 Hi, everyone, and welcome to another Yaron Debates Europe episodes. Today, we have with us an up-and-coming young public intellectual, a guy I know, and he's very, very interesting, William Costello. So William is a postgraduate student in evolutionary psychology, but he's already contributing in the public dialogue. He's written in aria. He's written in chelette. And he's someone who believes that evolutionary psychology is misunderstood, and that usually when we attack evolutionary psychology, we attack a strawman. So I'm very curious to see also where our two speakers meet on free will and whether whatever are the findings of evolutionary psychology, where they go against free will. And of course, as always on the other side, we've got Yaron Brooke. Yaron is the chairman of the board of the Andron Institute. He's the host of the Yaron Bruxo. And probably most of you already know him. So enough with the introduction. Make sure that you send your questions via super chat. Hopefully the questions have to be somehow relevant to what the speakers say or somehow relevant to the topic. We start with William, then we're going to go to Yaron, and then we're going to have a bit of inter-panel discussion, hopefully with as little intervention by the moderator as possible. Once more, many thanks to the Andron Institute for supporting these events. Check out the social media accounts of Andron Institute Global on Facebook and Twitter where we post short clips from these discussions. And of course, you can find short clips in the Andron Center's UK social media accounts. So enough with the introduction. William, thanks so much for being with us. The floor is yours. Great, thanks for that. So a brief introduction for what I plan to or hope to cover in my first 10 minutes or so, my opening remarks. I'm going to try to address the evolutionary psychology versus learning from culture dichotomy. I want to challenge the notion that they are incompatible. And I would also outline how the capacity for cumulative culture is a uniquely human evolutionary trait, the specific one. I'll challenge the notion that human minds are blank slates. I'll detail how evolutionary psychology accounts for cross-cultural differences. But I'll mainly be focusing particularly on sex differences in mating psychology because that's the fun stuff, right? So basically, to dismiss F-psych or evolutionary psychology, it's a form of mind-body dualism that's closer to superstitious and religious spiritualism than rational reason. In this sense, I can actually better understand the intellectual positions of creationists, religious creationists who deny evolution entirely. At least their position is consistently and coherently confused. And the modern version of the creationist exists more on the left wing, who despite their mantra of follow the science, and they appear to think that evolutionary processes led to the development of all of our biology except the human brain, which doesn't really make sense to me. And so to dismiss evolutionary psychology is to suggest that the brain has nothing to do with thought or your behavior, or that evolution only starts from the neck down. So it just seems a little bit of a confused position to take from the start. So what is evolutionary psychology and how did it come about? Well, in the final sections of origin of species, the great Charles Darwin predicted that one day his principles of evolution would be applied to psychology and human behavior. He said, in the distant future, I see open fields for far more important researches. Psychology will be based on a new foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation. In the 1970s, the psychological movement of behaviorism focused on the predictive powers of operant conditioning and the proximate causality of the environment. But they neglected the ultimate conditioning of what evolutionary psychologists would call the environment of evolutionary adaptiveness or the EEA. Evolutionary psychology marries Darwinian principles of evolutionary biology with the insights of cognitive psychology to understand that the brain's architecture evolved with specialized problem-solving mechanisms in response to selection pressures in our ancestral environment. These problem-solving mechanisms, they can best be understood like organs of the mind. So we have organs in the body that do different functions. We also have mental organs that drive different behavior and solve different problems. Evolutionary psychology understands the brain as like an organic wet computer with carbon-based neurons instead of silicon chips. And they're specialized in the electrochemical transmission of information that generates behavior or output appropriate to environmental cues or input. So likening it to computer can kind of help you understand it. Evolutionary psychology rejects the notion of human minds as blank slates that require all knowledge to come from outside general learning or culture. The founding members of the field, John Tooby and his wife, Lida Cosmides, they criticized at the time quite heavily what was called the standard social science model which dominated social psychology at the time. And the standard social science model kind of framed human nature as mere primitive instincts that was entirely distinct from culture. And it's here that we find the first fundamental misunderstanding of evolutionary psychology. It's this false notion that if a behavior is evolved, that it means it's not learned or that if a behavior is learned, that it means it's not an evolved behavior. So how are evolution and learning compatible? Well, first thing to understand is that evolution and learning require two different levels of analysis. Learning is a proximate explanation. So how something works or is developed in a more immediate sense in your more proximate sense. And evolution is an ultimate explanation why it was shaped that way by natural selection. So a lot of the confusion about Ebsite comes between mixing these two up. Human brains aren't hardwired with capabilities but we're rather live wired with the ability to learn from environmental cues. And the question is not whether a behavior is caused by instinct or learning but rather which instincts caused the learning. So an interesting example of an evolved learning mechanism is incest avoidance, the phone one. We do not always require to be taught that incest is bad. We just get that intuitive feeling of disgust at the thought of sex with the sibling, right? And the psychologist, Jonathan Haidt illustrates this intuition very effectively with the thought experiment where he asks people if incest would still be considered bad even if it was between two consenting adults who use two forms of contraception. Nobody found out, they were all happy. Invariably people still say this is wrong but they run out of reasons why but it still triggers that disgust. So the rational reason doesn't appear in this case to be sufficient to overcome or evolve disgust mechanism that is activated by the thought of incest. So how is incest avoidance an evolved learning mechanism? Well, a blank slate kind of general learning mind cannot kind of experientially learn that incest avoidance is adaptive because during one lifetime you wouldn't have the time to because you incur the mistake. It requires natural selection running this experiment over thousands of generations to equip our minds with this learning mechanism which uses two environmental cues or environmental inputs. One, co-residents during childhood. If you live with that person during childhood that'll be enough of a cue to learn that the incest avoidance mechanism will come online. Or seeing your mother nurse that child. Both of those cues. Humans who receive both of these cues are reliably disgusted at the thought of sex with the sibling. And conversely, interestingly if these environmental cues are not sufficiently received the incest diversion is not produced. So that mechanism is we're evolved to learn it but we don't come automatically with it and take some of the cues from the environment. Just like in our biology we're not born with teeth but they come online at a certain point for everybody that similar thing happens with our psychological mechanisms that develop reliably based on cues. The learning mechanism for language acquisition is another really good example because that shows how evolutionary psychology is compatible with cultural differences. So we evolved for function not for content. Otherwise if we evolved for content everybody would be speaking the same language everywhere. Humans universally learn language. However the content of the language depends on the environmental input received and thus it varies cross-culturally. So a significant point about evolutionary psychology is not it predicts universality at the level of the information processing mechanism not the actual behavior itself. It doesn't necessarily predict universality at the behavioral output itself but at the information processing mechanism. So the next thing I want to talk about is cumulative culture because the two big drivers of human behavior are evolution and culture. So the unique human evolutionary trait is our capacity to learn from cumulative culture to keep piling it on and culture itself can actually be described as a biological phenomenon. It's like a semi-autonomous evolving system of ideas or means as they're known. Human brains generate, circulate and accumulate culture as kind of gene meme hybrids as Daniel Dennett calls them. Human brains co-evolved with culture. So with more culture it causes bigger brains and more complex culture leading to even bigger brains and this is called the ratchet effect. So it ratchets it up. The more complex culture you have the bigger your brain gets and the two kind of co-evolved together. The ability to stockpile knowledge, transmit and improve upon it generationally enables humans to uniquely use our cognitive niche to colonize a range of diverse environments. We're not just restricted to one environment. We can live in the desert, we can live in the snow and that's because of our capacity to build culture cumulatively. Animals today are largely the same as animals 200 years ago in terms of their capabilities whereas humans are unrecognizable and we're about to colonize the cosmos because of our cumulative culture. We literally don't have to reinvent the wheel every time with each generation and that's a massive advantage to us as a species. Today's children probably know more about the universe and the way it works than Plato despite not being any more intelligent than Plato because they benefit from the collective knowledge and a great way of putting it is I might not be as smart as Plato but I have one advantage, I can read his books. So I'm not starting from zero. So humans each generation has an advantage over the other, over the previous one. We have a one to two minutes notice. No problem. So what can evolutionary psychology tell us about sex differences? Well, where the sexes face similar evolutionary challenges they will be similar and where they face different evolutionary challenges they will produce different psychological adaptations leading to different behaviors. An example of a similarity is eating. So men and women typically solve the problem of getting fuel into the body in similar ways. Reproduction is an example of a radical sex difference. So biologically women have the obligatory parental investment of internal fertilization and gestation. The absolute minimum investment for a male is one successful sex act which Nicos reliably informs me can be achieved within two to three minutes. So sexes are potentially more costly act for women than men. As such, one psychological difference is that women are a lot more choosy about who they have sex with. To evolutionists, it would be astounding if the areas where men and women had different physiologies they did not also have psychological adaptations that attended to those differences. So in terms of reproductive success it's more costly for men to miss out on the opportunity to forego sexual opportunities. And this kind of asymmetry between the sexes has led to group differences in male and female sexual psychology. Some of which I'll just go through really quickly before finishing up and we can talk about everything else on my list after Yaren has had a chance. So men tend to desire much greater desire for a variety of sex partners. Men tend to over perceive women's sexual interest in them because it's more costly to miss out on the opportunity. Men commit failures of sexual mind reading where we infer the sexual mind of women using our own which is why some men think it might be a good idea to send an unsolicited dick pic to a woman because they might actually enjoy receiving such a picture themselves from a woman. Men have been shown to perceive sexual harassment as less harmful than women do. And significantly, and the final one I'll talk about before handing over is that men are far more sexually jealous than women. This is because they lack paternal certainty. It's called the mama's baby daddy's maybe idea. Women always know that the child coming out of their body is indeed their own child. Whereas men, for most of our evolutionary history could not have been sure that that was definitely theirs. This led to evolved psychological mechanisms for greater sexual jealousy which in turn motivated increased mate guarding behaviors in men to make sure that you have that paternal certainty. So those are some interesting sex differences that come from our evolved psychology. Later, I can maybe talk about how evolutionary psychology actually predicts the cultural variation a priori before ahead of time. So for a field that gets criticized for being called just so stories, it does that a hell of a lot of time. And I can link to a really good article that collects a lot of examples of evolutionary psychology making their predictions like any other science. Thanks, William. So let's hear Yaron's introduction remarks and then we're gonna get back. I already have many questions and I'm sure the audience has as well. Let's go, Yaron. I have to unmute myself first, are we? You think I'd learn after six debates. Let me start by saying, this is not my field. So any mistakes I made on Nikos and Razzi's fault because they twisted my arm into doing this. Okay, so let me start with this. Much of what William started off with, I agree with. There's no question that the structure of our brain evolved that this idea of we evolved for function not for content. Yeah, certainly all of our sense perception evolved. The neuron structures in our brain, the way in which our brain functions in a particular form, in a particular way, all evolved. And there's no question. I agree also with the sum of what he said about sex that the fact that we have physiological differences as men and women do, I think necessitates certain psychological differences. Now, whether we know what those psychological differences are, I'm more skeptical, but there's no question in my mind that this is a proper field of study and something that needs to be examined. My problem is, so in some of the language they talk, they talk about neurocognitive machinery, that sounds kind of cool to me. I mean, it sounds right, right? We have a certain machinery, it's probably not exactly the right image because we don't function quite like a machine, but there's something there, there's certain capacities that the human mind has and there's some capacities that we don't have and those have psychological implications. They have implications about our behavior and about how we integrate ideas, what kind of ideas we ultimately have and therefore they have implications psychologically. The problem I have is that, and this is not just a problem with evolutionary psychology, it's probably a bigger problem with psychology as a field. The problem I have is that I think it is a science and it's infancy and it is a science where much of the tools to make it into a real science and to move forward have been ignored and negated and therefore many of the conclusions and many of the integrations that are being made are false because they are evading and ignoring fundamental attributes of human nature that are not being taken into account. And you see this in the language. We talk about learning something that happens passively. We talk about evolution versus evolutionary psychology versus learning. Oh no, no, they're integrated, they're the same. We talk about cultural influences versus evolutionary influences and the most sophisticated approaches, oh, they feed off of each other, it's not one or the other. True, but there's something missing here. I'm not a product of my culture and my genes. It's not true, the things just affect me and I just respond to them that it's somehow mechanistic in that sense or even that it acts like a computer, I think the computer analogy is not good. Because somebody has to write the software. So if you include the writer of the software in the computer, then maybe it's a better description. That is what we're missing here is, for you well, what we're missing here is the control that I have over my own cognition. Is a control I have over the cultural influences, what cultural influences have over me and what cultural influences don't have over me. Now, what I think is happening with the empirical studies of evolutionary psychology and I'm not an expert in these and again, I'm skeptical about studies only because nothing to do with evolutionary psychology, only because when I look at academic studies and feels that I know something about and I look at how they use statistics and how they design experiments and everything like that, I find them to be pretty weak and pretty flawed and do things with statistics that any statistics, any econometrics teacher would found upon, but yet you can get away with it because journals are not very selective and people. So I'm a little skeptical. And also because of the fact that in the social sciences, replicability is a big problem, right? And so I'm generally suspicious of empirical studies in fields that I know something about. So I extrapolate that to fields I don't know that much about and I think somewhat legitimately. So where was I going with this? So even putting that aside, the whole idea of designing these, oh, this is the point I was gonna make, yes. So what happens, I think, with empirical studies is is they are descriptive in a sense that they're describing how a majority or a significant minority or a large number of people behave in a particular way. But human beings, different human beings engage what I call the human part of them to different extents. So I have a view of the human beings, most human beings out there, devote real cognitive effort in their work and the rest of its time they cruise. They kind of put their minds in a sense in neutral and they just cruise. And if you put your mind in neutral, what happens? You're basically being determined by cultural influences and by the what do you call it, neurocognitive machinery. Some human beings actually engage their mind, they engage their reason, they engage their will, if you will. And they have that capacity engaged throughout their lives and therefore they have the ability to override the machinery or to override the cultural influences. It's true that in the world we live in today that might be a minority of people. I don't know, but it might be a minority of people. I'm more concerned with the human potential and what it means to be human and what human beings could achieve than in just describing the world as it is. If we describe the world as it is, then there are a lot of things that I think are pretty rotten about the world. I want to make the world better. So I want to teach people how to override their existing psychology, their existing inclinations. And that I think, and this is I think why there's so much variation between individuals, which we haven't talked about this. We talk about variations across cultures and we look at averages and we look at groups. But what's really interesting is differences between individuals and why they exist. And I think that has a lot more to do with the level of engagement of one's reason and the level of engagement of one's will than it has to do with anything genetic or anything associated with the culture. One lives in, it's why some individuals leave their culture or reject their culture or do things that I think evolutionary psychology of just looking at averages would never predict and could never predict because they're so different and outside of the thing. Let me just, how much time do I have there, Nikos? Let me just say one of the things that suggests to me that I'm a little suspicious about is that you said that evolutionary psychology deals really with function, not content, right? With your vault function and not content. And yet I hear content all the time, right? Evolution psychology gives us predictions about content all the time. And minute content and very detailed content about how we would behave or how we would respond to X, Y, and Z. So again, that, I kind of understand the function but then when you start getting into the minutiae of content I'm suspicious when you get into averages, I'm suspicious. For example, reproduction risk. Yeah, of course. Women and men fail to face different levels of risk. Why is that coded? Maybe that's just a cognitive decision they come to. Maybe women sit down when they're 16. I'm not saying this is the truth. I'm just saying, why isn't this a possibility? Why isn't it true that women at 16 sit down and say, here's reality. If I get pregnant, this and this would happen. I face much greater risk. I should be selective in who I meet with. And men at 16 sit down and think cognitively and think, choose to think, I could just screw around and there's no consequences. Why not do that? How do we know? We can observe the outcome maybe on averages although I know a lot of women who don't behave that way. I know a lot of women who seek variety much more than I seek variety, for example, on an individual basis. I haven't sought much variety in my life. What does that say about? Maybe I overrode that inclination if it exists. How do we know that it's not a decision that people came to? And it's a rational decision. Therefore, most people came to that decision because it's a decision that makes the most sense versus a genetic make-up. And then finally, I'll just say this, this is my suspicious of the field generally. Science requires, any science requires the one clearly define the terms one is using and have clear definitions for them. I find that when I read cognitive psychology or when I read psychology more broadly, I find lots of confusion. What is an instinct? What is a trait? What is knowledge? Where does knowledge come from? What are ideas? How are they different than knowledge? How are they different than instincts or traits? Inclinations, I could go on and on and on with the different terminologies that relate to the question of what we're born with because it's true that in terms of function we're not tabula rasa, but what does that mean? What are the differentiating terms between that? How do we form concepts? So you talk about a cultural accumulation which is absolutely right. I mean, it's amazing. We know a lot more than Plato even though Plato is a lot smarter than us because of the cultural accumulation. But that has to do with cognition. That has to do with our ability to form concepts and then to communicate concepts. How do we form concepts? Isn't it important? It wouldn't that be crucial to understanding cognition, crucial to both evolutionary psychology and psychology? And yet I don't think there was a theory of cognition in evolutionary psychology and I don't think there's a theory of cognition, a forming concept, of using concepts. In psychology, I mean, I'm suspicious of 90% of the theories of cognition in philosophy. At least they try. But so how does psychology that deals with concepts not have a theory of concept formation? Where do emotions come from? He has another one, right? Which relates to this cognitive confusion, I think that exists. What are our emotions? Where do they come from? Are they consequence of just certain chemicals in our brain, but why are those chemicals there? What triggers them? Why did different people have completely different emotions with responding to exactly the same thing? So I think there's a lot of interesting stuff, right? So I'm not dismissing the field. I just think like most fields in the humanities, it's a confused mess. And I think that about almost every field in humanity, it's not, but here, because it's a young field, the confused mess, I think is more exacerbated because I think generally human knowledge is a confused mess over the last 50 years, influenced by postmodernism, influenced by a lot of different bad philosophies. And as a consequence, new sciences are more susceptible to the confused mess than older sciences. Okay, I think I've gone over my 10 minutes, I'll stop there. Okay, thank you, Yaron. So let me read a couple of super chats. So Jonathan says, in honor of Yaron, Brooke, the hardest working philosopher in soul business. I'm a philosopher, right? Yeah. Okay, I thought the soul business was the crucial part. Yeah. Okay, so there's also super chats related to what you said both of you in your introductions, but I'm gonna let William have two, three minutes, pick what you want from Yaron and you can reply. Then Yaron's also gonna have two, three minutes, pick what he wants from your replies and reply. And then we're gonna go to super chat. I've already sent like four, five questions lined up. So let's see how we go, William. Super, yeah. Thanks for that, Yaron. It's interesting because you mentioned so much there, I was jotting down furiously to try and make sure I remembered it all. But I think that the field isn't as much of a hot mess as you might think. At all the things you mentioned, like how does a psych account for cultural concepts? It does. It has cultural psychology and culture, cultural content is based around our evolved psychology. It's very difficult to create a culture that completely goes against our evolved instincts. An example of that might be the kibbutz in Israel that tried to get rid of kind of parenting in favor of a more communal raising of children. And it was a total disaster. So it's very difficult to escape. The genes kind of hold culture on a leash in that respect. The issue about free will is it's still, in my opinion, more philosophical debate that people can just take a position on because it just depends on what you consider you. Do you consider you just your collection of mechanisms and body parts? Do you consider yourself the parts of the brain that you're conscious of? What about the ones you're not conscious of? The bits you have volition over, it just depends on where each individual says you begins. Evpsych doesn't necessarily imply determinism. Humans have a unique evolved ability to kind of, as you said, overcome our evolved instincts. We do that kind of all the time. An example is might be road rage, correct? You stop yourself dead in your tracks and say, oh, I better not be so aggressive even though my first instinct was. So we have kind of executive function there. I'm interested about which kind of conclusions you find false from Epsych or statistics you're referring to because evolutionary psychology, two of our top journals are routinely in the top 10 in terms of replicability. And in particular, the evolutionary psychology of sex differences and sexual strategies are some of the most robust in all of psychology and all of science. You mentioned emotions and individual differences. Evolutionary psychology probably started off by focusing on human universals, but now it has got into catering for individual differences. For example, I'm not that tall of a man. So my personality is less likely to be very aggressive and they've done studies like this that show how individual differences would predict differences based on your evolved psychology. And the final kind of thing I wanted to mention to you is that evolutionary psychology, I wonder if you worry that it's stripped some of the wonder away from the world. And for me, it doesn't do that. So thinking about what the world could be is called like massive theory of mind or thinking about what the world is like and not just necessarily describing it, but what it could be like, that's a human evolved trait as well. And that's kind of magic for me. So don't worry, you feel that Epsych kind of stripped some magic away. But on the other hand, you talk about like a missing link between culture or genes. And it sounds kind of just like you're talking about a soul. And you mentioned that there has to be a writer of the software. Well, there is one, it's evolution and selection pressures in the environment. And it routinely predicts what an organism will develop in response to a selection pressures in the environment on a physical level. And all that evolutionary psychology is, is taking that exact same concept and thinking what selection pressures have we built mental mechanisms to respond to? Thank you, Yaron. So I think evolutionary psychology, just in what you just said in the last few sentences clearly takes a position about free will and it rejects it. And I think it clearly does. If I am a complete product of my genes and cultural pressures, then I have no, there is no me. I am a product of those functions, nothing else. And I reject that. So, and I'm not religious, I'm not a mystic. I reject that. I believe that I have control on both. Now it's true, you know, because, so I think I can control what kind of evolutionary, what kind of cultural pressures I can acknowledge and not acknowledge, choose or not to choose. And I can, and I can change. I can be short and be not aggressive. And then I can choose to learn a key, I don't know, Brazilian jiu-jitsu and change my level of aggression as a consequence. But this is the problem I have with evolutionary psychology as a science. In my view, the most important aspect of psychology, the foundational aspect of psychology, the foundational premise of psychology is free will. The foundational premise of psychology, and by the way, good cognitive psychologists know this. So cognitive psychology, to the extent that it's practiced and it's understood properly, is a study of choices. It's a study of your ability to control your cognition. Now, you know, maybe that's not how it's taught. And then it's not good cognitive psychology. I might be talking about minority of cognitive psychologists. But the essential feature of human beings, the thing that differentiates human beings from other animals, is that evolution has given us something, provided us something that is not provided any other species. And that is the ability to write the software. It has given us function, certain pathways, but huge amounts of control over how we use those functions. Some people, for example, choose not to use them and therefore default to what their genes and what the culture dictates. So I have no problem with, you know, I don't know what magical means. I don't believe in magic and I'm not interested in magic. I do know that there are people who choose to have a particular life and people who choose to have a different life. I know it because I can introspect it about myself. And I know it because I see it in other people. People choose to engage in what makes us human, engage in reason, and the people who choose not to engage in what makes us human, not to engage in reason. And that to me is the starting point. Not, oh yeah, that's philosophy. You guys deal with it in philosophy and free will. We're not that interested in it. This is the key question. If we're not a being of free will, if you can't define the I, as Sam Havis says, there is no I, then there is no psychology. Then yes, you know, it's just a matter of then who cares? I mean, I would add who the hell cares because I don't exist, so why do I care? But even when you talk about knowledge and cognition, you talked about it in terms of culture and in terms of groups. Knowledge of cognition has to start with the individual. Knowledge and cognition start with the individual from a little baby forming concepts, coming up with ideas, testing those ideas. It doesn't start with learning. It's learning from the outside. It starts from learning from the inside. And yes, we have the mechanism to do that. That's evolutionarily driven, but that requires ignition and it requires monitoring and that is the role of self and that is the role of free will. So again, you know, the elements here that I find interesting and then, but I think you're missing the fundamental premises, the fundamental foundations of what a science of psychology, nevermind evolution, I said college you would require to actually be predictive about the individual, not about averages, not just about averages. Okay, William, brace for a barrage of questions. Most of them are, as it would be predicted, directed to you. Okay, here's a super sad. So it was stated that humanity is evolving to explore the cosmos. If an astronaut were to land on Mars, would the psychological evolution occur before or after they arrive? So I assume this means we didn't consider that then we have something like a new being where in this new, completely new environment, we would be a tabular asset basically. Okay, should I respond to them one by one? Yes. Okay, so that one about arriving on Mars. Yeah, I mean, theoretically evolution would start playing on his, you know, he'd respond to the selection pressures there, but it would take a very, very long time. So even the world around us now, on here on planet Earth, our evolved mechanisms haven't kind of caught up yet. We've created cultural innovations and technological innovations that are way ahead of our evolved mechanisms. It's called our modern skulls house stone age brains. That's the reason why men aren't just queuing up around the corner around sperm banks to get their genes into the next generation. Human males don't do that, but we do have a drive for sex because that's the only mechanism evolution gave us to recreate. It doesn't know about sperm banks. So yeah, I mean, if you arrive on Mars, your evolutionary processes would play out, I presume there's no reason to think the universe doesn't, you know, evolution. There's even such a thing called cosmological evolution that shows that universes use evolutionary processes by replicating a difference from each other and inheritance. So it would apply, it would just take a very, very long time like evolution does, but culture is faster. We can develop technological innovations faster than evolution will create the natural mechanism. Yeah, I don't, you can jump in whenever you want, yeah. Yeah, I mean, look at how women have changed over the last 80 years, you know, and because they've suddenly been allowed the freedom and they've been recognized as, when it comes to up here, the equals of men and therefore they now work, they are engaged in intellectual pursuits and intellectual activities that they would just not, right, and to a large extent because they were not allowed to in the past, whether they can today, they are artists 500 years ago, they were not. And this to me just shows that it's not about, and it's not that evolution happened, it's not that women changed, it's not that something had changed in the brains of women over the last 100 years to make them more open to being artists than they were before. It's something political changed, that is they were suddenly allowed to do that. They always had that, it was always part of their capabilities, it was always part of their abilities, it's the men suppressed them and didn't allow them to do it, our conception, our intellectual knowledge, our ability, our intellectual understanding of human beings changed and as a consequence, culture changed. But even there, culture changed because certain individuals came to a certain understanding and fought for the culture to change. This culture doesn't just change by itself, it changes because individuals choose to fight for particular causes and bring about those cultural changes and then we see people freed up as a consequence. So again, I think it's, one can't explain, I don't think what's happened over the last 250 years, one can't explain capitalism or freedom or the enlightenment through evolution. One has to have an explanation that has to do with the role of ideas and free will and choices that human beings have to explain these historical phenomena. But so culture is, I agree with you there that women haven't inherently changed a crazy amount over the last 200 years, it's just been a culture that used to oppress them to a greater extent, has freed them up to act on their skills and things like that. So totally agree with you there. But culture is just exchange and accumulation and innovating of ideas, human brains generate them. So in that sense, you can't get to culture without the evolved human brain. I just want to return to the- So why do cultures go backwards sometimes? Because why do they go against survival? Why do they disappear or get annihilated? Not from external causes, but from their own failures. So evolution doesn't imply just like, oh, straight line progress trajectory, it's always going to get better and better and better. It doesn't necessarily imply that. Can you give me an example of a culture that doesn't, that kind of- Sure, Rome. Rome adopts Christianity and commits suicide. There's plenty of culture, Venice. Venice during the Middle Ages was a thriving place and it adopted certain forms of hierarchy that basically destroyed the freedom that made its progress possible. You see lots of America today. You see lots of cultures in decline and going away and disappearing. But that would be kind of because they're competing against each other and- No, it has nothing to do with competition. It's completely internal. It's, I mean, human beings have the capacity to commit suicide. Human cultures have the capacity to commit suicide, which is not intuitive, let's say, not a word I used to use. From an evolutionary perspective, it requires something that I think psychologists have to start taking into account, which is choices. People make bad choices. Not because a program to make the right choices, because- But evolution doesn't imply that humans only make good choices. Evolution requires inheritance, variation, and competition. So, you know, cultures follow that same process too. And even ideas in capitalism follow that process too. So, it's not like evolution. William, can I ask a question here to clarify something that you said also for the audience? And we already have some more super chats and feel free people to send more. Thank you very much for your super chat. So, William, knowing you, for example, you grew up in the same environment that most, basically that all grow up. But knowing you, you're going against many of the tendencies today. So, for example, you are someone who is proud of some of your masculine traits, for example, intellectually you go against the stream. And at the same time, people who grew up in the same environment took a completely different direction. They go completely with whatever is espoused from the culture. They don't question anything. They consider that, you know what I mean. Yeah. So, in the absence of free will, in the absence of individual judgment, how would you explain that you went in one direction and the majority is going to another direction? So, yeah, that brings me back to what I wanted to actually pick up with Yaron Ahn on this idea of choice. So, what I wanted to ask was, could we choose for the world to be entirely different to go against our evolved instincts entirely? And I don't think we could. I think that would break down if we tried. And we've seen some examples of that with things like the kibbutz and stuff like that. Well, it wouldn't work. Yeah. But you could choose to do it. Like the kibbutz is an example of what I'm suggesting. Right? You know, you can go against human nature. I believe human beings have a nature. I'm not rejecting the idea of nature. You see, human beings are the only species that exist. So, is it your opinion? Who can choose to go against its nature. Is it your opinion that evolution has led us up to a certain point and now we're off the leash? In a sense, yes. I believe that evolution has created something. I mean, and I don't understand how we did it. I don't pretend to know the signs. Nobody does, right? But something has been created in human beings that separate us from the rest of the animals that separates us from revolutionary pressures at least to the extent that we use the thing that evolution gave us which is the ability to write the software. To the extent that we take the reins, right? That we take control of our lives, we free ourselves from revolutionary pressures. To the extent that we don't, and unfortunately I think a lot of people don't, we are still constrained by those evolutionary pressures. That's interesting because that means then it's probably just the degree to which where we land on that line that me and you might disagree. I might think we're still more subject to evolutionary wiring or nature than you might. Of course, we have the ability to, we're the only ones to understand that evolution happened and that we're subject to its nature and understand why we behave the way we do, which is, and that's what I mean. It's such a unique time in human development. Just a final few things I wanna pick up on you when you said about cognitive psychology if it doesn't deal with choice, it's not psychology. I mean, I disagree with that because psychology, you still have thought and consciousness and behavior and most of what the brain does is regulate your body's temperature. So most of what your brain does, we describe it in psychology of who's in charge, you or your brain. So this is where I go back to it again. It's just the kind of philosophical debate about it is to what extent are you just what you feel to be you inside that all your mechanisms, is it you and your mechanisms or is it just your mechanisms as a collection? Yeah, yeah, that's interesting that we just might, it just might be where we fall on that kind of spectrum of, yeah. Yeah, so take that last point you made. So yes, big chunks of our brain do things that are not psychological. That psychology doesn't study like regulating temperature, like regulating noticing. I don't think that's what psychology studies that my neuroscience might study that but not psychology. I think psychology studies, our behavior, our emotion, our cognition, all of those in my view are primarily regulated by our will. So if you take out the primary regulatory agency, right, that, so I think for example, emotions are consequences of conclusions we came to, conclusions that we even came through consciously or unconsciously, right? But there's a difference. Well, what does conscious means? Conscious means in my control, unconscious, I'm out of control. And then there's a whole question of, how does my conscious mind and my unconscious communicate relate to one another? Well, that's partially control. So without dealing directly with the idea of you, of I, of, and of will, I don't think you can be effective in explaining all those behaviors and emotions and thoughts that people have. Because, you know, in psychology, we would say that the mind is what the brain does. And the idea of central agency, you know, it's worth studying what you're kind of, in evolutionary psychology, it's called the kind of the press secretary role. A lot of what our brain does and the true motivations for our behavior is hidden from us. And our brain actually develops a kind of a press secretary as if representing the president, it kind of invents a post hoc story for yourself. And there's amazing studies by Roger Sperry and Michael Gazanaga called the split brain research. Have you heard of this? Where they split, they were treating epilepsy and they split the corpus callosum of their patients and it solved the epilepsy, but it actually made the patient actually act like two complete different people. They were completely conflicted about their central agency. So that kind of throws the whole idea of that little homunculus you inside your brain a little bit out the window when you're kind of, both things can't be true with the one person. Sorry, maybe they can, right? Maybe that's what needs to be explained, right? So I don't think it refutes agency. It just says that it's complicated and it's complex and maybe you require the functioning of your entire mind in order to have that agency. That agency is not in one particular place in your mind, but it's maybe accumulation of everything that you do with your mind. So it's, I agree completely. These are from a physiological perspective. I think these are super complicated issues. And this is why from my perspective, psychology and evolutionary psychology, as long as they don't accept that and they don't accept the idea of will and agency, there's still a major weakness in the science. And that's where I'd like to see the science head is to start embracing and bringing in the idea of agency and see where that leads you. Cause I think it'll lead to very different approaches to the empirical data that's coming out of these studies. Okay, gentlemen, let's go back to the questions from the audience. So Fabian asks, is William saying that over millennia, men will or could evolve to congregate around sperm banks? And let me add something. Is there a very rational way, completely relevant of evolution, why sex is fun, whereas going to the bank and giving whatever you give, not so fun, unless they pay you a lot of money or whatever. Yeah, I mean, theoretically over enough time if this evolution would kind of realize, oh, from a gene's eye point of view, you know, it's not about what's good for William, it's more, I'm a vehicle for my genes and then my children will be vehicles for my genes as well. That's why we care more about our children than anyone else's. You know, that alone gives me an idea that evolution is playing on our minds and behavior. Why else would we care about our children rather than just children generally? Yeah, but wait, wait, wait, sorry. Let me push a bit more on this. Irrespective of our children, isn't sex fun for itself? You're with someone you like and the material expression of this is sex. Can't we see it in a non-evolutionary way as a rational choice that I like this person? I want literally to become one with them. Yeah, so humans use sex more pro-socially than other animals, mainly because of concealed ovulation over evolutionary time. We didn't know when. Other animals don't necessarily have sex for fun. We do. And the idea behind that is that we didn't know when women are fertile for sure. So it just gives you this mechanism and you can also use sex to kind of, you know, it feels great so you can attract a partner who's gonna stay with you and be a pair bonded with you. So that's useful for humans as well. So, you know, if anything feels good, you can think that it's kind of like meant to drive you towards that behavior. I presume sex feels great for animals too when they do it, but they don't do it. They're different from us. They don't use it in such a pro-social way. It's more... I'm not sure they do feel good when animals have sex. I don't know what the evidence is. And particularly the lower you go, I think this is a sense in which I view evolution. Evolution, I think, made sex pleasurable, right? It created the mechanism by which sex is pleasurable. And then it leaves us alone to make choices about who we have sex with, when we have sex. I mean, we're not... I don't care about my children because... They're completely in the dark about why we make those choices, you know? No, we're not completely in the dark. I mean, I know why I have sex with who I have. It's a rational choices I make. I mean, there are lots of temptations now. Evolutionary theory drives those choices. If you talk together, people cannot hear you. So one at a time, please. Just a really quick point. So evolutionary theory predicts sexual strategies and sexual choices ahead of time. So... But it doesn't. It predicts it on an aggregate, on an averages, but it doesn't predict my sexual choices. Of course, okay. So, but it predicts... So you can aggregate stuff and come up with averages. But what do they mean? I mean, that's typical of a human male. It doesn't mean that every human male does the same thing. Steve Pinker, one of the best evolutionary psychologists of all time, he doesn't want to have kids. So I know it doesn't. It's a bit of a problem. We're not tram-lined to just kind of completely obey our evolutionary nature. But he would absolutely say that a lot of sexual strategies that are in most men are generally typical for men are the product of evolution. I think what's interesting is the more men engage their reason and their free will. And my guess is this could be empirically tested. The less they engage with what are called evolutionary strategies, and the more they make independent choices about the kind of sexual strategies they engage in. That would be interesting. Okay, a follow-up on this one. First of all, Superstar from Christopher, there's a couple of cool things you can learn from evolutionary psychology. So William looks like at least someone from the audience is found value with this. But let me ask you a follow-up question on the gender roles. So one of the most convincing examples of evolutionary psychology is the appeal to women of the bad boy, or if you take it more historically, let's say the warrior. But again, imagine that there is no science of evolutionary psychology. Couldn't you envision a rational way, a non-evolutionary way, why you'd prefer the warrior? The warrior displays excellence, displays courage, displays ability, displays leadership. So what's not to like? Why do we need the evolutionary pressure to like the bad boy or the warrior, rather than say, look, this archetype, there's virtue in this archetype. There is something to admire. There's heroism in this archetype. Therefore, I'm attracted to it. So what's wrong with that? There's nothing wrong with it. And I mean, those archetypes probably are scaffolded and built upon the evolutionary history because those stories kept repeating and repeating and repeating. The most successful man is the one who's brave and aggressive and he has prestige in his community and he overcomes the challenges. He saves the girl from evil. So it would make total sense that the best stories would actually play on our evolutionary instincts in nature. So for example, we have cultural content biases. Something like 92% of the most, the Billboard top 100 songs have reproductive messaging. So they're about sex or love or romance. So, you know, we constantly come back to content that plays on our evolved instincts that appeal to us for that very reason. Certain people have prestige and we copy them even in areas that aren't even their expertise because over evolutionary time, it was probably better to copy the high prestige person. All of that is culturally, cultural psychology is built on our evolved psychological instincts. Okay, Yaron, what will probably be parting words? My parting words are going to be to take individual cognition free will and reason seriously. And I really think this is what is missing for many fields in the world today, but certainly from the field of psychology broadly and evolutionary psychology most specifically. If I think about, you know, maybe this is, my failure in life is that I don't copy people and I seem to do things that are completely different and unique. So it's human choice is at the center of all of this and understanding cognition. And I really don't think without an understanding. And I think here is where Ryan Rand really shines and really presents us with new philosophical content. And I think philosophy is a foundation for science. So I think it's important. New philosophical content to understand things, psychology and other fields. Who work in epistemology, who work on cognition or work in concept formation on what is knowledge and where knowledge comes from. I think is essential for us if we're going to understand human psychology better. So there's a pitch to go read introduction to objective epistemology, which is not an easy book to read, but worthwhile. Well, William has expressed some sympathy for Ryan Rand on Twitter. But anyway, William, tell us a bit where people can find more of your work and what would be, let's say your half a minute things that you want the audience to remember. Well, firstly, I would say, Nikos, I think the attraction to Ryan Rand is more my admiration for your good self. Everyone else I know criticizes Ryan Rand. And I think to myself, how can someone I admire so much like Nikos? There must be something here. So what I would make a trade, a deal with yourself and Yaron, that I'll read some Ryan Rand stuff that you send me. And if you read some of the psych stuff that I send you, I know you do, you always ask for it, Nikos, anyway. And so that could be a good deal. William is my evolutionary psychology source when I want to figure out something. Right, okay. So that was helpful and hopefully the differences were made clear. So thank you very much, Yaron. Thank you very much, William. Thanks to the Ryan Rand Institute. Bye everyone and thanks for being with us. Bye guys.