https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=MwD9Hd8LUKQ
We found that the male that was most attractive to women was the tender defender. And I feel like you’re kind of describing a tender defender. I really want to talk to you about that. So okay, so I’ve been involved in an email exchange with Richard Dawkins. And I asked him to come on my podcast and he wrote back very politely and in a detailed letter pointing out why I wanted to talk to him, which was very surprising to me. I said I wanted to talk to him about sex selection, particularly. And then he identified a paragraph from a talk I did with Sam Harris that nailed exactly why I wanted to talk with Dawkins. Okay, so Dawkins is the blind watchmaker guy, right? And he’s anti-teleological to the core and also anti-religious, etc. And people know about Dawkins and Dawkins is an admirable person intellectually. But the evolutionary biologists are not taking the issue of sexual selection seriously enough in relationship to value. So let’s take what you just said. All right, so imagine this. You tell me if you think this is wrong because I really want to know if it’s wrong. Men, women do this too, but what are you going to sex differentiate for the time being? Men organize hierarchies around tasks. They want to get something done. Okay, and it’s something that everyone in the group wants to get done. And so as soon as they aggregate themselves towards the task, a hierarchy of competence emerges because there’s individual differences. And if the group is functional, they let the guys who are better at the task rise to the top. Okay, now imagine that across tasks, there’s a proclivity for some men to rise and others not to. And those would be men who are competent and generous across tasks. And so they’re more likely to emerge as successful in the domain of task related hierarchies. All right, now we know that women are what’s the word they made across and up hierarchies. It’s one of the relational. Yes, there are men made across and down hierarchies. Women made across and up. And that’s obvious cross culturally. It’s ameliorated to some degree in countries like the Scandinavian countries, but it’s there cross culturally. They like men who are a bit older and they like men who are a bit above them in the hierarchical game, let’s say. Men vote on who the most valid man is and women peel from the top. And that value game drives evolution. It’s not random. It’s not random at all. And so that’s you said, tender defender. And I do think that’s generous productivity. And so not all we’re selected for that and sexual selection specifies that even more completely and intensely, intensely. So men can win. Men can gain that by by displaying trappings of wealth. And like the pickup artist types, they mimic tender defender and they can fool women that way. But women, you know, by and large, are looking for cues for for exactly that competence and the capacity to protect the ability to protect. Why? What else would you want for your children? You know, you. Yeah, I mean, what you’re saying links so much to Zahavi’s handicap principle in evolutionary psychology, you know, that you need honest, reliable signals. Do like women are pretty smart at seeing bullshit, you know, like. Well, they’re the survival of their children depends on it. That’s why they’re extremely smart at it as they should be. And I don’t I don’t believe that it’s a misreading of the evolutionary literature to point out that one of the reasons that we have diverged so rapidly from our from our common ancestor with chimps, the chimps see much more similar to that common ancestor than we are is because chimps. Females are non selective maters, whereas human females are highly selective maters. And, you know, this manifests itself. And if you look at these charts, they’re quite comical in some sense. If you look at how men rate women on a typical dating site, it’s pretty much a normal distribution. The average woman gets an average rating and, you know, the nine out of 10 gets a nine and and and so forth. It’s distributed as you would expect, but it’s skewed way to the left for men. Like 60 percent of men are like a four or lower. And so even in just instantaneous ratings of attractiveness, there’s sex differences. So you put it what you put it very well, though, when you said it, our survival or species literally depends on it. I love it. I just want to double click on that. OK, so then the question is, and this ties into this humanist idea. What is it that we’re aiming at? Well, what part of that is well, what are the elements that make up competence and generosity? Well, we know what competence is made out of IQ and conscientiousness. That’s a huge chunk of it. So in general problem solving capability, that’s IQ. Consciousness is diligent application of that. OK, so then you pair that with generosity and openess to experience. Yes. Well, there’d be there’d be a niche there because that’s where you get creative types and they can be radically. I think of creativity as a high risk, high return game. You’re highly likely to fail. But I’m just linking that to Jeffrey Miller’s hypothesis about creativity being a reliable indicator of genetic mutation load, which is why it would be so sexy, you know, from from the selector point of view. Oh, you’d have to elaborate out that a bit, because this this is also the case for like all sorts of other species. Right. Bowerbirds, for example, exactly. And even fish, for God’s sake. Have you ever seen those sculptures that pufferfish make at the bottom of the ocean? It’s incredible. It’s very aesthetic. And they’re beautiful and they’re complicated and they take a lot of work. It’s like birds select highly for creativity in many cases. And so you see this you see this emerge out of evolutionary process in species that are quite distant from ours. It points to something underneath that’s common, you know, even that’s common across creative fish and creative people. It’s quite the damn gap. Well, this goes back to like a lot of things we’re saying, because like human intelligence, human creativity is so complex. It’s very hard to fake. It goes back to like the voice that earlier you can’t just accidentally get like a 170 IQ, even though there’s lots of reasons why maybe it missed lower IQ is misrepresenting your IQ. But, you know, this does relate to the fact that, you know, reliable indicators of these things are important from a sexual selection point of view, as well as other points of view. Well, that’s crucial, you know, because the blind watchmaker types, they say, well, evolution is just a random process. And there’s unfortunate political and philosophical implications that instantly emerge from that. Everything’s bloody pointless. There’s no direction. There’s no such thing as real value. It’s like, wait a sec, wait a sec. There’s random mutation on the creativity production side. So life capitalizes on chance as an extra domain of creative production. Just and you see that in creative thought in people, too, because there’s a kind of a randomness about creative thinking. You open up the gates and let ideas mate, you know, promiscuously, let’s say. But there’s no reason to assume whatsoever that the selection mechanism is random, especially when you add in sexual selection. And as soon as you introduce consciousness. I think you introduce sexual selection and as soon as you introduce sexual selection, you introduce directionality and so much for randomness. You can’t derive. So the people that processes that make the watch might be random, although, you know, what’s happening down at the genetic level is pretty complex and even bacteria exchange DNA with each other. So there’s plenty of play down at the genetic level as well as room for mutation. But once you get up to the selection level, like to me, conscious choice is the fundamental determinant of evolutionary progress. And I can’t. And look, even Darwin, because Darwin was a genius, he stressed sexual selection much as natural selection. But biologists for 100 years never paid any attention to that. And no wonder, like it’s revolutionary. To be fair, I do think Jeffrey Miller, to be fair, Jeffrey Miller, I think he did a good job in his book, The Mating Mind, kind of bringing to consciousness of the fact that creativity may have evolved due to sexual selection processes itself. And as well as human consciousness itself may have evolved due to sexual. Look, look, plenty of biologists have been assessing sexual selection in the last 30 years, but it was it was under stress to a huge degree for a long, long time. And it is a game changer because sexual selection among human beings, I think, is more important determinant of of successful reproduction than natural selection. I mean, they’re the same at some level. Women are acting as the gatekeepers, and so they are natural selection in some sense. But but how can you deny the role of conscious directionality in that? And I don’t see flaws in my reasoning. I mean, it is the case that men arrange hierarchies around competence and generosity. Fundamentally, it’s not power. Even bloody chimps don’t use power. You know, they baboons. They’re a bit of a different story, but power is too unstable. And so and I think it’s of advantage to men to elect men, even though that gives some men a wider range of mating opportunities, because the net benefit of enhanced productivity, especially when coupled with generosity, is so high that the downside of the hierarchical ranking is trivial in comparison. You want the best warrior leading your rating party, obviously. I mean, we want the best person in power, whether it’s a man or woman, right? I mean, we obviously want we want, you know, a really competent woman in power as well. Of course, we and we and men select competence in women, too. But there’s differential selection to some degree, because men will mate across and down, whereas women mate across and up.