The Battle Between Gender & Biology - Colin Wright | Modern Wisdom 251

I think the things we need to talk about, it's not necessarily things we're not talking about. I just think we're talking about things in the complete opposite way we should be talking about them. Like, I think it's important to talk about things like racism in society. It's important to talk about whether or not there are environmental components to behavioral differences between sexes or- or whatever species you're talking about. But we just need to have a more sober conversation where we don't leave some explanations off the table before the conversation even begins. You can't talk about things like any sort of cultural inertia that any population might have, regardless of where it's coming from in the world. Like, we can't talk about any of those sort of factors, like any cultural factors whatsoever that could be predictive of differential group outcomes. Like, that's just off the table. You can't talk about those at all. (wind blowing)

Colin flippin' Wright in the building. How are you doing, man?

(laughs) I'm doing well. That's a good intro. (laughs)

(laughs) Yeah, when you-

I like that. It's the best intro I've had so far.

What can you say? When I'm away, I'm on holiday, I'm just in a jovial mood, you know, just ready to discuss some evolutionary biology.

I'm down. Let's do it.

I love it. So what's the most undiscussed topic in evolutionary biology which you think should be talked about more?

So right out of the gates there. Um.

Yeah, there's very limited foreplay in this show, Colin. It's kind of straight in.

Yeah. And so there's- there's these bigger overarching questions about just, like, human evolution, um, how we evolve certain complex traits behaviorally and otherwise. But I'd- I'd say, it's- it's really gonna depend who you ask on some of these issues. Some people think that we can explain all the diversity of life and all the behavior with current models of evolutionary thinking, just gradualism, you know, mutation, selection. And then you have some people, like I've- I've heard people like Bret Weinstein, for instance. He's- he thinks there's like a missing component that, you know, we need to have some sort of paradigm shift and we- we need something to explain things like peacocks' tails and, uh, why there's so much diversity in the tropics and things like that. And I'm sort of in the camp that we've- we've figured out, like, the main big trends and, like, how, at least in principle, how these things could have arisen. Uh, I'm- haven't been totally convinced that there's any massive discoveries to be made in terms of, you know, that is gonna, like, completely change the way we think about evolutionary biology. Um, I think if- from this point forward, it's gonna be more, like, tweaking bits. And I'm sure, I mean, there can be some substantial insight we might gain from areas, but, um, yeah, I think- I think it's gonna be largely applying the same principles of, you know, Darwinian natural- neutral selection to- to sort of things that we already kind of know about. Then you can also go the other route and say, well, the important things to learn about are things that we- we kind of already know but we're not really allowed to say, maybe, or, to some degree, because there's sort of a social taboo against things. And I think that's probably more threatening to evolutionary biology in the short term and maybe even long term, depending on, you know, how long sort of these cultural norms last that won't let people, you know, speak freely about certain controversial topics or something, uh, or they only, even worse, they only allow sort of one side, the- the side that is sort of, uh, aligns more with our morality or something, that they only allow that side really to get published because it just- they s- they- they'll go through review a lot faster because they- they kind of are leaning towards all the preconceptions and views that reviewers might already have or something. So then you get like a biased literature that's not really reflective of reality but it's sort of reflective of what we'd kind of like to be true in a sense. So, uh, yeah, that's sort of my overarching take on sort of evolution at the moment.