Why Science Says Men & Women Will Never Be The Same - David Geary

David Geary is a cognitive developmental and evolutionary psychology professor at The University of Missouri and an author. Men and women are different. This should not be a controversial statement, and yet it is. Thankfully David has spent a career assessing differences between men and women in every domain from physical to psychological and behavioural to cognitive. Expect to learn the real reason why women are underrepresented in STEM, why achieving true gender equality in prosperous countries is impossible, the massive differences between men's and women's brains, why strength is not the most compelling argument against trans athletes in female sports, why there has been such a rapid increase in transgender youths and much more... Sponsors: Get the Whoop 4.0 for free and get your first month for free at http://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get over 37% discount on all products site-wide from MyProtein at https://bit.ly/proteinwisdom (use code: MODERNWISDOM) Get 83% discount & 3 months free from Surfshark VPN at https://surfshark.deals/MODERNWISDOM (use code MODERNWISDOM) Extra Stuff: Check out David's writing - https://quillette.com/author/david-c-geary/ Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #men #women #behaviour - 00:00 Intro 00:20 The Contested Topic of Sex Differences 06:00 Why Women Are Better at Reading 13:13 The Crisis of Disengaged Men 18:25 Sex Differences Increase When Freedom is Increased 30:00 Biggest Differences in Men’s & Women’s Brains 37:08 Are Differences Simply From Social Constructs? 49:30 The Science Behind Sex-based Behaviours 1:05:12 Traits that Women Do Better at Than Men 1:13:33 Why Has There Been a Rapid Increase in Transgenderism? 1:22:49 Where to Find David - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  You can take a brain pattern of a 10 year old and predict whether that brain belongs to a boy or a girl about 93% of the time, almost as good as you can by looking at an adult face of a male and a female. So huge difference.

• 0:15Chris Williamson?

  Why do you think the discussion about sex differences between men and women has become so hotly contested recently?

• 0:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, great, great question. I think it's always been hotly contested to some extent. It just kind of flares up and then down, just depending on conditions. I think the, one of the main drivers is there are many individuals who don't want to believe that there's biological bases to anything. And if there's a biological basis to anything, it's going to show up in sex differences. And there are gender activists who don't want to believe that there are differences between men and women that have a biological

• 1:06Speaker 00

  basis to them. And therefore, they don't want to consider that those potential differences contribute to socially important outcomes, like the percentage of males in computer science or engineering, or, you know, teaching, or whatever it might be.

• 1:25Chris Williamson?

  You, you did a bunch of research, right, looking at STEM and seeing what it was that contributed to women's lower participation in STEM subjects?

• 1:40Speaker 00

  Right, yeah. So, so we looked at, we, we've looked at a variety of sex differences and a number of things. And in one 2018 study, we looked at the proportion of women, college students, who were getting degrees in inorganic sciences. So, computer science, engineering, physics, and so forth. And we

• 2:09Speaker 00

  Plotted that against things like gender equality, which is would be a high gender equal country would be one that they tend to be generally pretty wealthy, liberal. There's high levels of female participation in the labor force, there's women in parliament or congress or whatever it might be, a lot of women in higher ed and so forth. So the standard argument has been for the last four or five decades is that as countries approach that type of wealth and liberal openness, that basic psychological cognitive

• 2:54Speaker 00

  and other sex differences will begin to disappear. So we looked at that generally, we looked across countries and we found the exact opposite of that, that as countries became more gender equal, there were proportionally fewer women going into these inorganic sciences, they were going into other areas presumably. So the gap in these these particular STEM fields actually increased as societies became more open to women participating in a variety of kind of cultural endeavors.

• 3:31Chris Williamson?

  Have you got any idea whether this is due to interests or abilities?

• 3:36Speaker 00

  Right, probably a couple of different things. Interest for sure, there are sex differences in interest in science generally, and there are sex differences in particularly interest in mechanical types of things, how how inorganic things work. In terms of abilities, the probably one of the primary movers is intra-individual strength. So if you're into so what what are you best at?

• 4:13Speaker 00

  Reading or math or reading or science or whatever it might be. And throughout the world, girls are generally, their best subject is generally reading. Meaning that their comparative advantage is in fields that are more reading heavy than math or science heavy, even if their overall levels of math and science are high or even higher than boys. If their strength is reading, they're still more likely to go into other fields than STEM related.

• 4:49Chris Williamson?

  That's very interesting that it's not necessarily, you could have, let's say that women were better than men in maths on average, but that women were even more better at reading. They're going to be predisposed to do the thing that they are best at. We all take pride in the things that we feel we're very competent at. And if we have this biological predisposition, that is a sex difference. Why, why would it be surprising that we would go away and flourish in those areas?

• 5:23Speaker 00

  Well, yeah, it is not actually surprising at all. But you know, in our mind, because it's just a rational choice. You're going to go into areas in which you're going to have a comparative advantage where you're going to do relatively better than you would in other areas. So if you're a poor reader and you're reasonably good at math and science, you're probably going to go into a tech field.

• 5:48Speaker 00

  If you're really good at reading and much better at reading than, than tech related sorts of things, you're probably going to go into humanities or something similar.

• 5:58Chris Williamson?

  Why is it the case, or why would it be the case that females are better at reading? And that males seem to be better at maths? Give me the ancestral justification for why men should be better at, at counting things and women should be better at reading things, given that both of those have only been around for a few thousand years?

• 6:22Speaker 00

  Right, yeah, so both reading and mathematics are evolutionarily novel abilities. And so you can't say that, well, you know, women evolved to be good readers and men evolved to do math, it just doesn't make sense. And, you know, probably if anything, the good mathematicians and recent evolutionary history probably have had below-average reproductive success, you know, just wild guess there. But in terms of reading, if you look at brain imaging studies and cognitive studies and so forth, it is an adaptation of the language system and other systems like theory of mind, you know, understanding characters and so forth, understand plots.

• 7:07Speaker 00

  And women have advantages in certain language areas and they have advantages in theory of mind and so forth. So the underlying basis upon which reading skills are developed, there's a sex difference favoring girls and women. When it comes to math, there's no math gene per se. I mean, there is a kind of inherent sense of quantity and so forth, but it's not a very sophisticated skill. And if we look at overall mean differences in math, they're pretty small. Where we see the differences are in areas that involve spatial abilities.

• 7:51Speaker 00

  So certain areas of geometry, solving word problems actually has a spatial component to it because you can sketch out the relations in a complex word problem that helps you kind of solve, set up and solve that problem. And that is driving the sex difference in math levels to a large extent when we see those differences. There are also more men than women at the high end of math performance. That was at one point a very big gap. It's closed since the 90s, there's maybe three to one men than women at the high end,

• 8:35Speaker 00

  but it's kind of been relatively flat since then.

• 8:38Chris Williamson?

  I would imagine, it seems to me that the discussion around, "We need to get more women into STEM, we need to get more men into HEAL," has very much dampened down.

• 8:52Chris Williamson?

  As the stark difference in college admission and then like completion rate between women and men with two women for every one man completing a four-year US college degree ish on average, seven times more men dropped out of college during COVID than women, it's huge. I noticed that the discussion around pushing women further into higher education appears to have kind of fallen by the wayside. We haven't, we haven't had that be quite so vociferous as it was. And that seems to have been, I would have said in the last sort of three to four years that I've really noticed it.

• 9:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. The, you know, if we go back, there's a long literature on kids liking of school, you know, going back more than a hundred years. And girls have always kind of liked school more than boys. Sitting there, listening to adults and, you know, being conscientious, doing your, I mean, that's more, it's easier for girls to adapt to that kind of environment than it is, especially for young guys. They just are not really, it's not really their thing. And as higher ed opened, you know, there, there were clearly restrictions on and discouragement of women going into college, going back 60 years or so. As those restrictions

• 10:15Speaker 00

  abated, we had more women flowing into higher ed than men. And now we have about a 60, 60, 40 ratio of completion for, in the US and a lot of Western, Western countries. Yeah. So bringing attention to that highlights the disadvantage that boys and men now have in educational outcomes. And that might be why you don't hear as much about it because the gender activists don't want people to think about it. But it's it's it's a problem. It's a problem on multiple levels.

• 10:59Speaker 00

  One is it's distorting the operational sex ratio for young adults. More educated women than men leads to more competition among women for a smaller base of educated and ambitious.

• 11:16Chris Williamson?

  Do you know what I've I've deemed that I needed to come up with a meme to describe that. So I've deemed it the tall girl problem.

• 11:24Speaker 00

  Tall girl problem. Yeah.

• 11:26Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 11:27Speaker 00

  And it's, you know, it's associated with the delays in marriage.

• 11:33Speaker 00

  You know, increased divorce rates.

• 11:35Chris Williamson?

  More objectification, more sexy selfies, more casual sex, more unprotected sex.

• 11:41Speaker 00

  Right, right. You know, back, back, back to the hippie and disco days. Types of things for young, educated adults. You know, which is whatever. I used to blame it on the Bee Gees, but apparently it's a little more complicated than that. You know, you've got the the sex ratio thing or the tall girl thing.

• 12:02Chris Williamson?

  Tall girl problem it is.

• 12:03Speaker 00

  Yeah. The other problem is, is that the US and a number of other highly developed countries are losing the industrial base that would

• 12:16Speaker 00

  provide pretty good paying jobs for working class guys. That really got them integrated into the workforce, integrated into the broader culture, so forth. And now a lot of those jobs are disappearing and you have a lot of guys that are probably pretty good at spatial mechanical types of things. But they're not pursuing school. And a lot of them are pulling back is a huge number. Work, you know, living at home still, not really engaged socially, not engaged economically. And, you know, it's a potential tinderbox for society if, if, you know, things really, really collapse economically.

• 13:01Chris Williamson?

  You are touching on all of my favorite catastrophes and crises here, David. So first one. Richard Reeves' book of Boys and Men. Were you familiar with that? Did you get to read that last year?

• 13:14Speaker 00

  I don't think I I've read that.

• 13:16Chris Williamson?

  You would. It's very short, super short read, only about one hundred and fifty, two hundred pages, I think. Fantastic. So it's, um, he is a policy wonk guy from Washington DC who is looking at structural issues that boys and men are facing. Uh, education, employment, and then in the the home, you would love that. So first off, put that on your list. Okay. Secondly, Nicholas Eberstadt, Men Without Work. Are you familiar with him?

• 13:39Speaker 00

  No, no. Yeah, I, I, yeah, sorry. I I've read the basic economic papers, but not the popular press books.

• 13:48Chris Williamson?

  Got you. Yeah. So his, um, he was on the show a couple of weeks ago and he said, there's this cohort of prime working aged twenty two to fifty five year old men, seven million of which are unemployed and not seeking work. On average, they spend two thousand hours per year watching screens. Fifty percent of that time is on prescription drugs whilst smoking weed. And two thirds of that cohort live in a household which claims at least one disability benefit.

• 14:18Speaker 00

  Right, right.

• 14:19Chris Williamson?

  Absolutely wild.

• 14:22Speaker 00

  Huge, huge problem. Uh, that is a huge problem. I mean, partially due to the changes, you know, increases in world trade and and changes. And as I said, the the manufacturing base. I I also wonder if a lot of the cultural, social rhetoric about things like toxic masculinity and so forth, and promoting girls in education, which is fine.

• 14:47Speaker 00

  But it's often seen by activists as a zero sum sort of game. You don't want to acknowledge any issues that boys have because that might take away from what girls are, the extras that girls are getting. And it's creating a real problem.

• 15:04Chris Williamson?

  I couldn't agree more. Um, one thing that you touched on before was the potential tinderbox. And, uh, let's roll all of these together. Given the fact that we have the highest rates of sexlessness amongst young men that we've ever seen, around about thirty percent of men haven't had sex in the last year, aged eighteen to thirty. Around about fifty percent of men say that they're not looking for short term or long term relationships. We have this massive cohort, around about seven million men just in the US, twenty two to fifty five, that are not looking for work, not, um, and also not employed, also not in education, employment or training.

• 15:40Chris Williamson?

  And yet, we haven't seen the in-kind increase of killings and antisocial behavior, spray painting cars, setting stuff on fire, pushing over granny, et cetera.

• 15:53Speaker 00

  Right.

• 15:54Chris Williamson?

  What do you attribute the fact that young male syndrome has all the raw materials to occur? And yet, we haven't seen it. What do you think's going on there?

• 16:03Speaker 00

  Right. Yeah. Yeah. Well, typically, as you said, when you have these disaffected, disengaged men, you get higher rates of crime and violence and a variety of other social ills. I think you hit on it. I mean, they have something to keep them occupied. They've got internet porn or whatever they're watching on the screens and they're getting some flow of income either from disability payments or extended unemployment, or they're living with their parents or something like that. So they are kind of marginally satisfied probably with things. But, you know,

• 16:43Speaker 00

  what happens if, you know, the US and these countries go into a massive recession and these benefits and other sorts of things have to be cut? And, you know, it's basically they're being paid off to be quiet and just deal with their situation.

• 17:00Chris Williamson?

  Oh, that's a very interesting way to frame it. There is some existential malaise, just this ambient sense that you're not needed, structurally, socioculturally, archetipally, in terms of the role that you play in the wider world. And the, how would you say, rich social safety net financially that a lot of men are offered, doesn't allow them to buy a palace, but it gives them enough money to keep the porn subscription and the internet ticking over, which means that social media can continue to sedate, video games, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, I think.

• 17:46Chris Williamson?

  Where I've arrived at is a sedation hypothesis that you've got porn video games, social media that are kind of nerfing the desire for status seeking, for goal orientation, and for reproduction, and giving them a titrated dose, this is enough, means that they don't need to go and do it, therefore, the lack of it doesn't hurt quite so much, it's not enough to be satisfied, but it's enough to not go and burn everything down.

• 18:14Chris Williamson?

  It's fascinating. I mean, this is a problem that I'm basically completely obsessed by at the moment. One other thing to just kind of round out what we spoke about at the beginning, is that the gender equality paradox, is that what we're referring to, the fact that as you get increasing egalitarianism, you have more of a sex difference in terms of what people go into?

• 18:36Speaker 00

  Right. Yeah, yeah. So that, we call it the gender equality paradox in STEM in this particular article. But you also see larger sex differences in a variety of other things, such as personality, spatial abilities, a variety of things that, you know, as people get wealthier, and there are more options, social and economic options available to them, they're better able to express their own individual preferences. And we've argued that as you're better able to express your own individual preferences, any inherent sex differences, or any inherent individual differences, will be better expressed in those

• 19:21Speaker 00

  contexts than as contexts that have, for a variety of reasons, more restricted opportunities.

• 19:30Chris Williamson?

  So as the real world constrains your choices less by being more free, more open, more degrees of freedom, more opulent, etc., that allows you to fully follow whatever it is that you care about the most, therefore, these sex differences, we seem to see increase?

• 19:50Speaker 00

  Right. Yeah.

• 19:51Chris Williamson?

  What is the response from sex difference denial groups about why the gender equality paradox exists then?

• 20:05Speaker 00

  Well, um, yeah, when, when we, uh, uh, Heesbert, So, and I did this, you know, the, this 2018 study, you know, I, I, we walked through, got through all the data and we thought it was pretty interesting, but not, you know, we didn't think it was going to be as big of a deal, at least I didn't think it was going to be as big of a deal as it turned out to be, mostly because it wasn't that surprising. And it wasn't that surprising because other people had found, you know, like increases in personality differences and so forth across cultures. Um, but our, but the response to it was pretty, um, negative. We, we got

• 20:44Speaker 00

  a lot of emails. Um, the editors of the journal apparently got a lot of emails, including, um, you know, attacks on us and pressure for them to retract the article, so forth. They, they didn't do that. Um, there, there was a commentary on it that did get published. Uh, I think just because the editor got tired of getting so many commentaries, he could finally say, well, we're already published one and we're not going to do any others. Um, that showed that the gender equality paradox didn't, well, one, they, they complained about how we define proportion of males and females in STEM fields, which was just

• 21:26Speaker 00

  kind of, kind of, um, you know, I know, you know, just kind of a stupid thing. Um, but then they took, actually, in a, a study that Heesber and I put together called the, the Biggie, which was an alternative, um, measure of well-being, sex differences in well-being, rather than the gender, um, equality measure that most people look at. We looked at things like opportunities to complete education, overall healthy lifespan, life satisfaction, things that are, um, equally valid for men and women and boys and girls, rather than

• 22:08Speaker 00

  something like, um, the proportion of women in par, parliament, which has a gender activist and it's, it's very female biased. So when we use the female biased measure... Which is what the activists push for in is a better measure of gender equality. We get the paradox. When we look at our measure, which we developed to make it sex neutral, just because the gender equality stuff is biased, they don't find that, which is what we would expect. But anyway, the authors of that made a big deal of that. They did a hit piece on Heesbert and I and BuzzFeed.

• 22:50Chris Williamson?

  Oh, very reputable academic response there.

• 22:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, I had never read BuzzFeed. I never even considered it.

• 22:59Chris Williamson?

  You'll be parked in between four outfits to wear on your next hot girl walk and 10 dog memes so good that we can't stop laughing. So I'm glad that they really positioned you appropriately there.

• 23:09Speaker 00

  Right, right. Well, they they put in there a lot of ad hominem and a lot of comments that the editor and reviewers of their comment to the journal said, you got to take out because this isn't supported. They put it in there. But anyway, now there's this BuzzFeed thing and there's this commentary on our original article. So when people bring up the gender equality paradox in STEM, they can now say, well, this has been debunked. See this BuzzFeed.

• 23:39Chris Williamson?

  Fuck off, dude. Fuck off.

• 23:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 23:47Speaker 00

  So that's that's how it's dealt with. You know, you get something into the general media in a commentary somewhere or some counter argument somewhere. And then when somebody brings it up, you don't have to discuss the points. You can just say, well, that's already off the table. It's gone. It's been, you know.

• 24:05Chris Williamson?

  BuzzFeed et al., 2018.

• 24:09Speaker 00

  Yep, yep.

• 24:10Chris Williamson?

  Phenomenal. Okay, one final thing to sort of round this out. You've used participation in STEM. That seems to be, you know, a very obvious sex difference that occurs as you get more egalitarianism in a society. Are there any other equally strong or even stronger evidence for the gender equality paradox?

• 24:32Speaker 00

  Well, one one interesting thing is the sex difference in height gets bigger.

• 24:39Chris Williamson?

  What?

• 24:40Speaker 00

  Which sounds weird. Yeah.

• 24:42Chris Williamson?

  What?

• 24:44Speaker 00

  And that that has nothing to do with gender equality, actually. It has to do with the overall health of the population, the wealth of the population, medical.

• 24:55Chris Williamson?

  Oh, so you think in a in a less prosperous, less egalitarian society or a less prosperous society, egalitarian societies tend to need to be prosperous in order to be able to allow people to choose what they want. Prosperous societies have better medical interventions, food, water, sanitation, etc., which doesn't nerf the height increases that men's natural genetic disposition would have caused them to get. Am I right here?

• 25:25Speaker 00

  That's correct. The physical sex differences get bigger because the overall health of the population gets better. And so not only are the psychological sex differences expressed better, the physical sex differences are actually larger. That that's a very robust effect. And I'm looking now at whether that particular fact is correlated with changes in sex differences and certain cognitive abilities, suggesting that as physical health gets better, you know, the brain obviously is going to mature better and fully develop to its full potential.

• 26:04Speaker 00

  Then some cognitive sex differences should actually increase along with the sex differences in height. And it's hard to study that a little bit because there's really good data on height across, you know, the last century in a lot of countries and some places across multiple centuries.

• 26:25Speaker 00

  But the, you know, the psychological cognitive tests are more recent, so there isn't as good a data. But but but there's hints of that. The spatial advantages of men and spatial abilities seems to be increasing along with their increases in height. And the and and it and it often is positively correlated with the overall health of the population. So healthier populations with bigger sex differences in height usually have bigger sex differences in spatial abilities. The same seems to be true with women's advantages

• 27:06Speaker 00

  in certain verbal memory tasks and episodic remembering personal experiences and so forth. They're better at those. And as indicators of overall physical health get better, the sex difference there seems to increase as well. So that ties it into if we tie it into height changes, we can better link it to actual an actual biological mechanism.

• 27:34Chris Williamson?

  David, you're absolutely blowing my mind here. This is so interesting. So in the same way as a prosperous society allows men and women to better choose the life paths that they have, it may also biologically, nutritionally, medically, et cetera, create a foundation that allows men and women to be more of what they are with regards to their cognition, their capacity, their behavior, which is upstream from a society that allows them to choose what they want to do more. So it predisposes them to a particular type, which would be women. I imagine, you know, if you were able to do the best studies in

• 28:18Chris Williamson?

  the world, you might even find that women's social networks become more intricate. They become more nuanced and more subtle in particular ways. This is like, this is one of the most interesting things that I've learned. This is really, really, really cool.

• 28:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, there are some interesting behavioral studies looking at in developing nations, looking at things like nutritional health, nutritional supplements for kids who are at risk for stunting, you know, kind of low physical growth, poor, poor physical growth. And so you can look at behavioral competitiveness, physical activity levels, which generally favor boys over girls. And you can look at, you know, how do supplements, you know, how does improving their health change the sex differences in rough and tumble play, competitiveness and so

• 29:17Speaker 00

  forth. And the biggest gains are for boys who are receiving these supplements. And the biggest losers are the boys who don't get them. So some of the sex differences in, you know, just physical activity levels and competitiveness are smaller or disappear in malnourished, you know, poor health kids. But when you improve their health, these sex differences pop up.

• 29:47Chris Williamson?

  That's fascinating.

• 29:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. Consistent with, you know, there, there's a biological foundation to this that is rooted in, you know, physical health, including, you know, brain development.

• 30:00Chris Williamson?

  When it comes to sex differences in cognition, what are the most well-established differences in men's and women's brains? Let's get into the nuts and bolts of what's actually going on here.

• 30:12Speaker 00

  Sure. So let's, you know, traditionally psychologists have been studying sex differences in cognition for, you know, a century or so. And they focused on verbal abilities, generally math and spatial. Let's take math off the table because it's evolutionarily novel. It's not that interesting. And verbal is a big field. It can go anywhere from, you know, how quickly you can name animals that start with the letter A versus analogical reasoning. You know, girls have advantages on one, boys on another. So it's, it's not, not clear. So putting it, I've argued that, you know, we really need to think about these cognitive sex differences from a broader evolutionary perspective and think about, okay, what is

• 30:57Speaker 00

  it that is universal across people, no matter where they live? You know, math isn't because you get it in school or you don't get it at all. And so things that are, one thing that is universal that women and girls have advantages on, or something that I call, or at least an aspect of folk psychology. These are skills that allow you to interact with individuals on a one-on-one basis and, more importantly, develop and maintain one-on-one relationships. This would be, you know, BFF sorts of relationships. You think about all the skills involved in that.

• 31:41Speaker 00

  And that would be, you know, language is obviously a good part of it, but also reading facial expressions, you know, making inferences about how they're feeling or thinking based on facial expressions, reading body posture, types of things, vocal intonation, theory of mind, which is your skill, is actually figuring out what's going on with the individual. And if we look at each of those individual skills, girls and women have small to moderate advantages in them. But in the real world, they're working in concert. They're not just bits and pieces. They're, they're working all together.

• 32:21Speaker 00

  And if we look at the entire constellation of skills, as they're working together in an interaction or interpreting an interaction, girls and women have fairly large advantages. Probably about 85% of them are better than the average guy, or maybe 90% or so. So it's a fairly substantial advantage. There are other areas involved in, you know, dealing with, with people or groups or whatever, where we see more subtle differences. But it's the, the one-on-one kind of emotional intelligence, I think some people might call it, that, I think that's what people mean by that. I call it kind of an individual level folk psychology. Girls, girls and women do really well at that.

• 33:06Speaker 00

  Boys and men do particularly good on what I call folk physics.

• 33:12Speaker 00

  This is, you know, not an academic physics, but it is kind of the foundation for aspects of an academic physics. It involves things like dealing with the physical world, navigating from one place to another, tracking the trajectory of things as they're moving through space, understanding how objects might be manipulated and used as tools, a mechanical reasoning type of thing. And so, boys and men have small to large advantages in all of those areas.

• 33:52Chris Williamson?

  Wow, okay. What's social learning theory?

• 33:56Speaker 00

  Social learning theory, well, there is a social learning theory where we learn to, you know, what do you do in this context? You know, you go to a dinner with folks, you know, it's your first formal dinner, you've never worn a tie before, and you have no idea how to do things. You know, you watch other people and you figure out, you kind of imitate what people who seem to know what they're doing are doing. And so, that's a social learning type of thing. And that's a universal as well. I mean, we learn a lot from other people, there's no doubt about that. But I think you might be mean social roles theory.

• 34:37Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 34:38Speaker 00

  Yes. Yeah, so, social roles is the argument that, uh, boys and girls and men and women learn to behave in sex-specific ways, you know, like, girls are more communal or nurturing, and guys are more agentic, you know, focused on getting things done, being more dominant and so forth, because they receive either explicit or implicit information from the social environment that they are, that basically tells them, oh, you're a girl, you're a boy, and this is what girls and boys do, and therefore, you...

• 35:20Speaker 00

  Adhere to these roles. And the argument then is that

• 35:27Speaker 00

  that's how all these, we're basically blank slate mentally, psychologically. And then we kind of develop these roles based from, you know, learning from others of, of, of the same sex.

• 35:43Speaker 00

  And that is the argument underlying things like, you know, encouraging girls to do this, getting role models, you know, girls in STEM role models, which is fine, I mean, whatever.

• 35:57Speaker 00

  The problem is, is it's, it's well overstated. You know, boys don't like playing with toy cars and blocks and so forth because their parents have implicitly given them those toys for Christmas or they've seen the advertisements, you know, boys playing with these things on television. They like playing with these things because, you know, if you're playing with a car, it is, it has a, a specific type of motion to it. It's a non-biological motion that captures the attention of what's called the dorsal visual stream that feeds into these folk physics centers that I mentioned previously.

• 36:42Speaker 00

  So there is an early bias in what boys and girls look at. Boys look at physical motion and stuff and they're attracted to those types of things. Girls look at faces and the details of objects more. And that's, I mean, there, there is some place for social roles, but, but it's, the extent of its influence is really overstated, in my opinion.

• 37:07Chris Williamson?

  A lot of people, when they talk about sex differences, particularly whether that be in children or as soon as people grow up to be adults, will come up against somebody who either in terms of well-meaning, or this is just the way that they see the world, will use social roles theory as, well, look, of course, boys are stronger than girls. They're the ones that are encouraged to do rough and tumble play. Of course, boys are more interested in things than people because they've seen it on TV. Of course, boys are expecting to be more dominant because these are the subtle cues that their parents and the media and everybody else has given to them. For the people who sit down at Thanksgiving, perhaps with that one brother or sister or cousin

• 37:52Chris Williamson?

  who makes it, puts this across as an argument. What are the strongest rebuttals that can dispel this particular myth?

• 38:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, so, so there was, well, one, these differences are universal. I mean, it's not just, you know, the, you know, US upper middle class families that see, I mean, you see it all over the place. But, but one important piece of data, well, there are a number of them. I'll, I'll tell you one and I'll tell you more if you want. There was a study done, you know, a few decades ago that was a fairly large scale study looking at, you know, a couple hundred parents and how they were socializing their kids. So there were, some of them were traditional parents, you know, they'd buy the girls Barbies or dolls or whatever, and the boys, you know, car trucks.

• 38:49Speaker 00

  And other parents were more, I don't know if they'd be progressive, I mean, they'd be called progressive today, but back then they were hippies or whatever they were. They, they, they were non-traditional. So they raised their kids, say, okay, you know, girls can play with, with blocks and with toy cars and boys can play with dolls and all of that's fine. It doesn't make any difference. And then the researchers brought the kids into the lab setting and said, okay, is it okay for girls to play with trucks and boys play with dolls? Those that were raised in non-traditional families said, yeah, sure, it's fine. No problem. So their beliefs about what's okay and or what's typical or not typical or whatever

• 39:34Speaker 00

  mirrored to some extent what their parents said.

• 39:39Speaker 00

  But then when you cut them loose and watch how they actually play, they still play in sex typical ways. So their beliefs about kind of what boys and girls should do and their actual, it was one thing, but their actual behavior was sex typical. There was no difference between how boys from traditional and untraditional families played and same for girls. Meaning that the kids are calling the shots here.

• 40:08Speaker 00

  They're creating their own environments based on what they find interesting and what they want to do.

• 40:15Chris Williamson?

  Does this show up in primates as well, juvenile primates?

• 40:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, rough and tumble play is pretty common in species where males are bigger and more aggressive than females. And those are typically species, if we're looking at primates, where there's a lot of male male fighting and competition in adulthood. Clearly see that in humans. If we look, you know, in human history, it's clearly a lot of physical competition, a lot of violence and so forth. The sex differences in physical size go back at least four million years in our ancestors. It's a long, long evolutionary history of that. Obviously, males and females are big, males are bigger than females in modern humans.

• 41:01Speaker 00

  And we see the sex difference in rough and tumble play. I mean, it just fits very, very nicely with this evolutionary pattern and this pattern of male on male aggression.

• 41:13Chris Williamson?

  I remember hearing a while ago that if you give a juvenile female chimp, perhaps, a sort of a soft toy that resembles a baby, that they treat it in a different way to the males. Is that right? Was that, have I made this up or was that correct?

• 41:31Speaker 00

  That's, that's correct. It was with vervet monkeys and I think it's been replicated maybe with macaques or so. So, right, if you give toys, you know, sex typical toys, the human sex typical, a doll in a truck, you know, big like dump truck that they can play with, you do see preferences. The females like the dolls more than the males do. The males are also more likely to approach their novel types of things and so the risk taking is higher there.

• 42:08Speaker 00

  Now, there's no, you know, toy trucks and macaque evolutionary history. But again, it could be attractive because of the type of motion in the dorsal ventral stream associated with navigation and just kind of focusing on large scale space.

• 42:27Chris Williamson?

  I'm fascinated by the fact that the type of toys, it's not, it's not just the fact that that figuratively represents a kind of role perhaps that I would imagine that if you were to look at the sex differences in the trucker community, that it's going to be heavily skewed toward men.

• 42:47Chris Williamson?

  But it's, there's also something innate about that movement back and forth. And given the fact that we, you know, go back far enough and we do have a common ancestor, there has to be the sex difference, which at least was maybe there before we split off. And we're seeing this play out with macaques or whatever else it might be.

• 43:05Chris Williamson?

  What, what would you say to the people that say, we are more similar than we are different? You know, if you look at the overlap between the dispositions that boys and girls have, that men and women have, you know, you've mentioned there one particular example, which seems pretty stark, which is the average female is better than 85% of men when it comes to, I think it was reading faces, or perhaps it was verbal ability. What would you say to people that say, we're more similar than we are different? These sex differences are basically small and it doesn't really matter. And David, you're just making a mountain out of a molehill.

• 43:41Speaker 00

  Yep, yep, yep. I've heard that. And that's a very popular belief in, in the field and in one that is debated. So if we look at sex differences in certain verbal skills, they're fairly small. So you can say, well, we're more similar than different. Maybe 60% of women are better than the average guy. Not big. But my point was, and other people's point is, is if you put the whole package together, it's, you know, the brain is an integrated system of, that pulls together abilities that you use in tandem.

• 44:19Speaker 00

  And when you pull together these networks of abilities, that would include, you know, making eye contact, theory of mind, sort of things, vocal intonation and so forth, that's when you get very big differences. And that's kind of more of a real life sort of thing. So if we look at individual personality types of things, like how sociable, how much you like just festive chatter and talking to people and kind of the warmth component being nurturing, you know, it's a modest sex difference favoring girls and women in this case. But if we put together the whole pattern of personality, we get much, much larger differences with not, in this case, not much overlap.

• 45:03Chris Williamson?

  Because this is not just like rolling a six once, it's the equivalent of rolling five sixes in a row. And that suite of traits, when bound together, trends much more toward women. I had Joyce Benderson on the show at the start of the year, and she gave me a really interesting example. I'd love to know if you've looked at any of this. She's spent forever studying kindergarten kids playing and the games that they play. And she mentioned that if you look at the sorts of games that boys and girls play, these are three, four years old, I think maybe up to five years old, you know, hasn't been a massive amount of time for socialization to occur, especially in kindergarten. This may be if you're the eldest child or an only child, the first time that you've actually

• 45:48Chris Williamson?

  got to spend any significant period of time with other kids. And she said, if you look at the language they're using, if you look at the games that they're playing, boys are binding themselves together over shared warfare against cowboys or aliens or something else. And if you look at what girls are doing, they are keeping something alive. It's a rabbit, it's a doll, and the language as well that's used is, again, very different, sexed differently. What have you, have you integrated any of this, the sort of social game playing into your work too?

• 46:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. Joyce's work is great. I really keep up on it and like, like reading it. Yeah, in, yeah, that's called social dramatic play. So kids-

• 46:40Chris Williamson?

  Social dramatic play?

• 46:42Speaker 00

  Uh, socio dramatic.

• 46:43Chris Williamson?

  Socio dramatic play, okay.

• 46:44Speaker 00

  Yeah. So kids, when they hit that age- Begin to develop a richer imagination. So they can now imagine themselves in different role taking sorts of, you know, you know, different characters in these roles. And then they can now better integrate their roles with the roles of their playmates. So they're, they're basically practicing social interactions in different contexts, being, you know, the hero or being the parent or whatever it might be. So it's, it's an important component of development. And the interesting thing there is that the fantasies that boys and girls,

• 47:28Speaker 00

  as, as, as Joyce stated, develop on their own, differ quite, quite dramatically. And in fact, the, the vocabularies of boys and girls begin to differ in the second year of life in terms of what they talk about.

• 47:46Chris Williamson?

  How so? What do they talk about?

• 47:48Speaker 00

  Yeah. So, you know, stereotypical things, you know, unsurprisingly to me. So 18 month old girls are more likely to focus on clothing and boys on objects. And, you know, in terms of just kind of free, free discussion sorts of things. But, but the boys integrating themselves into a, they typically integrate themselves into larger groups. Joyce probably talked about this as well. And these groups, as you said, are in some type of conflict with something, you know, Indians or dragons or whatever it might be. And they, they're coordinating and integrating their behavior together.

• 48:31Speaker 00

  That is, in my opinion, a component of rough and tumble play. I mean, there's individual rough and tumble play, but there's also coordinating your activity so that you are more functional as a group. And if we look at between group conflict in traditional contexts and we look at it historically, it is coordinated activities of males fighting the coordinated activities of other groups of males. That's male male competition. It just goes beyond one on one. It goes to a group level type of thing. And these early play differences that Joyce talked about, we've wrote about 20

• 49:12Speaker 00

  years ago, saying that this is preparation for this. The boys are creating these groups because these are the groups they're going to grow up with and later, in some cases, fight with or cooperatively hunt with.

• 49:25Chris Williamson?

  It makes complete sense to anybody with a semi functioning brain as to ancestrally why boys, males, would have this predisposition for practicing warfare and why girls would be interested in people. They would be playing doctor or drama or veterinarian or whatever.

• 49:47Chris Williamson?

  How does this manifest? Or what is happening that's causing this to manifest? We can understand why, right? We can understand the ultimate reason for why this is happening. But what is it that's inside of a male that causes him to think, let's pretend that we're fighting cowboys?

• 50:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, they don't, they aren't necessarily thinking anything. They're engaging in things that they find fun. So if we look at disorders or just individual variation in either prenatal exposure to testosterone or postnatal spikes, the first six months of life, there is a big spike in testosterone. So there's a second dose there in addition to prenatal dose. And girls have some fluctuating exposure to estrogens during that six month period as well, although it's not, it's more variable than with guys. But in any case, these hormonal

• 50:49Speaker 00

  influences are at least partly contributing to these sex differences in play.

• 50:56Speaker 00

  So girls who have more had more androgens early in life, you know, prenatally,

• 51:03Speaker 00

  engage in have play behaviors that are closer to boys than girls, or they're they're kind of in between those. So so it's a mix of of activity. So there there there's clearly a hormonal component to it. And I think the way that works is in terms of what captures your attention.

• 51:23Speaker 00

  You know, biological motion is probably going to capture the intention, you know, of a baby or something will capture the attention of girls more than boys, whereas the, you know, the physical motion is going to capture the attention of boys more than girls. All you have to do is have kind of a small attentional bias and built in reward systems that will kind of keep you focused on that and keep you engaged in related activities. And then it can kind of build from there.

• 51:52Chris Williamson?

  So that the mechanism is heavily driven by androgen exposure, so testosterone primarily. And that's one of the key differences. Is there anything else going on here? Is there protein folding in the brain? Are there particular areas of the brain that are larger, smaller atrophies, you know, hypertrophied in one form or another?

• 52:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, probably probably the there are. I mean, there there are sex differences in in certain very basic areas of the brain associated with aggressive sexual and that type of behavior. And there are some really interesting sex differences in overall patterns of brain organization. So if you look at gray matter and white matter, if you look at one small part, maybe there's no difference, or maybe there's a difference. And if there is a difference, it's probably not going to be huge on average. But if you look at the whole pattern of the brain,

• 52:49Speaker 00

  you get quite substantial differences. You can take a brain pattern of a 10 year old and predict whether that brain belongs to a boy or a girl about 93% of the time, almost as good as you can by looking at an adult face of a male and a female. So you huge difference.

• 53:07Chris Williamson?

  And that's FMRI?

• 53:09Speaker 00

  That would be MRI, just structural differences. What people really need to look at is the coordinated activity of brain areas. So certain brain areas that are linked together are going to fire together spontaneously. And that kind of helps build that network and keep it kind of well functioning. So if you look at those spontaneous brain activity studies, and there aren't that many with really young kids yet, but there's at least one during the prenatal period where you can put mom

• 53:49Speaker 00

  in a scanner and get brain activity indices of the fetus. And we see sex differences there in brain activity patterns at about six months, prenatally. And there was a recent study looking at, I think it was two and three month olds, also showing differences in spontaneous brain activity patterns. But exactly how those are related to some of these sex differences we were talking about, we don't fully know that yet.

• 54:22Chris Williamson?

  If it was 93% at 10 years old, what is it at six, three months prior to birth and six months after birth?

• 54:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, they didn't do that. That was a somewhat different technology and approach, and they didn't do those particular analyses. Probably it's going to be smaller because probably the differences get bigger with age. But they didn't look at it yet. I think nine or 10 is the youngest that I've seen look at that. There's a number of these studies with adults, and it gets up to 95% or so.

• 54:57Chris Williamson?

  Do you know how accurate they could be at predicting the sex of the embryo, though?

• 55:03Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, they they didn't do do those analyses.

• 55:07Chris Williamson?

  Okay, I understand. Okay, fine, fine, fine. That are evidently what the researchers are amongst another a number of things trying to achieve here is say, well, at age nine and 10, you have had, you know, social social roles theory comes back in again. Perhaps you have been socialized into a mode of thinking, which has caused structural changes in the brain. These structural changes then basically beg the question by being the detector thing that is supposed to be detected. And people say that's what a male brain looks like, because we have never seen a male brain, which hasn't been socialized as a male brain, despite the fact that there are a wide variety of families that raise children in traditional and non-traditional, progressive and non-progressive ways. Unless someone is going to say somehow that the brain of the embryo,

• 55:53Chris Williamson?

  three months prior to being born, has somehow been socialized, the sex differences that we see. And, you know, I'm being like overly explicit here to just really try and hammer the point home that there are structural changes that manifest into real world significant differences, not only in disposition, not only in tendency, interest, capacity. There it's a whole suite of things that occur. And David Buss, mutual friend of ours, was recently on Rogan, and I knew I had it. Absolutely adamant that Rogan was going to bring up sex differences. And sure enough, as as was predicted, that ended up happening.

• 56:39Chris Williamson?

  The most interesting thing that I've learned about sex differences in the last year is differences in throwing accuracy amongst children. Can you please red pill everybody that's listening on the differences in throwing accuracy amongst children?

• 56:56Speaker 00

  Sure. So, yeah, so you find differences in throwing accuracy, throwing distance and velocity. So even in preschoolers, boys are throwing more, they can throw farther.

• 57:15Speaker 00

  And with higher velocity, higher speed, and so higher kinetic energy than girls can. Uh, it is, it emerges very early, uh, as I said, the preschool years and becomes extremely large by nineteen, early adulthood or so, where there's very little overlap between, uh, men and women, maybe a little bit, but not, not much. It is, it is a very big difference. It is correlated with, um, differences, you know, the shoulders are built differently. Um, the forearms are longer in men relatively, uh, relative to overall size in women that,

• 57:56Speaker 00

  um, that difference is evident prenatally. It is associated with, um, the sex difference in this dorsal stream sort of thing, the ability to track moving objects, you know, to hit something that's, you have to have the cognitive system in, brain and cognitive system in place in order to hit something accurately. Um, and if somebody's throwing something at you, you want to be able to track it coming in so you can dodge it.

• 58:23Chris Williamson?

  Oh yeah. Didn't, you looked at a study to do with how effective males and females are at dodging projectiles coming at them. What, can you tell us that study?

• 58:32Speaker 00

  Yeah. So, um, some people have argued that, or in, in fact, the initial argument, and, and maybe it's still the argument that the male advantage in throwing distance, accuracy, speed and all of that sort of thing is due to, um, shared childcare and male hunting. Um, you know, and, and of course there, there is a, a big sex difference in, in hunting engagement in, um, in, in traditional contexts. No, no question about that. Um, but in addition to that, men are better at dodging things. So in this particular study, uh, you, you couldn't do it anymore, but, but the, the researchers, I, if I remember correctly, got, um, one of these tennis ball shooting machines. Um, and, uh,

• 59:19Speaker 00

  Decided to shoot them at undergraduates to see what would happen.

• 59:23Chris Williamson?

  I'm sure the professors had a fantastic time when they were aiming it at the annoying child in the the front row that keeps on distracting them during their lectures.

• 59:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Unfortunately, we can't do that anymore. But I'm sure it was at fairly low speed and so nobody would get hurt and so relatively easy task. And so they just looked at the number of balls that could be blocked. And men blocked most of them. In fact, there was a ceiling effect. And women were not as successful at that. And that's obviously a defensive mechanism. If other males are using projectile weapons, the ability to track and dodge that is an important component of male male competition. That's that's when my argument's not, which came probably before hunting.

• 1:00:14Chris Williamson?

  What is the suite of traits that we're talking about here when it comes to throwing accuracy, throwing velocity, dodging, seeing things moving through the air, etc.?

• 1:00:25Speaker 00

  Yeah. So, yeah. So, so we have the throwing component to it. It has, you know, the behavioral component, actually throwing something and hitting it accurately. It has physical components to it, you know, the upper body, upper body strength is big sex difference. There are the architecture of the shoulder and arms. There are, there's brain area associated with motion detection and integrating motion detection with physical movements as in blocking something or throwing something. And so there's brain and cognitive systems involved there that you see physical systems, the behavioral component, the brain and cognitive component.

• 1:01:08Speaker 00

  And guys are better on all of those components, or at least the most of them. Integrated together, you get a quite, quite a large sex difference.

• 1:01:18Chris Williamson?

  So this, learning that, and it was specifically the accuracy thing that really drove it home to me,

• 1:01:26Chris Williamson?

  is for me now, one of the more compelling justifications for us thinking about transgender athletes in sport a lot more carefully, because everybody has heard to death, someone talking about how a biological male shouldn't be able to step into the ring with a biological female, after a year of estrogen and testosterone suppression, and then punch their face into the ground. Like, you know, that's, it's self-evident. And a lot of the arguments that I've seen stem exclusively from, well, we can reduce power by X amount by putting them on this particular type of hormone blocker. Testosterone and androgens aren't all that drive power.

• 1:02:08Chris Williamson?

  Then someone comes back and says, well, look at bone density, look at muscle mass, look at all of the time that you've gone through puberty, blah, blah, blah. That's, that's done. Like, it's interesting. I guess it was interesting, but it's no longer interesting to me. What is much more interesting to me are the fundamental capability differences, especially when it comes to things like accuracy. Because if, let's say, for instance, that you were to have a biological male that is going into the,

• 1:02:34Chris Williamson?

  what is it, the baseball, NB, NB, no, what's the, what's the baseball league called?

• 1:02:40Speaker 00

  Is, is there a women's league?

• 1:02:41Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, there must be. I'm, oh, yeah, I've got to imagine so, but the same as the WNBA, right? Okay, so let's say that a male goes into the WNBA, they're not taller, they're not bigger, they're built the same on average as the average female basketball player, because I would imagine that female basketball players probably pretty tall, taller than me, taller than you.

• 1:03:01Chris Williamson?

  But what we're saying is that there is a fundamental capacity, capability difference that biological males have with just the way that they see throwing and spatial rotation generally. Not just to do with the physicality of the architecture of the shoulder, changes in forearm length, et cetera. But the, the way that their brains are able to see the world of throwing overall. This also explains to a degree why the WNBA may be significantly less popular than the men's division. Not because women are smaller and something else and something else, but they have a predisposition that is, oh, you could say that male's capacity is overclocked.

• 1:03:45Chris Williamson?

  And it is supercharged comparatively with women. So this to me is the most or one of the most compelling reasons because it gets beyond this sort of messy conversation about power and it gets more into fairness. And it's why it's so compelling. And I've never really heard anyone do a full treatise on on this area of transgender athletes in sport. What is it? Let's say that there was a sport where you had to do lying detection, or you had to manipulate different social groups, or you had to be able to detect facial cues or something. If you were to have female to male transitioners in that sport, they're going to absolutely dominate the league, even if they have taken testosterone for ages and they're walking around with their socio sexuality through the roof and

• 1:04:29Chris Williamson?

  their their sex drive's really high or whatever. I just found this, it's really fascinating. I think this is really, really interesting stuff.

• 1:04:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Some of the spatial differences and the perceptual differences that I mentioned are more strongly related to prenatal or an early postnatal hormonal exposure than actual circulating testosterone. So you can, the men's circulating testosterone isn't really highly correlated with their spatial abilities, but the earlier exposure seems to be what's important there. So yeah, you can decrease muscle mass a little bit by reducing testosterone, but there's other things you're not going to change that people have, as you said, people haven't talked about.

• 1:05:09Chris Williamson?

  How big are the differences between navigating from one place to another?

• 1:05:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, good, good question. They are, I would say, they are, you know, most of them are kind of contrived situations. You know, they're moderate to large. I would say men are better, you know, just kind of dead reckoning sort of thing. You know, you start from someplace and you wander around in the woods and then you try to figure out how to get your way back without, you know, explicitly just backtracking the exact same way you were, get the quickest route back. Men are better in that. I don't remember the exact effect size, but it's, it's, it's, it would be noticeable difference. Map reading is different as well. Interest in maps is different.

• 1:06:01Chris Williamson?

  We could see quite obviously why it would be the case that men need better spatial rotation, they need better navigation over a broad ranging kind of distance, because if you're going out and on average, men ancestrally hunted more than women, therefore, wildebeest goes from right to left, I have spear, wildebeest plus spear plus throwing plus trajectory, plus how the fuck do I drag this back home, hashtag where is home as well. Also, what about female sex differences that give them capacities that men struggle with? And also, why would these be there? What is the evolutionary justification for why they would have them?

• 1:06:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, so the sex differences in the folk psychology or emotional attention, emotional intelligence that I talked about earlier, women have advantages in. Probably related to a couple of things. One of them is women are and girls want to develop a social support network that for social emotional support and social and other types of problem solving. Men form networks as well, but they're usually task oriented or competition oriented networks. So if you hang out with all your friends watching, you know, the WNBA or the Superbowl

• 1:07:26Speaker 00

  or something, maybe the Superbowl will be better. Watching the Superbowl and you were this last time rooting for the Chiefs, all of you, and they win, you're all kind of bonded together, even if you didn't talk about anything during that time, you drank beer and did whatever you're going to do, that's kind of a shared activity that kind of helps link male groups together. And you can have lots of guys there. You can't, it doesn't have to be limited to two people. Girls and women form relationships more based on the dyadic interactions and the social and emotional support, talking through issues, talking about what's important to them and so forth. And

• 1:08:13Speaker 00

  The dynamics of this are very different between males and females. I covered in my book on sex differences. But one component of it is that to develop and maintain these BFF relationships, you have to be very sensitive to the emotional state of your girlfriend, your best friend, you have to read things and so forth. She may not want to really bother you by talking about, you know, problems with her boyfriend or her mom or whatever that might be, but you can pick up that something is not quite right.

• 1:08:55Speaker 00

  And you know a lot more about her than guys do about their friends. You say, "Oh, you having trouble with your mom again? Is it such and such?" a sort of thing. So that's the theory of mind sort of thing. You're picking up subtle, nonverbal cues, picking up on it. And that's exactly what the girlfriend wanted you to do. And that engages you in the talk that hopefully will help to resolve that type of issue. So that emotional intelligence is really important for these relationships. It's also important for dealing with and metting out something called relational aggression. So the movie Mean Girls, maybe you've seen that.

• 1:09:39Speaker 00

  So, you know, kind of bitchy girl, you know, subtle put downs, gossip and spreading lies. It's basically designed to disrupt the social networks of competitors, undermine their same-sex friendships and make them unattractive to boyfriends, would-be boyfriends. And...

• 1:10:07Speaker 00

  It is most effective if it's done in a way that is plausibly deniable. That is, you do it very subtly. You know, I'm really worried about so and so because I think she's seeing three guys or drinking a lot.

• 1:10:22Chris Williamson?

  Venting.

• 1:10:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, that that sort of thing. And so because it's more, you know, when when guys are mad at each other, they'll make eye contact and they'll push or yell. I mean, you don't have to figure it out. I mean, it's usually obvious. If they're really upset, but you have to have these subtle social skills to pick up on that relational aggression so that you can counter it. And so I think the combination of relational and also have these subtle skills to use it to manipulate other other people. I think the combination of the the social support friendships and the competition, female female competitions, relational aggression is really

• 1:11:07Speaker 00

  the basis for the female advantage in these these skills.

• 1:11:12Chris Williamson?

  It seems to me that the heavier brow ridge that men have, the bigger jaw, the bigger hands, these are our weapons. Right. This is how men would have done their intrasexual competition. It would have been intergroup warfare as well with different tribes, et cetera, et cetera. The ability to understand and manipulate social dynamics, language ability, reading facial expressions. That is female weaponry in a regard. Now, it's also defensive, offensive, affiliative, you know, coalitional, all of that. But I just, I love thinking about conceptualizing things in this way that

• 1:11:56Chris Williamson?

  because women on average weren't getting into physical altercations because they are more fragile, sometimes could be with child. If they die, the danger of the child being on their own is significantly higher. Therefore, make sure that you don't, how would you say explicitly, obviously accusatorily do something that could cause you to be on the wrong end of a very sharp stick from either the. Husband of the woman that you just pissed off or the woman herself.

• 1:12:27Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:12:27Chris Williamson?

  So you need to be able to manipulate social groups. You need to be much more subtle and you need to dance your way through this. You need to use coalitional tactics. You need to sow seeds of discord, venting is an example of this. And because of that, you have to have a predisposition. You have to have these capacities to be able to make yourself capable. Whereas for men, everything's out in the open. You got a problem? Let's sort the problem out. We don't need to have that quite so much.

• 1:12:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. Men, men engage in relational aggression too, and they play politics. And some of them are very good at it. But the politics is to organize large scale groups for a collective action sort of thing, rather than manipulating the social dynamics within a smaller kind of social network. But, but, but yeah, you're, you're right. Yeah, you have to be very good at that to navigate all of these complex social relationships in a way that doesn't provoke retaliation.

• 1:13:29Chris Williamson?

  Yes. When it comes to the current trends that we're seeing, this increase in transgender, especially youths, what's your assessment of the situation? Why do you think it is that we've had such a rapid increase in that happening?

• 1:13:48Speaker 00

  Right. Yeah. So I, yeah, I wrote that Colette article that you mentioned on that. And if we look at it historically, well, so let's step back. Let's look at brain patterns that I mentioned before, where, you know, you take a 10 year old, you can predict 93% of the time whether it's a boy or a girl. If you take an adult, you can predict 95% of the time whether it's a man or a woman. So the brain patterns for guys are kind of bunched up in this area. But there are some individuals that kind of go out on the curve. So there are guys that have female typical brain patterns. Not a lot of them, but they're

• 1:14:30Speaker 00

  there. And there are girls who have, and women who have male typical brain patterns. So it's not.

• 1:14:40Speaker 00

  You know, kind of out of bounds to think, well, you know, maybe for whatever reason, you know, you didn't see the sex typical shift in brain development for whatever reason. So you're gonna get, it would make sense that, you know, you have some guys who really like girl things, but they're kind of forced to be boys and to do boy things and they would develop gender dysphoria and the same thing for some girls. And so if we look at early transsexual individuals, they had a pattern of sex atypical play.

• 1:15:21Speaker 00

  So they, you know, the boys are playing and liked girl things and so forth, expressed wanting to be a girl, had this dysphoria, depression and discomfort with being a boy or a girl, if it's the reverse of that. And those individuals, if they're carefully screened and so forth, would be fairly rare. But if they transition, most of them do okay. They're okay with it. So the detransition rates are one or two percent. So it's like, yeah, it worked for them. But now, jump forward to the last, you know, well, it started maybe 20 years ago, but especially

• 1:16:03Speaker 00

  the last 10 years or so, the number of individuals who are claiming to be transgender has really spiked, way beyond the numbers you would expect based on these brain patterns, for example. And the demographics of these individuals have changed as well. Typically, it was disproportionately more men than women, and they had a history of gender dysphoria. Now we're getting more women, especially adolescents, than men. And most of them, as far as I know, don't, I mean, some of them do, but a lot of them don't have this history of gender dysphoria and sex atypical play patterns and other

• 1:16:46Speaker 00

  sorts of things that have historically been reliable markers of...

• 1:16:53Speaker 00

  Transgender issues and doing well with with the transition if that's what they they chose to do. So there's been this huge spike, as you know, and it's been argued that's social media has has driven a lot of it. And I think that's right. And I argued that adolescent girls in particular may be at risk for these negative social media influences. Because during that time, you know, early adolescence, late adolescence, they're really trying to develop this social support network. They're really trying to develop this, you

• 1:17:38Speaker 00

  know, a couple of BFFs and feel included and integrated and socially supported and emotionally supported and so forth. That's a really important thing. Now, guys go through a similar thing where they want to be part of a bigger group that works together and so forth. But the girl networks, I think, are more susceptible to social contagion and going along with ideas that maybe aren't a good idea, just to fit in and to be part of the group and not to get excluded or rejected from the group, which is a bigger concern for girls than than it is for boys. And so I think we have a recipe for, combine that with social

• 1:18:22Speaker 00

  media and all the media attention, general media attention to these issues. It's now become a political signal, rather than a kind of a personal desire. It's like, you support this because you support all progressive sorts of things, or you're against it because you're against all progressive sorts of things. It's really created an environment that I think is going to be detrimental and is being detrimental to a lot of adolescents and young adults, especially girls.

• 1:18:55Chris Williamson?

  And this would explain why you have seen a sex difference in the number of F to M as opposed to M to F transitions or desires for transition because it you would presume that there's a left-handedness argument that gets used. I'm not sure if you've heard this used before, where during the Middle Ages, people that were left-handed were seen as more likely to be witches. So people hid the fact that they were left-handed. I think it was around about 2% of people a few hundred years ago said that they were, whereas now it's around about 10 to it's a teens percent, I think, of the population that are left-handed.

• 1:19:37Chris Williamson?

  So the argument is when you stop demonizing people for being their true self, being fully left-handed, or being a male that identifies as a female or vice versa, that people open up, that would be the explanation for why you would see this rampant increase, the fact that we are more as a society, more accepting of it. But that wouldn't explain why you have this massive increase in F to M as opposed to M to F.

• 1:20:02Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 1:20:03Chris Williamson?

  And this sex difference appears to be explained away largely by the raw materials that we went through, women's desire to fit in, their greater social cue, ability to absorb, absorb that. It also explains why you don't have a completely random distribution of people across the entire United States. You know, one person out of every 10 schools, one girl out of every 10 schools, one male out of every 30 schools, let's say, across the US, it's five girls in one class that all sit at the same table together during lunch.

• 1:20:40Speaker 00

  That's right. Yeah, yeah. You see these clusters or in the one school district, I think 10% of the kids, I don't remember what the male female breakdown was, claimed to be transgender or non-binary or something, which which makes no sense. The the other issue that has changed is the regret and detransition rates are going up.

• 1:21:05Speaker 00

  From fairly rare one, two percent or so to, you know, depending on what you look at, the stopping of hormonal treatment can be, you know, one out of three or so. So the rates of people kind of changing their mind is going up, suggesting that the transgender, the dysphoria, so forth, wasn't really related to that. It was due to some other, other issue.

• 1:21:31Chris Williamson?

  What I find particularly fascinating and a kind of morbidly ironic about this situation is that the biological sex differences that men and women have are providing the raw materials to cause increasing volumes of men and women to recant their own sex, or at least their own gender identity. So it's almost like a supply and demand of what's going on is happening in a community of people that deny that there are any sex differences.

• 1:22:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it, it, it, it, it's a mess. So, right. So, yeah. So you're, you're saying that the adolescent women's girls susceptibility to social contagion has a biological basis to it, which I think it does. And that biological basis makes them more prone to claim that they're really a guy. Yeah.

• 1:22:32Chris Williamson?

  Deny that there are any sex differences.

• 1:22:34Speaker 00

  And deny, deny that they're, they're, yeah, it is. It's amazing. People can, can spin stories for sure.

• 1:22:44Chris Williamson?

  David Geary, ladies and gentlemen. David, I've absolutely adored this. It's been booked on the, on my schedule for about two or three months now, and I've been looking forward to it. It's delivered more than I could have hoped for. First off, what are you working on next? And then secondly, where should people go if they want to keep up to date with your work?

• 1:23:02Speaker 00

  Right, so related to sex differences, keep up, I published a third edition of my book, Male Female, came out in 2021, so it's, it's pretty, pretty up to date and I'm pretty anal about documenting things because I know it's controversial and you gotta kind of oversight things. On the sex differences thing, the thing I've been working on, on and off, as I have spare time, you know, I have other things to do, is this tracking sex differences and cognition and behavior as they are related to the sex differences in height. So suggesting,

• 1:23:45Speaker 00

  you know, as, as I mentioned, you know, populations get healthier, sex differences in height get bigger. If there are other biologically based sex differences or related to, you know, the health of the brain, for instance, then we should see other differences in spatial abilities, verbal abilities, memory abilities and so forth emerging. So I work on that, I've been working on it, off and on on that for, for a long time. And it's hard to get, kind of knock out evidence for it, but there's something there. I, I just, you know, the, the data isn't quite there. But I, I have a number of articles on sex

• 1:24:26Speaker 00

  specific vulnerabilities based on evolutionary theory and basic biology that, you know, if anybody emails me, I'm happy to send.

• 1:24:36Chris Williamson?

  David, I really appreciate you. Thank you so much for today.

• 1:24:39Speaker 00

  Great, thank you, thank you. I really enjoyed it.