ve lived in three worlds: you’ve lived in tribal Islam, and you converted to political Islam, through the Muslim Brotherhood and sister Aziza. And then when you escaped an arranged marriage and went to Europe, you essentially converted to classical liberalism, and atheism. It seemed like a large ideological change for someone to make over a lifetime. And I wondered how you related to the past versions of yourself? Ayaan Hirsi Ali: {Laughs} That’s a great question, and especially the way you put it. It may seem as if it happened all of a sudden; that I had a sudden awakening. A lot of people have asked me about that. I think it wasn’t a sudden awakening. I think it was a gradual evolution. If I start with the tribal Islam of my grandmother and my mother’s attitude towards the faith of Islam, it was a mix of the tribal and the old fashioned, superstitious notions. I was born into it. So, I imbibed with it from childhood onwards. So then, this is in the mid 80s and we lived in Nairobi, Kenya, and that’s where Sister Aziza becomes our teacher at the Muslim girl’s secondary school, and she introduces this form of puritanical Islam, which was a rejection of the more tribal Islam I had known up until then. Around the same time, we lived in two neighborhoods called Kariokor and Park Road; and in those two Somali communities we were also seeing individuals who had been educated in Medina in Saudi Arabia and who had been to Sharia universities. They came and explained to us that Islam as we practiced it was actually superstitious and wrong. So, they introduced the more pure form; what these days is called Salafi * or

* The Salafi movement is a reform movement within Sunni Islam, which focusses on looking at the early years of the religion to understand how Muslims should practice

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Wahhabi. † And then this gentleman called Boqol Sawm; he who fasts 100 days - I discuss him in Infidel ‡ - he basically initiated me and the other children, we were teenagers at the time, into the Muslim Brotherhood movement. So, I started to wear the hijab, and gradually dressed myself even more restrictively in black without anyone forcing me to do it, and I started to pray five times a day. I took this very seriously, when I was told to ask the non-Muslim classmates to convert, and I was asked to just adopt a wide range of these practices from a more radicalized, puritanical Islam. Then fast forward to when I come to the Netherlands, this is in 1992, and by then I have had some doubts about that particular way of practicing my faith. But I’d never had the courage to ask any truly probing questions. So, if you go back to 1989, when Salman Rushdie had published his book and was condemned to death by Ayatollah Khomeini, § I was within the natural community of people who condemned Rushdie for his transgressions. This condemnation, on my part, was obviously done without any questioning at all. But then, in 1995, when I’m in the Netherlands, I take up political science courses in the University of Leiden. The reason why I say my change was gradual was because it was in those years at Leiden, where the emphasis lay on how to think and how to ask questions - maybe that’s where classical liberalism was introduced in a more formal way; not as a set of beliefs that you adopt, but as one approach among others. So, we obviously started learning about socialism as well as other paradigms. But I found classical liberal ideals to be the most attractive. And by the time September 11, 2001 came round, I had, I think, evolved to a place mentally where I was able to ask these very direct questions of myself. These nineteen men who attacked these civilians, do they do it because of what everyone was saying? Because of America’s foreign policy? Or because they were young, disillusioned men? Or were they really driven by their convictions? I recall their faith. Salafism rejects bid’ah (religious innovation) and supports the implementation of Sharia law. † Wahhabism is a fundamentalist movement within Sunni Islam that seeks to restore pure monotheistic worship amongst its followers. The term Wahhabi is mainly used by outsiders and its adherents reject its use, and refer to themselves as Salafi. ‡ Infidel: My Story. Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s autobiography. § Salman Rushdie’s book was The Satanic Verses, which was inspired in part by the life of Mohammed. The controversy, also known as the ‘Rushdie Affair,’ was due to Rushdie being accused of blasphemy and the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran issuing a fatwa which ordered Muslims to kill Rushdie.

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reading whatever it is that I could find of these nineteen men, and their beliefs resembled very much what I had believed in myself in the 1980s. So, you could empathize with them, to some extent? I don’t know if you would call it empathy. But I could see the logic of their thinking. If you’re a young man, and you’re being asked to destroy the infidels who had invaded Muslim lands, if it is a requirement of your faith, you believe God is the Creator, and you have only to answer to God, and that you risk going to hell in the afterlife, unless you obey Him. One of the big reasons that Bin Laden was pushing this narrative at the time was that the American infidels were allowed into Saudi Arabia, and that was an affront. If you believed in that you had to act. So, I wouldn’t call it empathy. But I would say yes, I saw a certain logic. And I was frustrated by the leadership at the time, not just the American leadership; President Bush and his administration, but also the Europeans who were, in my view, trying to make excuses, away from the ideology, the creed that had inspired these young men to act. So, it wasn’t a moment of empathy. But it was: ‘Look, it’s very clear, we do have a problem with the basic fundamentals of Islam unchanged and unreformed.’ I do want to speak about your book, Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women’s Rights1 - because that’s the reason for this conversation. In Prey, the premise is that the fifth wave of immigration occurred where 3.5 million people; immigrants and asylum seekers, crossed into the European union,2 three quarters occurring in 2015, after events like the Syrian Civil War. The premise of your book seems to be that these were predominantly young men who came from Muslim dominant cultures, and that this led to an increase in sexual assaults against women, and an erosion of women’s rights. So, I wanted to briefly talk about the compelling evidence that shows that the cultural beliefs of Islam were really important in these types of offences. I think when I was writing the book, and working on the question: ‘Is there an increase in sexual violence against women? Is it possible to link this with the increase in immigration, and an influx of young unaccompanied men? And if Islam is relevant at all, then in what way is it relevant?’ So, some of these questions, obviously, are very difficult to answer without solid data. And I described in the book, that exercise of data gathering was frustrated by the way the European leaders fear that the immigration issue is going to be exploited by populist and far-right parties. So, a lot of that data, if it exists, is

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hidden. And very often it is also overlaid with data, or conclusions, that say there is no link, there is no correlation to be seen here. And in fact, imagine you’re a white man asking these questions; then you are accused of harboring anti-immigrant feelings and sentiment. Now Islam, it comes into it in the first question that you asked me, you see this separation between tribal Islam, and that more puritanical, Wahhabi, Salafi type of Muslim Brotherhood Islam. Now with both of these forms, there is a code of conduct for men and women and how they relate to one another. And women are regarded either as good or bad. There’s a very clear framework of behavior that a good woman is supposed to follow. She’s supposed to have a male guardian, and obey her male guardian, stay at home, and remain a virgin until her wedding day and when married with her husband still continue to practice these very, in what Western feminists would call, submissive behaviors. The doctrines of modesty. Yes, the doctrines of modesty. So, with that in place, the men when they do engage in sexual misconduct, the first question that is posed, unlike the West, is not: ‘Is the man the perpetrator? And he ought to be punished for that.’ Rather, the first question that arises is: ‘Did the woman in question break this modesty doctrine or not?’ And, ‘What was she wearing?’ or ‘What was the context?’ And that context almost always favors man. If it is the puritanical Islam and this was to go to a court of law, then she would have to produce four witnesses and so on, she would have to explain why she was outside and not with her male guardian and other chaperones. So, that’s in the formalized Sharia law. The informal tribal one is another way and again, I tried to describe this in the book, where the clan protects its women; the ones that are regarded as modest and decent, and anyone who breaches that, then the clan will take revenge. That is readily understood by all within that community. Again, the burden of proof still lies on her. So, when men shaped by that and with those attitudes come to Europe, which is a radically different context, and they see white European women as women who live outside of the modesty doctrine, then they consider them immodest and therefore bad. I spoke to one Egyptian man Hamed Abdel-Samad, and I asked him to explain to me how their attitudes towards European women developed. And he said, for those men who have dysfunctional views of women in the West, there were three key points. One was women, as seen in the movies, from Hollywood. So that’s one image of white woman that they have, the

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unrealistic and sexually objectified portrayals that occur in Hollywood. And the other is the porn industry, which totally misrepresents women and what they “want.” And the third, interestingly, is that there are some women looking for boyfriends who happen to volunteer in refugee compounds. So, the prejudice, if you will, is that it’s justified to attack these women because they are actually somehow looking for it. This indicates little respect for women in general, you could say it is ingrained for the men in question. And the only type of woman they respect is the one that they can’t reach; someone who is covered up and protected by her clanmates and is locked up, and all other women are fair game. And that is where the book title Prey came from. In the book you said on average, over the last 10 years, 67% of first-time asylum seekers were men and over 80% of these men were under the age of 35 years. And in Germany’s 2015 immigration wave, male asylum seekers outnumbered women at a 2.81:1 ratio. When this is discussed from a criminological perspective, what people say is that in any community where the sex ratio suddenly become extremely imbalanced, then you have an increase in the number of sexual assaults against women. The other thing we have to be mindful of is that sexual assault rates, amongst Muslim migrants constitute a small percentage of the population of sexual assaults. But what people misunderstand, and they’ll say, ‘Well, the sexual assault rate is much larger in Germany amongst native born Germans,’ but actually, what we’re talking about is standardization to the population. In fact, when you standardize the rates of sexual assault against a migrant population, they may be orders of magnitude larger than the general population. They’re the points that I’d like to get clear. How important is each factor? Because I felt like you were saying there are the cultural factors; whether that be say someone coming from Afghanistan with Pashtun tribal values and Islamic values. Then there is the fact that the sex ratio is severely skewed, and that people are coming from countries that are war-torn like Syria, and they’re traumatized. How would you weigh all those things up? What would you give more weight to? I say that in the book, it is obviously all three factors; the cultural factors that we just talked about now, but also the sex ratios. And here, I think a woman called Valerie Hudson has done some very good work on that - she shows that where these sex ratios are skewed to that extent, you do get spikes

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in sexual misconduct, but also aggression in general.3 So, you have a youth bulge, and you have a large number of men. And there aren’t enough women for these men. She says that’s a very, very important factor. She looked into Sweden and other Scandinavian countries. In fact, when she was doing her research in Sweden, she was condemned for it. But she says that they are playing with fire, the Swedish government.4 She says that a share of the violence that we’ve been seeing in Sweden lately perpetrated by immigrants can be partially explained by this factor,5 so she does put a lot of emphasis on that demographic sex ratio that’s off. And then there is the issue of broken societies. When I was a translator, I saw this with my own eyes in the Netherlands - young men whose tribal society had broken down. The tribal code didn’t apply to them. The authoritarian government of Mohammed Siad Barre in Somalia had broken down. So, they weren’t even familiar with institutions like the police or the military or any other order keeping institutions. They were born in an anarchical, very unstable, structurally unpredictable environment. And they were used to witnessing a lot of violence, and a lot of violence was also perpetrated against them. These were young men who were locked up or beaten, some of them are forced into doing things they would otherwise not do. And yes, they are very, very traumatized in psychological terms. And in many ways, I would say also hardened psychologically. And so, when you go through some of these court cases, and you read through the court report, I thought it was striking that very often, when the judge asks or members of the court ask, ‘Do you feel sorry? Do you have any remorse?’ That these men show absolutely no remorse whatsoever, and would perpetrate that particular crime again, and felt misunderstood by their own communities if they had any, and the new communities that they had come into. And so yes, that is also a very, very important factor. And you have to take all three of these factors: the religious, cultural variables, the sex ratio, the demographic youth bulge, and also that these men are coming from war zones, and violent societies. There was one Eritrean man, I think it was again in Scandinavia, in Norway, where he was very open and honest about it when he was asked, ‘Would you treat women in your country that way?’ And he said, ‘Yes, we do that all the time.’ So, I don’t think that these young men, if they’ve ever been interviewed, are actually really dishonest about what their motivations are. It’s the social workers, the politicians, sometimes members of law

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enforcement, the media, academia, who are trying to make excuses for them - that the young men themselves aren’t even using. Cultural factors are not being properly addressed. So, I think the conclusion is, it’s very, very important to understand all the factors that contribute to this misconduct. But the one conclusion is that we have to start integrating these young men. The problem seems to be that any call to integration, and especially assimilation, would be instantly branded racist. And that seems to be where the conversation has completely broken down. In many parts of Europe, that is the case. In a country like Sweden, which I think is the country that’s facing the worst problems, that’s what happens the minute you start talking about assimilation, the conversation is shut down, although I should say there are now signs that mainstream Swedish political figures are at least beginning to reconsider some of their premises. Now in Denmark, the conversation has continued, and they have developed integration or assimilation programs that are promising. And they did this in Austria, only after they had what they call a rape epidemic that shocked public opinion. So, it became inevitable; there was no other next step left to do, it was impossible to continue to live in denial. I know you use the example of the Red Army in Germany, in terms of their violence against German women, so it made me think about war and trauma, and how unique the problem was. Is it essentially the same problem, just with a different group at a different time? I think that is partly true; different group, different time. But the Red Army was still European, and so, the cultural barrier was not as high as it is in this case. Also, there was a mindset from many Russian troops that brutal revenge for the German invasion of Russia was somehow justified: in that sense, German women were easy targets and could not do much, if anything, to stay safe from those attackers. Soviet military domination made any real accountability afterwards impossible. What we’re running up against here is this postmodernist type of cultural relativism that is used to shut down debate and to explain away bad behavior - if that bad behavior is perpetrated by men of color. But that doesn’t do anything to help the victims. So those women who have fallen victim to this, get no justice, and other women are at risk. And so that is now the predicament of some of these European countries today. They have let down their women

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- they had already let down immigrant women. I had written quite a lot on when immigrant women, Muslim women, were excluded from the de facto protections of the law. So little girls are forced into marriage and they’re subjected to female genital mutilation. They are first taken out of school and forced to marry people they don’t want to. These are all violations of the law. But many of these girls of foreign descent were absolutely not protected. And the idea again was often ‘Well, they’re different. It’s their culture.’ And now there’s a spillover. It’s that the problem is spilling over, not the one of forced marriages, but that these men are acting in groups and attacking women that they have never seen before. Let’s talk about the psychology of it at a national level. I think about postmodernism and your views on Western feminism and ideas such as decolonization. I also thought about the psychology of the German people, especially the generation who grew up during World War II; the Kriegskinder, ** and perhaps their real aversion to anything that even remotely looked like some sort of ethnic or religious profiling, which you could totally understand. It took me to the idea that you could criticize the politicians, social workers, bureaucrats, and the justice departments for not collecting the data. But their rationale would be if we collect the data, the data could easily be used by a right-wing populist political group to mobilize people in hate. And whilst your message is very nuanced, it doesn’t mean that other people would take it that way. So how do you deal with the problem that your message can be misappropriated? I think the way to deal with it is to look and see if the strategy of pretending that there is no problem actually helps far-right groups or hinders them. If you look at countries with very strong far-right movements, those are the countries that bungled the immigration policies, and have no integration or assimilation programs to speak of - it’s where the problems are at their worst. If you look at the countries with weak or non-existent far-right movements, they’re the ones who have actually taken their voters very seriously. So, in Denmark, the ruling coalition is led by Social Democrats; it’s a center-left party, that has implemented most of these so-called difficult

** War children.

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programs. I think the experience is different ever since the cartoons of 2006. †† But they have been very, very honest about the challenges of immigration they talk about national identity. They talk about borders, and they talk about assimilation very openly. And so although Denmark certainly has a populist right-wing party, you can’t really say they have a meaningful far-right movement. In contrast, countries that stuck their heads in the sand like France, Germany, Sweden, do have strong far-right movements. So, my conclusion is that denial, and this is what I call the ‘head in the sand’ approach to the problem, actually strengthens the far-right. It’s where voters are taken seriously that temptation for the far-right, the extreme right, decreases. Where the leadership is honest, that is where the far-right does not flourish. So, I think it’s very interesting. Germany, I think is a special case, because of the Second World War. And because of this terror of profiling people along ethnic or religious lines, it’s extra difficult for the Germans to pull off something like this. But even they could do it because Germany of today is radically different from the Germany of the Second World War. Now, with regard to these postmodernist narratives about decolonizing. And trying to somehow atone for what happened in the past, atone for them today, by sacrificing women and children, or the working-class groups. I don’t think that makes any sense at all. Are we simply going to sacrifice our women and risk a very strong, far-right movement? But they’re also risking something else. They’re risking that voters lose faith in existing institutions, and then start doing things for themselves. For instance, a good example, the number of guns sold in Sweden, I don’t have the statistics in front of me, but it’s grown exponentially.6 That is a loss of faith in law enforcement and the police, that is a loss of faith that the Swedes are displaying for the rule of law. So, this is the kind of thing that these European countries are risking, by sticking their heads in the sand. I wonder if they’re able to do that, politicians or journalists, because most of the problems that you talk about in your book affect neighborhoods which are entry points for asylum seekers, which are low socio-economic

†† In September 30th, 2005 Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published 12 editorial cartoons depicting Mohammed. This led to Muslim groups in Denmark complaining and violent protests and riots in some Muslim countries.

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neighborhoods. So really, to some extent, who cares what happens to poor women? Exactly. That is exactly where the decolonization narrative, just… It goes bonkers, really, because it is working-class women, and the working class groups in general, that were the people that the left was supposedly protecting. They’re the ones that are sacrificed to this mismanagement of immigration and the negative, unintended consequences of immigration. And now you have a development, like Biden’s sudden withdrawal from Afghanistan. That’s going to trigger a lot more immigration, not just from Afghanistan, but also the other countries that will get destabilized because of the withdrawal from Afghanistan. Your book came out during the pandemic, and that would have radically changed border control and immigration policies. That may reverse now, once we adapt to a COVID normal. I just got back from Italy. And Heathrow was full as it always was. I was standing there the day before yesterday. Yes, people were wearing masks, but in terms of crowd numbers, it didn’t feel at all like there was some kind of major lockdown. It was all very frustrating. There’s a lot more bureaucracy and forms that one needs to fill out, but in terms of just masses of people … The number of immigrants now trying to cross from France into the UK that’s spiking, and the ones that are coming through the fourth route, the Mediterranean and Turkey - that’s already all back on trend. So, I think for the European countries right now… I think they should have a very, very urgent conversation on how to assimilate these young people. I know they’ll be discussing border control a little bit and who is going to take how many Afghans and that sort of thing but we will have learned nothing if we don’t have very serious conversations about where these people are going to be housed. Who is going to bear the burden of these negative, unintended consequences of immigration, which are not just sexual misconduct? And who’s going to pay for it? And what are the consequences for those people who fail to assimilate? I remember your critique of Western feminism; you said that it was focused on its own self-actualization. And you alluded to it before, that ideas in relation to critical race theory and decolonization are actually hurting asylum seeker women, and that these ideas have gone too far. But it seems as

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though they can always make the argument that US foreign policy, for instance, has led to the victimization of people in places like Afghanistan, where the US helping to radicalize the Mujahideen to fight against the Russians. And so there is this idea of you reaping what you sow, if that makes sense? It does make sense. And I think maybe the most charitable thing I can say about the feminists who regard themselves as woke is they’re doing nothing for the working class. It’s all about them, and their intersectional problems. And if you look at some of this gender fluid stuff that’s coming at us, they seem also to be okay with ‘woman’ being removed from the lexicon. So now we’re not women anymore. We are ‘chest feeders’ and ‘people who birth’ and ‘persons who menstruate’ and so on. So even on that level, they seem to be quite happy for women to be erased. And this is not just a corruption of language. If they accept women being erased from the public space, as they are doing, and as the Taliban is also doing now. We are being erased, and they seem to be okay with that. Some would rather focus on J.K. Rowling than the Taliban. So, in many ways, perhaps the most charitable thing you can say about them is that they’re just useless. Their whole narrative is useless. It’s a nuisance. What we really need is some very strong feminism, that type of classical liberal feminism, and I think that there is an opportunity for a coalition for working class women and immigrant women, because they’re the ones who feel the pain of this particular type of globalization. It is often communities, not even of working class people, but of generational poverty. People who are essentially invisible, and I think that’s probably where the problems really may lie because those communities don’t really have a voice and don’t engage in activism. And I think that’s where it gets lost. I read an article in The New York Times by Jill Filipovic.7 She talked about you rolling out old colonial tropes about virtuous white women being at risk from dark-skinned men. It seems like that is the heart of those types of criticisms. That is a typical millennial woke feminist who is completely out of touch. And just spewing this nonsensical jargon, but really not a word of empathy for the victims described in the book. So, you have to wonder if she actually read the book? And because of the way it was difficult to come by official data, I do use testimonies of women who have fallen victim to this, and that is pretty gruesome, and she doesn’t even spend a word on any of that, and just dismisses it with this nonsense. She has a platform like the New York Times,

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and instead of approaching this problem with the seriousness it deserves, it’s just another instance of ‘Let’s shoot the messenger.’ I think we have to get past that. So, women and men as well, we really have to say, this is a very, very serious issue. And in the coming years, we are going to have more immigrants coming from Africa, from South Asia, and from the Middle East. These are places where women are treated very differently. We have to get ready to have programs to assimilate the men and women. And the sooner we start the better, otherwise, I think we’re going to leave the way open for far-right movements and other mischief makers to come and take over these topics. Her criticism of you was that under your own ideas around integration and assimilation, when you were younger, and you were a supporter of the Fatwa against Salman Rushdie, would you have made it as an asylum seeker or refugee? Oh, no. But I, at that time, wasn’t interested in seeking asylum. I was completely full of my own fanaticism, and basking in the warmth, as we myself and my fellow 18 and 19 year old students - happily burnt Salman Rushdie’s book. We weren’t seeking asylum. I think you also said you shouldn’t have been accepted at that point. Yes. Because I would not have come with good intentions anyway. If you believe that the society that’s hosting you is infidel and it deserves to be destroyed…Then I think it would be very foolish of that society to welcome you and accept you. Let’s get to some of the important ideas within Islam itself. So, I think you’d agree that Quranic verses such as the Surah An Nisa 4:34, ‡‡ which seems to condone a husband perpetrating domestic violence against his wife, as a means of disciplining her, and seems to say that quite explicitly, that that would be the heart of the cultural problem.

‡‡ Quranic verse Surah An-Nisa 4:34: Men have authority over women because God has made the one superior to the other, and because they spend their wealth to maintain them. Good women are obedient. They guard their unseen parts because God has guarded them. As for those from whom you fear disobedience, admonish them, forsake them in their beds, and beat them. Then if they obey you, take no further action against them. Surely God is high, supreme. N.J. Dawood translation, The Koran.

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So, what I have said in the past, and I still stand by it, is those texts are in the Quran. And yes, there are people who are fanatical and puritanical enough, who want to use these Quranic texts, the way we use the GPS, when the book says, ‘Hit your wife, if she disobeys you,’ then I do it, because the book says that and so you get into this circular reasoning. Again, with things like this, I just believe in accepting looking at reality as it is; there are male Imams, shouting this from the pulpit, they are preaching it to young men. So, a lot of these young people by reading that verse, feel morally justified when they engage in domestic violence. And then some other guy comes along and says, ‘Well, it’s not really meant that way. It’s meant some other way.’ Well, if God is absolutely so clever, and so omniscient, why couldn’t He just make it very clear? And it is perfectly clear. And then what that whole exercise of interpreting the text does, is it takes you away from discussing the problem, and holding the perpetrators of the domestic violence responsible. Instead, we’re having a discussion about theology, and again, that is just not fruitful, it’s not productive. I spoke about this particular verse with an Islamic scholar once. And his interpretation was, in terms of from the Arabic, that it’s not a verse about domestic violence. It’s a verse about divorce and that it means ‘strike out.’ He was also talking about Mohammed in the Hadith, who explicitly states that domestic violence is not to be perpetrated.8 I then thought about when you heard Osama Bin Laden, and you thought that what he offered was a very plausible version of Islam. I think you may disagree with this, but is that part of the solution? To offer a plausible reinterpretation of those texts that are nonviolent? I actually don’t disagree with it. And the main point I make in my book Heretic, is that it is for the people who are saying Islam can be reformed - it should be reformed. I just make the case for a reformation; for change, for a modification. I talk about these three groups of Muslims: the Mecca Muslims, the Medina Muslims, and reformers who are the modifiers. Now the Medina Muslims are very clear in their fanaticism. They’re saying ‘No, we want to live by the laws of the Quran and the Hadith, and we want to follow Mohammed’s example. No changes required, the people who are seeking change are bad.’ And then you have a very large, silent majority that I describe as the Mecca Muslims, who would simply rather not be confronted with all sorts of dissonance with regard to how they lead their lives, which is generally

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peaceful, and what’s written in the Quran, and so they can’t handle that kind of dissonance. So, they ignore it altogether. And just say, ‘No, the Quran is a good book, it’s a peaceful book, let’s change the subject.’ And then you have the modifiers, who try and struggle as you described, with verses like this, when I say it says ‘beat,’ actually, it means something else. So, it’s with that group that I say, ‘Look, here is five key points if you’re serious about change.’ §§ Here are these five points that are big and problematic, and it would be nice to have some kind of consensus and maybe some kind of movement that gets behind these five things and changes them. Then after that we can speak about an Islam that is changed and reformed and liberal. It’s an attempt at Islam finding its modernity. I thought in terms of your call for reformation, you said that there would be a need for Muslims to be able to think critically and criticize the Prophet Mohammed. I wondered whether that was very likely? Sort of like Christians criticizing Christ. The historian Daniel Pipes has written quite a bit on it and has studied Muslims in America.9 He says Muslims start asking these questions of Mohammed as a moral guide, ‘Yes or no?’ And many of them come to the conclusion that they don’t want Mohammed as their moral guide, and quietly leave the religion. He says it’s the most interesting, untold story of our time, just the sheer number of Muslims who are secularizing, who are leaving Islam, and maybe either going to other religions or living as atheists. So, to the reformers; the Muslims who were sincere about changing the faith, I think they also have to contend with that trend. That if you say, ‘Mohammed is a moral guide, and he’s infallible and absolutely perfect, you can’t question him,’ then you risk Muslims either becoming non-Muslims or fanatics, and taking him very seriously and literally. Or there is the other option, the one of saying, ‘Well, let’s just twist his words around until it fits with my lifestyle.’ That doesn’t seem to work. People don’t seem to want to do these mental acrobatics for a long time.

§§ In Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now. Ayaan outlines 5 key areas where Islam must be reformed: (1) Literalist readings of the Quran and the semi-divine status of Mohammed, (2) the privileging of the afterlife over life now, (3) Sharia law, (4) the enforcement of Islamic law by violence if necessary, and (5) the imperative of jihad, or holy war.

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It possibly creates too much cognitive dissonance. So, I wanted to talk to you about your solutions. I think you’ve talked about addressing the ‘push’ factors, like using military intervention, and civilian forces to build institutions and rule of law in countries that may be to some extent, failed states. However that hasn’t seemed to be very successful in the past. I mean, we’ve just come out of 20 years in Afghanistan ... No, I didn’t put it that way at all. So, I’m definitely not proposing that European countries start mounting invasions in these countries. Absolutely not. I’m just saying it is better if European countries would get involved. And this is on a diplomatic level, on an economic level. Sometimes America does that, and I think France does the same thing, too. When some of these countries are challenged, for instance, with terrorist attacks, and these homegrown militias seem to come very close to breaking down order, then it would be, I would say, in their self-interest, if European governments were to help militarily, those fragile governments in putting down the insurgencies. And the people I have in mind are the Islamists, and many of these developments you now see are in Africa, where local governments are just too weak to stand up to an Islamist insurgency. And what the Europeans have been doing is just displaying complete indifference until the problems come to their shores. And so, it would have been nice if they engaged in some kind of proactive dealing; saying to these countries, ‘We don’t want large numbers of people coming from Eritrea.’ So, we might want to help Eritrea address her economic problems or problems of that nature. And I think it was Trump’s administration, that probably criticized some of these European countries as they just want to lean back and hope that Uncle Sam is going to solve all their problems. The last question is in relation to your statement that ‘Tolerance of intolerance is cowardice.’ And it reminded me of Popper’s idea that you need to be intolerant of intolerance, *** and your statement seems to endorse the advocacy of using illiberal means to achieve liberal ends. But I thought that

*** The philosopher Karl Popper described in his 1945 book The Open Society and its Enemies the paradoxical idea that ‘In order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must be intolerant of intolerance.’ Thus, if a tolerant society was, through its tolerance, to accept the existence of an intolerant philosophy it would cease to be tolerant.

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there seems to be a danger in that it may actually attack the things that make a democratic society great, which is being pluralistic and tolerant. So, in our liberal democratic societies in the West, they are pluralistic, and they’re tolerant. Once in a while, an intolerant group emerges and tries to invoke something, in the case of the Islamic State, they are invoking God. In the case of the woke, they’re invoking Social Justice, but they then want to impose their ideologies on the rest of us. And I think we should be intolerant of that; of their intolerance, in order to sustain the pluralism and liberties that we have. For instance, here in America, we have all these people who have been cancelled and silenced; losing their jobs, losing their livelihoods. I think we should be intolerant of that kind of behavior and when it came to Islamists again, invoking God to hurt other people, I think we should be intolerant of that too. Being intolerant of intolerance is a way of maintaining and preserving our liberal order. So, it’s the opposite.

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References 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

7. 8. 9.

Ali AH. Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women’s Rights. HarperCollins; 2021. Migratory Map. Accessed December 17, 2021. https://frontex.europa.eu/weknow/migratory-map/ Hudson VM, Den Boer A. A Surplus of Men, a Deficit of Peace: Security and Sex Ratios in Asia’s Largest States. Int Secur. 2002;26(4):5-38. Europe’s man problem. POLITICO. Published January 6, 2016. Accessed December 16, 2021. https://www.politico.eu/article/europes-man-problem/ Adamson G. Migrants and Crime in Sweden in the Twenty-First Century. Society. 2020;57(1):9-21. doi:10.1007/s12115-019-00436-8 Henley J, correspondent JHE. Sweden’s gun violence rate has soared due to gangs, report says. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/ 2021/ may / 26 / fatal-shootings-have-risen-in-sweden-despite-fall-acrosseurope-report-finds. Published May 26, 2021. Accessed December 16, 2021. Filipovic J. Ayaan Hirsi Ali on Muslim Men and Western Women. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/09/books/review/ayaan-hirsi -ali-prey.html. Published February 9, 2021. Accessed December 16, 2021. Mehmet Ozalp : The History & Philosophy of Islam | troublemag. Accessed December 23, 2021. http://www.troublemag.com/mehmet-ozalp-the-historyphilosophy-of-islam/ Pipes D. When Muslims Leave the Faith. Daniel Pipes. Accessed December 16, 2021. https://www.danielpipes.org/19668/when-muslims-leave-the-faith

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~ Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, founder of the AHA Foundation, and host of The Ayaan Hirsi Ali Podcast. She served as a Member of the Dutch Parliament from 2003 to 2006. While in Parliament, she focused on furthering the integration of nonWestern immigrants into Dutch society, and on defending the rights of Muslim women. She has written several books including Infidel (2007), Nomad: from Islam to America, a Personal Journey through the Clash of Civilizations (2010), Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now (2015) and The Challenge of Dawa (2017). Her new book, Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women’s Rights, was published by Harper Collins in 2021. Prior to joining the Hoover Institution, she was a Fellow at the Belfer Center’s Future of Diplomacy Project at Harvard University, and a Resident Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. She received her Master’s degree in Political Science from Leiden University in the Netherlands.

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On DarkHorse, Ivermectin and Vaccine Hesitancy Based on an interview with Eric Topol Interview conducted on October 14, 2021 Mark Halloran: So I thought I’d like to pick up where the Sam Harris interview left off,1 and go into some of the things in more detail. I’d like to talk about the research in relation to ivermectin, vaccines and some of the immune escape mutations like Delta. In terms of the Bryant et al. (2021) meta-analysis that was done for ivermectin, which showed that COVID19 deaths were reduced by ivermectin; that was a moderate certainty evidence finding and there was low certainty evidence that ivermectin reduced COVID-19 infection by an average of 86%.2 I suppose I’d like to talk to you about why this isn’t compelling evidence for the use of ivermectin in the prevention and treatment of COVID. Eric Topol: That’s pretty simple. Because the two largest studies that were in the meta-analysis, were both shown to be fraudulent. That is, the data was impossible, and they had to be withdrawn.3,4 And so then, what you’re left with is a bunch of very small studies. And collectively, they’re not enough certainty to say anything. So, whether it prevents infection and prevents adverse outcomes, we’re left in the lurch. It’s still possible that ivermectin does have an effect. I’m not saying it doesn’t, in fact, maybe it does? But the point is, you can’t make that judgement, based on a collection of small studies that are inconclusive. That’s very different from, for example, the drug that Merck developed recently - another Merck drug, interestingly, because ivermectin is also made by Merck. And I’m not a fan of Merck by any means, having been part of the Vioxx * exposure years ago.5 But they had a trial of * Vioxx was the brand name for Rofecoxib which is a COX-2 nonsteroidal antiinflammatory drug used to treat conditions such as osteoarthritis, rheumatoid arthritis,

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molnupiravir, † a drug that had known anti-viral activity that’s potent, whereas ivermectin’s mechanisms, are still a little bit fuzzy, as far as where SARSCoV-2 is concerned. But they did a real trial, which was intended to be quite a reasonable size, and it was judged by an independent data and safety monitoring board that it had to be stopped because it was overwhelming in its efficacy with regard to reduction of hospitalizations and deaths: 50%.6‡ In fact, there were eight deaths versus zero, for placebo versus the active drug. Now, you need trials like that, to be able to say something definitive. And that’s even just one trial. Usually, you like to have independent replication. And there is an ongoing trial for that drug, in relation to prevention in people with early COVID infection, confirmed. But the problem with the story with ivermectin is that it’s a hodgepodge of studies, some of which various doses were used, there were some indications for prevention of infection, and some for prevention of outcomes. So, it’s all over the place. And it’s left in the suspension of maybe this drug could do something? But when you have fraudulent research being conducted, that is a very worrisome sign. And the fact that we haven’t had reliable sources of data from the usual entities like the Recovery Trial out of Oxford, or large study groups like Solidarity or the World Health Organization (WHO). A lot of the studies that have come forth had tiny numbers and are not coming from trusted sources of trialists. So, no, the way I look at it is, it’s just that the zone of uncertainty is too high. And you have these zealots that are pushing this, saying it’s a panacea; it’ll end the pandemic. That makes it even worse, because you want to have definitive data, ideally; two large trials, and independent replication to say anything. And there’s not even one large trial for ivermectin, the total body of evidence was based on less than a couple of 1000 people. I think that was the heart of it, aside from the fraudulent issues. I know Lawrence et al. (2021) had written a letter to Nature8 outlining all of the acute pain conditions etc. In September 2004 Merck withdraw Rofecoxib from the market due to concerns about increased risk from heart attack and stroke due to high dose, long term use. † Molnupiravir is an orally administered form of a potent ribonucleoside analog that inhibits replication of SARS-CoV-2.6 ‡ Note: the Merck trial data for Molnupiravir has been revised to a 30% (rather than 50%) reduction in hospitalizations and death, and half the absolute benefit than they previously disseminated at their interim analysis.7

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issues in relation to the study: impossible numbers, mismatch of trial register, inconsistent timelines etc. I would say outside of that, having worked in preclinical research with drugs for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) in transgenic mice, that what people generally don’t understand is that sample size matters in relation to power and effect size. And so, I could have cited multiple drugs that looked effective in animal models that were either totally ineffective, or actually had adverse effects in ALS patients. And that was not even fraudulent. Just bad study design, low numbers, insufficient power. Absolutely, you need big numbers. Remember, you’re talking about treating millions, if not tens of millions of people. And you don’t want to make the wrong call on a thousand people or a couple of thousand people, not that you have to have 10 million people in a study, but you want to be sure. And you also don’t want to be making false claims. So, the ivermectin zealots were saying this was 99% effective,9§ and having an emergency podcast with Joe Rogan.10** That should get you scared, because there is no drug in the world that has 99% success. Even if ivermectin someday is proven to have some efficacy, it’s not going to be 99%. We know that. So, these are the things that really are disturbing, actually. Lawrence at al., called for a paradigm shift in relation to how metaanalysis is done. That, in fact, the meta-analysis should occur on individual patient data. What do you think of that? That’s really important. That’s been part of the meta-analysis story for years. When you pool data, it isn’t just like it’s on the back of the envelope, or you just take the total numbers from each of the publications. In this case a lot of them were preprints. You actually have to have the data from each individual participant in the trials; in the patients. So, they didn’t have the data. And had they had it, a lot of these mistakes would have been preempted. So, one of the rules of what would now be considered for a top tier metaanalysis would be that you have talked to the authors of each of the papers, you’ve had them submit their data; the actual raw data for each person, so that when you do your pooling, you have all that information and then you can actually look at the granular aspects of each person. But when you don’t do § Bret Weinstein’s Dark Horse Podcast: COVID19, Ivermectin and the Crime of the Century. ** Joe Rogan Experience #1671: Bret Weinstein & Dr. Pierre Kory.

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that, and you just have basically kind of bottom-line data from papers without you connecting with the authors, you have a weak meta-analysis that has to be automatically suspect. The point made in the Bryant et al., paper which Tess Laurie is a coauthor on, is that corticosteroids were put forward as a treatment for COVID based on one randomized controlled trial, whereas ivermectin has had dozens. How would you respond to that? I think you said it well, when you said that sample size is so important. If you have 20 studies, and there are about 20 people in each group, of the placebo and ivermectin; adding those things up - it’s not a lot of veracity in that data set. So, the problem is you really want to bank the determination of whether a drug works on large bodies of data, rigorous studies and you can’t just lump all the different doses together too which has been a problem with these meta-analyses of ivermectin. So, no matter how you look at it, this data doesn’t cut it. Ivermectin, is still a big question mark. And maybe someday we’ll get the truth about it. But it’s discouraging how it’s gotten so much mileage, and you have these people that are basically saying, if you’re not giving the drug, you’re hurting people. When in fact it could be just the opposite. I think that the people who are the advocates for it, if I’m to look at them as good actors, are simply looking at all the data and making a mistake based on the data they’re looking at. They’re looking at observational studies, like where they’ve introduced ivermectin along with multiple other safety protocols, and there’s been a reported reduction in infection and death.11–13 How much weight would you give to those reports? You’re going to have a reduction just on a basis of time as we get smarter about how to treat people, just simple things; like putting people prone to avoid mechanical ventilation. And we make all these points of progress in the course of the pandemic. And if you just study a drug along the way, there’s just the time, learning, wisdom, that comes along with it. So, you can’t make judgments about that either. The only way you get the answer is randomized trials done with both the active drug, placebo, contemporaneously. Randomized, large numbers, with rigorous collection of the data, and sharing of the data. That’s important. I’ve been involved in some of the largest randomized trials in cardiovascular research Global Use of Strategies to Open (GUSTO) and had over 41,000 people in 18 countries looking at death as the

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endpoint and heart attack. We know how to do these trials, they are not hard, but they have to be large. And they have to be rigorous and subject to audit. And these are things that we haven’t had any of for ivermectin. On every box you want to check ivermectin data falls short on. When I spoke to Nobel Laureate Peter Doherty,14 this was at the beginning of the pandemic, we spoke about a paper released by his institute which is the molecular proof of principle for ivermectin. Caly et al. (2020), did an in vitro study that found that there was something like a 5000-fold reduction in SARS-CoV-2.15 Of course, they were using super physiological levels of ivermectin that are not FDA approved and cannot even be replicated in vivo. It feels like that’s where it’s kind of gone wrong. The dosing is a big deal. There’s been so many drugs, one of the famous ones was resveratrol, that would make you live forever, if you drink 10 cases of wine every day, in order to get enough resveratrol. And that totally was a bust. And whenever you have supra physiologic doses that can never be achieved in human beings, as the only real biological activity marker, that’s’ a problem. There are so many drugs - when you repurpose them in a screen, all the drugs that could have antiviral activity for SARS-CoV-2, the list is very, very long. However, at doses, the potency, that you could actually give the medicine in a pill form, it starts to get narrow; very few. And one of those just recently, it appears to have clicked with the Merck drug. And there are a couple others that are in the process, with Pfizer and Roche. So, I think we’re going to get there. But the dose support work that you’re getting at for ivermectin, was a terrible reach, we would never be able to achieve that amount of drug in vivo. And, interestingly, some of the trials that are thrown into the bouillabaisse, which is what this is, are very low doses of ivermectin, and even the highest doses are low relative to what had a putative level of antiviral activity in the Caly et al. in vitro study. It’s a tenfold increase on the FDA approved level. I do want to talk to you about Israel and about Delta. I don’t really understand this that well, but the escape mutations and the reduction in the effectiveness of the vaccines to protect against infection are down to something like 39%. I know you were initially against boosters to some extent, but what’s our future look like with this? With more variants coming out that are more infectious and possibly even more lethal. What are we looking at? Constant boosters?

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Delta †† is pretty bad. Delta is something that won’t make it easy for another version of this virus to compete with; it’s so hyper-transmissible, and it also has some immune evasion features. So, to be able to beat Delta, and come up with another global strain, it’s not going to be easy. There hasn’t been one yet that has mounted any competitiveness with Delta, but we may see that because we don’t have global containment of the virus. And there’s a chance for it to evolve further, but hopefully, we won’t see it. Now, let’s say we just stay with Delta as our circulating virus around the world, which is pretty much the case, the only continent that was holding out till recently was South America, and that’s also being taken over by Delta. But everywhere else, it’s Delta, almost 100%. So back in late June in Israel, where they had previously gotten their cases down to almost zero, that is they got it down to one per million, or 10 cases in the entire country of Israel. So, it looked like they had beaten this virus, after having really had a tough road. Then Delta started and they had a huge surge. Because there was a double hit, they’ve been very aggressive in getting the vaccine to their population early. So, they were set up for waning immunity. Now, we knew that the vaccines weren’t going to stay effective for years, we knew there would be a third shot needed, likely maybe at one year, or two years, at some point. We didn’t know it’d be six months. That was the big Israeli realization, when they first came out with that and said: ‘Oh my gosh, protection has dropped from 95% to 40% against symptomatic infections.’ At first there was denial among the medical community. Nobody wanted to see that. So, the double whammy was both that they had gotten off to a very fast start, they had a lot of people then who were at the six-month waned immunity period, and they also had Delta.17 If we never had Delta, if they just had Alpha, ‡‡ these breakthrough infections would have probably still been much lower. It’s this combination of a very contagious form of the virus with the waning of immunity that was expected. It really basically was like a perfect storm. And you add into that, that in Israel they gave Pfizer, at three weeks spacing, which led to a not optimal response of the Beta, the B and T cell immune response. So that now has been largely squashed by the boosters. They used boosters of the Pfizer, the same dose, the same original vaccine in †† Delta variant (B.1.617.2) was first reported in India in December 2020.16 ‡‡ Alpha variant (B.1.1.7) was the first variant of concern identified in the United Kingdom in December 2020.16

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millions of people. And they’re well on their way to getting back to that one case per million people, which is the ultimate - we can’t do much better than that. And I think what we’ve learned already, people over 60 need to get a third shot, that probably applies to all vaccines, or with Johnson & Johnson, that would be the second dose. §§ But an additional dose is going to be needed around six months for people over 60. If we want to suppress symptomatic infections, instead of just hospitalizations and deaths, then we have to go down to much lower ages, possibly as low as age 20 or 18. That’s the big question: how aggressively do you want to suppress symptomatic infections because they’re going to crop up with more exposure to Delta, if we don’t give a third shot. It seems that that’s a balance then because even though there’s a decrease in approximately 39% for the ability to stop infection, there’s still an 89 to 93% protection rate against hospitalization and death. It’s really a little lower than that. But if you zoom in on the people over age 65, then it drops down, and for the people in their 70s it dropped from 95 to 85, which is substantial. So, the point I am getting at, is that most of the hospitalizations and deaths occur in people over age 60. So that’s where you see the big bang of the booster. Because the immune response is just not going to be as good with older people, even with a good vaccine, they’re just not going to be able to produce antibodies the same way. Exactly. So then with the younger age group it’s two things going on. One, they make better antibody and cellular responses; B and T cell, and they don’t have as much of a risk to wind up in hospital or die. So, for those people as you get younger and younger, the benefit of an additional shot is lower. But it is consistent about the symptomatic infections. We just learned that data this week from Israel. There’s one other point - if we get containment of the virus, where it’s at very low levels, then the need for these additional shots is much lower, especially in younger healthy people. So, a lot of this story about the additional shots is dependent on us getting our global vaccination rates way up, achieving containment, and the unknown as to whether neutralizing §§ A single dose of Janssen Ad26.COV2.S was found to have an efficacy of 66.9% against symptomatic moderate and severe SARS-CoV-2 infection.18

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antibodies at high levels is going to be required to prevent infections and transmission. That is still out there, dangling, because we finally have spacing between vaccinations; now that we’ve given a six month third dose, and we have this really good cellular immune response generated - that might be enough to carry us years. We’ll have to see. If you’ve got something as infectious as Delta doesn’t it become sort of a pandemic of the unvaccinated? But then the unvaccinated can also affect the vaccinated if you’ve got a significant proportion of them. If we thought 70:30% - if we had 30% unvaccinated, we would get away with it at Alpha or Beta, we’re not going to get away with it at Delta. I’m wondering whether if we vaccinate everyone say from down to 16 years old, then doesn’t it becomes a pandemic of children? The virus then starts to circulate in really young children and become potentially more infectious and deadly in children? That’s the concern. I haven’t been a fan of the pandemic of the unvaccinated just because we’re all in this together. And as you said, aptly, people who are vaccinated are not necessarily durably protected. So, they’re involved. And they can transmit, maybe not as frequently, but if you’re vaccinated, and you get a breakthrough infection, you may transmit before you have any symptoms, or you may never get symptoms, and you may be capable of transmitting particularly with Delta, because it’s such high copies of the virus that you harbor in your nose and upper airway. And then you get to the children. Now, even if we were to get 80% of the total population, and there’s some more people that have prior COVID who have immunity - it still may not be as ideal as if those people got one dose of a vaccine - but then you start getting up to the 90% ballpark. And with the children basically then you get the drag effect of having most of the population – you’ve built up this great Delta immunity wall. We don’t have that yet. We’re seeing it maybe in places like Spain and Portugal and the UAE, where they are at 80% of the population vaccinated and prior COVID, unlike Singapore, which had almost no prior COVID. So that may be the ticket to getting containment, Israel may get that now because they’ve gone through so much to get through this recent Delta wave. The Delta problem changed the dynamics. We need 90% - 95% of a Delta wall of immunity; a combination of some type of vaccination, plus prior COVID in people who didn’t get vaccinated, and particularly if it’s within the

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last six months or a year of that prior COVID. And then the kids will basically benefit even without having to necessarily get vaccinated. But like in the US, we’re so short; we’re at 56% of the total population. We need those kids vaccinated to be part of the 90% because they are a vector of transmission. Places that have done really well, like Spain or UAE, it’s not as vital for them to get young children vaccinated as it is in the US. However, the safety profile hasn’t been established for certain subgroups, has it? So, children are one, pregnant women are another, and then there are the immunocompromised. Are we going to be able to get vaccination in those subgroups without an appropriate safety profile? I think the pregnancy thing has played out. Pregnancy is an immunocompromised state. And right now, in the UK, 1 in 5 of the intensive care unit patients with COVID are unvaccinated pregnant women.19 So, it’s very serious matter. And we know that the safety has been assured and efficacy is short. And so pregnant women do benefit from getting vaccinated. The real immunocompromised patients are the ones that have an autoimmune disease or are taking drugs that are basically interfering with their immune system. That’s tricky, because they’re variable, and we need to probably do lab tests to see that they are really getting protection. So that one’s a bit of a wildcard because it’s quite heterogeneous. I think the benefits of vaccination, though, are much bigger than the average person is appreciating. Because it’s not just the individual, of course, it’s the ability to break the chain. And then there’s the children, you’re right, we don’t have the safety data we would like. Let’s say we saw in the teenagers that the myocarditis cropped up. And that wasn’t expected. We didn’t know that was going to happen, we still don’t know the mechanism of it. And most of those are boys, most of them do really well. It’s mild, it’s self-limiting. The number of cases is, let’s say, 1 in 50,000. But if you get down to teenage boys, it gets higher, but almost always, they recover well. And it’s usually the second dose. Now, what if that was even more common in children? We don’t know. And the only study we have is with Pfizer with 5 to 11 years old.20 And it’s only 1500 people who got the vaccine. *** Now we’re back to like ivermectin numbers. But now we’re talking about safety issues. And if it’s 1 in 50,000, or 1 in 10,000, and you only have 1500 people studied, you can get a misread. So, there wasn’t *** BNT162b2 vaccine (n = 1518), Placebo (n = 750) Total (N = 2268)20

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any myocarditis in the 1500 children in that study. But we need more data to be certain about that. In relation to the instances of myocarditis from the mRNA vaccines, it has been suggested that there may be some degree of molecular mimicry between the spike protein and self-antigens.21 Everything under the sun has been touted as a putative mechanism, and we have nothing yet to rule in or out. It’s very elusive. I think that there was the idea that somehow the mRNA was getting into a vein during the injection, but that doesn’t explain why it’s just boys. And then why the second shot, and the age thing? There are so many unknowns here, whether it’s an actual autoimmune, proinflammatory response. This mimicry. I’ve heard testosterone being put forward as a factor. Well, there’s young women getting myocarditis, so testosterone doesn’t do this. Why is there an imbalance of the genders? It’s puzzling. The good thing about it is if you get COVID, the chance of you getting the real deal myocarditis is relatively high, much higher than if you get it from the vaccine, which is very mild if it occurs, and self-limiting.21 So COVID of the heart is not a good thing; from the infection. COVID caused myocarditis of the vaccine, even though we don’t know why it occurs, I think we can at least say it’s not likely to be of a durable, adverse impact. The rarity of myocarditis from the mRNA vaccines being a problem is notable. What are the comparable rates between myocarditis from COVID versus myocarditis from the vaccine? If you just looked at all people, without segmenting teenagers or older people, it’s more than a 10-fold increase in myocarditis from COVID than you would ever get from a vaccine. And it was a New England Journal of Medicine paper from Israel that found this and others have confirmed it.22 It’s orders of magnitude difference. ††† And it’s also a different type of myocarditis from COVID. It’s a much more worrisome heart problem that you get through COVID infection, then when you get it through the vaccine.

††† According to Barda et al. (2021) the risk ratio of myocarditis from vaccination is 3.24, whilst myocarditis from COVID19 infection has a risk ratio of 18.28. COVID19 is also associated with more severe adverse events such as myocardial infarction and thrombocytopenia.22

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People talk about getting natural immunity through catching COVID versus some type of artificial immunity from vaccines. The issue is that people don’t take into account that after previous pandemics the increase in neurological illness, things like Parkinson disease, have skyrocketed. So COVID is not something that you want to go out and catch to get natural immunity because you don’t really know what’s down the track for you. So, I think this is a really important topic, the so-called prior COVID immunity, or natural immunity ... The problem we’ve got is none of it is long term. The immunity that you get from a COVID infection, in some people, can be quite durable. You just don’t know that until it’s too late - when you actually wind up getting a reinfection. Even prior COVID - what some people like to call natural immunity - I don’t think it’s natural to get COVID. I don’t think anybody wants to get COVID. And just like I don’t want to have a chicken pox party to get chicken pox, you don’t want to have a COVID party. The issue here is the immunity you get is very different. With COVID infection you’re getting exposed to the entire virus, you’re getting different antigens that you’re making antibodies to, and different cellular immunity. It’s a very different from you just getting the spike protein to fight against. So, it does have, in some people, more durability and more breadth. The best of all, you can’t beat this, is you get COVID, you have a good immune response, and then you get one dose of vaccine. That’s unbeatable. That’s better two doses of any vaccine known to mankind. That’s hybrid immunity.23 But again, you don’t want to get COVID. It’s only if you had missed an opportunity of getting the vaccine, because when you get COVID, there’s a wildcard. The wildcard is what you’re getting at which is long COVID. Long COVID is a mosaic of many things. Some of the constituent symptoms are brain fog, and cognitive impact. Obviously, fatigue is a central part of this, but also breathing difficulty, and many other things. Now, recent studies have shown that this is not uncommon at all, more than 10% of people who get COVID, even young, healthy people are getting long COVID symptoms. Diverse, debilitating symptoms, and they often can’t return to work, or if they do go back to work, they’re troubled. They really have limitations. So, this is the legacy of the COVID pandemic; there is going to be millions of people around the world who have long COVID. And who knows how long it will last for?24

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Well even beyond long COVID. What we’ve seen from previous pandemics is that there’s a correlation after the pandemics with people developing severe neurological illnesses. To pinpoint that further, there’s one really important study that came out of the UK. So, in the UK they have the Biobank. And they have taken hundreds of thousands of UK citizens who volunteer to participate and a large number had a brain scan. And by happenstance, they had it before the pandemic. Then they repeated their brain scans, if they had COVID, or they didn’t have COVID, and they saw marked grey matter loss in the COVID group.25 And it gets to your point, which is that it takes a long time after losing brain cells to see the impact. And the fact that it’s already been documented from that UK study, that’s one of the most worrisome studies we’ve seen about COVID. Beyond the deaths, and the sickness that induces, is the implications of what it could do to some people’s brain. Young, healthy people who happen to have brain hits or involvement. So, this is yet another reason why we don’t want people to get COVID. Many will wind up unscathed, of course. But what about the people who unknowingly, have this hit to their brain, which we still need to learn a lot more about? I wanted to address some of the claims that were made in Bret Weinstein’s DarkHorse podcast with Dr. Robert Malone and Steven Kirsch.26 So, the first one is that the spike protein that’s produced by the mRNA vaccine is cytotoxic. And then, the claim is that the transmembrane domain that is supposed to anchor the spike protein to a localized spot, fails, or can fail to some extent, and that the spike protein then cleaves, and then Steven Kirsch talks about a Japanese study that shows the distribution of the spike protein throughout the body, bloodstream, the ovaries and in bone marrow.27,28 Tell me what do we make of this? What evidence is there for this? It’s all false. It’s all unacceptable lying; making things up. For example, Bret Weinstein on one of his podcasts said that the reason people get headaches post vaccination is because the mRNA from the vaccine crosses the blood brain barrier, and that’s what’s causing it. That’s ridiculous. This is what, in many ways, has ruined the American vaccination campaign, why we’re sitting at 56% fully vaccinated instead of 80 or 90%. It is this kind of fabrication. Now, I want to make sure that your listeners know that Dr. Malone, who claims he’s the inventor of mRNA vaccines is a charlatan; he’s not the inventor of mRNA vaccines. He’s already admitted to that. So,

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anything he says is suspect. And for whatever reason, he’s on a campaign to take down the mRNA vaccines that he says he was the inventor of - when he wasn’t the inventor. He had some involvement with the delivery of nanoparticles with mRNA.29 But he was not the inventor of the vaccines. And he continues to make false assertions, and team up with people like Bret Weinstein and others, to make stuff up. And all this stuff is made up. It’s unacceptable, and it’s scaring people from getting the vaccines. I suppose the thing to be aware of is that SARS-CoV-2 is cytotoxic.30 There is no evidence that the that mRNA vaccines Pfizer and Moderna specifically, are cytotoxic. No evidence. To say this sort of thing is just outrageous. There’s never the comparison with COVID itself, which, as we’ve already discussed - what it can do to the brain, what it does do to cells, how it hijacks the cells. So, these things have scared the public and their listeners and their followers from getting vaccinated. And this complete sham of inventing the vaccines so that that supposedly commands respect when it’s an absolute lie. It’s unimaginable that this has been happening. This is what has been happening here in the vaccine world. Yes, people are making false assertions. And you can never keep up with it. Because if it isn’t that, then it’s that it causes infertility or it causes cancer. It’s a gene therapy, it’s experimental, the list goes on, it’s infinite attempts to take down the vaccines, and there’s no basis for it. These vaccines, the mRNA in particular, have been given now to hundreds of millions of people, and the number of people who’ve had any very serious untoward events, adverse outcomes, is miniscule; it’s almost nil. The thing that may have contributed to the vaccine hesitancy, is the skipping of the animal experimentation. The shortest period for vaccine development prior to this was the Ebola vaccine, which took five years. Do you think that this and then the emergency authorization by the FDA led to more hesitancy? It took 30 years to have the mRNA platform, and that’s with mRNA delivered by nanoparticles to get into muscle cells to then start the factory of the immune response. It took 30 years - not one year. The point being is that it took a long time. The animal studies were done in non-human primates; macaques. And it was done in the largest clinical trials in the history of vaccines, 40,000 participants in one trial, 35,000 in another trial, these were conducted in a compressed way. I’ve already alluded to the fact that one thing

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that was done to move things fast, was to do the three week dosing of Pfizer and the four week dosing of Moderna. I would have loved to see that done 8 or 12 weeks, because it would have had an even better immune response. But remember, we were going into a crisis of existential threat to a large proportion of people. They needed to go fast. And they didn’t want to wait 812 weeks and thought the 3 or 4 weeks was going to be enough. That was the only thing rushed. When it came down to the FDA to adjudicate whether these vaccines are safe and effective, they actually took great pains to delay the Pfizer to make sure the trial was complete. Because at one point, under the pressure of the Trump administration, they were trying to get vaccine emergency approval, on the basis of the first interim analysis of 32 events. 32 events! They wanted the administration of Trump and Pfizer to get approval. Well, the first thing the FDA said was, ‘No, you have to finish that darn trial, and then we’ll look at the data,’ and then maybe we’ll give you an emergency approval. That’s what happened. So, this was not rushed. This was done in a rigorous way, thank goodness, because if it had been rushed, and if Trump had gotten his way to have the October surprise, ‡‡‡ and at Pfizer the CEO Albert Bourla, kept talking about getting the results out in October, if they had gotten it on the first interim analysis of 32 events, that would have been a nightmare. But since it was done right, this accusation that the trial was done too fast - it’s complete balderdash. It’s malarkey. It’s upsetting because it was actually done in a very rigorous way. I know that at the beginning of the rollout of the vaccines that they were monitoring for things like antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE).31 But that turned out to not be an issue. But they’re the sorts of things that you look at with vaccines. Your claim is that if you’re going to see something it’s within two months of a vaccine administration. We’ve seen everything we’re going to see with these vaccines - we saw it in the first two months. And that even includes the myocarditis that we discussed. It was seen in the first couple of months, when it’s introduced to the population at large. So, there’s not going to be any surprises. We talked about some of the pluses of a natural infection during our conversation. Let’s ‡‡‡ The October surprise is a news event in the US that is either spontaneous or planned and which may influence the upcoming November elections.

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just be truthful about all this. And unfortunately, a lot of the damage has been done. Too many innocent minds have been inculcated with the fabrications, and disinformation. And I say dis not misinformation, because some of the perpetrators of this lack of evidence and fabricated stuff, did it purposely - to advance their own agendas. And we’re suffering because we can’t fix it now. It’s embedded. They’re programmed now to have a total aversion to getting vaccinated in the United States, and we suffer the most of any country because of that.

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References 1.

#256 - A Contagion of Bad Ideas. Sam Harris. Accessed December 17, 2021. https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/256-contagionbad-ideas 2. Bryant A, Lawrie TA, Dowswell T, et al. Ivermectin for Prevention and Treatment of COVID-19 Infection: A Systematic Review, Meta-Analysis and Trial Sequential Analysis to Inform Clinical Guidelines. Open Science Framework; 2021. doi:10.31219/osf.io/dzs2v 3. Davey M. Fraudulent ivermectin studies open up new battleground between science and misinformation. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com /australia-news / 2021 / sep / 25/fraudulent-ivermectin-studies-open-up-newbattleground-between-science-and-misinformation. Published September 24, 2021. Accessed December 13, 2021. 4. Reardon S. Flawed ivermectin preprint highlights challenges of COVID drug studies. Nature. 2021;596(7871):173-174. doi:10.1038/d41586-021-02081-w 5. Topol EJ. Failing the Public Health — Rofecoxib, Merck, and the FDA. N Engl J Med. 2004;351(17):1707-1709. doi:10.1056/NEJMp048286 6. Merck and Ridgeback’s Investigational Oral Antiviral Molnupiravir Reduced the Risk of Hospitalization or Death by Approximately 50 Percent Compared to Placebo for Patients with Mild or Moderate COVID-19 in Positive Interim Analysis of Phase 3 Study. Merck.com. Accessed December 13, 2021. https:// www.merck.com / news / merck-and-ridgebacks-investigational-oralantiviral - molnupiravir - reduced - the - risk-of-hospitalization-or-death-byapproximately - 50 - percent - compared - to-placebo-for-patients-with-mildor-moderat/ 7. Merck and Ridgeback Biotherapeutics Provide Update on Results from MOVe-OUT Study of Molnupiravir, an Investigational Oral Antiviral Medicine, in At Risk Adults With Mild-to-Moderate COVID-19. Merck. com. Accessed December 14, 2021. https://www.merck.com/ news/merckand- ridgeback - biotherapeutics-provide-update-on-results-from-move-outstudy-of-molnupiravir-an-investigational-oral-antiviral-medicine-in-at-riskadults-with-mild-to-moderate-covid-19/ 8. Lawrence JM, Meyerowitz-Katz G, Heathers JAJ, Brown NJL, Sheldrick KA. The lesson of ivermectin: meta-analyses based on summary data alone are inherently unreliable. Nat Med. 2021;27(11):1853-1854. doi:10.1038 /s41591-021-01535-y 9. Bret Weinstein | DarkHorse Podcast: COVID, Ivermectin, and the Crime of the Century: DarkHorse Podcast with Pierre Kory & Bret Weinstein on Apple Podcasts. Apple Podcasts. Accessed December 14, 2021. https://podcasts .apple.com/us/podcast / covid-ivermectin-and-the-crime-of-the/id147158152 1?i=1000523859023 10. #1671 - Bret Weinstein & Dr. Pierre Kory.; 2021. Accessed December 14, 2021. https://open.spotify.com/episode/7uVXKgE6eLJKMXkETwcw0D

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11. Chamie J. Real-World Evidence: The Case of Peru. Causality between Ivermectin and COVID-19 Infection Fatality Rate.; 2020. 12. Chamie-Quintero JJ, Hibberd J, Scheim D. Sharp Reductions in COVID-19 Case Fatalities and Excess Deaths in Peru in Close Time Conjunction, StateBy-State, with Ivermectin Treatments. Social Science Research Network; 2021. doi:10.2139/ssrn.3765018 13. Indian States Turn to Ivermectin in COVID Crisis. Published May 18, 2021. Accessed December 13, 2021. https://www.medpagetoday.com/specialreports/exclusives/92644 14. Peter Doherty : COVID 19 – The Crown | troublemag. Accessed December 14, 2021. http://www.troublemag.com/peter-doherty-covid-19-the-crown/ 15. Caly L, Druce JD, Catton MG, Jans DA, Wagstaff KM. The FDA-approved drug ivermectin inhibits the replication of SARS-CoV-2 in vitro. Antiviral Res. 2020;178:104787. doi:10.1016/j.antiviral.2020.104787 16. Cascella M, Rajnik M, Aleem A, Dulebohn SC, Di Napoli R. Features, Evaluation, and Treatment of Coronavirus (COVID-19). In: StatPearls. StatPearls Publishing; 2021. Accessed December 13, 2021. http://www.ncbi. nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK554776/ 17. Levine-Tiefenbrun M, Yelin I, Alapi H, et al. Viral loads of Delta-variant SARS-CoV-2 breakthrough infections after vaccination and booster with BNT162b2. Nat Med. Published online November 2, 2021. doi:10.1038/s 41591-021-01575-4 18. The Janssen Ad26.COV2.S COVID-19 vaccine: What you need to know. Accessed December 13, 2021. https://www.who.int/news-room/featurestories/detail/the-j-j-covid-19-vaccine-what-you-need-to-know 19. Among England’s most critically ill covid patients, 1 in 5 is pregnant and unvaccinated. Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/ 2021 / 10 /11 /england - pregnant - women - unvaccinated - covid /. Accessed December 13, 2021. 20. Walter EB, Talaat KR, Sabharwal C, et al. Evaluation of the BNT162b2 Covid-19 Vaccine in Children 5 to 11 Years of Age. N Engl J Med. Published online November 9, 2021. doi:10.1056/NEJMoa2116298 21. Bozkurt B, Kamat I, Hotez PJ. Myocarditis With COVID-19 mRNA Vaccines. Circulation. 2021;144(6):471-484. doi:10.1161/CIRCULATION AHA.121.056135 22. Barda N, Dagan N, Ben-Shlomo Y, et al. Safety of the BNT162b2 mRNA Covid-19 Vaccine in a Nationwide Setting. N Engl J Med. 2021;385(12): 1078-1090. doi:10.1056/NEJMoa2110475 23. Callaway E. COVID super-immunity: one of the pandemic’s great puzzles. Nature. 2021;598(7881):393-394. doi:10.1038/d41586-021-02795-x 24. Higgins V, Sohaei D, Diamandis EP, Prassas I. COVID-19: from an acute to chronic disease? Potential long-term health consequences. Crit Rev Clin Lab Sci. 2021;58(5):297-310. doi:10.1080/10408363.2020.1860895

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25. Douaud G, Lee S, Alfaro-Almagro F, et al. Brain imaging before and after COVID-19 in UK Biobank. medRxiv. Published online August 18, 2021: 2021.06.11.21258690. doi:10.1101/2021.06.11.21258690 26. Bret Weinstein | DarkHorse Podcast: How to save the world, in three easy steps. on Apple Podcasts. Apple Podcasts. Accessed December 14, 2021. https://podcasts.apple.com/si/podcast/how-to-save-the-world-in-three-easysteps/id1471581521?i=1000525032595 27. Washington D of C 1100 CANS 1300B, Dc 20036. PolitiFact - No sign that the COVID-19 vaccines’ spike protein is toxic or ‘cytotoxic.’ @politifact. Accessed November 8, 2021. https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/ jun/16/youtube-videos/no-sign-covid-19-vaccines-spike-protein-toxic-or-c/ 28. Health Feedback. COVID-19 vaccines don’t affect ovaries or fertility in general; the vaccines are highly effective at preventing illness and death. Health Feedback. Published June 24, 2021. Accessed November 8, 2021. https:// healthfeedback.org / claimreview / covid-19-vaccines-dont-affectovaries- or - fertility-in-general - the-vaccines - are-highly-effective-atpreventing-illness-and-death/ 29. Dolgin E. The tangled history of mRNA vaccines. Nature. 2021;597(7876): 318-324. doi:10.1038/d41586-021-02483-w 30. Meckiff BJ, Ramírez-Suástegui C, Fajardo V, et al. Imbalance of Regulatory and Cytotoxic SARS-CoV-2-Reactive CD4+ T Cells in COVID-19. Cell. 2020;183(5):1340-1353.e16. doi:10.1016/j.cell.2020.10.001 31. Lee WS, Wheatley AK, Kent SJ, DeKosky BJ. Antibody-dependent enhancement and SARS-CoV-2 vaccines and therapies. Nat Microbiol. 2020;5(10):1185-1191. doi:10.1038/s41564-020-00789-5

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~ Eric Topol is the Founder and Director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, Professor, Molecular Medicine, and Executive Vice-President of Scripps Research. As a researcher, he has published over 1,200 peer-reviewed articles, with more than 315,000 citations, elected to the National Academy of Medicine, and is one of the top 10 most cited researchers in medicine. His principal scientific focus has been on the genomic and digital tools to individualize medicine. In 2016, Topol was awarded a $207 million grant from the NIH to lead a significant part of the Precision Medicine (All of Us) Initiative, a prospective research program enrolling 1 million participants in the US. This is in addition to his role as principal investigator for a flagship $35M NIH grant to promote innovation in medicine. He was the founder of a new medical school at Cleveland Clinic, Lerner College of Medicine, with Case Western University. He has over 500,000 followers on Twitter (@EricTopol) where recently he has been reporting insights and research findings for COVID-19. Besides editing several textbooks, he has published 3 bestseller books on the future of medicine: The Creative Destruction of Medicine, The Patient Will See You Now, and Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again. Lastly, Topol was commissioned by the UK 2018-2019 to lead planning for the National Health Service’s integration of AI and new technologies.

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Black Politicized Lives Matter By Heather MacDonald On May 25, four Minneapolis police officers arrested a man for passing a counterfeit $20 bill. One of the officers kept his knee on George Floyd’s neck and shoulders for eight minutes while Mr. Floyd was handcuffed on the ground and pleading that he couldn’t breathe. Mr. Floyd died of a heart attack during the arrest. The next day, Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey announced that whatever the investigation into Mr. Floyd’s death revealed, being black in America should not be a death sentence. Mayor Frey’s interpretation of Mr. Floyd’s horrifying end - that it was a function of his race - instantly became universal. That idea was coupled with the claim that Mr. Floyd’s death was representative of an epidemic of racially biased police killings of black men. Together these two claims triggered an explosion of violence in Minneapolis and across the country, destroying thousands of livelihoods, turning city streets into war zones, and ripping apart the very foundation of law and order. Police officers were shot at, slashed, and assaulted with bricks and bottles; their precinct houses and cruisers were firebombed. Courthouses were vandalized. Firefighters let public and private property burn to the ground rather than risk being attacked by the rioters. Professional thieves used stolen cars as missiles to hurtle into stores which they then cleaned out through the shattered glass. The flames of that terrible week have burned out, but the attack on civil order continues. Monuments to the nation’s Founders have been torn down and defaced; anarchists colonized portions of Seattle and New York with impunity. Violence has become the response of choice to any criminal justice decision the activists do not like. In mid-July 2020 vandals tried to torch the Georgia Department of Public Safety as part of ongoing protests against the police in Atlanta; in Salt Lake City, vandals broke windows of the District Attorney’s office and pepper sprayed police officers after the district attorney

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declined to prosecute an officer-involved shooting. Riots broke out in Kenosha, WI, Philadelphia, and Brooklyn Center, MN, among other locations, following police shootings. Courthouses and police precincts remain favored physical targets. In Portland, Antifa thugs have hurled bombs at the federal courthouse; they have tried to blind federal agents with lasers. And across the country, police officers are routinely attacked as they try to make a lawful arrest. Ambush assaults on officers rose 91% in the year following Mr. Floyd’s death. The unchecked anarchy of those riots and their long aftermath have sent a clear message to criminals: no one is controlling the streets. Gang shootings and homicides have spiked nationwide as a demoralized police force pulls back from discretionary stops and arrests. In the weeks following the Floyd riots, homicides were up by 100% in Minneapolis, 200% in Seattle, 40% in St. Louis, 240% in Atlanta, and 182% in Chicago. The year 2020 likely saw the largest percentage increase in the nation’s history.1 At least four dozen children under the age of 18 were fatally shot in drive-by shootings, nearly all of them black. We have been here before. In 2015 and 2016, homicides in the U.S. saw their largest two-year increase in nearly 50 years, following the police shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014. Brown’s death fueled the first iteration of the Black Lives Matter movement. Cops backed off from proactive policing, having been relentlessly told that they were racist, for example, to question someone hanging out on a known drug corner at 1 am hitching up his waistband as if he had a gun. As a result of this decline in discretionary enforcement, another 2000 blacks lost their lives in 2015 and 2016, compared to 2014 numbers.2–4 ~ The rapid rise of crime over the last year and a half makes that first version of what I have called the Ferguson Effect look like child’s play. Today’s Ferguson Effect 2.0, or better, the Minneapolis Effect, has been far worse, since the Black Lives Matter narrative that policing in the U.S. is lethally racist has been amplified by every mainstream institution in the country. ~

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A lot is riding on whether that narrative about the police is correct—not just thousands of lives, but the very possibility of a civilized society. Essential criminal justice practices are being rapidly dismantled in the name of fighting alleged law enforcement bias. So is it true, as U.S. President Joe Biden routinely announces, that every time a black person leaves his house, his family members need to fear for his safety from the police? It is not. The idea that the police are wantonly killing black men is an optical illusion, created by selective coverage from a politicized press. That optical illusion is then reinforced by an elite establishment dedicated to the idea that racism is America’s defining trait. There are three types of evidence bearing on the Black Lives Matter claim about police racism: the raw numbers on police shootings and deaths, individual cases like Mr. Floyd’s, and academic research. The raw numbers are these: Every year the police fatally shoot about 1000 people, the vast majority of whom are threatening the officer or bystanders with deadly force. About 50% of those police fatalities are white and about 25% are black. Anti-police activists look at that 25% number and proclaim: police bias, since blacks are about 13% of the population. That is the wrong benchmark, however. The decisive issue in assessing police activity is the choice of a benchmark. Every article you read, every news story you watch in the mainstream media, will compare police stops or arrests to a population benchmark, because that is the only way that the Black Lives Matter narrative can be sustained. But law enforcement actions must be measured against crime, not population ratios, because policing today is datadriven. Officers are deployed to where people are most being victimized, and that is in minority neighborhoods. And it is in minority neighborhoods where officers are most likely to interact with armed, violent, and resisting suspects. Here are the victimization data: Nationwide, blacks between the ages of ten and 43 die of homicide at thirteen times the rate of whites, according to the CDC. In Minnesota blacks of all ages die of homicide at 12 times the rate of whites. In Chicago’s four most violent districts, the homicide rate is 26 times higher than in the safest districts.5 One might think that the Black Lives Matter activists would care about such loss of black life. They ignore those black deaths, however, because the victims are killed overwhelmingly not by the police, not by whites, but by other blacks.

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Here are the criminal offending data: In the 75 largest U.S. counties, which is where most of the population resides, blacks constitute around 60 percent of all murder and robbery defendants, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, though they are only 15% of the population in those counties. Nationwide blacks commit homicide at eight times the rate of whites and Hispanics combined. In Chicago, blacks commit about 80% of all shootings and homicides, though they are less than a third of the population. Whites commit about 2% of all shootings and homicides in Chicago, though they, too, are less than a third of the population. * In a typical year, blacks in St. Louis commit all or nearly all homicides, though they are less than half of the population. In New York City, blacks commit about 75% of all shootings, on average, though they are 23% of the city’s population. Whites commit less than 3% of all shootings in New York City, though they are 34% of the city’s population. These crime disparities have enormous consequences for police use of force. The biggest determinant of officer behavior is civilian behavior. The greater the chance that officers confront armed and resisting suspects, the more likely they are to escalate their own use of force. And that chance is far higher in black communities. As discussed below, blacks are actually shot less by the police than their crime rates would predict, and whites are shot more. The percentage of white and Hispanic homicide victims who are killed by a cop is three times higher than the percentage of black homicide victims who are killed by a cop. So that 25% or so share of fatal police shootings each year comprised of black victims - when measured against a crime benchmark - does not support the Black Lives Matter narrative. What about the individual case? Mr. Floyd’s death was immediately portrayed as what is known in literary theory as a synecdoche—a part that stands in for a whole, in this case, the whole of anti-black police violence. But if we conclude from that one case, however shocking, that the police are biased against black men, we could just as easily conclude from other individual cases that the police are biased against white men. Take the death of Tony Timpa, which adumbrated the death of Mr. Floyd. In 2016, the 32-year-old schizophrenic called 911 in Dallas to report that he *

Data supplied to the author by the Chicago Police Department.

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was off his medication, frightened, and needed help. Three Dallas police officers responded and kept Mr. Timpa face down on the ground for 13 minutes with a knee to his back, all the while joking about Mr. Timpa’s mental illness. Mr. Timpa was handcuffed and had not resisted or threatened the officers. He pleaded for help more than 30 times, exclaiming that the cops were killing him. Eventually he stopped moving or making any sound, as the officers continued their wisecracks. After Mr. Timpa was loaded into an ambulance, an officer said: “I hope I didn’t kill him.” Mr. Timpa was already dead from homicide caused by physical restraint and cocaine. Very few Americans outside of Mr. Timpa’s family know his name. His death did not make international news or spur widespread riots. Because Mr. Timpa was white, his death did not fit the Black Lives Matter narrative and thus was of no interest to the media. That same year, a cop in Mesa, Arizona, unleashed a barrage of gunfire from his AR-15 rifle at a 26-year-old man in a motel who had been reported as having a gun. The victim was down on his hands and knees in the corridor outside his motel room, trying to comply with the conflicting commands that a sergeant was screaming at him, and begging “Please don’t shoot me!” Like Mr. Timpa, the victim, Daniel Shaver, was white. In 2015, the year that Black Lives Matter became a national phenomenon, a 50-year-old white man in Tuscaloosa involved in a domestic violence incident ran at the officer with a spoon and was fatally shot. A white 25-yearold male in Des Moines led the police on a car chase and walked quickly towards the officer when he got out of the car and was fatally shot. A white 21-year-old male in Akron escaped from a grocery store robbery on a bike and didn’t take his hand out of his waistband when commanded to do so and was fatally shot. None of these victims was armed. ~ No one knows these men’s names, either, because they don’t help the narrative. Had any of these victims been black, however, there is a good chance that they, too, would have become international causes célèbres. If the press focused monomaniacally on white victims of police shootings, rather than ignoring them, the public would think that we were living through an epidemic of police shootings of whites. The widespread perception that questionable police shootings occur exclusively or almost exclusively against black males is a function of selective coverage.

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Let’s look more closely at unarmed victims of fatal police shootings. According to the Washington Post’s data base of fatal police shootings, there were 18 unarmed black victims of fatal police shootings in 2020 and 26 unarmed white victims of fatal police shootings. The Washington Post defines unarmed generously, to include suspects beating an officer with his own gun or fleeing a car stop with a loaded semi-automatic pistol in their cars. Those 18 allegedly “unarmed” black victims of fatal police shootings make up .2% of all black homicide victims, assuming conservatively a black death toll in 2020 of around 8,300 blacks—more than all white and Hispanic homicide victims combined. Those 18 “unarmed” black victims make up an even smaller percentage of the country’s 40 million or so blacks .000007%. Neither ratio is large, to say the least. The claim that the death of George Floyd was the result of a pattern of police racism is pure supposition with no supporting evidence. ~ What do academic studies say about the question of systemic police bias? I could cite a 2019 paper from the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences for the proposition that there is no racial disparity in police shootings once violent crime is taken into account. I will not do so, however. The authors retracted that study in July 2020,6 because I had cited it verbatim in congressional testimony and in several articles. The authors, a professor at Michigan State University and a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Maryland, had come under enormous pressure from the criminology profession to disavow their study thanks to its entry into public consciousness on the “wrong” side of the policing and racism question. As it turns out, the authors forgot to retract another article of theirs from 2018 which reaches the identical conclusion—that violent crime, not race, determines police shootings.7 That 2018 study analyzed two years of fatal police shootings from 2015 and 2016. About 1050 whites and 500 blacks were killed by the police in those two years. Calculated against population ratios, blacks were 2.5 times more likely to be killed by police than whites. This 2.5 figure surfaces regularly in the mainstream media as proof of police racism. But as always crime is the proper benchmark for policing, as the authors of the 2018 and now retracted 2019 studies well understand. When one compares fatal police shootings to homicide reports and arrests, the likelihood of being shot, in the authors’ words, flips completely. Whites are about 3 times more

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likely to be fatally shot than blacks, once their homicide rates are taken into account. There is also no evidence of bias in fatal police shootings when benchmarked against overall violent crime rates. Other studies have reached the same conclusion. Harvard economist Roland Fryer has found no racial discrimination in police shootings—officers in 10 large cities and counties were more likely to shoot a suspect without first being attacked if the suspect was white than if the suspect was black. An analysis by the Center for Policing Equity also concluded that whites were disadvantaged compared to blacks when it comes to lethal force. An economist at Maryland's Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation concluded that if blacks are killed by officers at a rate higher than their population numbers, it's because of blacks’ higher rate of arrest, not their skin color—again, a question of the benchmark. So, a robust body of empirical work disproves the racism charge. What about the counterevidence? What little there is concerns non-lethal police force. Roland Fryer also analyzed the forms that New York police officers fill out after stopping a suspect. He found that blacks were 21 percent more likely than whites to have an officer use non-lethal force on them, such as an officer placing his hands on a suspect or drawing his weapon. But Mr. Fryer’s study made some questionable assumptions. He categorized suspects as “perfectly compliant” with an officer’s instructions, for example, based only on the fact that the officer had not checked off any boxes on the stop form regarding suspect behavior. The absence of a check mark is not the same thing as an affirmative judgement of perfect compliance, as Mr. Fryer himself acknowledged in an email to me. Other studies suggest that blacks resist officer orders at a higher rate than whites, which would produce any disparities regarding officer use of nonlethal force. A 2005 paper by criminologists at the California State University randomly sampled 400 police reports from a Southern California police department—200 cases where the suspect resisted and 200 where the suspect complied. It found that resistance was more likely in high crime areas, and, as the inevitable corollary of this fact, that blacks suspects were more likely to resist than white suspects. In fact, race was one of the most significant predictors of resistance, with black suspects being four times as likely to resist than whites.8

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This finding accords with studies from 1995 and 2001 that officers who come into contact with non-white suspects are assaulted at a higher rate and that most assaults on officers occur by suspects with criminal histories. Given the lack of racial disparities in police shootings, those who argue that officers use non-lethal force disproportionately against blacks have the burden of showing that any disparities in non-lethal force are not the product of suspect resistance. The proponents of the bias thesis have not met that burden.9 But with the current tidal wave of hatred crashing down upon the police, further delegitimating their authority, suspect resistance will go up. That resistance will increase the chance of officer use of force, which, if videotaped and stripped of the civilian behavior that preceded it, will trigger new waves of civil violence. ~ Car stops are another enduring topic in the case against cops. Studies claiming bias in traffic stops as usual use the wrong benchmark: population. The relevant benchmark is the rate at which different groups break traffic and equipment laws. There was a short period in the early 2000s when a criminologist could still study such matters and keep his job, but that window quickly closed. Before it did, New Jersey and North Carolina speeding studies showed that blacks speed more—on the New Jersey Turnpike, at twice the rate of whites, a disparity that increases over 90 miles an hour. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, an office of the Transportation Department, has a program based on the “nexus of crashes and crime.” For decades, research has found that neighborhoods with the highest rates of fatal accidents also have the highest rates of violent crime. It is a truism of policing that “criminals are bad drivers,” says former Milwaukee Police Chief Edward Flynn. “They don’t follow traffic laws or update their vehicle registration. Years ago, I learned that expired inspection stickers were the quickest way to find a warrant fugitive.” Given the higher rates of driving and equipment infractions in the black population, a higher rate of car stops is no proof of bias in enforcement. Many black cops report that if they stop a black driver, the first thing out of the driver’s mouth is: you only stopped me because I’m black. The cop will respond: no, I stopped you because you ran that red light or were driving 25 miles over the speed limit.

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The charge that blacks are at daily risk from white supremacy extends beyond police civilian interactions to civilian-on-civilian interactions. Basketball star LeBron James has tweeted: “We’re literally hunted EVERYDAY/EVERYTIME we step foot outside the comfort of our homes!” This, too, is a sentiment at odds with the data. In the universe of all interracial violence between blacks and whites, blacks commit 88% of that interracial violence, whites 12%. These numbers exclude homicide, since they are based on victim self-reports. But adding homicide would not change the proportions. This black on white violence manifests itself in flash mobs, whereby youth rampage through downtown business districts assaulting passersby and looting stores; wilding; the knock-out game; and the usual brutal armed robberies. Two such robberies in Minneapolis in August 2019 were typical. In one, about a dozen people on the Target Field Plaza beat and kicked a man while ripping off his pants and shoes and stealing the contents of his pockets. They then jumped on the victim like a trampoline, hit him with planting pots, and ran him over with a bike. In the second incident, a man using his cell phone outside a downtown bar was kicked and punched by a group of youths until he was unconscious. The mob then stripped him of iPhone, wallet, keys and cash. Then there are the gratuitous assaults. In New York in 2020, even before the George Floyd riots, a 92-year-old woman was slammed into a fire hydrant in Manhattan’s Gramercy Park, hitting her head; a 78-year-old woman was punched in the head in Brooklyn; and an 80-year-old man was knocked to the ground, dragged, and robbed in the Bronx. During the August 2020 riots in Kenosha, a 70-year-old man tried to intervene in the arson and looting of the historic Danish Brotherhood building. One of the looters hit him on the side of the head with a plastic bottle filled with cement, breaking his jaw in three places and slicing his scalp. In March 2021, Zayvion Perry, 16, and Adriel Riley, Jr., 14, doused a 53-year-old man with gasoline as he sat in his apartment in Rochester, NY, and set him afire. The man died of his burns several days later. The vicious beatings of elderly Asians that gained media attention in 2021 have been portrayed as the work of white supremacists. In fact, they are overwhelmingly committed by blacks. If any of the victims mentioned above had been black and their assailants white, these, too, would have been international scandals, given nonstop

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coverage by the world’s press as proof of America’s savage white supremacy. But just as we turn our eyes away from black-on-black crime, we are just as adamant about looking the other way when it comes to black-onwhite and black-on-Asian crime. ~ The press routinely omits the race of unapprehended crime suspects in its news coverage—a practice at odds with the public good--and has started foregoing mug shots of arrestees, since such descriptions and photos are said to give the public a mistaken impression of who commits most street crimes. Actually, mug shots and suspect descriptions give an accurate sense of urban violence. This squeamishness about even acknowledging the reality of black crime is not consistent with an alleged regime of white supremacy. The narrative about police-civilian violence is also the reverse of the truth. Police officers are far more likely to be killed by a black criminal than an unarmed black is to be fatally shot by a police officer. As of September 8, 2021, four “unarmed” blacks were slain by police officers since the start of the year, according to the Washington Post. The Post’s “unarmed” category includes violently resisting crime suspects who are pummeling officers on the ground and refusing to comply with orders after being tased. Those 4 unarmed blacks represent .00000008 of the nearly 47 million self-identified blacks,10 or less than 1/100 of one person killed per 100,000 blacks. Fifty police officers have been murdered in 2021 as of September 3, 2021.11 In 2019, there 694,195 were sworn officers in the U.S.,12 before the rush of retirements following the George Floyd riots.13 Conservatively using the 2019 headcount, those 50 officers represent a rate of 7 officers killed per 100,000 on the job, or 875 times the rate at which blacks are killed by cops. Historically blacks have made up over 40% of cop killers nationwide – 43% between 2005 and 2013.14 In 2019 blacks nationally were over 37% of all cop killers whose race was known.15 Conservatively estimating that 40% of the cop killers this year have been black, 20 officers have been killed by a black suspect in 2021, for a rate of nearly three cops per 100,000 officers killed by a black. A police officer is 375 times as likely to be killed by a black suspect as an unarmed black is to be killed by a police officer. Attacks on the police have been rising. Through late June 2021, ambush assaults on officers were up 91% compared to the same period in 2020. Ambush attacks on police officer are up 91% in 2021 compared to previous

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years.16,17 Those assaults will continue to increase, as the political establishment and the media fuel anti-cop hatred further. Meanwhile, there is hardly a single aspect of the criminal justice system that is not being undone to avoid disparate impact on blacks. Felonies are being reclassified as misdemeanors to lessen the number of blacks sent to prison. Prosecutors are declining to prosecute low level offenses like public drinking, disorderly conduct, graffiti, and turnstile jumping. Bail is being eliminated. Gang databases are being purged. Undercover police units that get illegal guns off the street are being disbanded. Because computers are allegedly as racist as people, valuable crime-fighting tools like facial recognition technology and analytical crime software are being mothballed. Universities and school districts are severing their ties with pariah police departments. The chancellor of the University of California, Los Angeles, apologized profusely for allowing the Los Angeles Police Department to use a university parking lot for a staging area during the local George Floyd riots. Such a practice threatens the school’s marginalized voices, the chancellor said, and would not be repeated. Officers are demoralized and despairing. In no other profession are you condemned as a racist by the country’s elites from the day you step on the job. Retirements were up 45 percent from April 2020 to April 2021 in 200 police departments surveyed by the Police Executive Research Forum; resignations were up 18 percent. The Riverside, Ill., police department usually gets over 200 applicants for its police exam; in 2020, it had 62- its lowest turnout in 42 years. The Portland Police Bureau lost more officers to retirement in August 2020 alone than in all of 2019. The Asheville, NC, police have stopped responding to low-level crimes because they have lost about a third of their staff to resignations and retirement. Seattle’s response times to the highest-priority calls have plummeted thanks to resignations by younger officers and the inability to recruit replacements. New York Mayor Bill de Blasio cancelled two future police academy classes as part of New York City’s defunding movement. He needn’t have bothered. Those may be the last fully staffed police classes the city can muster. Officers are telling potential recruits to avoid the job. And now, with shameless hypocrisy, the anti-cop brigades are blaming the police for pulling back from precisely the types of enforcement that they so roundly condemn as racist. The Brooklyn Borough President and a city

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council member groused to the New York Times in 2020 that the police had not responded to complaints about illegal dice games, loud music, and other public order infractions. Had the police taken action, of course, they would have risked more charges of racism. But people who live with street disorder understand that it is the breeding ground of violent crime; it is out of those rowdy gatherings of hundreds of youth on street corners that shootings often emerge. ~ The law-abiding residents of high crime communities have been the initial victims in this growing wave of lawlessness. These are the people whom the press never seems to talk to, people like an elderly cancer amputee in the Mount Hope section of the Bronx who told me: “Please, Jesus, send more police”. The only time she felt safe to go down to her building’s lobby was when officers were there, because it was otherwise colonized by trespassing youth selling drugs and smoking weed. “As long as you see the police,” she said, everything’s A-OK. You can come down and get your mail and talk to decent people.” These are the people, who, like this vulnerable senior citizen, invariably beg for more police protection and can’t understand why the criminal justice system can’t keep the dealers off the streets and locked away. These good bourgeois citizens are of no interest to the activist press, the only people who listen to their pleas are the police. Nor do the black toddlers who have been gunned down in their bedrooms, front yards, and parents’ cars over the last two years carry any import to the Black Lives Matter movement, since their assailants are of the wrong race and do not wear a badge. In one week in July 2021, at least 6 black children under the age of 12 were killed nationally in drive by shootings. In Minneapolis, six children 10 or younger were shot in June and July 2021, including a nine-month-old baby and two three-year-old boys. A six-year-old girl and a nine-year-old girl died of their head wounds; a ten-year-old boy, also shot in the head, will likely be a vegetable for life. In Chicago over Fourth of July weekend 2021, a five-year-old girl, a sixyear-old girl, a 12-year-old girl, and 13-year-old boy were shot; several days earlier a month-old infant was critically wounded and a nine-year-old girl was shot in the head.18–20 The nation turned its eyes away because none of those children were shot by a cop; they were killed by other blacks.

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~ The only thing that will slow this false narrative about police racism is if white children start to be gunned down in drive-by shootings. The allegedly anti-racist press ignores young black victims but goes into crisis mode if white children are shot, as the reaction to those rare school shootings show. Cumulatively, there are several Newton, Connecticut’s, every year in the black community - only the police pay consistent attention.

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References 1. 2. 3. 4.

5.

6. 7.

8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13.

Lopez G. 2020’s historic surge in murders, explained. Vox. Published March 25, 2021. Accessed December 19, 2021. https://www.vox.com/22344713/ murder-violent-crime-spike-surge-2020-covid-19-coronavirus Expanded Homicide Data Table 1. FBI. Accessed December 19, 2021. https: //ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2016/crime-in-the-u.s.-2016/tables/expandedhomicide-data-table-1.xls Expanded Homicide Data Table 2. FBI. Accessed December 19, 2021. https: //ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2015/crime-in-the-u.s.-2015/tables/expanded_ homicide_data_table_2_murder_victims_by_age_sex_and_race_2015.xls Expanded Homicide Data Table 2. FBI. Accessed December 19, 2021. https: //ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2014/crime-in-the-u.s.-2014/tables /expandedhomicide-data/expanded_homicide_data_table_2_murder_victims_by_age_ sex_and_race_2014.xls Sweeney SC Annie. Violence spike of 2020 widened familiar safety gap between city neighborhoods, University of Chicago Crime Lab analysis shows. chicagotribune.com. Accessed December 19, 2021. https://www. chicagotribune.com / news / criminal-justice / ct-2020-homicide-rate-spikesafety-gap-20210729-3lau7u2mijgaxjkvfkqqnvooee-story.html Retraction for Johnson et al., Officer characteristics and racial disparities in fatal officer-involved shootings. Proc Natl Acad Sci. 2020;117(30):1813018130. doi:10.1073/pnas.2014148117 Cesario J, Johnson DJ, Terrill W. Is There Evidence of Racial Disparity in Police Use of Deadly Force? Analyses of Officer-Involved Fatal Shootings in 2015–2016. Soc Psychol Personal Sci. 2019;10(5):586-595. doi:10.1177/1948550618775108. Belvedere K, Worrall J, Tibbetts S. Explaining Suspect Resistance in PoliceCitizen Encounters. Crim Justice Rev. 2005;30:30-44. doi:10.1177/073 4016805275675 Fachner G, Carter S. An Assessment of Deadly Force in the Philadelphia Police Department. :188. Tamir C. The Growing Diversity of Black America. Pew Research Center’s Social & Demographic Trends Project. Published March 25, 2021. Accessed December 19, 2021. https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2021/03/25/ the-growing-diversity-of-black-america/ CDE :: Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted. Accessed December 19, 2021. https://crime-data-explorer.app.cloud.gov/pages/le/leoka Table 44. Table 74. FBI. Accessed December 19, 2021. https://ucr.fbi.gov /crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-2019/tables/table-74/table-74.xls Mourtgos SM, Adams IT, Nix J. Elevated police turnover following the summer of George Floyd protests: A synthetic control study. Criminol Public Policy. n/a(n/a). doi:10.1111/1745-9133.12556

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14. Table 44. Table 44. FBI. Accessed December 19, 2021. https://ucr.fbi.gov/leoka/2013/tables/table_44_leos_fk_race_and_sex_of_kn own_offender_2004-2013.xls 15. FBI Releases 2019 Statistics on Law Enforcement Officers Killed in the Line of Duty. Federal Bureau of Investigation. Accessed December 19, 2021. https:// www.fbi.gov / news / pressrel / press-releases / fbi-releases-2019statistics-on-law-enforcement-officers-killed-in-the-line-of-duty 16. Pagones S. Ambush attacks on police officers up 91% in 2021 compared to last year, group says. Fox News. Published July 1, 2021. Accessed December 19, 2021. https://www.foxnews.com/us/ambush-attacks-police-officers-lawenforcement 17. Law Enforcement Officers Shot in the Line of Duty: 2020 Year-End Summary. Published online 2020:9. 18. Casanova MB Stephanie. ‘The city is traumatized’: Englewood community members pray for 1-month-old injured in shooting. chicagotribune.com. Accessed December 19, 2021. https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ breaking / ct-baby-shot-englewood-20210702-m3cqgnjyindclaignecsxlujlestory.html 19. Casanova JG Stephanie. Girl, 9, and violence prevention worker wounded in 79th Street shooting. chicagotribune.com. Accessed December 19, 2021. https:/ /www. chicagotribune.com / news / breaking/ct-girl-shot-chicago20210701-dmob5gfz2jakhmdgx3gegeklnm-story.html 20. Rosenberg-Douglas MG Katherine. Girl, 6, shot early Monday in same Chicago neighborhood as 5-year-old girl about 8 hours earlier. chicagotribune.com. Accessed December 19, 2021. https://www.chicago tribune.com/news/breaking/ct-chicago-shootings-girl-shot-child-20210705q7kz6us24bdjbi5kbybqma7jyy-story.html

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~ Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and a New York Times bestselling author. She is a recipient of the 2005 Bradley Prize. Mac Donald’s work at City Journal has covered a range of topics, including higher education, immigration, policing, homelessness and homeless advocacy, criminal-justice reform, and race relations. Her writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, and The New Criterion. Mac Donald's newest book, The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture (2018), argues that toxic ideas first spread by higher education have undermined humanistic values, fuelled intolerance, and widened divisions in our larger culture.

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Making Evolutionary Sense of Sex and Gender By Jennifer A. Marshall Graves The genetics of sex and gender is full of contradiction. That’s why I love it. Sex development and expression breaks all the evolutionary laws of survival of the fittest. Y chromosomes that self-destruct, men who love other men and forgo having kids, men and women who believe they were meant to be the other sex and will do anything to make sex change a reality. Nor are humans alone in their confusion. The natural world is full of sexual contradiction. Sex chromosomes with mixed messages, sex change, fierce female moles and nurturing male emus, gay sheep. Like it or not, men and women are very different genetically, anatomically and behaviourally. But within each sex there is tremendous variation, so that for most traits distributions overlap. There are short men and tall women, fierce females and nurturing males.

Why sex? We take the male/female divide for granted, but when you think about it, sex doesn’t seem to make evolutionary sense. Sex is expensive, requiring animals to attract a mate and fight off competitors as well as making sperm and eggs, the ultimate waster of time and energy. And anyway, our genes would be better off if we cloned ourselves, as do many plants – and even some lizards. That way all our genes would make it into the next generation, rather than having to go halves on offspring as we do. Generations of geneticists have puzzled over this, and there are many theories.1 Mostly these assume that there must be some very big advantage in combining varieties of our 20,000 genes. Sex throws together two genomes, and there is a mechanism to mix them up each time a man or woman make sperm or eggs. A process called recombination takes place as the first step in sorting out a single copy of each chromosome for sperm or eggs. Recombination literally splices one part of

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mum’s chromosome 1 to the other part of dad’s chromosome 1, so that most chromosomes in the egg or sperm are patchworks of mum’s and dad’s gene variants. Why could this be important? The classic explanation was that recombination continually creates new combinations of variants that could do well in new environments. A more recent refinement is that, specifically, new combinations of proteins on the surfaces of our cells bamboozle would-be pathogens that are always bombarding us.2 This idea receives support from studies of animals like cheetahs and Tasmanian Devils that are running out of genetic variability, and seem to be very sensitive to being wiped out by a pathogen that sweeps through a colony of near-clones. This probably explains why female-only species of lizards evolved rather recently; they don’t last long.

Sex chromosomes are nothing but trouble I’ll start from the start with sex genes and chromosomes, which break all the rules of proper function and evolution. As most people know, women have two copies of a medium-sized chromosome called the X, and males have only a single copy (that’s why it’s called the “X for unknown;” its name has nothing to do with its shape). Men also have an extra small chromosome, called the Y, which women completely lack. So, men and women have different genomes. The genome, a metre or so of DNA carrying about 20,000 genes, is chopped up into 23 handy sized DNA molecules that are bound with protein and bunch up when the cell divides so we see them as “chromosomes” (that is “staining bodies”) under the microscope. We – and other mammals – carry two copies of the genome, one from mum and one from dad. That’s why chromosomes come in pairs; two copies of the biggest chromosome 1, two copies of chromosome 2 etc, in both males and females. That’s called diploidy, and it is generally considered to be a good thing because if some accident befalls a gene, say on chromosome 1, there is a backup copy. In fact, if you have only a single copy of any of the 22 ordinary chromosomes, you don’t even make it to be born. ~ Sex chromosomes are different in many ways. The X looks normal enough, with more than 1000 genes that encode all sorts of functions including

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housekeeping enzymes, visual pigments, blood clotting factors – not at all dedicated to femaleness. It is its differential dosage in males and females that causes problems. The first problem is that males have only a single copy, so men have no backup if any X-borne gene is mutated (witness the much greater frequency of boys with colour blindness or diseases like haemophilia and mental retardation). The second problem is the dosage difference between the sexes, which is hard on genes that must interact with genes on other chromosomes in a 1:1 way. To avoid problems with this dosage difference, there is a complex system that genetically inactivates the genes on one or other X in cells of females. If this doesn’t work, you die. As well as their single X, men have a male-specific chromosome called the Y. A pathetic little chromosome bearing hardly any genes, it seems to be composed mainly of junk DNA, simple sequences repeated over and over so it binds fluorescent molecules and literally glows in the dark. It contains hardly any genes; only 27 in the region that is present only in males. Several have amplified into many copies, though some (or most) of these copies have been disabled by mutation. The Y may look a bit pathetic but one of its 27 genes determines that the embryo that bears it is male. This gene, called SRY (Sex Determining Region on the Y),3 directs other genes to turn a little “genital ridge” of cells in the embryo into a testis. The testis makes male hormones, and the embryo develops into a baby boy. In XX embryos with no SRY the genital ridge develops as an ovary and the baby is born a girl. The Y has a peculiar set of genes. Its 27 genes are a very specialised set. Several are dedicated to male functions like making sperm, and others seem to be there because they are necessary in a double dose in males as well as females. Nor does the X have a standard set of genes. There are a disproportionate number dedicated to male reproduction. The reason for this seems to be that because genes on the X are present in a single copy in men, they are exposed rapidly to selection – those that advantage males will do better. Harder to explain is that there are five times as many genes on the X as you’d expect that are involved in intelligence;4 perhaps they accumulated because females preferred to mate with smart males who had smart variant genes on the X. Darwin called this sexual selection, and it can lead to very rapid evolution –

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perhaps explaining how human brains doubled in size over just a few million years. One curious factor is that some genes are good in one sex but not the other. Genes for making sperm are not much use in a female, and genes for making eggs are no use in a male. There are even some genes that are good for one sex but bad for the other - these are called “sexually antagonistic,” and are well known from studies in a range of animals including fruit flies.5 So, sex chromosomes don’t work very well. Like many peculiarities we observe in nature, they are better understood in terms of evolution, than of function.

How did sex chromosomes evolve to be so odd? Isn’t evolution supposed to get rid of things that don’t work well and favour ever better solutions? Well, no. Evolution, rather than working to some grand design, does not know where it is going and simply patches things up so they more-or-less work. Here I’ll explain how our sex chromosomes came to be so peculiar – and are getting more damaged all the time. The X and Y chromosomes look very different, and bear very different sets of genes, so you will be surprised to discover that they evolved from a perfectly normal pair of chromosomes, like chromosome 1, that had nothing to do with sex.6 The first evidence for the autosomal origin of the human XY pair was that the very top bit of the X and Y is the same. When the chromosomes pair and sort themselves out into sperm, the X and Y pair up in this little region, and recombination (the breaking and rejoining of pieces of the X and Y) takes place. The rest of the Y does not pair with the X or anything else – it is all alone in the world. Another curious thing is that most of the genes on the human Y, even those with male-specific functions in sperm (even SRY itself), have copies on the X from which they obviously evolved.7 So, the conclusion is that the Y chromosome started off with the same 1000+ genes as the X. Indeed, we know from studying many animals, that our X and Y were once an ordinary chromosome pair; they still are in birds and turtles, which have quite different sex genes and sex chromosomes. In birds sex chromosomes are the other way around, ZZ specifies male and ZW female; a sex gene on the Z chromosome called DMRT1 operates via dosage difference; two copies specifies male and one copy female. Even platypus have different sex chromosomes, more like birds than like other mammals.

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How did this happen? It all started with the evolution of SRY, the sex determining gene, which evolved from an ancient gene with functions largely in the central nervous system. A simple rearrangement that repositioned this gene so it worked in the embryonic gonad gave it new powers, to switch on other genes in the testis determining pathway. So, a respectable braindetermining gene became a testis determining gene. The acquisition of a sex determining gene was the kiss of death for this proto-Y chromosome, and led to the loss of nearly all its active genes. There are many ideas about why genes get lost from the Y, and people write books on this. Put simply, the Y chromosome suffers from being always in a testis. The testis is a dangerous place to be because making sperm takes many cell divisions, each one an opportunity for a gene mutation to take place. The Y also suffers from being alone in the cell because recombination can’t take place to restore a good Y chromosome by patching together the good bits of two mutated Y chromosomes. The process of gene loss is still going on, as we see from the many men who are infertile because part of their Y chromosome has been deleted. So how rapid is gene loss and what is the future of the Y? We can date the start of our sex chromosomes to about 160 million years ago because they are not shared outside mammals, or even by platypuses, from which we diverged 180 million years ago. So, we can calculate that if the remaining genes on the Y continue being inactivated and lost at the same rate, the whole Y will be gone in about 6 million years.8 What will happen when the human Y disappears in 6 million years? Well, providing humans survive that long (which seems increasingly unlikely), a new sex gene on another chromosome may take over. This has already happened in two groups of rodents, and in each, a new sex determining system has driven a wedge between species. So, if you come back in 6 million years, you may find no humans – or several hominid species. Scary thought! Sex chromosomes are the posterchild of the evolutionary principle I call “Dumb Design.” No sensible creator would ever have designed sex chromosomes that cause so much genetic havoc and are well on the road to self-destruction.

Genes and sexual development The Y may be small and peculiar, but it packs a developmental wallop. We knew this 60 years ago when it was discovered that babies born with unusual combinations of sex chromosomes were male if they had a Y

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chromosome and female if they didn’t, no matter how many X chromosomes they had. And babies with parts of a Y were male only if they had the top bit of the Y, implying that a gene near in this region directed male development of the foetus. Indeed, a gene was discovered on the Y in 1990 that directs male development of the embryo. SRY turns on other genes that instruct a ridge of cells on the embryonic kidney to become a testis. It’s a complicated pathway of at least 60 genes, full of checks and balances, that turns on or off genes. So, you have SRY activating a gene that in turn activates other genes in the testis pathway, and as well inhibits genes in the ovary pathway. Likewise, in the absence of SRY, a gene in the ovary pathway activates other genes in this pathway, and also supresses a gene in the testis pathway.9 It’s a real pushmipullyu. The embryonic testis makes male hormones (androgens), and these hormones direct the development of male genitals of a baby boy, and continue to exert their effects after birth in morphology, muscle strength and fat distribution, hair growth, voice pitch and behaviour, and, after puberty, the production of sperm. In the absence of SRY, other genes turn on to differentiate the same ridge of cells to become an ovary, which makes female hormones that direct female development and egg production. The genetic differences between men and women go far beyond just this one gene, or the pathway of sex determination, and may exert their effects independently of hormone production. There are another 26 genes on the male-specific part of the human Y, and some of these encode proteins that are needed for making sperm. Surprisingly, looking at which of our 20,000 or so genes are turned on in different tissues shows astonishing differences between men and women. Fully one third of our genome (more than 7000 genes) is expressed differently in men and women in one tissue or another. And not just in breasts and gonads, but other supposedly neutral tissues like liver and kidney.10 These differences are likely to underpin many of the differences, long known but only recently acknowledged, in the susceptibility of men and women to many diseases, and the different efficacy of treatments.11 And most shockingly, many genes are expressed differently in the brains of men and women.12 Add to this the observation that the male-specific SRY gene is expressed in the brain and seems to have a role in the susceptibility of men to Parkinson’s disease.13

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There have been fierce arguments over decades as to whether sex differences extend to the brain and behaviour. Do men have superior spatial ability or women superior verbal ability? Are men on average more aggressive and risktaking? I am not qualified to take sides in these debates, but will just comment that it would be remarkable if brain development did not respond differently to the demonstrated differences in gene activity in men and women.

Sex and career choices A great deal has been written and discussed about the role of sex differences in abilities, career choice and progression, and very many schemes have been enacted to increase women’s participation in STEM. In science, it is obvious that sex is a major factor in choice of study as early as primary school, and for decades there have been wails of dismay about the low enrolment of young women into science, particularly engineering, computer science and maths. There are programs on programs (many in which I have enthusiastically participated) to lure girls into science during school and university, and to keep them there during their careers. Drop-out rates are higher for women, and we talk about “the leaky pipeline” that delivers few women into senior positions.14 My own path through science might look very straight and confident, and when asked, I would aver that I did not suffer from discrimination – at least while I was a modest junior academic (things got nastier as I became more senior). However, subtle discouragement and discrimination was there at every turn, and the temptation to leave the pipeline was presented many times. It seemed so normal that it had no name. ~ I remember the occasion, in sixth grade, when our class was asked what careers we would choose. Most of the little girls wanted to be air hostesses and the little boys’ firemen. I learned how to spell “architect,” which served me well over the next decade. But my (girls’) school did not teach maths in the final year (modern history was deemed more suitable for young ladies), and I was one of only two girls in my final year university physical chem class (guaranteeing exclusion from the study groups and cheating consortia). Biology was a better mix, and I was in awe of a very brilliant woman lecturer “Mrs Mayo,” the wife of “Dr Mayo,” another lecturer – only later did I discover that both had DPhils from Cambridge.

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Postgraduate research was in quite a close-knit little group, but the pattern was still exclusion from corridor cricket and late-night excursions to buy “floaters” at the Adelaide Town Hall. After a PhD at the University of California, appointment as the only woman in a blokey department in Melbourne rapidly taught me not to accept the classic female roles (one of my lucky breaks was to reject an early invitation to organize the departmental Christmas party), and to observe closely how my male colleagues came to amass their space and equipment and technical help. The real turning point came when I became pregnant; a point at which well-bred young women were expected to politely resign their tenured jobs for a lifetime of casual demonstratorships – the biggest source of leaks to the pipeline. Fortunately, I could not succumb because I was at the time sole breadwinner while my husband studied. Negotiating first a teaching and research career, building up a lab of enthusiastic young people gave me some immunity from the quiet sexism of Academia, but winning the L’Oreal-UNESCO For Women in Science prize in 2006 made me realise that being good at my job is not enough. This is when I started taking seriously efforts to remove sexism from academia. I have spent a major part of my 50 year career on various women in science committees, institutional, Australian, and international. For 40 of these years, we produced report after report, saying much the same thing. We must remove barriers to employment of women. We must make STEM education more female friendly. We need good role models, good mentors for young women in science. But only in the last decade has there been an appetite to do something to enact plans to attract more women into science and keep them there. It is quite thrilling to me to see the fruits of our efforts in programs like Science in Australia Gender Equity (SAGE)15 modelled on the Athena Swan program that strongarms and rewards institutions to make practical changes, not just in words and covenants, but on the ground. But what is the end-point of these schemes? Can we measure progress toward this endpoint? The simple answer has been that we should not rest until enrolments in computer science are 50% women, and until our professors of physics are 50% women. Oh, and our nurses, too, and primary school teachers of course. On this measure, we are a long way behind, with women constituting only about 15% of engineering enrolees, and 10% physics professors. But is 50% realistic? And is it desirable? We simply don’t know whether girls’ preference for arts and sociology is purely social, or is at least partly

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genetically determined. It is obviously at least partly social (for instance women make choices more compatible with running a household and bringing up kids) and I would like to see redress on workload balance between partners. But I would hate to insist on a 50:50 distribution of men and women in engineering and physics just to make up the numbers.

Evolution of sexual behaviour Sex is essential for reproduction, so it is a big part of “Darwinian fitness” that drives the success of our species, any species. (Fitness is not measured as strength or health, but simply as the number of descendants who inherited our genes). This means that any trait that increases the chances of leaving children will be selected. And any trait that increases the chances that the children will leave children. Conversely, any variant that means that the bearer has fewer or less healthy and fertile children will be ruthlessly expunged by natural selection. These traits can be anything; favourable variants that make eggs longerlived, sperm more active. Or that enhances success in attracting a willing partner who will help bear your genes into the next generation. “Mate choice” covers all the factors that go into selecting a mate, including being attracted by outward signs of fertility (at the core of men’s fascination with breasts and hips), and being turned off by a smell that denotes a too-close genetic relationship. There is evidence that this information is delivered via the many variants at the Major Histocompatibility Complex (MHC) (called Human Lymphocyte Antigen, HLA in humans), a large region of the vertebrate genome that contains a set of very variable genes that code for cell surface proteins involved in adaptive immunity.16 Then come all the factors that go into attracting a mate, including elaborate mating displays if you’re a fly or a bird, or appearance and behaviour in mammals including humans. Geneticists are always interested in conditions that are common even though they would not seem to fulfill the criteria of evolutionary fitness, and sexual behaviour offers several that have defied logic. ~ One of these is male homosexuality, which, by any reckoning, is common in all ages and all cultures, even those that impose drastic social sanctions. In 1998 the first convincing study was published showing that a gene variant (“gay gene”) on the X chromosome was associated with homosexuality.17

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This caused a furore in the conservative South of the USA, where homosexuality was seen as a “lifestyle choice,” and a genetic factor was incompatible with the dictum that “God cannot create a sinner.” However, corroborative evidence of several “gay genes,” detected by different strategies, makes it clear that homosexuality is at least partly driven by genetic variants. This is not at all surprising. Almost every trait you can think of, including other behaviours (like toilet flushing and belief in a god18), is at least partly genetic. Much evidence comes from twin studies; identical twins show more concordance in the behaviour than fraternal twins (and it may be even more because recent research shows that identical twins may not be as genetically identical as we supposed because of mutations occurring in one or the other after the developing egg is split into two). Homosexuality is also common in other species, including many mammals. In fruit flies, a single mutation in a gene changes mating behaviour in males so that they direct their flap-flap, tap-tap mating displays to other males.19 And indeed, variants in many genes affect fly mating. We are no different, not even that much more complicated. What is surprising is how common homosexuality is, given that gay men have far fewer offspring than straight men. You would think that gay genes would not make it in a competition for Darwinian fitness. Many years ago, during an interview with Phillip Adams alongside a gay men’s rights activist, I suddenly twigged. Maybe homosexuality is a typical sexually antagonistic gene variant. The gay gene, I surmised, was really a “male-loving” variant of a mate-choice gene present in everyone. In a male it will lean toward homosexual partnering, and few offspring. But the same “male-loving” gene variant in his female relatives will push his sisters and aunts to partner earlier and compensate by having more children. So, this gene variant is overall successful, and is kept in high frequency in the population by positive selection in women.20 If this were true, you would expect to find the number of children mothered by the female relatives of gay men to be higher than average. And a few years later, studies in Italy confirmed that it is, indeed, 30% higher, enough to offset the fewer children born to gay men.21 I would predict that the same argument can be made for lesbian women, although there are few data. They simply have a preponderance of “female-loving” variants of a gene or genes. You might expect their male relatives to share these “female loving”

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variants, to partner earlier and have more kids. I would be surprised if there were not tens or hundreds of genes, variants within which affect mate choice in both men and women. I see them as typical “sexually antagonistic” genes that in one sex curtail reproduction, but in the other sex boost it. So, evolution works in sometimes counter-intuitive ways to produce a spread of normal variation that we see in sexual behaviour, just as in visible traits like height.

Sex and gender Sex and gender are quite different concepts, and it is important to differentiate them. Sex is the different biological and physiological characteristics of males and females, such as genes, chromosomes, hormones, reproductive organs. Natal sex refers to the biological sex you were born with. Gender is how you identify yourself within (or even outside) the broad swathe of maleness or femaleness. Sex, as I have discussed, is controlled by genes whose effects have been channelled by evolution into two alternative developmental pathways that yield male or female development. This is why sex is referred to as “binary,” although there are a few individuals in whom development lies between or outside these two channels. Biological sex is pretty hard to change in mammals including humans; you can change the outward manifestations and even the hormones, but genes and chromosomes are unreachable. ~ But nature throws up variants in several ways. For a start, there are significant numbers of children born with a mutation in one or other of the 60odd genes that translate the presence or absence of SRY into development into a man or a woman. Some of these variants – for instance a mutation in SRY itself, or a mutation in the molecule that responds to male hormone – produce physically normal girls, who discover that they have a Y chromosome only when they fail to menstruate at puberty and prove to have no functioning ovary and only half a vagina. And there are boys with two X chromosome who possess an SRY gene that has been transferred to the X chromosome. Other mutations are harder to deal with as they produce babies with some intermediate characteristics that can change during development, so sex is uncertain and advice on sex of rearing is fraught. Children with a block early in the gonad differentiation pathways have “streak” gonads that have not

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developed in either direction, and they develop outwardly as female. At the other end of severity, some variants are downright life-threatening unless treated. Although it is not possible to repair the genes or chromosomes of these children, some parents, fearful of bullying and exclusion, opt for genital surgery. Not surprisingly, many of these children with Disorders (or “Differences”) of Sexual Development (DSD) grow up feeling discontented with their parents’ choices, and tell heart-rending stories of deception and a lack of acceptance. Patient groups advocate leaving decisions till puberty, but this leaves a DSD child vulnerable and means surgery is less satisfactory. In some countries in which treatment is not available, DSD children (and often their families) face discrimination, neglect and even death. There is no right answer; the practice today is to minimise any treatment until the child is old enough to make decisions on this aspect of their lives, and avoid removing any genital tissue.22 Unlike sex, gender is anything but binary.23 Rather than being channelled into two alternative pathways, gender is a broad spectrum, in which a person may consider themselves at any point, regardless of natal sex. A person may define themselves as cisgender (same as natal sex), transgender (different from natal sex), non-binary or even gender-neutral. Whereas it’s hard to change biological sex, there are many ways of crossing gender lines, and this has always held great fascination across many cultures. History, literature, opera is replete with stories of women posing as men, and men posing as women to fight or avoid wars, woo or escape lovers. My personal favourite is watching a woman sing the role of a man posing as a woman in Der Rosenkavalier. On the more serious side, there are people, young and old, whose sex chromosomes and genes, and sexual development is biologically standard, but who are convinced, often from an early age, that they were born the wrong sex. In severe cases of “gender dysphoria,” patients have an intense wish to transition to the sex of choice, and may opt to undergo surgery. The rates of male-to-female transition is 1/200, and female-to-male is 1/400, quite high compared to biological variants. ~ Again, treatment is fraught. Children who profess to be transgender are at least accorded respect and listening, but the concern is now that being gender

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fluid has become quite trendy for high school students. Caution has been urged in rushing major surgery and treatment with puberty blockers because at least half change their minds at puberty. Again, there is some evidence that gene variants play a part in gender dysphoria. Several studies implicate “the usual suspects,” including genes involved in hormone pathways. This sort of variation is not unusual for any trait, morphological or behavioural. The puzzle, again, is why gender dysphoria is so common when transwomen and transmen are infertile unless they preserve their eggs or sperm, so do not commonly hand down their gene variants.24,25 I wonder whether these genes, too, may be classic “sexually antagonistic” variants. I suggest that there are variants of these genes that predispose to femininity or masculinity, and everyone inherits a mixture that affects their gender identity. At one extreme are women and men who inherit a lot of feminine-leaning traits; the men may become transgender and have no children while their female relatives who share the same variants partner earlier and have more children. Conversely, among people who inherit masculine leaning traits, manly men may have more children, compensating for female-to-male transmen who have few.

Sex, gender and sport; there is no level playing field As transgender becomes more accepted and transmen and transwomen more frequent, there are issues to sort out. Some are relatively easy, like labels for toilets, some just take understanding and getting used to like use of appropriate personal pronouns. Others are insoluble. One of the insoluble issues is the status of DSD people and transwomen in elite sport. Like it or not, men have, on average, significantly greater muscle strength, heart function and lung capacity than women, and sex tests have been a part of the Olympics for a century to prevent men gate-crashing women’s athletic events. Originally a sex test was the presence of a sex chromatin body (the inactive X chromosome) in the cheek epithelial cells. This was rightly decried as discriminating against women with only a single X, so gave way to (expensive and slow) chromosome tests, then to direct screening for the presence of the SRY gene. But this was pointed out to discriminate against girls having a Y chromosome but a mutant SRY or androgen receptor. Indeed, XY girls with an AR mutation are overrepresented in elite sport; not because they have an androgen advantage (although their bodies make testosterone, it

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cannot be utilized by the cell), but because they are taller courtesy of a growth gene on the Y chromosome. Some of the high-profile cases have concerned women who are not intersex or transgender at all, but simply have traits that put them way ahead. The most celebrated is that of an Indian runner with extremely high levels of testosterone; although by any test she is female, her testosterone levels are naturally higher even than the average for men. Undoubtedly this gives her an advantage of muscle strength and sustainability. But to me it seems that banning her from competition makes no more sense than banning an ultra-tall basketballer (or a horse like Phar Lap with an enormous heart for that matter). Adding to this confusion are now significant numbers of transwomen who were born and grew up as XY males but have had sex change surgery, androgen suppression and estrogen therapy. Understandably, it is very important for transwomen to feel accepted as women in the community, and sport has always been an effective means of achieving identity and acceptance. Many transwomen speak movingly of the importance of their hockey or water polo team to their sense of self. Yet a growing number of sporting organizations are now under pressure to ban transwomen from competing in women’s sport, citing (incontrovertible) evidence that the presence of androgen early in their lives as boys gave them a permanent advantage in strength, heart and lung performance, even if they take androgen-suppressing drugs. Bodies such as the Olympic committee are tying themselves into knots trying to be fair.26 So how can we create a level playing field? It seems to me that the playing field can never be level. Elite athletes, although they invest enormously in training and coaching, are bound to be on the extremes of many distributions, and we can’t ban them all. Perhaps we need to compete in categories like children’s sport (e.g., Under 14 C grade basketball) or the Paralympics (e.g., Triathlon PT1). I look forward to representing Australia in the Over-80 medium height low androgen Olympic netball team.

Why are we so obsessed with sex and gender? Sex is, of course, the most dramatic normal variation between humans. It’s the first thing you notice about a new acquaintance. Many of these problems I have discussed are problems only because we are so intolerant of difference. What’s the big deal? We are not freaked out by differences in height or facial characteristics or intellectual ability, yet parents

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are horrified if their newborn is diagnosed with a DSD. Paediatricians and genetic counsellors have told me that parents of DSD kids are often traumatised beyond reason. “I’d rather my baby had a serious heart problem,” one new mother was heard to remark. Often the rush to surgery is fuelled by fears that DSD children will be routinely bullied for their anatomical differences – fears that, sadly, are not misplaced. Children can be very cruel. Perhaps the fears of parents of DSD children are intensified by primal distress that their own genes will not be passed on to future generations; parents are looking at the end of their lineage. Why are we so intolerant of differences in sexual development? Why are we resistant to the ideas of variation in sexually different traits? They are not terribly rare in humans, and also occur throughout the animal kingdom. Examples abound in nature of females that act like males; for instance, female hyenas and moles aggressively claim the top spot in the hierarchy as the result of high androgen levels that drive male-like genitals as well as aggression. Or emus in which it is the male that incubates the eggs and takes care of the chicks. And why are we so appalled – and so titillated – by the concept of changing sex? Plenty of other animals do it routinely. There are whole species of fish that start out one sex then transition to the other when they get big enough. Some start off female, then transition of males when they get big enough to defend a harem. Others start of as males and transition to females when they are big enough to lay a lot of eggs. My favourite is the blue wrasse, a fish species in which a dominant (blue-headed) male guards a harem of demure gold-striped females. If this male is removed, the biggest female becomes male. She changes her behaviour in minutes, colour in hours, and by 10 days has swapped her ovaries for testes that are making sperm.27 What a ride! If we look around, we see that humans occupy a tiny spot in the grand panoply of sexual differences in morphology and behaviour. We can do a lot by removing rampant discrimination against minorities that occupy outlier positions on distributions of sexual traits. This has happened remarkably rapidly for gay men and women in most western countries, although there are still nations that sanction homosexuality. But other problems arise with suspicions that people could use transgender as a means of infiltrating – and even attacking – women, for instance in restrooms or prisons. Or claiming a physical advantage on the

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track. Everything can be abused, and we have to guard against siding with the perpetrators, as well as the victims, of sexual discrimination. ~ Maybe we are programmed by the evolutionary necessity to find a good mate to provide a superior genome for our kids and hopefully some parental care. And maybe we are programmed by the evolutionary necessity to evaluate the competition, comparing ourselves and anxiously assessing the chance that our genes will make it into the next generation – increasing our Darwinian fitness. It may not be sensible to ignore these biological imperatives, but like other traits evolution endowed us with (like our lethal love of sugar, which evolved so we would choose ripe and nutritious fruit), we can learn to control our urges and rationalise our choices to such an extent that we can celebrate the enormous variation in all aspects of human sex and gender.

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~ Jenny Graves is an evolutionary geneticist who exploits our distant relationship to Australian animals to discover how animal genes and chromosomes evolved, and how they work. She uses this unique perspective to explore the origin, function and fate of human sex genes and chromosomes, (in)famously predicting the disappearance of the Y chromosome. Jenny studied at Adelaide University (BSc, MSc) and the University of California Berkeley (PhD). She lectured at La Trobe University, then at ANU she founded and directed the Comparative Genomics Group and an ARC Centre of Excellence. She returned to La Trobe as Distinguished Professor and Vice Chancellor’s Fellow. Jenny has produced three books and more than 400 research articles. She received the international L’Oreal-UNESCO prize (2006), appointment as Companion of the Order of Australia (AC 2010) and the Prime Minister’s Prize for Science (2017). She was elected to the Australian Academy of Science (1999), and the US National Academy of Science (2019).

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Stories and Data: Reflections on Race, Riots, and Police By Coleman Hughes Originally Published in City Journal The brutal death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers has sparked protests and riots around the United States. We have witnessed humanity at its finest and at its ugliest. Citizens of faraway nations have expressed solidarity with black Americans; police officers have marched alongside protesters; protesters have defended businesses against looting and destruction. At the same time, rioters have burned down buildings and looted businesses; protesters have been pepper-sprayed and beaten; cops have been shot and run over with cars. At the root of the unrest is the Black Lives Matter movement, which began with the acquittal of George Zimmerman in 2013 and rose to national prominence in the wake of Michael Brown’s death in 2014. My view of BLM is mixed. On the one hand, I agree that police departments too often have tolerated and even enabled corruption. Rather than relying on impartial third parties, departments often decide whether to discipline their own officers; the legal doctrine of qualified immunity1 sets what many say is an unreasonably high bar for civilians bringing civil-rights lawsuits against police officers. Bodycams (which increase transparency, to the benefit of both wrongly treated police suspects and wrongly accused police) are not yet universal. In the face of police unions that oppose even reasonable reforms, Black Lives Matter seems a force for positive change. On the other hand, the basic premise of Black Lives Matter—that racist cops are killing unarmed black people—is false. There was a time when I believed it. I was one year younger than Trayvon Martin when he was killed in 2012, and like many black men, I felt like he could have been me. I was the same age as Michael Brown when he was killed in 2014, and like so many

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others, I shared the BLM hashtag on social media to express solidarity. By 2015, when the now-familiar list had grown to include Tamir Rice, Laquan McDonald, Sandra Bland, Freddie Gray, and Walter Scott, I began wearing a shirt with all their names on it. It became my favorite shirt. It seemed plain to me that these were not just tragedies, but racist tragedies. Any suggestion to the contrary struck me as at best, ignorant, and at worst, bigoted. My opinion has slowly changed. I still believe that racism exists and must be condemned in the strongest possible terms; I still believe that, on average, police officers are quicker to rough up a black or Hispanic suspect2 and I still believe that police misconduct happens far too often and routinely goes unpunished. But I no longer believe that the cops disproportionately kill unarmed black Americans. Two things changed my mind: stories and data. First, the stories. Each story in this paragraph involves a police officer killing an unarmed white person. (To demonstrate how commonly this happens, I have taken all of them from a single year, 2015, chosen at random). Timothy Smith was killed3 by a police officer who mistakenly thought he was reaching into his waistband to grab a gun; the shooting was ruled justified. William Lemmon4 was killed after he allegedly failed to show his hands upon request; the shooting was ruled justified.5 Ryan Bolinger6 was shot dead by a cop who said he was moving strangely and walking toward her; the shooting was ruled justified.7 Derek Cruice was shot in the face8 after he opened the door for police officers serving a warrant for a drug arrest; the cops recovered marijuana8 from the property, and the shooting was ruled justified. Daniel Elrod robbed a dollar store, and, when confronted by police, allegedly failed to raise his hands upon request (though his widow, who witnessed the event, insists otherwise); he was shot dead. No criminal charges were filed. Ralph Willis was shot dead9 when officers mistakenly thought that he was reaching for a gun. David Cassick was shot in twice in the back by a police officer while lying face down on the ground. Six-year-old Jeremy Mardis was killed10 by a police officer while sitting in the passenger seat of a car; the officer’s intended target was Jeremy’s father, who was sitting in the driver’s seat with his hands raised11 out the window. Autumn Steele12 was shot dead when a police officer, startled by her German shepherd, immediately fired his weapon at the animal, catching her in the crossfire. Shortly after he killed her, bodycam footage revealed13 the officer’s despair: “I’m f------ going to prison,” he says. The officer was not disciplined.

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For brevity’s sake, I will stop here. But the list goes on. For every black person killed by the police, there is at least one white person (usually many) killed in a similar way. The day before cops in Louisville barged into Breonna Taylor’s home and killed her, cops barged into the home of a white man named Duncan Lemp,14 killed him, and wounded his girlfriend (who was sleeping beside him). Even George Floyd, whose death was particularly brutal, has a white counterpart: Tony Timpa.15 Timpa was killed in 2016 by a Dallas police officer who used his knee to pin Timpa to the ground (face down) for 13 minutes. In the video, you can hear Timpa whimpering and begging to be let go. After he lets out his final breaths, the officers begin cracking jokes16 about him. Criminal charges initially brought against them were later dropped.16 At a gut level, it is hard for most people to feel the same level of outrage when the cops kill a white person. Perhaps that is as it should be. After all, for most of American history, it was white suffering that provoked more outrage. But I would submit that if this new “anti-racist” bias is justified—if we now have a moral obligation to care more about certain lives than others based on skin color, or based on racial-historical bloodguilt—then everything that I thought I knew about basic morality, and everything that the world’s philosophical and religious traditions have been saying about common humanity, revenge, and forgiveness since antiquity, should be thrown out the window. You might agree that the police kill plenty of unarmed white people, but object that they are more likely to kill unarmed black people, relative to their share of the population. That’s where the data comes in. The objection is true as far as it goes; but it’s also misleading. To demonstrate the existence of a racial bias, it’s not enough to cite the fact that black people comprise 14 percent of the population but about 35 percent17 of unarmed Americans shot dead by police. (By that logic, you could prove that police shootings were extremely sexist by pointing out that men comprise 50 percent of the population but 93 percent17 of unarmed Americans shot by cops.) Instead, you must do what all good social scientists do: control for confounding variables to isolate the effect that one variable has upon another (in this case, the effect of a suspect’s race on a cop’s decision to pull the trigger). At least four careful studies have done this— one2 by Harvard economist Roland Fryer, one18 by a group of public-health researchers, one19 by economist Sendhil Mullainathan, and one20 by David Johnson, et al. None

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of these studies has found a racial bias in deadly shootings. Of course, that hardly settles the issue for all time; as always, more research is needed. But given the studies already done, it seems unlikely that future work will uncover anything close to the amount of racial bias that BLM protesters in America and around the world believe exists. ~ All of which makes my view of Black Lives Matter complicated. If not for BLM, we probably would not be talking about ending qualified immunity, making bodycams universal, increasing police accountability, and so forth— at least not to the same extent. In fact, we might not even have a careful national database on police shootings. At the same time, the core premise of the movement is false. And if not for the dissemination of this falsehood, social relations between blacks and whites would be less tense, trust in police would be higher, and businesses all across America might have been spared the looting and destruction that we have seen in recent weeks. But isn’t this the price of progress? Isn’t there a long tradition of using violence to throw off the shackles of white supremacy, going back to the Haitian revolution and the American Civil War? Didn’t the urban riots of the late 1960s wake Americans up to the fact that racism did not end with the Civil Rights Act of 1965? To start, any analogy to slave rebellions or justified revolutions can be dismissed immediately. Taking up arms directly against those enslaving you is one thing. Looting21 clothing stores or destroying22 grocery stores is something else entirely. We must be careful not to confuse the protesters with the rioters. The former are committed to nonviolence. The latter are simply criminals and should be treated as such. As for the riots of the late 1960s, progressives should not praise them for shocking Americans into action without also noting that they helped elect23 Richard Nixon president, which progressives certainly did not intend; that they directly decreased the wealth24 of inner-city black homeowners; and that they scared capital away from inner cities for decades, worsening the very conditions of poverty and unemployment that the rioters were supposedly protesting. What’s more, the case for violence rests on the false notion that without it, little progress can be made. Recent history tells a different story. In 2018, the NYPD killed five people,25 down from 93 people in 1971. Since 2001,26

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the national incarceration rate27 for black men ages 18-29 has gone down by more than half. Put simply, we know progress through normal democratic means is possible because we have already done it. In a perfect world, I would like to see the yearly number of unarmed Americans killed by police decrease from 55 (the number in 2019) 5517 to zero. But the more I think about how we would achieve this, the less optimistic I am. At a glance, copying the policies of nations with very few police shootings seems like a promising path. But on closer inspection, one realizes how uniquely challenging the American situation is. First, America is a huge country—the third largest in the world by population. That means that extremely low-probability events (such as police shootings) will happen much more frequently here than they do elsewhere. For instance, if America were the size of Canada, but otherwise identical, about six unarmed people would have been killed by police last year, not 55. Second, America is a gun country, which makes policing in America fundamentally different than policing in other nations. When cops pull someone over in the United Kingdom, where the rate of gun ownership28 is less than one-twentieth the American rate, they have almost no reason to fear that the person they’ve stopped has a pistol hidden in the glove compartment. That’s not true in America, where a cop gets shot just about every day.29 So long as we are a gun country, American police will always be liable to mistake a suspect’s wallet or smartphone for a gun. And we will not be able to legislate that fact away—at least not completely. A third factor (not unique to America) is that we live in the smartphone age. Which means that there are millions of cameras at the ready to ensure that the next police shooting goes viral. Overall, this is a good thing. It means that cops can no longer reliably get away with lying about their misbehavior to escape punishment. (And that the claims of those accusing police in such situations will face objective video scrutiny.) But it also means that our news feeds are perpetually filled with outlier events presented to us as if they were the norm. In other words, we could cut the rate of deadly shootings by 99 percent, but if the remaining 1 percent are filmed, then the public perception will be that shootings have remained steady. And it is the public perception, more than the underlying reality, that provokes riots. Combine all three of these observations and one arrives at a grim conclusion: as long as we have a non-zero rate of deadly shootings (a virtual certainty), and as long as some shootings are filmed and go viral (also a virtual

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certainty), then we may live in perpetual fear of urban unrest for the foreseeable future. The only way out of this conundrum, it seems to me, is for millions of Americans on the Left to realize that deadly police shootings happen to blacks and whites alike. As long as a critical mass of people view this as a race issue, they will see every new video of a black person being killed as yet another injustice in a long chain dating back to the Middle Passage. That sentiment, when it is felt deeply and earnestly, will reliably produce large protests and destructive riots. The political Right has a role to play as well. For too long, “All Lives Matter” has been a slogan used only as a clapback to Black Lives Matter. What it should have been, and still could be, is a true movement to reduce the number of Americans shot by the police on a race-neutral basis. If the challenge for the Left is to accept that the real problem with the police is not racism, the challenge for the Right is to accept that there are real problems with the police. If the level of discourse among our public officials stays where it currently is—partisan and shallow—then there is not much hope. In a worst-case scenario, we may see a repeat of the George Floyd riots every few years. But if we can elevate the national discourse, if we can actually have that honest and uncomfortable conversation about race that people have been claiming to want for years, then we might have a chance.

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References 1. 2. 3.

4. 5. 6.

7.

8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13.

Special Report: For cops who kill, special Supreme Court protection. Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-police-immunity-scotus-specialrepidUSKBN22K18C. Published May 8, 2020. Accessed January 1, 2022. Fryer RG. An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force. J Polit Econ. 2019;127(3):1210-1261. doi:10.1086/701423 Twitter, Email, Facebook. Judge rejects request to seal body camera videos, dismiss suit by family of man shot by San Diego police. San Diego UnionTribune. Published September 3, 2018. Accessed January 1, 2022. https:// www.sandiegouniontribune.com / news/public-safety/sd-me-sdpdshooting-2 0180831-story.html Ferrise A, cleveland.com. Akron police officer fatally shoots man. cleveland. Published September 25, 2015. Accessed February 6, 2022. https://www. cleveland.com/akron/2015/09/man_killed_in_officer-involved.html Akron police shooting ruled justififed. wkyc.com. Accessed January 1, 2022. https://www.wkyc.com/video/news/local/akron/akron-police-shooting-ruled -justififed/95-2261430 Des M. Officer inside patrol car fatally shoots unarmed man. Accessed February 6, 2022. https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/crime-and -courts / 2015 / 06 / 10/fatal-officer-shooting-ryan-bolinger-dancing-manvanessa-miller/71010592/ Kauffman ME and C. Des Moines will pay $225,000 to family of unarmed man killed by police officer. Des Moines Register. Accessed January 1, 2022. https://www.desmoinesregister.com / story/news/crime-and-courts/2017/11/ 17/des-moines-pay-225-000-family-unarmed-man-killed-policeofficer/873877001/ Another day, another drug raid fatality - The Washington Post. Accessed January 1, 2022. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2015 /03/06/another-day-another-drug-raid-fatality/ New details released in Stillwater homicide, officer shooting. Oklahoman.com. Published January 30, 2015. Accessed January 1, 2022. https:// oklahoman.com / article/5389230 /new-details-released-in-stillwaterhomicide-officer-shooting/ Autistic 6-year-old shot, killed during police pursuit in Louisiana, report says. Accessed January 1, 2022. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/autistic-6-yearold-shot-killed-during-police-pursuit-in-louisiana-report-says/ Civil lawsuit in Jeremy Mardis shooting death settled. Accessed January 1, 2022. https://www.thetowntalk.com/story/news/2018/03/30/civil-lawsuitjeremy-mardis-shooting-death-settled/465467002/ Dog in police shooting ruled not vicious. Accessed January 1, 2022. https://www. desmoinesregister.com / story / news / 2015 / 02/26/dog-policeshooting-vicious-burlington/24078037/ Report sanitized to justify Iowa cop’s shooting of mother, family says. Accessed February 6, 2022. https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news

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17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

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/investigations/2018/10/18/autumn-steele-burlington-iowa-police-shootingrecords-show-cover-up/1286178002/ News ABC. Lawyer: Man killed by officer was asleep when police fired. ABC News. Accessed January 1, 2022. https://abcnews.go.com/US/wire Story/lawyer-man-asleep-police-fired-house-killing-69587748 The Dallas Morning News. Dallas Police Body Cameras Show Moment Tony Timpa Stopped Breathing.; 2019. Accessed January 1, 2022. https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=_c-E_i8Q5G0 Tony Timpa death: Dallas police body cam footage shows officers mocking a man who later died - CNN. Accessed January 1, 2022. https://edition. cnn.com / 2019 / 08 / 02/us/dallas-police-body-cam-footage-captures-death/ index.html Fatal Force 2019 - Washington Post. Accessed January 1, 2022. https:// www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/national/police-shootings-2019/ Miller TR, Lawrence BA, Carlson NN, et al. Perils of police action: a cautionary tale from US data sets. Inj Prev. 2017;23(1):27-32. doi:10.1136/ injuryprev-2016-042023 Police Killings of Blacks: Here Is What the Data Say - The New York Times. Accessed January 1, 2022. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/18/upshot/ police-killings-of-blacks-what-the-data-says.html Johnson DJ, Tress T, Burkel N, Taylor C, Cesario J. Officer characteristics and racial disparities in fatal officer-involved shootings. Proc Natl Acad Sci. 2019;116(32):15877-15882. doi:10.1073/pnas.1903856116 ‘Please, I Don’t Have Insurance’: Businesses Plead With Protesters - The New York Times. Accessed January 1, 2022. https://www.nytimes.com/2020 /05/31/us/minneapolis-protests-business-looting.html Looters attack groceries in impoverished neighborhoods - CNN Video. Accessed January 1, 2022. https://edition.cnn.com/videos/tv/2020/06/06/ looters-attack-groceries-in-impoverished-neighborhoods.cnn Wasow O. Agenda Seeding: How 1960s Black Protests Moved Elites, Public Opinion and Voting. Am Polit Sci Rev. 2020;114(3):638-659. doi:10.101 7/S000305542000009X Collins WJ, Margo RA. The Economic Aftermath of the 1960s Riots in American Cities: Evidence from Property Values. J Econ Hist. 2007;67(4):849-883. Use of Force Report. NYPD. Prisoners in 2001. Bureau of Justice Statistics Bulletin. Prisoners in 2017. US Department of Justice. Guns in the United Kingdom — Firearms, gun law and gun control. Accessed January 1, 2022. https://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/region/united-kingdom Officer Involved Officer Injured in 2019 | Gun Violence Archive. Accessed January 1, 2022. https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/reports/officer-shot? year=2019

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~ Coleman Hughes is an American writer and podcast host of Conversations with Coleman. His writing focuses on race, public policy, and applied ethics. Coleman’s writing has been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, National Review, Quillette, The City Journal, and The Spectator. Born and raised in northern New Jersey, Coleman briefly attended the Juilliard School to study jazz trombone before dropping out as he discovered a passion for applied ethics and public policy at Columbia University, where he graduated with a B.A. in Philosophy. He was formerly a fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and a fellow and contributing editor at the City Journal. In December 2020, Hughes was listed on the Forbes 30-under-30 list for 2021 in the Media category. Coleman is currently working on his book ‘Racialized,’ which will be published in 2022.

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In Defense of Free Speech Based on an interview with the late James Flynn Originally published in Trouble magazine’s Deep Trouble Podcast Mark Halloran: I wanted to start with a question about your father who I read was a Socialist Democrat. I think the story about being locked out of the factory when the workers voted for William Jennings Bryan, * was a pretty powerful one. And how he helped Eugene Victor Debs; † the president of the American Socialist Party, out of jail after he was branded a traitor by President Woodrow Wilson. I was interested in the influence your father has had on your life politically, and in terms of your work? James Flynn: Well, he doesn’t, I think influenced my life as directly as going to the University of Chicago. It’s true that I was raised in a household where I had a father who had a favorable view of the Democrats, particularly insofar as they were behind the trade unions and the workers. I think also of equal importance was going to the University of Chicago, being in about the only atmosphere under their policy, where to be progressive was actually in fashion. I think what I took away from your book; In Defense of Free Speech: The University as Censor,1‡ was the right-wing power within universities at the time that you were a young academic seeking tenure, and how that affected your career. And you talked about the power that was wielded by conservatives within universities and how that’s very different from the power

William Jennings Bryan was an American politician who was the Democratic nominee for President of the United States and who ran three times in 1896, 1900 and the 1908 election. † Eugene Victor Debs was an American socialist, political activist and trade unionist. ‡ The book was eventually published by Academica Press as ‘A Book too Risky to Publish: Free Speech and Universities.2 *

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that’s wielded by far-left groups within universities today. Well, that it (right-wing power) is more vicious, as it extends off campus. Not that some of the left-wing groups don’t resort to saying that they’ll beat up your family and your kids, but they don’t usually. And they may have the power to bounce you from university. They don’t usually have the power that was operative during the McCarthy period, where if you were working class person, they could prevent you from getting into a public housing project. Or if you’re a teacher, you had to take a loyalty oath to teach in New York City schools. Or they could try and get you banned from any government employment or harass your relatives. So, in that sense, it was much more serious. They had more weapons. I’ve heard right-wingers excuse this by saying, ‘Oh, we were just against the communists,’ but they quite consciously used that as a club to say socialists are communists, and therefore we’ll beat up on them. And liberals are really communist sympathizers, and we’ll beat up on them as well. There were a few screw balls who thought of all this as an anti-communist crusade. But the right-wing in general was very pleased to see that they could effectively immobilize virtually their entire opposition by linking them to communism. I know that you said that nothing the left has done within universities in the last 50 years, approaches the totalitarian regime that the right ran when it was running universities. So, they were in control, effectively throughout much of American history. There is the Red Scare § after World War One, and America had heads of universities who considered themselves as devout Protestants who wanted to get rid of atheists. And they, of course, were terribly anti-gay. So, there was about 100 years really, from the time of the Civil War up through the Korean War, where you had mainly right-wing control of universities and people who were liberal or left had to suffer the consequences. Mine (University of Chicago) was one of the few where students were protected by Robert Hutchins, the chancellor, because he was always a good civil libertarian. And while his views were conservative, he was very dedicated to academic The first Red Scare occurred after WWI and involved a perceived threat from the anarchist revolution and the American Labour movement. Red Scare’s involved the widespread fear of a rise of communism, anarchism and left ideologies within the society or state. §

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freedom, and tried to protect the students or staff wherever he could. So, I didn’t have much problem as a student at Chicago. I only faced problems when I faced the outer world, which was still under the control of the rightwing and most universities were right-wing at that time. People say to me, ‘Oh, that’s a fight between the right and the left.’ You’ve lived long enough that you don’t trust the right-wing - you know if they were in control, they’d be persecuting us. And indeed, they try to when they can. Sometimes they invite speakers in the hope they will be banned. So, they’ll have a cause célèbre. And other times if someone on campus actually takes a left-leaning position, they try to get them banned. And my answer to that is dual. First, why give them ammunition? Why make it appear that they have free speech on their side by giving them so many cases that they can legitimately prosecute? Why not starve them of ammunition? And the reason, of course, is that most of the left don’t believe in free speech, either. They’re pretending they do now, some of them, because they’re suffering from this persecution, just as the right are pretending that they believe in free speech, because they see that their people are being outed. But it’s very rare to find people who aren’t involved in this type of culture war between the right and left, and are willing to forbear doing to the other side what they feel is being done to them. Reading your book, it made me think that I wonder when the university had really ever been a place where you had freedom of speech? It varies so much from place to place. As I say, in one chapter, Chicago today is a much more secure place from left-wing persecution than either Harvard is or Princeton. And certainly more so than these universities or Yale. Remember, the better the university, the more they have people who actually don’t like persecution and violation of free speech. So, what would leave you reasonably safe at Harvard or Chicago exposes you to the mob, if you teach at some place that is less elevated than that, and also depends a good deal as to whether people on campus spend all their time organizing protests and persecuting people who don’t agree with them. Middlebury is the case; I don’t think the people who run Middlebury really wanted to run Charles Murray off campus.3 Indeed, they made every effort not to, it was the students who played along with the townspeople and declared him essentially a non-person. That’s not true everywhere, you’re not going to find that type of student militant behavior at, let’s say, Fairleigh Dickinson.

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The valuing of free speech seems like a rare thing, because when I thought about it, everyone is susceptible to groupthink. And when the majority of people are of one political leaning, that’s going to control the way that everybody communicates within the group. Oh, yes, of course, their motives are pure. The conservatives wanted to protect America when it was being confronted by the Soviet Union against internal communists, and wanted people to rally to the flag. Today - and here’s progress - thanks to cognitive gains over the 20th century, most young students are much less racist and sexist than they were 50 years ago. And indeed, many of them just get angry if you allow people who take a conservative view on race to speak. They have been told that these people have no academic standing, and there’s no reason to let them speak and you must make the university a place where everyone feels safe. And just having Charles Murray on campus can be sufficient, apparently, to convince people at Vassar that they have to have counselling. Just knowing he is there, even if they know they’re not going to be in contact with him. And if they have black friends, they think ‘How can anyone be so insulting as to listen to somebody who has supposedly a reasoned case, that Jensen just might be right about race, IQ and genes?’4** So, a lot of it is misguided fervor by the ignorant. Now, of course they have a perfectly good formula for staying ignorant - if you never hear what the other side has to say you can’t marshal your evidence and reasons to refute them. The more you hold something as blind faith, the more you find it intolerable to debate it. To some extent you make the distinction between right opinion and right knowledge. And so, you and the students of Middlebury who ejected Charles Murray, kind of have the same worldview, in that there is no genetic difference between racial groups that would underlie a difference in terms of IQ. They very well may be correct, but they’re totally incapable of arguing to that conclusion. If you’re lucky, historically, you are filled by your parents and the media and your fellow students with views that are less vicious than other views. And that’s progress. But sadly - you’re right on the distinction between knowledge and right opinion - right opinion is happening to be, as an Arthur Robert Jenson was an American psychologist known for his work in psychometrics. Jenson was voted the most controversial intelligence researcher5 due to his conclusions on race-based differences in IQ.6 **

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accident of history, correct. Knowledge is knowing what the other side has to say, and being able to beat them in a contest of ideas. And I think you probably found chapter three of my book the most telling. I remarked that if I were a student at Middlebury and had been forbidden to read the works of Jensen and Murray and Richard Lynn,7†† how uneducated I’d have been, I would have been just a well-meaning liberal, who thought it was bad to be bad to blacks. But I would have missed out completely on all I’ve learned about black subculture in America. All I’ve learned about race and IQ. All I’ve learned about what it would take for a humane society to operate. And all that I’ve learned about how to make a case that women are as intelligent as men. If you don’t argue against your opponents, if you just declare them beyond the pale of reason, you miseducate yourself, you can’t possibly formulate a coherent position in favor of your views. But the main thing is, when you talk to me, you have the impression that you’re talking to a person who has learned a great deal about the black experience in America, who has learned a great deal about cross cultural data, who knows something about the relationship between IQ and education. And that is essentially because I read Jensen and Murray and Lynn, and wasn’t prevented from being exposed to the terrible nature of their published work. The problem is that there are other factors at work. Students today just read much less broadly and in depth than they used to, despite the fact that more go to university, fewer adults are reading serious history or literature. And to a degree they don’t realize they’re like mediaeval serfs who are captive in the bubble - that their experience is dictated by the mass media and the politicians. That makes them much more malleable and makes it a lot easier to get them to march off to war. So, although they have profited from a century of gain in cognitive ability, you have to marry that with knowledge. In order to get anywhere, you can’t marry it with increasing ignorance and expect things to improve, and to take a position on free speech that systematically keeps you ignorant is not the answer. It’s interesting that point because what you’re known for, and I remember you from my undergraduate psychology degree, is something called the Flynn effect.8

†† Richard Lynn is a psychologist and intelligence researcher who is known for his controversial views on racial and sexual differences in intelligence.

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That’s right. I’ve always cautioned people against thinking that the Flynn effect settles the race and IQ debate. Although, of course, it’s used as a club to do that. I’ve always said, ‘Yes, it takes us part of the way; it shows that the environment can really have a great deal of effect on IQ, setting genes aside.’ But you still have to make a detailed case, that the environmental gap that separate white and black in America today is analogous to the gap that separates the generations. It doesn’t let you off the hook. When I heard the original interview between Charles Murray and Sam Harris,9 I immediately thought Murray doesn’t understand the Flynn effect. And then I found out – he named the Flynn effect. He coined the term Flynn effect, which was a good boon for me, it opened doors that otherwise wouldn’t have been open. He quite rightly said that the mere fact that over 100 years, we have made enormous environmental progress, and may have raised average IQ by 30 points, doesn’t mean that in a given time and place, those same environmental differences separate black and white. And of course, Jensen made what seemed to be a powerful point you’re still run into people who don’t even realize this - that when you equate black and white people today for socioeconomic status (SES), that doesn’t eliminate the IQ gap. And even worse, because that’s far more important, that doesn’t eliminate the educational achievement gap. To answer that question, you have to undertake a very searching inquiry into the limits of SES, and the nature of black subculture. And even if the race and IQ gap didn’t exist, you learn an awful lot from doing that. Everyone who can read history with an unbiased eye and isn’t full of either right-wing or left-wing nonsense knows that in America, that Chinese people of a certain SES, when equated with Irish people of a certain SES, set up a far more educationally efficient home. You don’t, when you walk into an Irish restaurant, see an Irish kid asleep over his books and when he wakes up, he goes on reading the next passage - he is likely to be out playing sport. And when you enter a Jewish home, it’s quite different to entering a Polish home. These groups are separated by important cultural differences that have a transcendence of SES. Today, it’s respectable to say all it’s all SES. Then you can say you can’t blame blacks for being poor - that lets them off the hook. Instead, you have to give an intelligent attempt to show that subculture is important. If you do this though, you’re accused of blaming the victim, you’re saying black culture is to blame for blacks not achieving educationally. To

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think that anyone is to blame for the history of their ethnic group is insane. I’m not to blame for the fact that when the Irish came to America, they had never picked up farming skills and were let loose in alien cities. That they have a history of violence; that many people’s highest aspiration was to be the best street fighter on the block. Am I supposed to be blamed for how the Irish were treated in England and the oppression that they faced in America? SES doesn’t capture. Historically, when you consider that during slavery, black people were considered to be three quarters human under the Constitution, and post slavery, black lives, were essentially being criminalized - that you could be imprisoned for looking at a white woman the wrong way. Yes, of course. As I’ve said in my material, which I wouldn’t never have developed if I hadn’t been arguing with people like Jensen and Lynn, that, of course, a black kid from an upper middle-class home will have an advantage over a black kid from the home where everyone is high on some type of narcotic. No doubt. You remember my use of Elsie G. Moore’s study?10 She was the one who looked at black children, all of whom were adopted by either white or black professional parents. Even though all the mothers had 16 years of education; the black and white mothers, even though the fathers were all professionals, or semi-professionals, by the age of eight and a half the black kids adopted by the white professional parents were 13 IQ points above the black kids adopted by black families. Well, that hasn’t got to do with race. No one sorted them by race or genes before adoption. And when she observed the mothers, the white mothers were universally encouraging, saying ‘That’s a good idea. Let’s try this.’ The black mothers were universally censorious saying ‘You’re not that dumb. You can do better than that.’ It turned out that the white professional mothers had a much more positive attitude to problem solving than the black professional mothers. I was also the first one to analyze, Han Eysenck’s ‡‡ data with the half black kids in Germany during the occupation of Germany, and they did as well as white kids left behind by American servicemen.8,11 What was the difference? There was no black subculture in Germany. They were just darkskinned acculturated Germans. They faced prejudice. But they didn’t face the ‡‡ Hans Jürgen Eysenck was a German-born British psychologist known for his work on intelligence and personality.

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subculture, which differs widely between groups in terms of encouraging cognitive performance. If I was going to be the devil’s advocate, and perhaps take Charles Murray’s side of the argument, there’s the obvious thing in terms of the sample sizes being very small. Therefore, it’s hard to draw any conclusions. The other thing is that, as you pointed out, the African American fathers who were enlisted in the Army had to pass cognitive tests. And I had to study it, and then allow for that. And when I did that, I said, ‘Well, you could make a case that due to the weeding out of less intelligent black fathers, that really the results show about a three-point genetic gap. Now you have to take into account that although you didn’t live under a black subculture, your mother was convicted on the face of it of sleeping with the enemy! If you want to go into wild speculation, you would have to conclude that 12 points of the IQ gap between black and white are due to subcultural factors, and only three points are due to genetic factors - and even those three are up for grabs. Being persecuted isn’t pleasant. That means that if it were true in America, then the blaming of anti-black sentiment, as the main cause of the race-IQ gap and achievement gap, is four-fifths mistaken, as four-fifths of it lies in the substance of black subculture. Now, they’re not to blame for that - they came up from slavery. But it means that just giving them a pot of money that equals them with whites is not going to be universally effective. Now, it could be that as we learn more and more about the human genome, I think it would be remarkable if we came up with a conclusion that more than two or three points was genetic. The difference between twins and singletons is four points, and no one runs around fighting in the streets over that. You remember, I published data that shows that blacks have gained five points than whites over one generation. And the gap is no longer 15 IQ points, it’s nearer 10.8 And if that happens another generation these people are going to have a lot less to argue about, aren’t they? If blacks ever cut the IQ gap to five points, how much time are we going waste on this? When I first read about the Flynn effect, I thought, ‘Is it really likely that IQ is going to increase by about a standard deviation; up to 15 IQ points, in fifty years. Really, statistically, it’s more likely that things will regress towards the mean. And then recently, I discovered the reverse Flynn effect.12

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That’s right. I wrote an article on that which was published in Intelligence a few years back.8 And I say there’s nothing about the Flynn effect that’s written in the stars like the law of gravity. The reason the Flynn effect has occurred is that over the 20th century, most people have been exposed to more cognitively demanding environments. And if that is no longer true, than they won’t make gains. Not only won’t they make IQ gains, which is trivial, they won’t make gains in terms of developing critical intelligence. There’s nothing written in the stars. I think there’s every indication that today young people are having a much harder time finding intellectual challenge at universities. I’ve read that IQ peaked at around the mid 1990s.13 Yes, in Scandinavia among young adults, in Holland, it looks like it’s stalled, but without regressing. If you look at Germany, there’s an amazing difference; they’re gaining still on vocabulary, but losing in spatial visualization. If you look at America, although they seem to be gaining a bit on all fronts, and you have to look at it by age group, elderly people in practically every advanced society are making big IQ gains over their parents at an elderly age. They’re being stimulated, exercising more and have a better diet. So, you have to look at it by group, my feeling is that during the school years, we’ve reached a point where for reasons we can’t really manipulate, most young people, particularly males, are interacting less successfully with a school environment. So, I would be very surprised to see data that shows IQ gains in that age group. I think we’re still in a position where the world of work is making a few more cognitively demanding jobs than it used to. So, we would see more moderate gains there. Therefore, you have to ask not only what country you’re dealing with, but what age group you’re dealing with. They did a wonderful study of Ravens. §§ And they found that when they compared modern kids in Scotland with kids in the 1930s, they didn’t gain much at school, because in Scotland at that time, years of schooling were pretty universal. But what they did find was that later on, after their school years, they made profound gains on the Ravens. My point was that the 500,000 Danish men declined below pre 1991 levels. It seems like IQ tests may no longer be matching the environment for

§§ Raven’s progressive matrices is a ‘culture free’ non-verbal test used to measure general human intelligence.

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selecting out what’s important in terms of intelligent behavior. Yes, the intelligent thing is to read widely, think hard, argue with your opponents and develop critical intelligence. That’s always been the really important thing. Could it change, though? Yes, that can change. And I’m afraid it’s not necessarily changing for the better. That is, I’m afraid that young people are reading less. Apparently, all the studies of American schools show that even in terms of occupational skills, kids are losing critical intelligence, and they barely even read the course material any longer. A majority of courses are now given in America by adjunct professors who can be fired at will and have terrible conditions. And they’re desperately trying to publish despite being overloaded. And so, they make a hedonic pact with the students. They say to the students, ‘We won’t ask much of you, as long as you give us good write ups,’ and the students follow. There’s a great correlation between how favorably they are reviewed and how easy a course is. And they have relapsed to where they’re now reading probably no more than five or eight hours a week as compared to thirteen in the past. So, they say to the lecturer, ‘Go ahead, give us a coursebook, give us something that all we have to do is memorize a few chapters from and we can get an A, then we’ll write you a good reference’ and the beleaguered lecturer thinks, ‘God, if I assign a demanding essay, think of all the marking I’ll have to do. I better spend what little time I have on trying to publish in a professional journal.’ So, you have a situation in which students and staff corrupt each other. Yes, I’ve been in that situation. I meant that perhaps what is required from the environment for intelligent behavior changes. So, I’m thinking that as technology develops and people have access to information all the time, then they don’t need to develop general knowledge as measured by tests like the WAIS. *** Well, you have to know something to take advantage of the internet rather than be corrupted by it. If you just set sail on it almost any screw ball could influence you. How can you know why there was a terrible war in Nigeria if The Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS) is a IQ test designed to measure intelligence in adults and older adolescents.

***

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you don’t know that a war even happened? You’re never going to put in to your Google. How can you know what were the causes of the war in Nigeria? You’re ignorant that the war ever took place. Many people seem to think that they are making use of the visual world if they merely garner a lot of helter-skelter information on what immediately interests them. That’s not the way to proceed. I try and show how academics in some ways are their own worst enemies, they too can be dogmatic and persecute academics who have a minority view. And I also try to point out that people who train teachers are not innocent of the fact that the students that these teachers teach, come to university without the equipment to do well. So, it’s not all a matter of academics being beaten up by other people - they beat up on themselves. And sometimes the students they turn out, send them a clientele that’s not promising. But the major thing is something that almost no one will deny, but no one likes to face. And that is all of those who curtail free speech turn, what should be a contest of ideas, into a contest of strength. All those kids at Middlebury showed was that they were more powerful than Charles Murray. None of them could have argued with him. It’s a case of might is right. Yes. It’s a case of might is right. When you’re on top, you’ll bully whoever you disagree with. And that turns it into a test of strength. You still pay an incredibly heavy price for that, in terms of remaining intellectually naive, but at least you’re not likely to be thrown out of university. When the pendulum swings back again, we’ll see what all these people think of this notion that the administration and alumni and students can bounce anyone they take a dislike to. You’ve faced criticism as well, because of your work on race and IQ. I’m a racist. I blame the victim because I talk about subcultures. And I say black subculture is an important element that has to change if blacks are to have better educational achievement. I would say the same about Maori subculture. Certainly, this was true of Irish subculture of my own group. I’m not there just saying, ‘Oh, we are persecuted. We were turned down for jobs. We were not given housing.’ Which is all true, by the way. Irish in America, when my father was young, he faced ‘No Irish Need Apply.’ They would advertise a job and they would say ‘No Irish Need Apply, Colored Man Preferred’ because they thought of blacks as being less violent than Irish were.

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So, they were turned down unjustly for jobs and Jews were kept from going to Harvard because they were Jewish. And of course, Chinese today are kept from going to Harvard because they’re Chinese. You take exception in your book to particular departments within the university. Some of the departments that you have an issue with are things like Women’s Studies and Black Studies. Within the university there are academic fashions, and people outside the academic fashion often find no home there. I name those departments, in particular, because they don’t just have a sort of intellectual party line, based on too narrow a research agenda. They have an ideology that defines the ideal student, and the ideal student in a Black Studies department is someone who flirts with the revolutionary left, and has no time for reading conservative black scholars, like Thomas Sowell and others, that he would learn a great deal from. So, they actively corrupt their students by demanding not only that they be intellectually in fashion, but by demanding that they be ideologues of a particular persuasion. You take exception with some of the ideas within these departments such as trigger warnings. Yes - that’s the latest outrage. Every lecturer should comb through their lectures and find the slightest thing that might upset anyone. At Chicago university they say that people go to university to get upset. They go there to seek out ideas that upset them and think about those ideas. There was a terrible thing, I think it was at Vassar, where a group of women got together and said, ‘One of the worst things about having Charles Murray come to campus is the time students have to spend to think about how to refute him.’ As if that were something bad rather than something good. Your book made me wonder whether you thought there were any limits to free speech at all? There are limits to free speech in the sense that even John Stuart Mill said you can’t stand up on a balcony and shout ‘Fire!’ That can’t in any way be described as political or religious debate. That’s just a way of trying to get people killed by panic. And you certainly couldn’t have people stand in front of a black hostel of a campus with Ku Klux Klan signs and when they walked across campus to go to class be pursuing them with racial epithets. We all

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know that this is forbidden - of course there are limits. What is not, however, to be included within free speech limits is refusing to allow things to be said, just because they upset people. It’s one thing to persecute people and render their whole educational experience dysfunctional. Of course, you can’t allow that anywhere - anymore than you can allow them to tackle them when they cross campus or try and burn their books. You don’t allow people to shriek racial epithets. But when you have serious people who have a serious case to argue, to treat those books, as if they were shouting racial epithets, is weird. You take the fact that speech is not a total absolute, and then you run to the conclusion that anything that upsets anyone isn’t covered by free speech. Free speech is always placed within the limits of inciting violence. You can always twist free speech into a mere incitement to violence. But there’s no evidence that in most of these cases on campus that any of these banned speakers or banned textbooks, resulted in black or women’s studies students being confronted with people shouting sexist or racist epithets. What was obnoxious about these books was that they made a case that students disagreed with but didn’t know how to refute. There was a part in your book where you said ‘If I were the university president, I would allow the KKK to come in and distribute flyers and even hold their rallies.’ My view is that anyone who is presented with a flyer, they can either read it or crumple it up. They don’t have to pay any attention to it. If I were a university president and the Klu Klux Klan wanted to put up flyers on a notice board, I would say, ‘Are you sure this is really worthwhile? Why don’t you hold a meeting off campus where the authorities can deal with the problem? These flyers are just going to be snatched off the bulletin boards. And I’ll have to pay the cost of having someone watch to see that they’re not snatched away. And what exactly do you think you’re going to accomplish with this?’ I think there are some ideas that are really not worth discussing. Yes. Well, as I say, no one has to read a flyer. I don’t read most flyers I see on bulletin boards - I can immediately see they’re nonsense. And what’s the problem with a student seeing some stupid flyer in favor of the Klu Klux Klan? I would assume that he would think ‘Sad that there are so many ignorant people around.’

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I think there are limits in terms of allowing groups to come to speak at a university. You wouldn’t allow a pro-pedophilia group or Islamic State to come and speak. I would kill them by ignoring them. Why the hell does anyone have to pay attention to the fact that they want to give a lecture on campus - just study your chemistry. However, since their visits to campus so often create a riotous situation, I would say to them, ‘Public schools of our state cannot forbid you to hold a meeting, find a Public school 10 blocks off campus and hold your meeting there. And at least the university won’t have to bear the cost of giving you security – the local cops will do it.’ In America the right-wing media predominantly focusses on the university protests. However, it really seems it’s a very small percentage of the university itself. Look at how uncritical people are being at present about the climate debate. I was amused when a person whose intelligence I respect said ‘Well now at least we know what we’ve got to do.’ That, by the way, is now the message of the oil and coal companies ‘Oh, it’s not our fault all you have to do is not use oil and coal and junk your cars’ when they know full well that that will never happen. It lets them off the hook. It’s a wonderful idea that if everyone tomorrow threw their car into the Leith and walked to work and didn’t eat meat, and didn’t engage in air travel - wouldn’t we be better off? The fossil fuel companies think ‘Gee, that’s a good way to have people think, if they think that way we’re off the hook and we can go right on making our cars and using oil.’ I published a book called No Place to Hide14 on climate change. The only way to deal with it is by concerted action. Of course, you want people to walk, and of course you want people to not drive expensive, gas guzzling cars. But the only way to handle it is to actually have a situation where you do something to manipulate the climate, to hold down temperature until we discovered safe fuels, which is going to take us a few generations. I’m often appalled when, even the best students, say, ‘All we have to do is force the politicians to be better people.’ It’s a generational difference, isn’t it? There’s an ideological difference between your life experience, and the young people who are part of departments such as Black Studies and Women’s Studies.

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There is a difference, but there’s also no difference in a certain respect. And that is, right from the day I was born, politicians and the media tried to brainwash me with what they thought would make me a complacent citizen. That still holds true – however all the forces at work may be more powerful now. I grant you that the internet may be a much more powerful influence than the daily newspaper was when I was a kid. You take exception to departments within universities that are ideologically driven. And you in your book criticize postmodernism. Yes, there’s that nonsense. The problem is that so many kids now go to university just wanting to gain a vocational advantage. And of course, you can be a very good surgeon, and still know nothing about climate change, know nothing about the role of money in American politics. That is, you have none of the critical attitudes you need to improve the society. But you’re very good at cutting on the brain. And you’re very good at building a bridge. You’re very good at programming a computer. So, there is a shift away from the humanities and critical thinking to this overwhelming ethos; where vocational advantages is the main purpose of the university. I think there should be in every university a minor in critical thinking. You wouldn’t make it compulsory, but every student may take it along with their major. And in it you would have a curriculum that would be designed to encourage critical intelligence, where you spent your time learning some history and reading some literature and taking some philosophy. And learning enough social science and economics to argue with these people. I don’t have any notion that I’m going to be successful in preaching that. Although I make a few in roads at least when I teach my courses, where I try to integrate disciplines in a way that makes students more critical. It might be that universities are losing their purpose. They have always lost their purpose to some degree. They were started to train people to be clergymen. That was their original vocational setup. And then people started realizing universities could teach people vocational skills so that they could earn a living. There was a period of course, when universities were flooded to some degree, by upper class people, some of whom just wanted to drink and run around, but others of whom considered themselves to be reflective, genteel types. And, many of them, since they had we’re going to inherit money, would take things like Latin and Greek and

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philosophy and literature. Now, that group is mainly gone. And what you’ve got to do is to raise an awareness within universities, that part of their purpose is to teach critical thinking and not just vocationally valuable skills. There’s a difference between the departments in terms of their ideological focus… Some of them are much worse than others. The ones that really indoctrinate you in America are Black Studies, Women’s Studies and Teacher Training. And then on the heels of those are departments are the ones where you can’t discuss the race-IQ debate, departments where you can’t discuss Israel versus Palestine, departments where you can’t imply that different cultures are at different stages of development. They all have a certain bias against these views. And then there are a few departments, ideally philosophy, history and literature, which would be more open, but they’re not necessarily. They can always be infected by postmodernists. You mention Jordan Peterson, who has really found his fame through saying that the issue with the culture within universities is related to some version of what he calls a neo-Marxist postmodernism. It’s not just neo-Marxists. Yes, everyone tries to get in on the party; feminists, Marxists, God-knows-who will all go around mouthing that there are an infinite number of interpretations of the universe, and the people who try to rationally grapple with the universe are merely trying to get more powerful than people who don’t. He tends to link it to Marxism. There are Marxists who do that. But there are many Marxists who follow Marx, who said that there is objective truth out there, there’s an understanding of the dialectic of history, and why one society evolves into another, and what the impediments are, in terms of realistic evidence that working people suffer. Marx wasn’t a postmodernist. He merely thought that many dogmas were historically relative, which is true, and that you could improve on that by becoming a learned person, and by recognizing which dogmas were merely suited to the ideology of a time and then try to find a sociology and a history that transcends that. His contention, seems to be, that the Marxism part is changed from being about the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, and instead focusses on different groups within society and the power interactions between these groups.

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Anyone who is willing to look at reality will see that different groups vary in power, nothing particularly bizarre about that. I’d far prefer to argue with a Marxist who thinks that truth is possible, and is trying to argue for a position that you have to see ideas in a sociological context to deal with them, which is a truth of sociology, and who is convinced that history moves in terms of the invention of devices that serve human needs better, like the factory system. At least, you can bring evidence to bear because they assert something that’s falsifiable. It’s not falsifiable to go around and say ‘Everything is just a point of view.’ How can you falsify something like that? Except to say, if you think carefully, no one believes it. Cultural relativism is a strange beast in itself. In my book, Fate and Philosophy15 you’ll see how quickly I deal with it. Almost no one is really a cultural relativist, you’d have to be a very peculiar person to say that you equally appreciated the music of all different cultures. Such a person never goes to a concert, because they’re torn in fifty different directions. But there’s a lot of muddled thinking out there. And the less we have free speech, and the more we have people making it a test of strength, the more that muddled thinking will flourish. If you look at the ideological bent of Black Studies and the activism it produces, it may seem extreme. But it’s been in response to something. It’s been in response to a history of white supremacy; a history of slavery. The history of white supremacy should be looked at very carefully in the light of facts and evidence that shouldn’t be clouded by a lot of self-serving myth. There was a period after slavery, that for peculiar sociological reasons, black families tended to be more stable than white families. So, to now just run around and scream black family instability is a legacy of slavery needs more examination.16,17 There are many that question why women have a lower income on average than men. It’s a very complex problem. As Erich Fromm ††† said, ‘For almost any person, who is in any way disadvantage, the best instrument is the truth. They have difficulty mustering the same power as their oppressor. But once they can become convinced that truth is on their side, they have an extra string to their bow.’ Discouraging the notion that truth is possible - that’s not the way forward.

Erich Seligmann Fromm was a German social psychologist, philosopher and psychoanalyst. He was associated with the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory.

†††

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References 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

My Book Defending Free Speech Has Been Pulled. Quillette. Published September 24, 2019. Accessed February 6, 2022. https://quillette.com/2019/ 09/24/my-book-defending-free-speech-has-been-banned/ A Book Too Risky To Publish: Free Speech and Universities | Academica Press. Accessed February 6, 2022. https://www.academicapress.com/node/ 382 Information on Charles Murray Visit. Middlebury. Accessed January 26, 2022. https:// www.middlebury.edu / newsroom / information - on-charlesmurray-visit Sowell T. Arthur Jensen and His Critics: The Great IQ Controversy. Change. 1973;5(4):33-37. Carl N, Woodley of Menie MA. A scientometric analysis of controversies in the field of intelligence research. Intelligence. 2019;77:101397. doi:10.1016 /j.intell.2019.101397 Panofsky A. Misbehaving Science: Controversy and the Development of Behavior Genetics. University of Chicago Press; 2014. Accessed February 5, 2022. https:// press.uchicago.edu/ucp / books / book/chicago/M/bo16124298. html Lynn R. Race differences in intelligence: An evolutionary analysis. Published online January 1, 2006. Flynn JR. The “Flynn Effect” and Flynn’s paradox. Intelligence. 2013;41(6):851-857. doi:10.1016/j.intell.2013.06.014 #73 — Forbidden Knowledge. Sam Harris. Accessed January 26, 2022. https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/73-forbiddenknowledge Moore EG. Family socialization and the IQ test performance of traditionally and transracially adopted Black children. Dev Psychol. 1986;22(3):317-326. doi:10.1037/0012-1649.22.3.317 Colman AM. Race differences in IQ: Hans Eysenck’s contribution to the debate in the light of subsequent research. Personal Individ Differ. 2016;103:182-189. doi:10.1016/j.paid.2016.04.050 Teasdale TW, Owen DR. A long-term rise and recent decline in intelligence test performance: The Flynn Effect in reverse. Personal Individ Differ. 2005;39(4):837-843. doi:10.1016/j.paid.2005.01.029 Robson D. Has humanity reached ‘peak intelligence?’ Accessed February 5, 2022. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190709-has-humanity-reachedpeak-intelligence No Place to Hide. Potton & Burton. Accessed February 5, 2022. https://www. pottonandburton.co.nz/product/no-place-to-hide/ Flynn JR, Flynn J. Fate & Philosophy: A Journey Through Life’s Great Questions. Awa Press; 2012.

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16. Bodenner C. “The Breakdown of the Black Family,” Cont’d - The Atlantic. Accessed February 5, 2022. https://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2015/10/thebreakdown-of-the-black-family-contd/410155/ 17. Besharov DJ, West A. African American Marriage Patterns.

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~ Professor James R. Flynn has combined political and moral philosophy with psychology to clarify problems such as justifying humane ideals and whether it makes sense to rank races and classes by merit. Emeritus Professor Flynn has been profiled in Scientific American and ran for the New Zealand Parliament in 1993 and 1996 as Alliance candidate for Dunedin North. Research Interests include humane ideals and ideological debate; classics of political philosophy; race, class and IQ. He was Head of Department from 1967 to 1996. Vale James Flynn

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Acknowledgments First and foremost, thank you to Steve Charman who recorded and edited all excerpts for each of the interviews. Thank you also to Steve and Melissa Proposch for supporting me to develop the Deep Trouble Podcast which was hosted by Trouble Magazine and which served as inspiration for the current book. Lastly, thank you to all the authors and interviewees for contributing to this project, in particular Heather Heying, Gad Saad, Nicholas Christakis, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Peter Boghossian, for reviewing multiple drafts of the essays and interviews included in this book.

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