 Hi, and welcome to What Sex Got to Do with It. I'm your host, Leonard Diggins, and I'm here with the author of the book, Heather Remoth. And we are now about to cover the first chapter in the book, which is called In the Beginning. Why In the Beginning? Well, I sort of wanted, I actually wrote that after the book was finished. And I thought, gee, I really ought to alert readers as to what's coming because I believe that I'm offering a fairly significant challenge to Darwin's theory of sexual selection. And it's very, very difficult to suggest a paradigm shift in a theory that's as widely accepted as Darwin's is. And I really think that particularly the theory of sexual selection, but even the theory of natural selection, there are some things that we really ought to be looking at a little bit differently. And so I wanted to give the reader a heads up, you know, you're going to be asked to consider Darwin in a different light in this book. And at the end of that first chapter of the preface, I end by asking the reader to engage with me. And as I mentioned earlier, you're my dream reader, someone who would engage with me, engage with my ideas. Yeah, yeah, I hadn't thought of it that way before. Maybe come up with your ideas of your own, challenge me a little bit, but be open to the idea that the way we viewed sexual selection is not the whole story. In fact, I think Darwin got sexual selection very wrong. Interestingly enough, sexual selection is the one theory that is truly Darwin's own. The theory of natural selection, lots of people have been coming up, not just Alfred Russell Wallace, Darwin's grandfather was an advocate of natural selection. And Wallace and Darwin both came up with the mechanism for how natural selection would work by reading Thomas Malthus' essay on population. I think Malthus got a whole lot wrong. So I think I refer to Darwin's Malthusian flaw and the ways that he was influenced by Malthus, but his book on sexual selection, or his discussion of sexual selection, appeared in the book The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex. So it was in that book that Darwin talked about human evolution. He didn't really relate the two completely. I think at one point he said, well, he considered them both in the same book because that's when he was first afforded the opportunity to do so. But The Descent of Man, if he had the theory of sexual selection a little more accurate, his understanding of human evolution would be of our species-specific behavior. I think he missed an opportunity to have a clear understanding of what our species-specific behavior is. So the theory of sexual selection was inspired by Darwin's inability to explain the beauty of the peacock's tail, hence these peacock feathers around us. He said it made him sick to look at a peacock's tail because he couldn't explain how that could be functional enough to have evolved. And so he came up with the theory of sexual selection as if he focused on beauty, selection for beauty. Well, I believe that Darwin and many male biologists who have followed him, and female too, project the thing that drives their own attraction, which is beauty, projected onto the female that's doing the selection and assumed that females select for beauty. Darwin acknowledged, he believed, that female choice drove sexual selection. He happened to not believe that women were any longer smart enough, civilized women were no longer smart enough to make such choices, but felt that it had served in the past to drive human evolution. Darwin was very misogynist, but I think that he projected the thing that would have driven his selection would be the beauty, youth and beauty, as I say in a later chapter, into the females doing the selecting, because he acknowledged that females drove sexual selection, was female choice that drove sexual selection. But so I think that that's, you know, in a later chapter I talk about why selection for the peacock's tail was not for beauty, it was a way of telling that boys from the girls. Right, right. Yes. I was intrigued by the use of, in the beginning, because it is a book about evolution, and in the beginning, as you know, it is biblical, and so I was wondering if you were somehow drawing a contrast between evolution and creationism, and clearly that wasn't the intent at all. And if it were, I was just kind of wondering how that really fit in with where you were taking things, but clearly that wasn't the case, so I now have the answer to my question. When, for example, I would chat with somebody on the bus about what a lecture I'd just been to at Harvard and would mention that I was writing a book about evolution, a challenge to Darwin, I would feel people edge away from me assuming that I was a creationist. Oh, I see. That if... All right, because it's a challenge to Darwin. It's a challenge to Darwin. They assume it's creationism. No, no, no, not at all. I just want Darwin to get it right. Yeah. I'm forgetting the main points that I made in the preface, the things that I was going to be talking about. One was female choice in sexual selection, how there's been an understanding of the traits that... Well, first of all, women haven't... How can you write a theory of human evolution and ignore, totally ignore the behavior of 51% of the population, because women are 51% of the population, which Darwin did, because he assumed women weren't smart enough to be making choices. So how can you expect that theory to be accurate? So what I do is I look at sexual selection through a female lens. And that's what my research at Rutgers was. I interviewed women about how they selected the men in their lives, took a tape recorder, just sat down and had informal conversations that ran from three to five hours in length and asked them to describe real men in their lives. What was it? What was it about them? How did you meet? Tried not to ask any leading questions. And women love to talk about the men in their lives. I mostly just had to say, uh-huh. When I later... I didn't type at the time, so I paid someone to transcribe the tapes for me. When I went back through them, I realized, oh, I have to be very careful not to say, oh, that's interesting, because as soon as I would say that, I'd get a flood of information in the same vein. So I tried to stay pretty neutral, but I interviewed women. And I was a thorough Darwinist at the time. Absolutely. Charles Darwin was my hero, absolutely. And so I assumed that I would find out that the men, the women, through their viewpoint described it as the most successful, that those men would have the greatest reproductive success, that they would sour more children quite the opposite was true, as you are probably aware in humans, people with a good control of resources who are generally considered successful have fewer children. They can limit the number of children they have and still have reproductive success. So my research, just like my research at UMKC, or at UMKC on testosterone and women, I got the exact opposite of what I expected. And I realized that, oh, neither Darwin nor I know enough about evolution. And so I left Rutgers and began to self-educate, are not enough about evolution, enough about economics, and began to self-educate in the field of economics, because I knew, from my research, I knew, I knew, I knew that economic behavior was driving the choices that women made. So I'm very much focused on looking at sexual selection through the eyes of the women exercising female choice. And it's not just for beauty, it's for a whole range of traits that women select, the traits that make us who we are as humans. And so that's one of the things I focused on. The other thing I wanted to give people a heads up, my reader heads up that language was going to be very, very important. And that social, the ability, I'm forgetting where I was going with that, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, Len. The symbolic, the symbolic nature of human language gives us symbolic control of resources, natural resources. And that is the major difference between humans and other species. Other species control the resources they need with their own bodies. And so they have an equitable share of resources, because their bodies are pretty, their physical strength is pretty much the same between, but with humans, we control resources symbolically. And so Jeff Bezos or an Elon Musk, they can control so many more resources. And we're definitely going to get to that later on, I know that's coming. But that's one of the things I wanted to give people a heads up. I'm going to be talking about female choice from a female point of view. I'm going to be talking about symbolic control of resources. I'm going to be talking about language ability and also the way we see what we expect to see and therefore don't see, don't see what's really there. We see what we expect to see. And Darwin himself did. When he looked at the fossil record and, for example, the Cambrian explosion and suddenly there are all these new fossils, he can't see that that has any implication to his theory because that's not what he's expecting to see there. Confirmation bias was the phrase I was looking for that we all suffer from confirmation bias. It's very hard to see a truth that we're not to see the truth of something that we don't expect to see. We just, for example, when I lose something and I'm looking for it, if I think I'm looking for a red book, I can look at exactly the book I'm looking for. It happened to have had a blue cover, but I forgot the color. So you don't see what you're not expecting to see. And so I bring that up, I think, a lot in the beginning, too, that I want my reader to be aware that we all have confirmation bias and we have to sort of drop our assumption about what we think we know about evolution and be willing to come at it with a fresh eye. So you mentioned several times to me that it's the male biologists that have a hard time seeing things differently, but then you also mentioned that some women science is, too. But are you finding more reception to your theory or what you have learned amongst female biologists that you talk? Not yet. The book will just be released in the States. It's scheduled for release on April 28th. You're the first person who's read it who has a background in the sciences. And I cannot tell you how gratified I am that you read it and pronounced it excellent. I thought, what? Because I am so very used to not having people able to hear me. And I think some of that, I don't mean to be a whiner. I hope I don't sound like a whiner. Some of that is the fact that I'm a woman and I'm female. And in the book, I kind of understand why men and women both overlook female behavior. There's an evolutionary explanation for that. But even at Rutgers, where I had such great mentors and people were so helpful to me and gave me so many opportunities, because it was sociobiology back at that time, the feminists just really hated Lionel Tiger and Robin Fox probably still do. Like Lionel, they would stamp stickers on his door that said, this discriminates against women. It was so funny. I was his graduate assistant. There was probably the smartest woman in our department, was a cultural anthropologist, my degree, my PhD is actually in anthropology. And she worked for a well-known feminist anthropologist in the department and as her graduate assistant back then it was Mimeograph Machines. Vicki got to run the Mimeograph Machine Lionel, who supposedly discriminated against women, had me co-edit a book with him and put my name on the title of it. So, you know, I got lots and lots of opportunities at Rutgers, but even there. So I give that as a preface because my mentors were wonderfully supportive of me, both Lionel and Robin, and Robert Trivers as well. But people tended to focus on one of my findings in the interviews I did with women was the importance of courtship feeding. And people tended to focus on that because that was fun. And it's not just that men take women out for dinner as part of the dating scene. You know, this comes up in the later chapter, but it was the very end of doing all these hundreds of hours of interviews and I interviewed a woman who was married to an airline pilot. And I asked her, she said her husband was the sexiest man alive, bar none. And I asked her, I said, wow, you know, what traits, what traits give him that title? And she couldn't think of any. She was so embarrassed. I said, well, think about the last time he made you feel the way. At the end of my interviews, I'm coaching her a little bit. I said, what did he do, what did he do that made you feel that way? And she said, I know, I know. He brought me two pineapples. He brought me two fresh pineapples. And at that moment, I thought, ah, I pictured a little lizard with a bug in its mouth, or a male cardinal feeding a female cardinal sunflower seed. I thought courtship feeding in humans. And I went back, I hadn't taken any notes on it, but it was everywhere. Not women, when women would start describing meals they'd had 20 years before. Oh, I had the shrimp scampi with a Caesar salad. I stopped paying attention because I thought, OK. But the tape recorder was paying attention. So it was everywhere. And it's not just the fact of going out for a meal. They were describing in detail what they ate right before they had sex for the first time. So I saw the link right away, oh wow, courtship feeding in humans. I think I'm the first person to document that. So it was very fun for my mentors and my peers. The other grad students, I got to be known for that, and they had a rather four-letter word description of my theory of evolution. But the really important thing that I discovered was this link between how with secure economics birth rate dropped. That was my significant discovery in humans. And that, it was too much fun to talk about courtship feeding. Economics is not as much fun to talk about, I agree. But that was my significant discovery. And that is my challenge to Darwin. Darwin himself understood that. In The Descent of Man, he pointed out that the superior, he made the mistake of confusing wealth with genetic superiority, which is a very big mistake to make. But one made most often by those with great fortunes. But he felt that in his words that since the most successful members of the species were having the fewest children, the species would retrograde unless we changed our behavior. Now he was thinking of upper-class British women not having enough children. He was very concerned that Irish women and poor women were having a lot of children. So his own biases against the poor and the Irish influenced his theory of evolution. And his own confirmation bias about his own theory, he could see that the most successful members had the fewest children, but he didn't let it challenge his theory. Because according to his theory of natural selection, that should not be happening. So that's the kind of confirmation bias Darwin himself couldn't see his own. Right. And that certainly will be getting into that a lot more in some of the subsequent chapters made of. So in this first chapter, you also mentioned an encounter with, not an encounter, but you talk about Terrence Deacon and how he, he written the book called The Symbolic Species to Co-Evolution, A Language in the Brain, and how he actually, you thought that he understood where, understood things the way you did about the role of sexual selection, and then he wrote a paper or something, and then he said, but since this doesn't result in sexual dimorphism, it can't be the basis of sexual selection. And I guess, I understand where you're coming from, and I kind of see as the issue is that it isn't that the thing that results isn't sexually dimorphic, it's the fact that people don't see that as the thing that people mean, or looking at, let me rephrase that, that is used as part of the behavior that leads to the sexual selection. And so language may not be sexually dimorphic, at least inherently so, but perhaps the way someone uses it is, so we say that maybe like women and men and women use language differently? Perhaps. I think the thing may help the viewer understand sexual dimorphism and sexual selection. Sexual selection was assumed to always result in sexually dimorphic traits. For example, the peacock's tail that drove Darwin so crazy. Obviously, the male peacock tail is very different from the female peacock tail, and Darwin assumed that's because women are female, the peahen selected for the beauty of the tail. Therefore, only the peacocks would have these gorgeous tails, not the peahens. So he assumed that sexual selection always related, resulted in sexually dimorphic traits, traits where there was a dramatic difference between the male and the female of the species, the gigantic antlers of the Irish elk. He assumed that female elk selected for those giant antlers, and that's why the males had them and not the females. So when I had done my research on interviewing all these women and I would go around to conferences and talk, give presentations, and this was like a conference of bio-behavioral science, for example. I would speak to auditoriums packed with mostly men, because it was mostly male scientists, very curious about the traits that made men sexually attractive to women. That's why they were there. And I'm sure that I'm talking about sexual selection. After all, it's females. These are the traits that they like in men, and that made them select the men that they had sex with or married or fell in love with whatever. And at the end of every talk, it was invariable that the first hand that went up in the Q&A would be a man who would say, oh, well, this is all very interesting, but it's not sexual selection. And I was so puzzled by that. I was so puzzled by it that I'm angry at myself now. I didn't even ask, well, why not? I just sort of was dumbfounded by it. But it happened again and again. And I thought, why am I having so much trouble getting these scientists to understand that my work is about sexual selection? It's about the traits that made women select the men in their lives. And it was only while I was writing my book here, because Terence Deacon is great on language. He's my favorite theorist on language. Oh, he's a language in the brain. He's a neuroanthropologist, a neurobiologist. I mean, he really understands neurology. His book is fabulous, and he really... So I think he's one of them, just a brilliant theorist. And so I've heard him do a YouTube feature in which I thought he alluded to the fact that he expected that sexual selection would result in males and females having different language abilities. I thought that can't be true. So I was Googling to try to find that. I thought, surely I misheard him. I discovered a research paper that he'd written, and he and Robert Trivers had talked about the ideas in it. And Terence Deacon, one of the men I really admire for his brilliance, he said, well, of course, language ability can't be the result of sexual selection or it would be sexually dimorphic. Men would be much more... Would be skilled in language and women wouldn't be. And I thought, what? I went back, I re-read that. What? What? What? That was the light went off. That was while I was writing this book. I discovered that. And I rise. That's why all those men... For a time, it wasn't sexual selection because they think unless it results in traits that are dramatically different between men and women, then it's not sexual selection. And that was the moment the light went off for me. I thought, that's why men don't get this. That's why they don't credit women. And I think it's more significant in misunderstanding how humans evolved than it is in any other species. But we don't look at female behavior in that regard in other species because we just assume they're only selecting for sexually dimorphic traits. I can't believe that's true in any species as I... In parts of the book, I talk about birds and stuff and how I indicate that there has to be more going on than just beauty here. Right. And even though I phrased the question in a way that made it seem like I was subscribing to the notion that language could be used in a way that would reveal some sexual dimorphism, I mean, I agree with you. I was just kind of wondering if language was maybe the right one to use because to a certain extent, I think that it can have some sexually dimorphic traits. Certainly lots of people assume that women are more verbal than men, but you look at all the great authors, their skill with language of great male authors, male and female authors, of course. But the whole men are from Mars, women are from Venus. I do think men and women have different communication styles. Again, Lionel Tiger has a great... I don't mean to act like these are all universals, all completely under the control of biology because I don't believe they are. Lionel Tiger had a great line. Biology is not destiny, it's statistical probability. So when I make general statements like men and women might have different communication styles, that's statistical probability that you can't predict exactly that that would be true. You can't look at any one woman and say her language skills are going to be superior to, for example, yours. So I don't want to give the viewer the idea that we think that's... To say that there's a biological underpinning to behavior doesn't mean that you can predict behavior based on that. Right, and that really sets the stage for a lot more conversation and I find myself really wanting to talk about this chapter one even more, but you know what? We actually talked about some other chapters while talking about chapter one. So I think when we talk about some of those other chapters, I'll come back to some things that I wanted to talk about in chapter one. So I think this is a good start. I mean, to us exploring your wonderful book, I mean, until there are 15 more chapters to go. And even though you think that's a lot, I think we'll find that's going to go up by really fast. So thank you so much, Heather. Well, thanks, Len. This is fun. It's fun. All right.