 Welcome to episode number 14 of What Sex Got To Do With It, where we're talking about chapter 13. The reason that we're one chapter behind is because we started the first episode with doing the acknowledgment, so I hope that you will go and check that episode. That was the first and really good one. But I'm here with my favorite great-grandmother in all the solar system. And I tell you, the James Wett telescope has been like scanning solar system, and you're it. You're it. So these chapters call out talking sense to a species with all the answers. Yeah, and the origin of that chapter title is the difficulty that it is to give a hard truth to a species that's as good at rationalizing its behavior as we are. And we are genius at it. We're really, really good at telling ourselves that what benefits us personally really is good for everybody. And we're very good at denying the benefits of the privileges we've had in our lives. We all want to believe that we've worked hard for what we have. And to be told, wait, wait, wait. Your brain is a tricky little creature there, and it's not always telling you the truth. So that's why it's hard to talk to a species with all the answers. We're clever. Yep, yep, I thought that's where you're headed. But I like what the pattern that we have here is. It's kind of nice to just understand what's going through the author's head and as she came up with it. So as was chapter 12, I'm going to be bouncing around a lot. There's just a lot of good writing here. That's ideas that sparked a lot of questions for me. So let's talk about eugenics. And you just say how that is, well, let's just say not a good idea, short-sighted. I just want to understand what you mean by eugenics, because do you consider that when we do gene editing to cure disease eugenics? Not to cure disease. I think we have to be careful when we do gene editing. I'm in favor of a lot of it. Like, I was really excited to hear that there's some possibility to treat some really awful diseases through gene editing. But the variability in our genome is one of our strengths. It's one of the wonderful things about sexual reproduction. Not all the traits that we carry are expressed at any time, as you know, the dominant, the recessive traits. So we can adapt, we're nimble on our feet. We can adapt more quickly. Should we suddenly be presented with a new challenge? And I think they're happening all the time. And we don't really yet know what genes we might have to rely on in the future. So to use gene editing in a way, for example, in one of the science book club discussions, someone was saying, oh, well, you know, with gene editing in just a few generations, everyone can have IQs over 200. And I'm thinking, what a horrible thing to select just for intelligence. Who decides what's needed? Do we want us to be ever more clever denying our own responsibility for things? So I think there's a danger. Those who are doing the editing tend to want the genes that they carry to value the traits that they have, superintelligence. Certainly people are, you know. So I think we have to be careful not to put value judgments on genetic variability. You certainly am opposed to disease, things that cause suffering and hardship. But we don't yet know what traits we might really need. So let's make sure we preserve genetic variability I think that's really important. Right, but this is, so I was maybe thinking that the difference, though, between being treating disease and eugenics is that eugenics happens before birth, being in a treating disease, or before, or not even, I guess you could even say it's not necessarily before birth, because to the extent that you determined that there was something that is affecting the embryo or the fetus, that it was better treated sooner rather than later, I mean, I kind of tussle with me fixing something versus designing something. Yeah, there's a difference between fixing and designing. You know, the Japanese geneticist or Chinese was he. I forget. I think he was maybe Chinese, I forget, who, what did he do with embryo implants? He did some kind of gene editing that made the children immune to, was it AIDS or HIV, I think. And just outrage about that, first of all, he did it with it, because they're guidelines against doing that kind of thing. He wasn't curing. He was trying to impose a future immunity to something. And that's going to be heritable now. They'll pass that down to their offspring, probably. So I'm not sure what else it might. You know, it was done without enough knowledge and with not enough consensus around it. And I think we have to be really, really careful about playing God. I'm thrilled when diseases are able to be corrected. I mean, cystic fibrosis, diabetes, all kinds of things that perhaps they can do gene editing, you know, CRISPR techniques to correct for diseases. I mean, I'm in favor of preventing suffering. I'm very opposed to creating a master race. You know, the super human being. All children are beautiful. All children are healthy. You know, I happen to really love human variability. I am enchanted by neurological variability. How differently we see the world without realizing necessarily that we're not seeing it quite the same way everyone else is. So I would hate, I hate the idea of designer babies, quite frankly. I really, that makes, I think we would lose so much more than we would gain. But I want to prevent suffering, but preserve variability. Does that make sense? Yes, yes, definitely. I'm just exploring some. Yeah, no, you know, the discussion. Yeah, no, no, no. We're not advocating for this or for that. We're kind of, and it's important to just kind of think about how you feel. And maybe I'll go home and think, oh, no, no, no. Did I say that wrong? Do I really mean that? So dialogue with other humans is always important. So let's just ahead me 100,000, a million generations from now. Without any eugenics, we now find ourselves with species with less variation. And someone says, you know what, we can increase the variation. But we have to do it, of course, dramatically. What would you think then? Well, first of all, I think you're unbelievably optimistic to assume that humans are still going to be around more than, I don't know. You're taking us, so we have a limited time here. Let's go with my premise. We go with your premise. But I think human reproductive behavior produces variability. And mutations occur spontaneously. And I think if you want more variability, that suddenly you have a species without variability. But less, just less. With less. Let's give you a little less. But if it has less, because it's been crispered out of us? No, no, no. I said there's been no genetic manipulation by people. Oh, I think variability is good. Because it prepares you in advance for circumstances that you can't foresee. It gives you genetic options that you might not be using now, but that might be useful in the future. As I say, I am personally biased in favor of a lot of variability. Yeah. Yeah, I was just trying to get at me. I was just trying to tease out whether there might be a case where you feel that as humans can go in and do stuff with the genome, with the intention of doing good. So could you just, yeah, go ahead. I want to be cautious about messing with mother nature. Who defines what good is? You know, that's scary, scary stuff. You know, sociopathologists were accused of being a genesis, which I always found to be a completely ridiculous claim. Because I never met a sociopath, just who was a eugenicist. All the sociopathologists were trying to do was establish that genetics is a factor in human behavior, as well as cultural nature and nurture both matter. That's all that sociobiology, or what is now called evolutionary psychology, is trying to establish. This wanting to design makes me very, very nervous, because those who are in charge of designing always value the traits that they happen to have. And they tend to want to create humans in their own image. But if that weren't the case? What do you mean if it weren't? If it was a case that they didn't want to design necessarily in their own image, and that they were more focused on variability. But what I know of human nature makes me hard to believe that that would be possible. All right? All right? So you say, we'll successfully solve our problems, only when we learn to make our shared humanity the source of the feel-good sense of belonging that is one of the rewards of group membership. And I like this insight, because for me, it's a part of redefining yourself. And my notions are, one of my notions is that there is really no such thing as altruism, because no one does anything unless they perceive it as being relatively beneficial to themselves. You just have to redefine self. So the self is more than just you. It's really you. I've always said that you and I are very much on the same page here. Altruism, if you look at it closely, is always driven by something that makes you feel good. And if you're programmed to feel, I mean, even I grew up in a family where there was a, you know, my parents fought a lot, a lot of tension in the family. I have really learned to want everybody to be happy. That's not because I'm an altruist. It's because if everybody's not happy, I'm going to be feeling pain. And so that's not altruistic for me to want everybody to be happy. I'm trying to avoid the personal anguish and pain that comes when there's chaos. So I think that's speaking to what you're talking about. So now the question is, how do we increase that sense of belonging to get people to realize that that creates the good feeling? I think, Len, part of it is understanding that we're a horribly tribal species. And thinking about, again, our original species being a chromosome fusion, I suspect that that's one reason we're so terrifically tribal, because we would have had to be looking for others just like us. So we're not going to be successful in reproducing the kind of thing you were talking out at earlier. So unless we're drawn to others that look very much like us or seem like part of our tribe, we're not going to, that's not going to get programmed in, because we're not going to reproduce successfully. So we have to understand our tribalism is complete bunkum. It's just nonsense. But it feels good to feel like you belong to a group. This is my team. I'm part of this. I'm not like them. But we have to recognize that it's that kind of feeling has its origins in very primitive biological directives. And we can imagine if suddenly you feel like you're in everybody's tribe. How good it just expands your feel-good sense if you drop some of those artificial constructs of other. We're the us and them species. We're so good at saying, oh, he's other. She's other. This is who I am. It makes me feel good. And even to belong to a tribe that's known real and horrible discrimination, it still helps form your sense of identity. And so I think we have to learn or I hope we can learn. And I think we can just through the course of my life. I learned to shed biases that I've had. And so we do learn to shed them. And my sense of joy and happiness just dramatically increases the more people I'm able to identify with and feel, oh, yeah, I know why that person, that person and I have a lot in common. Or even, oh, wow, that person is different. How much fun it's going to be to find out about the way they see the world. It's like an exploration of unknown territory. And so I really hope I view tribalism and greed as just the two most awful of our species specific traits to that I really hope we can rise above. I think those two we can rise above. And I think we're successfully doing it. But what we gain in one area, we seem. I mean, now it's political divides that we seize on. What nonsense that is. We all are interested in the same outcomes. Mostly all people want the same things. We're a combination of, I had this epiphany the other morning. There'd been a death in the family. And I was trying to sort out how I felt about the person who died and the complicated nature of our relationship. And so in processing my grief, it wasn't just straight line grief. I love the birdsong wakes me in the morning in Arlington. We're so far east in our time zone. The birds start murmuring around 3.30. They're now slowing down a little bit, but certainly by 4. So I have a condo on the fourth floor. And it's no windows, but great big skylights. And my bedroom is very small. The skylight over my bed is almost as big as my bed. And I throw it open wide. It's like sleeping outside. So there's a rain gutter under the open skylight. And then a northern mockingbird sang me awake at 4.30. It was like a symphony, just the most gorgeous, gorgeous. And it's when I'm trying to process my grief. And I just had this epiphany. We are all a result of the genes we were born with and the experiences that we've had in life. All any of us want is to love and be loved. No one sets out to deliberately make someone else unhappy. And I just absolutely believe that. And as soon as I rise, oh, I do believe that. And of course, no one is deliberately trying to torture me or to put me down or to make me feel less than I am. Each person is just trying to find love for themselves and to be able to love. But they're constrained by their genetic component and the experiences that they've had in life. Right. Well, I agree. And essentially, what made it easier for me to deal with, let's just say, challenging interactions with people is that it isn't that people, my insight was that it's not that people do what they can. They don't do what they can't do. Oh, interesting. And that made me. Oh, that's interesting. And so when you say, why don't they just? And it's like, well, they can't. Yeah, yeah. They don't do what they can't do. They don't do what they can't do. And I don't do what I can't do. It might be. There are times when I just don't have patience. And it's like, I can wish I had patience all I wanted. I don't have it. But to get back to your thing of positive reinforcement, I loved my first mother-in-law. Isn't that funny? I just adored that mother-in-law, the rare daughter-in-law. I've not ever in my life known a perfect person. But my mother-in-law, Mother Fowler, was as close to a perfect person as I've ever known. And she had an old-fashioned Pennsylvania expression, Dutch expression that she used, Pennsylvania Dutch expression. You get more flies with honey than you do with vinegar. And that goes back to what you were talking about. Positive reinforcement. So there are people, use your expression again, I like that. People don't. They do what they can, but they don't do what they can't do. But we can help people learn to do what they can't do by offering positive reinforcement as they begin to approach what would make their life, ultimately make their life happier. When I meet a really difficult person, and let's face it, there are some people like that in the world, I often think, oh, I would hate to live in his skin. I would hate to live in his skin. It must be awful to feel like the world is attacking you and after you and... Yes, except that there is, as you mentioned, me, some positive feelings that come from victim. Like, you know, you kind of mentioned that in this chapter, I'll have to scroll back down, that you mentioned something about the empowerment people kind of get from... Well, could you feel like you're part of a tribe? For example, when I hear people complaining about being a victim as a result of this, that, and the other, I have to bite my tongue to keep from saying, well, what do you think? Don't you think women have known discrimination to? So my fallback then is to feel, hey, well, I belong to a tribe that's been victimized, or what do you think? You don't think old white women or old women with white hair get diminished and not taken seriously? So we do fall back on, but I'm on a tribe that, and I have that sense of, oh, but I belong to a group that's been victimized too. So it's a sense of identity. Yes, yes, and feeling victimized is also me, one of the contributors to people feeling angry, and angry, people being angry actually feel powerful. In fact, Jennifer Lerner, me from the Kennedy School, did this paper called, we had to do with anger, and it was essentially how the anger just really makes them feel good, and they feel, because what it does is it makes them feel certain. And it's also, a lot of endorphins get released in an outburst of anger. Yeah, and so they then feel that they know who has created the problem for them, and so it's a sense of feeling victimized. It's interesting, yeah, it's interesting. But we're talking about how we see the other, as a result of this potential change in the chromosome, where we were then looking for the other individuals. But I'll posit that it goes further back than that, because it's that you need the other for existence. Just going back to physics to me is like, you can't have one without the other. And so I know it's kind of like the Chinese yin and yang thing, but it requires two, and so there's always gonna be a difference to me then, and it's how those come together that creates another that is kind of the basis of existence. So that's why I feel that we actually kind of have to go beyond just like understanding me, just human nature of me, but also kind of understanding the space in which humans exist in order to understand me, the effects that kind of existence has on us. And so in part of what I'm really getting at is that we kind of learn to embrace the differences because what humans are very good at is discerning differences. Oh, you are? Yes. And so even if you had everyone the same race, it's like we're gonna figure out how we differ. Oh, oh, oh, absolutely. Yeah, we find, I have curly hair, you have straight hair. You know, I now, when I'm in a crowd, I notice people with white curly hair and I chuckle to myself, how come you were drawn to that person, my tribe, that person's in my tribe white curly hair. I mean, you know, I don't ascribe value to it, but I am aware that's what I noticed, but then I'll go even a little further than you do. I think not only do we have to begin to see ourselves as part of this whole network of humans, but this whole network of life on the planet. And that's very comforting to me to feel a part. I'm part of an evolved system of interdependence. We all need each other. Although I have, I decided in an earlier episode, you know, we need the honeybees more than the honeybees need us. And I do believe that. I'm not sure how much the honeybees do need us, except that we plant flowers that they like because we want to harvest their honey. So there is this interdependence with all life on this planet. And I think as I get older and I'm aware that my own boundaries will dissolve in the not too distant future, although if I'm aiming to be a great-great-grandmother, you know, might be a longer future than I've allowed myself. But I take comfort in a feeling. I will go back to being part of that whole network, the interdependence of all species with each other. You know, I think I say at one point in the book, death begets life in that we die, we decompose, other creatures feed on us, plants grow. I mean, there is that cycle that what we are is not really lost. You know, other species will depend on my decaying body. I mean, I find comfort in that, I do. And probably more comfort is as I get to be older and try to figure out what is the meaning of it all. And just seeing myself as not separate from the whole process, but part of that whole interconnectedness of life. You know, I- Or just existence. Yeah, yeah, of existence, yeah. I say, silly, you know, the things that people take comfort from, I take comfort from mocking birds, singing me a wakened for eight hours. It's nautical dawn for them, eight hours. So yeah, it's just, I hear them too, you know. So it, yeah, yeah, two and a half minutes in. And there's so many other things I could cover. Certainly, you talk about how the brain, you know, how we take shortcuts, but it's just how brains are wired to take shortcuts. You know, you really can't help it. It's like we have, even before the digital age, we had so much information coming through that once you have a pattern, you kind of go, well, that's in that pattern, you know. And I think it's important to recognize we are wired that way. And therefore, not always to totally believe what our shortcuts tell us, recognize, oh, that may not, you know, I understand why I am that way. I don't want to judge myself for being that way. But it may not serve me well always to do that. You know, that's part of what I call rising above our species specific traits. You know, we're clever enough to know, oh, wait, wait, wait. That's how our brains evolve, but that doesn't mean I have to behave that way. I hear you. So, you know, we're going to do our editors a little bit of favor, and we're going to end this one on time and say that we look forward to the next chapter. Can I scroll down and find it fast enough? Well, it's going to be chapter, yeah, it's going to be chapter 14. And I'll call it Tangled Up in Economics and Evolution. Yes. And we're headed into the home stretch here. Yeah, we sure are. It'll be three more chapters and we'll wrap this up. It certainly has been a lot of fun. Why hope our viewers have as much fun as you and I are having? Yeah, well, they get to check it too. Yeah, but you and I are having fun doing this. And in case we don't have a chance to say it later on, because maybe one of those other chapters we're just running out of time, we'll say thank you very much to ACMI. You've been a really great host and making this possible is really one of the great things about Arlington and cable access in general. So if you have an idea of me, you can make it happen. You can spark all kinds of positive things. So thank you, Heather, thank you, ACMI. Thanks for watching.