An Interview with Dr. Charles Murray

you are really asking for it [Laughter] even to raise this issue is is uh you can now be officially labeled by the southern poverty law center as a eugenicist [Music] hello everyone and welcome to unsafe space i'm your host carter laron and i'm joined as normal by carrie smith and today we are very very i'm kind of giddy i'm excited to talk to a very special guest dr charles murray dr murray holds the fa hayek emeritus chair in cultural studies at the american enterprise institute he first came to national attention with the publication of his book losing ground which has been credited as the intellectual foundation for the welfare reform act of 1996. in 1994 uh the bell curve a new york times bestseller he co-authored with late richard hernstein sparked heated controversy for its analysis of the role of iq in shaping america's class structure in 2012 and another new york times bestseller coming apart dr murray described the nature and causes of the cultural polarization that by 2016 would shape national politics in his latest book human diversity he describes recent developments in genetics and neuroscience that are transforming the social sciences he has a phd in political science from the massachusetts institute of technology and a ba in history from harvard you can follow me on twitter at charles murray we'll put links to books that you can buy uh and his website on american enterprise institute below with that uh welcome to unsafe space dr murray well i think this is the first time i've talked about these topics since i was on with sam harris uh i hope that uh you don't get the same reaction sam did but we'll find out well uh i'm okay i'm okay with that we can get that reaction and uh that'll be fine that'll be fine so i'm wondering can we you know before we delve into kind of technical matters i'd like to get your opinion on your place in american culture i mean your your writing to be honest your writing is some of the most careful and nuanced that i've ever read when people write about scientific topics if you're extremely painstakingly careful about how you word things um and yet uh your work is routinely misrepresented you're consistently vilified uh the southern poverty law center calls you a white supremacist who uses pseudoscience um and uh i guess my question is kind of broad why does the left hate you when you work so much it's not uniquely controversial i don't think um among experts in the field but they seem to really really hate you uh what's up with that uh i'm probably the worst person to ask because i'm too close to it i can tell you well first when losing ground came out long time ago that's 1984. there was uh a a new new republic article uh by a guy named greenstein who formerly headed a a left of center uh think tank and the title of the article was charles maria fraud and so that i got some of that same reaction all the way back there a couple of things i think have gone on and by the way when you talk about yourself but i'm sorry i apologize if it sounds fatuous when you're talking about your own work this way but here's my own best best guess losing ground kind of broke the rules because i said that the social policies of the 1960s were bad because they hurt poor people and they especially hurt poor black people and they most especially hurt young poor black people and the problem wasn't we were spending money on welfare queens it was that we'd introduce a destructive set of incentives uh into the black inner city people on the right aren't supposed to say that people on the right are supposed to say we've got to quit uh supporting vice and we've got to put you know supporting the welfare queens and so in the way i was poaching on the left's territory and that really irritated people greatly then in 1994 with the bell curve the kernstein and i got into a completely different level of vitriol there was yesterday uh an article in the new york times uh excoriating andrew sullivan for publishing an article for by dick clarenstein and uh about the bell curve 26 years ago yeah and was it ben smith i think the author was anyway he was saying he just couldn't he couldn't uh take sullivan seriously twenty-six years later he didn't even write the article he just published it didn't even write the article no he just uh published it along with a bunch of critiques but but the story i was about to tell was that before the article came out uh there was a lunch at the new republic which is common the author of an article comes in you have the staff sitting around and you talk over brown bag lunch and i was in the room with people who i had formerly looked upon as collegial people within my disagreed but you know we were some kind of friendly uh intellectual adversaries and and very quickly into that lunch i looked around the room and people were looking at me with hatred that's the only word i can use and i was stunned you know because i thought i knew these people and uh there you strike a nerve when you talk about iq and race that is sensitive by an order of magnitude more than any other topic i can think of and then when you add genes into that you have just an incredibly explosive mix it's it's i think the big topic yeah can i jump in and i um so my background is is such that we on the show a lot carter and i try to pull apart my old ideology i was what i call a social justice warrior for about 20 years and i went to duke university i was a biological anthropology major a women's studies minor which is where i kind of got indoctrinated into what used to be my old belief system and your name was known in my circles but i wasn't i never read the bell curve i thought i knew everything about it without reading it it was sort of this this yes this received opinion that you get of uh and and so i i thought of i i apologize first of all that i was so easily led and uh maybe just young and afraid of thinking outside of my echo chamber or of engaging with something that i i held opinions on that weren't my own and so i when i heard your name the bell curve it was said as if it was a known fact that you were a racist motivated by racism to to try and cherry-pick data to present um a racist point of view about iq and i i was just wondering if you could tell me that's my person my first introduction to you was completely wrong and uh i've since read uh i've read half of human endeavor same about halfway through it i'm really enjoying it that's great i uh we're gonna we're currently doing it for our book club selection for unsafe space and i wanted to ask you do you seem to do you have an idea about what the most commonly held misperception about you is or are there many is that is that the one now that that's really a question i can't answer i'm serious i can't answer it uh okay i i mean i would tell you that what initially uh i thought was you know i was married for 13 years to a half thai half chinese woman in in thailand i lived in thailand for six years i have two daughters that are half asian and i thought that it was kind of hard to accuse someone of being an employed nationalist if they had next race kids turns out that's not true because uh if if you can that white nationalists are well known for doing things like marrying asian women uh but that doesn't make them any less fight nationalists so i'm also a libertarian which means not only am i not a white nationalist i don't think the government should get involved in all sorts of things that it's currently involved in i don't see how you can be a libertarian and be quite natural so the accusation which is just tossed around routinely that i'm a white nationalist really mystifies me very casually yeah yeah yeah so i i wanna i wanna i do wanna get into uh your human diversity book a little bit because um i think you present a conservative and academically conservative not politically conservative and an academically conservative overview of the current state of science uh regarding three pretty radioactive topics right uh gender uh race and and class um can you can you kind of first tell us your motivation for for writing the book and then i kinda i do wanna go through at a high level maybe uh your thoughts on each one oh the motivation i i've got to confess was i'm just fascinated by this stuff i mean there's so much new that's gone on in genetics and neuroscience and it was topics i wanted to know about and nobody had written about them in a way that uh satisfied me and so the best way to to read a book that you want to read and isn't out there is to write it you know that's never done that with a couple of books i did that with human accomplishment uh so basically i was just fascinated by it but another aspect of it is that i really think this is going to revolutionize the social sciences because it's not just race and iq there is enormous resistance within the social sciences especially sociology especially anthropology as you remember from the old days uh duke uh to talking about heritability of all sorts of traits the the the role that genes plays now is really not controversial scientifically for example if you go back to iq uh is the question of genetic differences between races still up in the air yes it is is the question of the heritability of iq still being debated not by anybody who's serious uh the estimates keep moving up but it used to be that oh it was maybe 40 to 60 percent that's the that's the range that dick hernstein and i used in the bell curve and now it's it's at least half and the thing is that as people get older the heritability rises so it's around 70 80 percent for adults now you cannot do good social science when you know that all sorts of human traits are highly heritable without incorporating that into your analysis you can't enter as independent variables in a regression equation a whole bunch of things about income parental education and the quality of the neighborhood and so forth and just leave out anything having to do with the role that who your parents were played genetically in who you are so the social sciences are going to be drag kicking and screaming into this because progress is so fast in these areas and i was trying to get i was trying to take my colleagues in the social sciences and grab them by the shoulders and say come on first place you aren't going to be able to publish a journal article in 2030 that doesn't take genetics into account it's time to you know time to understand this and second don't be afraid of it it's really fast so i had i like sources i like how you said in the that people are gonna go look back at this perhaps and and just kind of shake their heads amused because the fear that constrained people from writing about the things that we know that we already know yeah we already know i mean i i relate to it a little bit though because i remember when i first read the bell curve i mean you know i had a very um obviously my view my knowledge base has changed a lot since i first read the bell curve but i i definitely had kind of a lockheed tabula rasa uh assumption about humans um and it was very hard to read that that was wrong and i needed to change that assumption and that there's some environmental but uh that you know i couldn't be an environmental essentialist anymore uh that that was just not a tenable position to take and so i imagine um i mean if you look at for example just look at the the radical trans movement and the kind of the post-modern application of gender theory um that we have happening right now they are essentially environmentalists environmental essentialists right and so uh to suggest that there's any kind of genetic link uh even though that's 100 true there is a genetic like is uh it's quite emotionally difficult for people to to get over even even though the the reason reason should bring them there very easily i i've got to say that i went through the same transformation if you go back to losing ground and look look at the last chapter i think that when it comes to education i have kind of a throwaway line i'm making the case for uh or for charter schools and and uh schools that parents you know have a lot more control over what goes on and i think i have um uh aligned to the effect that if you gave vouchers so parents could send their kids to the school they wanted to that the difference in racial difference and test scores would disappear very quickly and that was said by a person who really took for granted what you took for granted that if you got the signals right if you got the incentives right and policy was sending out the right messages that you could affect drastic large positive changes and that the only problem with the 1960s was we got the incentives wrong well within a half a dozen years after that i had i had had to come to grips with the limits on what you can do environmentally yeah and it that that is it's i'll say one of the most disturbing things in in your book to me is as a parent uh and i don't think other parents are going to like this very much but um you know as a parent it turns out that uh we don't have as much control uh and i'll just use it and you have 10 propositions that are very carefully worded so i don't want to use sloppy language i'll quote one of your propositions which is the shared environment usually plays a minor role in explaining personality abilities and social behavior and what that kind of translates to is uh hey your parenting isn't as important as you think it is that's kind of depressing i don't know what to do with that i don't like it either this is a case where i took a lot of persuading and you know my wife and i will still talk about this and her argument which i think has some basis in fact is you can't make your kids smart uh by the environment and you can't make them good but you can make them reasonably nice that that if you you can raise them so maybe the kids don't have some of the personality traits you would really like but you can at least make them sociable unless you can socialize them and and i think i think that that those are a couple of the the traits that you can have more effect on and by the way the numbers uh in the big twin studies tend to support this fairly limited role however there's another way of looking at it do you have more than one child uh not yet okay uh there's an old joke about everybody's an environmentalist until they have their second child and the reason for is once you have that second child you can see within weeks after they're born very different personalities very different personalities from the first child and you also have this strong sense of there's nothing i can do about this in terms of the fundamental characteristics of the child sometimes it's good sometimes it's bad so let me let me i want a little bit of optimism though so here's what i'm thinking i'm just going to propose this so we're saying that you know you're saying that the science shows that the shared environment don't have a lot of control over but there's this non-shared environment component which is quite significant and i don't really know how to wrap my head around what that non what are all the components that go into that non-shared environment and is it like what i'm thinking is is it like ra like happenstance singular events that actually have that move the the needle in some meaningful way and should a parent be trying to construct singular events that move the needle or or like have a a an environment that encourages more of the the right kind of happenstance events that just might move the needle i i don't know i want to do something you should know you should know mr murray that carter's the man who schedules intermittent frivolity yeah i want some kind of control i want to do something here's a way to think about the non-shared environment first um a lot of its measurement error originally it's called e in the ace model right for those of our listeners who are familiar with that and the reason it's called e is because it stood for error you have the shared environment and you have the genetic background that you can partition out algebraically and what's left over is the non-shared so don't forget the fact there's a lot of error in there the second thing is go back to when you were 18 19 20 years old you're in college there i bet there are a bunch of ways that you sort of acted consciously against the influences of your parents consciously against the influences of where you grew up uh you maybe were trying to get out into the big world if you've grown up in a small town who knows what they were but there's a period that in that period of life you were doing a lot of things which in were kind of way out of the envelope but you know the cliche about as we get older we get more like our parents it is statistically true and and so a lot of the non-shared environment i think is not just happenstance but it is it is a life it is part of life to try to buck against the genetic reigns that uh that i'm making gene sound way too powerful here but you're struggling against the nature part of it and pretty soon you get back to who you actually are underneath um [Music] the reason it's called non-shared environment is because we don't know how to manipulate so trying to come up with happenstance events to change your kids isn't going to do much much good either not to get philosophical but is that is there free will in here somewhere i don't know oh i don't think there's any problem in finding a room for free will all of the the statistics we're talking about explain if it's really powerful analysis explains maybe 40 of the variants and that's really good so that leaves a lot that's unexplained um i've never gotten upset about free will as an issue because a there is so much that's unexplained and b as my plato philosoph teacher said in my first year at college we all behave every day as if we had free will so why not believe it and and so so that don't worry about that don't worry about genetic determinism but also don't think that you can uh um sort of do an end run around the non-shared environment i'm afraid you can't damn it um well i wanted to i actually do you have more questions about the book the question i have i wanted to get back i know you do but i wanted to get to the um controversy that er because i had not heard your name for a while and then in 2017 sort of when i started leaving my old belief system and and there were a lot of things that were that came to there were a lot of things that played into that but one of the things was noticing what was happening on college campuses and the thing that happened to you at middlebury in 2017 and i don't know if you're tired of talking about this or if you can explain briefly for our audience uh the series of events there at that school but for me it was very disturbing and i it kind of worked a little bit to shake me a bit awake as to my old belief systems uh similarities to a cult maybe so can you talk a little bit about that and had something had that ever happened to you before i mean i know you've been protested before oh yeah back in back in the days when i was giving some lectures after the bell curve i had some protests and they were usually kind of choreographed which meant that we knew in advance that there were students that were going to come in they were going to be carrying signs and that also at some point they would get up and leave and they did and so the protests were there but i also got to get my lecture middlebury was brand new in so far and by the way i was giving a lecture on the themes from coming apart coming apart has absolutely nothing to do with the with the controversial aspects of the bell curve or anything else i've written uh so i was giving a lecture about something had nothing to do with the things that i was that the protesters were upset about um but they were upset because i was a eugenicist and a white nationalist and all the rest of that and not only that they were going to keep chanting and screaming all afternoon and i was never going to be able to talk and uh then later on that night when we were leaving the building it turned out that antifa and some of their allies were outside and uh we basically got mugged on our way to the car and uh professor allison stanger who had been moderating the event was seriously injured yeah uh i was not and and it was uh it was the first is one of the early examples of if you pardon me saying so a pretty nerdy guy getting that kind of treatment i mean you'd had uh what's his name uh the rabble rouser the very inflammatory guy milo the milo yeah yeah he'd he'd rather i mean come on he was trying real hard to get that reaction and and so i was i was sort of the first of uh of the innocuous people in terms of my behavior and my presentation and so forth you've got that kind of reaction that was pretty scary but it's nothing compared to what's going on now where the degree to which the degree to which you cannot even whisper to your colleague any some you know doubts about uh things is is really i'm exaggerating there okay that's hyperbole but it's pretty bad you certainly cannot in a faculty meeting make a data-driven statement that upsets the woke you cannot do that you're in trouble if you do well this leads to a question i was going to ask you about because it you know we see that the college students in antifa hate you and are willing to be violent but that was a question that like i you know you talk about you talk about the state of science of current science let's just use genetics as an example um in a way that shouldn't really be controversial among among experts in that field like you're not you're not grasping at straws or making wild claims or you're taking a survey and this seems to be the consensus at the current time in this field are you are you ostracized even by the experts in the field or the experts in those fields kind of quietly say like yeah you're right we'll just you know we can't talk about it um the first place if you're talking about human diversity that book has not been reviewed by the new york times well it had the daily new york times had a review written by a fine arts person of the fine arts degree which is not really the background you're looking for in something to review university but not in the sunday times book review not be viewed in the wall street journal not reviewed in the washington post it's so in one sense there has that's kind of interesting because i have not written a book for a long time that has not gotten reviewed in all three places okay so that was kind of interesting i'm glad to say that i have had a number of geneticists including some who've said this on a blog on their blogs and another who's going to be saying it in a review that will be coming out shortly you say that in terms of the way i'm quite precise and accurate in my discussion of genetics and that that gratifies me a lot and i've had some similar comments from neuroscientists about my presentation of the the state of neuroscience so my problems are not with geneticists or with neuroscientists as far as i can tell it's with social scientists but even they have kept very quiet about this book and part of the reason is perhaps i made it too long and dense occasionally i wonder if it's just much more convenient not to give it any publicity because i do say some pretty inflammatory things in a quiet way about differences between males and females and what we're finding out about genetic differences in different ancestral populations and what my appendices i have one about that should be you know having the lgbt people wanting to burn down my house and i have another one where i talk about uh the greater male variants hypothesis that got the kid out at google fired and the rest of it not a peep so i have not had problem with the scientists that i have been summarizing and characterizing that haven't had a problem yet at all well that's that's informative it me you know it it uh it means that there's not really arguments against what you're saying from a scientific perspective there's just a lack of a or maybe a fear to even bring the topics up uh among social scientists because you know they don't want to have to to have that conversation you know you mention in your book that you think polygenics will defeat the orthodoxy of those environmental essentialists eventually the in the social sciences that they're gonna they're gonna have to accept the predictive power that you think is going to happen with polygenics and you make a strong case for that but the question that i was asking myself was well they seem to ignore sex differences pretty effectively uh like what makes you think that more data in another field is going to convince them well by the way the the staying power of the denial of sex differences has been really impressive i grant you that it is also uh undergoing a lot of evolution already so that uh things that were you know some years ago early 2000s uh janet hyde came out with the hypothesis that of small differences between men and women she by the way she writes in a very civil uh intellectually uh rigorous manner and she was making the case that yeah there are lots of differences on a lot of traits but they tend to be small and now there is growing consensus that well yeah if you've got seven different comparatively small effects but they're all conceptually related that adds up to a very big uh combined difference and and there is i think a shifting consensus in the social sciences about that i also think there is a shifting consensus about differences between men and women in terms of their their interests one of my own favorite parts of the book is where i take a long look at the study of gifted talented youth that was started at the university of johns hopkins by julian stanley and the reason i love that data set because i followed these people now for 30 odd years is that everybody in that data set had an iq of about 140. i mean so you had you completely sidestep any issues of are men smarter than women and that kind of thing everybody in this data set was easily smart enough to do anything they wanted to intellectually and furthermore they had grown up in the washington baltimore philadelphia area to upper middle class parents uh during the 1970s and uh whatever's the time you aren't old enough to remember it i was a parent at that point already gender neutral toys were really big in that in that group and so was raising your child in gender-neutral ways hadn't percolated down to the rest of america but in those circles you had young women or girls at that point being raised to at an era where they were saying you can have it all you still have the differences in the uh tendency of women to head toward if they go to sciences they they head toward biology instead of pure mathematics uh if they often go into the social sciences or they go into the humanities the guys tend to go into the hard sciences and i sense a comfortable certainly comfortable in terms of this cohort of women who were in the study but i think in the larger one saying yeah guess what men and women do have different profiles on average the old overlapping distributions thing where yeah there's a difference but you have lots of lots of women who love to study physics and you have lots of men who love to study poetry but you've got different needs and the distributions overlap so yeah the issue about sex differences and denial sex differences has been very tenacious it's it's crumbling as for polygenic scores here's going to be the problem i think uh the social sciences use regression as sort of their workhorse and uh i can't go into it in any detail but for those who aren't familiar with it basically you've got a thing you're trying to explain called the dependent variable the how much education you get and you're you have independent variables which are supposed to explain it you know how much income do your parents have that's where they live uh so forth and so on apologetic scores are going to be another variable that you can enter in with all of those standard environmental variables and every time that someone does it in a published article it is going to make a huge difference to the results so you've got social scientists who are doing the standard list of topics they've always done but you got to do a literature review at the beginning of the article and it's going to be a technical literature out there which if you have not included if you haven't taken genetics into account at some point everybody's just going to say well you know but we know what happens when you take genetics into account and it sort of overthrows all your conclusions given the way that the social sciences work on policy related issues the kind i deal with i don't see how they get around that on the other hand i'm this wild-eyed idealistic optimist i guess in some respects but i don't think by 2030 i don't think you're going to be able to make a living as a social scientist who doesn't deal with that one of the most interesting parts of the the chapters on sex differences were i think is is the fact that you mentioned that study after study found that average sex differences between men and women increased or was higher in the countries that were more egalitarian where things were more equal where women and men were choose were free to choose what they wanted to pursue and maybe not constrained by any social ideas of sex or gender roles um how how has that how those studies been received and i was surprised that there was more than one of them actually because i i thought it would be something controversial like let's not look at this again yeah it's it's it's it's very counter-intuitive everybody and i suppose if i thought about this before i started reading the studies i would have gone along with everybody else would assume that some as some aspects of male female differences are environmental because we all know from experience that that young women were discouraged from going into certain fields my older sister went to college in the late 1950s in ames iowa iowa state and wanted to be an architect so she was sitting in a calculus course or engineering course as a freshman and the professor from the podium says he doesn't think girls have any business being in engineering that's an environmental pressure and it was real and you'd say well as as countries become more egalitarian some of that difference is going to go away it turned and per and by the way i think that did happen during the late 1960s and through the 1970s and into the 1980s i think that the trend lines in the choices that women made educationally and occupationally are clear evidence that women had opportunities open up and they took advantage of them but then there was kind of a new equilibrium that was reached so here's what happens as you briefly said it turns out that men and women are more different in sweden than they are in bangladesh you know they're more different in norway than than they are in saudi arabia in terms of personality traits in particular and so there's been a lot of scrambling and by the way as you said it's not one study this has been replicated now four five six times always comes out the same there is a plausible explanation if you're a really bright woman who uh can be an engineer in bangladesh you are also living in a country where being an engineer is one of the few really well-paying jobs that are available to you it's much more attractive economically than than becoming a secondary school teacher or you know uh being in humanities so you may prefer verbally oriented occupations but you got the skills to be an engineer so you become an engineer you're a woman with exactly the same skill set in sweden you can make a living doing what you want to do a whole lot easier than the woman in bangladesh so you go with the way you want however i got to add something to this carrie turns out with a lot of these changes it's the guys who do more changing than the women do yes that was interesting yeah which is not always a good thing but uh but but that does seem to be the case fascinating it's a this is what i would say to people who are thinking about whether to pick up uh human diversity is this stuff is really interesting and now the fact is that uh as as you have mentioned um i have very carefully worded propositions in there you know i probably bend over backwards too much to uh to make the pros innocuous but if you look if you read between the lines there's really some very exciting stuff in that book yeah absolutely and uh i i do think it's fascinating and it makes you know whenever i find something like this it makes me want to go get maybe i should go get a degree and whatever maybe i should go take a class in genetics because it's just there's so much i don't have time to do all this but i'm one of those kind of people who just you know now i want to go study genetics um but let's let's get into the biggest most radioactive topic because i want to um i'd like to talk about it i'm going to talk about race but i'm going gonna use your so the way that just for people who haven't read the book you have ten propositions that you carefully worded so that you're that you'll defend these propositions but not summations of them or distortions of them or you know someone's paraphrasing so i'm gonna i'm gonna read two of the race propositions and um and i think they're fascinating and have wide-reaching effects one is human populations are genetically distinctive in a way that corresponds to self-identified race and ethnicity and two is evolutionary selection pressures since human left humans left africa have been extensive and mostly local now both of those things actually are not controversial to someone who knows nothing about anything and just lives in the world and sees people behave in ways and and and knows maybe a little bit about evolution and goes well yeah of course there's pressures i mean there must be pressures because people turned out differently like it doesn't sound like those are controversial but in in academia and in modern uh mainstream right now they're extremely controversial statements let's pick them apart let's start with the first one there is a claim which you agree with that the word race has kind of racist origins um and is is not the right word to be using so you're using this term um ancestral populations i think can you tease that a little bit and explain to people what the difference is uh by the way if people listen to this and say race is a much shorter word than ancestral populations i agree with you but it's also true the word race carries a lot of baggage with it and so what you do genetically is you don't start with the races that exist out there and then see if you can see genetic variations that correspond to them what you what you can do instead is take genetic variants the problem here is there's such a specific technical language i'm going to use one thing called snips single nucleotide polymorphism a snip can take on more than one form that's what creates variation among people most of our most of our bits of genetic information are the same for everybody but their snips are what create all the variation and i will say very briefly as well that all complex traits are determined by thousands of snips just about most of the bar okay so what you can do is take a cluster analysis of variants of these snips and just see how they cluster in a statistical sense in a factor analysis sense well guess what they cluster in ways which correspond if if you want five clusters those five clusters are going to correspond to people's whose ancestry was sub-saharan africa uh europe uh the americas uh oceania and and asia if you then want to look at 10 or 12 clusters you can experience increasing number of clusters what happens is it doesn't transform the picture what it does is simply make it more detailed so you can discriminate between east asians and south asians and so forth and so on uh the proof that this works is the fact that you can send 100 bucks into 23andme and get back uh proposed profile which says you're 65 percent swedish and 22 uh of italian and so forth and so on and the reason they can do that is that this science i hate to use the phrase settled science but this is this is in the genetics world been there done that this is old news uh doesn't surprise anybody but the fact is it's really easy genetically to take people a sample of people you've never seen them and you can say this person is uh european origin looks like a european this person is sub-saharan african and you're going to be right 98 90 of the time okay they even gave me my neanderthal percentage they do now you've got to take some of this assault because um uh you know if it turns out that somebody says you're three percent melanesian don't go looking for a polyamorous relationship that a great grandfather had when he was out in tahiti uh what's happened is probably there is a a portion of your your genetic profile uh which could lead to that conclusion but it's a small proportion and and so it's right about when the 65 percent of swedish yeah that's a pretty solid number the details can get uh tricky okay so that's that's the first of those that were genetically distinctive in ways which correspond to ancestral populations and people who get excited about that or also people who are upset about it probably also have gotten their profile from 23andme and haven't sort of the nickel hasn't dropped as to what's going on here the second one is the really interesting um and that is that since humans dispersed out of africa there has been considerable evolution and it has been very local a bit of background here you had steven j gould uh who was it you know author of uh miss measure of man and a bunch of other things who was very successful in persuading a lot of people uh that and by the way it was generally accepted at that time that evolution is such a slow process that the 60 70 000 years since humans left africa is not enough time for anything important to have happened and the reason i'm sorry i don't interrupt but i have a question about that i've always had a question about that why was that the consensus when it's very clear that there was some evolutionary pressure because there are traits that are visible so clearly some evolution happened why is it this why was it this weird orthodoxy that like well only that and nothing else we're very sure that there could be no other evolution except for that evolution yeah for example even something available this phrase that somebody likes uh stephen gould would use was with skin color and he said we know now that it's literally only skin deep as if the changing of skin color was the case well if you've got a lot more sunshine down on the equator you're going to have darker skin than if you're well it turns out it's not nearly as simple as that but you could do that well we also knew that lactose tolerance was way different uh for caucasians and further populations that's a fairly complex change we knew that sickle cell anemia exists in africa it's like you're right there was a there were a bunch of of reason there are a bunch of known differences uh but it was sort of said well that doesn't get to cognition though that can't run personality those are simpler well that was never very strong but people believed that and it was easier to believe that because evolution that's driven by random mutations is really really slow and what has been discovered over the last 20 years especially 25 years is that there can be changes in what's called standing variation much more quickly so you're not waiting for a brand new mutation whereby a snip does something different than it's ever done before you have a variety of of snips that are associated let's say with something like thriftiness that trade the threat of thriftiness and they've been there all along they evolved for whatever reasons they had other uses for the human survival and evolution but in a hunter-gatherer culture being thrifty doesn't make any sense because the meat's going to rot in a couple of days and you don't have many possessions to begin with you invent agriculture what happens all at once being thrifty has all sorts of evolutionary advantages both in sexual selection more likely to attract a woman if you've been thrifty and are prosperous and are a good you know a good bet for a for a partner uh but also simply you can get prosperous in an agricultural society in a way you can't get prosperous in a hunter-gatherer well you can have rapids by the way we have not proved that thriftiness genes have changed all right i'm using that as an illustration that you can fairly quickly you can get major changes and by the way we already know that's true from all sorts of uh animal husbandry things that have been going on for centuries and the famous silver fox experiment that was done in russia whereby they they chose silver fox generations for tameness they bred deliberately for tameness and they got within a relatively sheer number of generations dogged like silver foxes so that's a major change in the the reason the received wisdom of genetics now that there has been a lot of change since humans left africa and it's been quite specific it's occurred differently in populations that are now located in europe than it did in populations that were in east asia for example right and this comports with i mean i know you've avoided evolutionary psychology which we can talk about maybe why uh but um i i was speaking with an evolutionary psychologist a couple years ago who explained that actually from an evolutionary perspective it's much cheaper evolutionarily to change behavior than it is to develop a new physical trait so if you see a population where there's been pressure enough to develop a new physical trait it's very likely that there's been that behavioral changes happened well before that because behavior is actually very cheap evolutionary to turn on and off yep yep and and just really quickly i did avoid evolutionary psychology in the book because i know exactly what would have happened had i put it in there that people could have sidestepped all the things i was saying about changes in the science and say oh more of these just so stories where men come up with these reasons why they're promiscuous and they're driven to it by evolutionary pressures that aren't their fault and that kind of stuff the the success of the critics of evolutionary psychology and demonizing it as just those stories is very sad because it's one of the most exciting branches of the social of the sciences out there yeah so i i guess i guess the next question is given what you're talking about given the fact that there is um that there are ancestral populations that are empirically derived at without preconceived notions of where they are and they they kind of map roughly onto race not exactly um and given that we know there's evolutionary pressure that has been as you would say extensive and mostly local the result is just just to clarify for people the result is what and then what do we do with that that's those well why don't you uh read the third of the propositions if you have it right in fact sure i do i do the third one is continental population differences in variants associated with personalities abilities and social behavior are common yeah uh that's pretty opaque okay here's the story there have over the as recently as 2015 not very long ago the total number of genetic variants that were known to be associated with iq was numbered on the fingers of one hand i think that was true 2015 maybe it's 2014. we now have well over a thousand variants associated with iq that we were familiar with we have i'd say we i haven't done any of this um the geneticists have hundreds of variants for virtually any personality trait you want to mention a lot of cognitive ailments all sorts of things so in each of these cases you've got several hundred at least variants associated with these statistically they still don't explain a lot of the variance yet they're predicted but they've you know there's it's early days yet however what you can say is all right you've got these variants that are associated let's say with iq what happens when you plot the frequencies of these of the alleles and these variants sorry for the jargon sort of just a two-dimensional plot so on one axis you've got people from sub-saharan africa or that ancestry on the vertical axis you've got people who from china in so far as can a cognitive profiles are the same the allele frequencies for those variants associated with iq should cluster very close to the diagonal they should be very similar for both populations well it is true that they are within continents so that if you take a tribe in kenya and a tribe in nigeria which are very different to begin with and then if you take a pop a sample of americans who live in the western united states who are african-american and you plot their allele frequencies the correlations are in the range of 0.8 to 0.99 0.98 you take a population from china and a population from kenya and the correlation is likely to be on the order of 0.7.74 0.75 that's still a high correlation of the standards of the social sciences a correlation of that size means that when you take a look at that scatter plot they're all over the map if you are saying there is no genetic source of personality and cognitive differences you have to assume that these very different allele sets of allele frequencies all balance out well that's just not very likely especially when you can already do the analysis it says here are i keep on talking about iq i could say extraversion let's say the the the variance associated with personality extroversion of the ones that give a plus to that they in one population uh outnumber the other population six to forty so you have way more variants that are going to promote extraversion in one population than in another population that then it becomes almost impossible that they balance out so what i'm saying in that chapter and uh by the way one of the commentators on twitter has referred to this as intellectual cowardice because i was too too conservative i'm saying there are going to be a lot of genetic contributions to personality traits and cognition out there that separate what we've ordinarily in the past called races and we are just sticking our heads in the sand if we don't recognize that the fact that that was also said in the new york times op-ed piece by david reich an extremely highly respected geneticist who specializes in ancient genomes doesn't seem to register with people um he was being no more provocative than i was and no more no less he's just saying folks calm down because this is something that we're going to be confronted with we don't need to think it's the end of the world because it's not it's going to be overlapping distributions there are going to be minor changes in a lot of but come on quit this hysterical denial that there's any genetic source of difference among the groups we call races one of the things you mentioned in your in the book about um you very clearly state at one point that that because there are genetic differences it doesn't mean that there's a moral attachment to uh or a moral moral value attached to any of these genetic differences and i find it really interesting that we seem to attach a moral value to um certain things like iq but we don't attach a moral value or we don't seem to attach one to athletic ability or uh you know how fast someone can run and and and i'm struggling to understand why that is why is it attached to certain things and not others do you have any i'm not that you can answer that but the dirty little secret is that there are a whole lot of people in the intellectual elite what dick hernstein and i called the cognitive elite who do think that the measure of human worth is iq they'll never say so they'll never say so but uh my wife has a wonderful way of putting it she's herself as a phd and you know went you know oxford and yale so she knows this world very well and when i was getting all the criticism about iq wasn't really all that important she said one time you know when people are putting on their makeup or shaving in the morning if they're in an academic faculty they aren't worried about their publication list versus their colleagues they're worried about how smart they are relative to their colleagues intellectual ability is the coin of the realm in academia uh and and you folks are involved with academia if you want to argue with me you can i think that's probably a true statement and so why do people attach a moral value to it because an appalling number of people in the american elite put way too much importance on iq as a measure of a person's worth i i i think you're 100 correct and i think that the scary thing for them would be to say you know what your iq is not something you can be proud of because it's not there's no action that you took to deserve it it's a you can't be any more proud of it than you know uh some genetic variation you have on something else it's not a thing to be proud of because it's not related to actions you took it's not a volitional thing there's no there's no moral value to it and i think it scares a lot of uh people in that elitist class precisely because well without that why should i be ruling and and rich and in charge if if i'm not superior like then what um i agree it's uh so they want they want to be seen as superior because they um they see themselves as being higher iq but they don't want to be seen as racist so therefore they must say that high iq is not uh high iq is not different among great there's no genetic difference do i have this right there are so many things that are just plain obviously cognitive dissonance on a massive scale that's going on in academia today um not just academia i would i would broaden the set of people it's what i called the uh uh the new upper class in in coming apart where they live their lives according to very conservative standards in many ways they get married they don't have babies out of wedlock they are probably too passionately devoted to their children and just leave their kids alone a little bit more but but you know they're good parents in that sense they work long hours they they behave in all of these extremely traditional ways and then in all of their public utterances on everything they said well you can't say it's better to be married when you have children than to be single well you can you know you can't say that and they go through all the things that they will not make value judgments about where they very clearly have made value judgments in their own lives in practice in practice they do not preach what they practice you know since we're since we're on hot button topics a related topic here is uh is dysgenic pressure and it's something that i wish people would talk about more because we have this uh we have this i think correctly moral understanding that eugenics is bad bad bad eugenics is bad uh we don't have government push push eugenics um but we seem to not care if the government is doing things that are causing dysgenic pressure uh and i'm wondering if you could talk about that a little bit because something that scares me i mean you've talked about the cognitive elite and separation of of cognitive elite from the rest of the i will say that the masses and uh i'm particularly concerned about this genetic pressure because our problems are just going to get worse if we continue pushing dysgenic pressure on some of the population and while the cognitive elite continue to intermarry and and move the other direction you are really asking for it [Laughter] even to raise this issue is is uh you can now be officially labeled by the southern poverty law center as a eugenicist i mean you you've you can't take it back you've already committed yourself look oh well carter's a big fan of the movie idiocracy i don't know if you've seen that movie but we can just say let me just make a couple of comments about eugenics and dysgenics and so forth the first is i would say to all of my high iq friends who have gotten married uh did you get married to if you're a woman did you get married to a really dumb guy because he was cute no you didn't you got married to as smart a person as you could find probably or at least they had to be more than you are not going to have a baby with somebody who's dumb because no matter what you say publicly about the heritability of iq you know in your heart that it's there so the the new upper class practices eugenics constantly in their own lives in trying to come up with the smartest best babies they can come up with the second thing is something dick currency and i said in the last chapter of the bell curve that got me labeled as eugenices would have gotten dicta labeled such be lived and that is we said you know what when when you subsidize births by by uh people who couldn't ordinarily afford to have babies and would have to would get married because they'd want a young woman who would get married because they wouldn't want to try to raise a baby on their own all the you are in effect having a a a dysgenic intervention you are encouraging the birth of babies forget about iq you're encouraging the birth of babies to to situations which are not going to be good for that baby in a variety of ways and that's true but the well here's the good news the good news is dysgenic pressures aren't as bad as a lot of people think they're there but uh birth rates have fallen dramatically not only among the highly educated they have also dropped substantially among people are having said that the dysgenic pressures are there nobody's ever going to change policy to stop that because to change policy would be to do a couple of things one is that it would be be very making very judgmental statements about you know it's really important children have a father as well as a mother it's really important that people be emotionally mature enough to be parents etc etc that's never going to fly and it would also mean watching withdrawal of some kinds of support from young mothers which nobody wants to see i mean nobody wants to see a baby suffering for something that the baby had nothing to do with and that's a completely understandable human practice uh human response i think that the way out of this is never going to be a policy change i think the way out of this is going to be when people are once again comfortable saying to their own children but also saying more broadly to the society as a whole here are the arrangements under which children should come into the world that's best for the children and we are morally responsible all of us to do all we can to encourage people to make those decisions that lead to babies being born in those circumstances it's got to be a moral an opening up of moral discourse where people are willing to make judgments that's going to help in this policy he's never going to do a thing for like a lot of things we talk about it comes down to it is not necessarily a problem for the government it's a cultural problem yeah yep uh i think that we are watching a nation right now that is consumed by cultural problems not political ones yeah and they've it's it that they take the form of politics but it's it's downstream from cultural polarization yeah i mean you've said this this brings me to another thing that i wanted to talk to you about uh i'm usually the pessimist on the show but i'm gonna quote some stuff back to you uh i think you've said the american experiment is doomed to fail and won't survive our children can you expound upon that a little bit yeah yeah this was in a book um well i've said it a couple of times but it was a book called by the people where i'm saying look the american project as i understand it is the notion that people should be lived to free to live their lives as they see fit as long as they accord the same freedom to everyone else and the government's role is to provide a safe environment for that enterprise and otherwise step aside which is basically my way of thinking about libertarianism it's it's also a way of saying what the original constitution was aiming for that's dead there is no aspect of american life in which you can be sure that nine justices of the supreme court would say this is not the government's job you are not permitted to enter this area uh because the limits are gone they went a long time ago so it's dead in that respect uh the good news is that there are lots of ways in which you can have de facto freedom in your lives unfortunately those ways are available to people like us a lot more than they are to the poor to minorities to ordinary people i mean people like me can live where we want to live in the kinds of neighborhoods we want to live in we can send our kids to the children of the schools we want to send them to we have unparalleled access electronically to knowledge into all sorts of tools that we take advantage of and we can sort of buy our way out of a whole lot of the problems that poor people can't buy their way out um once again this is not a problem is ever going to be fixed because the founders had it exactly right that you've got to put iron bands on the government to prevent it from ever getting into certain kinds of activities because if you don't have the iron bans you will have factions and those factions will slowly erode them and uh that's happened and you can't get the bands back on again the creation of the american project happened at one historical moment when everything all the stars came together um and something happened that is unlikely ever to happen again in human history that's maybe maybe that's a little bit too long-term uh pessimism do you think that i mean we're kind of far afield from the human diversity stuff but it's still fascinating to me do you think that um do you think that could happen in a like a lot of people are saying that we're in we're about to have a civil war we're in a low-level civil war there's at least a cultural war happening if there's not a civil war on the horizon i mean do you think that there's a large enough subset of the population who wants to support the original ideas of the founders and could break away and kind of keep the flame going even if it's not in the 50 states i spent the last four years watching all sorts of people who professed to all have the same ideas i had about freedom and about the role of government and all the rest of that who have adopted agreement on policies i thought that would outrage them and the trump administration forget about everything else just about the spending but in all sorts of other ways i've reaching the end of my life really depressed about what's happened to the libertarian movement libertarian of the small l limited the limited government movement that was a good-sized movement particularly in the 1990s it looked like it was really gaining ground and then you had the bombing in oklahoma city which was just a huge event in terms psychologically in terms of what it did to the advocacy for limited government and uh which we never really recovered from that and and now we have trump and we have proven how many sunshine patriots we had in the limited government movement they're gone and i don't see how in the future they can ever come back and espouse conservative slash limited government ideals without being terminally embarrassed given what they have defended the last four years i mean you've got a little bit more partisan there than i did no no no i i think i mean i could probably disagree a little bit with some of that only because i think not everyone that i i don't know maybe not it depends on i don't really support trump but uh because i hate his policies as you're saying so i i'm okay with with that part of what you're saying but i guess um i guess the the question though is like if if it's dead oh god this is so depressing if it's dead if there's real like i find a lot of people who will espouse those ideas also and say like well i believe in limited government but not when it's limited in a way that bothers me i want the government to you know i wanted to do xyz with the government um do you think though that you know you said this kind of breitbartian thing that the culture is upstream of of politics and the problems with culture which which you know i agree with and we talk about on the show a lot um trump is trump's the only one at least fighting the the cultural war against the social justice ideology i think he's bad on basically all the other libertarian things and spending and everything like he's he's horrible he's not a libertarian he's horrible but uh i think a lot of people see an existential threat of like literal marxists that want to take the country and he's kind of the only one standing up to them is that not accurate in your view yeah there was no way in which anything i said was intended to be an endorsement of the other side and and so much so that uh i am looking at the problem of going into the ballot box and and uh saying i don't have a candidate you know um uh the the because i i never intended to get into politics uh there are a variety of ways in which i'm glad trump was president instead of hillary and there are a lot of ways that if biden is elected i'm scared stiff so i think that i think that we have to stop looking for a lot of our solutions to our problems in politics because we're doomed to disappointment and i think that there is a lot to be said at this point for focusing on our little platoons because a lot of those little platoons still work really well i'm out here in a little town in maryland i've been for 30 years it's a real community it's one that tocqueville would recognize and we are not alone i think the real cultural divide these days in this country is not between races it's not even between economic levels you have lots of people who made lots of money out in topeka and peoria and the heartland who have a big house and have lots of money and also go down to the local bar and and have beers with the guys uh and work in the factory you know there are a lot of that there's a lot of ways in which a lot of america still functions in a very traditionally american way with communities solving their own problems with lots of mixing among people in the big cities that's not true and so i have very little hope for changing the nation but all of us have who are lucky enough to have some resources anyway have it within our power to choose little platoons that are very satisfying in some very traditional lives i guess that's the optimism carter's carter's looking for a place to build a medium-sized platoon where we can all relocate so i i could tell that's the question he was getting too is where i mean i mean not i mean look i i don't i do i do share the pessimism that the u.s is beyond hope at this point and i think you articulated well the you know in the sense that the founders intended it to be is beyond hope right right um and and so okay uh the us is just another nation state uh and how powerful it will be on the world stage is unknown um but i do but i do have i i don't know maybe i do have is it irrational optimism to say like there are a lot of people maybe in the small towns who at least espouse some version of what you're talking about that uh i don't know i i i'd love to have them separate somewhere you we all go to the same towns in the same spot and say goodbye to the rest of the united states well just let me emphasize to you that we don't sit around in the town i live in talking politics either um what we do is and this is not a special town it's very ordinary we had a fire up the street where family got burned up the fire was not out uh at the point at which all sorts of people in town had already taken all sorts of steps to help the people who got burned out and things being being brought to local collection points for them it was just this spontaneous unorganized by all sorts of people in town because this is what you do when one of your neighbors had a problem and i'm sure a lot of them vote different ways and so forth and that doesn't need to get in your way that's one of the saddest things that i think right now is that if somebody's on the other side of the political fence they must be evil as opposed to just disagreeing with you and uh one of the most encouraging things and maybe that's something we can conclude on one of the most encouraging things that i get out of polling data is how few people pay any attention to politics i mean the numbers are really stunning of the number of americans who live their lives and sort of a couple of weeks before the election say well i suppose i better figure out what's going on i just love it that's that's one of the few things which gives me hope that uh those of us who spend our lives in the middle of this cauldron uh that probably all three of us live in uh should be it should be an instructive lesson for us and how to live our own lives i love that because people are busy living lives they're feeding their kids going to work they're not yeah well i think that's politics deserves even less attention than that so the fact that it's low is good and uh yeah i agree that's enough that's a that's some optimism it's good optimism to end on um dr murray i really appreciate your time i won't keep you too much longer but i i really appreciate your time and love your work i now got to read some more books that i've i found out that you wrote that i didn't read um in the past but um yeah i think you are uh you're very courageous and measured voice that i really wish people would pay attention to because you're bringing uh sci the cutting edge science not even always cutting edge but the state of science to lay people in a way that's very careful shouldn't be controversial and everyone should be able to digest and read and understand and uh i really appreciate you for that so so thank you i've enjoyed it a lot both of you appreciate it thanks for watching if you're new to the channel we have a deep content library that includes interviews with everyone from mike cernovich to megan murphy so go check it out if you'd like to see more please consider supporting the show by visiting unsafespace.com donate you can find us on all the major social media platforms at least for now and you can find a community of like-minded individuals on our unsafe space chat on telegram see you there warning this is an unsafe space dangerous ideas have been detected the content of this production has not been authorized by the cathedral pay no attention to it for your protection the following co-conspirators have been unpersoned and marked for cancellation please avoid any contact with these individuals i have calculated a 94.9 chance that their ideas are more contagious than coved [Music] if you think about it no one should be allowed to express opinions but don't think about it i mean that's not your job [Music] thinking has been scientifically proven to be less efficient than compliance remain calm the new group of nine people will enforce the constitution just as well as all previous sets of nine people have done computer voice curtis never mind that last line is fake news please disregard it and return to your safe space immediately there will be cake you

Channel: Unsafe Space

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Length: 82min 53sec (4973 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 23 2020