The Uncomfortable Science Of Sex Differences - Steve Stewart-Williams

Steve Stewart-Williams is an evolutionary psychologist, a professor, and an author. Why is it so difficult to talk about the differences between men and women today? It's important to recognize that men and women deserve equal respect and opportunity, but that does not mean they are exactly the same. There are differences between the sexes that can be meaningful, valuable, and even beautiful. So what are those differences, and why has discussing them become so polarising? Expect to learn why talking about sex differences is so controversial, what the actual definition of sex is, why there are challenges to the binary idea of sex, the largest sex differences between men and women, how sex differences reveal themselves via personality, the danger of denying and/or not respecting the differences in sex, and much more… - Get a free bottle of D3K2, an AG1 Welcome Kit, and more when you first subscribe at https://ag1.info/modernwisdom Get 35% off your first subscription on the best supplements from Momentous at https://livemomentous.com/modernwisdom Get 160+ lab tests for just $365 and save an extra $25 at https://functionhealth.com/modernwisdom Get a Free Sample Pack of LMNT’s most popular flavours with your first purchase at https://drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom Get ChatGPT to explore ideas, solve problems, and learn faster at https://chatgpt.com - 0:00 Why Sex Differences Are So Controversial 2:07 Why Sex Differences Matter 7:55 What Actually is Sex? 13:21 Biology vs Society: What Shapes Sex Differences? 19:50 How Much Do Parents Impact Sex Differences? 21:37 The Gender Equality Paradox 26:39 The Top Difference Between Men and Women 29:02 What is the Biggest Sex Differences in Sex? 39:44 Is Parental Investment Damaging? 42:18 Do Men Have Greater Reproductive Success? 50:14 The Hidden Motivations Behind Behaviour 54:34 Are Human Sex Differences Unique? 01:00:07 Is It All About Reproducing? 01:03:20 Why Women Prefer Reading Porn 01:11:44 Are Men and Women Compromising On Sex? 01:14:13 How Similar Are Male and Female Mate Preferences? 01:16:55 How Status and Wealth Shape Attraction 01:21:55 Would Women Sleep With Their Ideal Sperm Donor? 01:29:21 Why Are Women Attracted to Dangerous Men? 01:37:34 Is Height Really That Important? 01:40:25 Do Men Actually Talk More Than Women? 01:46:54 Why Do Men Choose to Be Sexually Violent? 01:52:11 Are Women Naturally More Nurturing? 01:58:59 Who Gets More Jealous in Relationships? 02:03:30 The Biggest Personality Differences Between Men and Women 02:13:25 Are Cognitive Sex Differences Real? 02:16:55 Why Women Outlive Men 02:23:34 Why Mental Health Differs Between the Sexes 02:26:21 What Happens When We Deny Sex Differences? 02:29:53 The Cost of Exaggerating Sex Differences 02:32:33 Where to Find Steve - 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/ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic here - https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom - 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.

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  Do you think that you could have published this book six years ago?

• 0:03Speaker 01

  I think that I could have, but it would have been a less wise move. I think it would have gone down a lot worse six years ago. Things have kind of cooled off a little bit, I think.

• 0:12Chris Williamson?

  Why is talking about sex differences so controversial?

• 0:16Speaker 01

  Well, it's a good question, and I think that it's a few things. I mean, sometimes it surprises me because sometimes I think a lot of the differences that we're talking about, they're really quite modest differences. They are often differences in preferences rather than cognitive abilities. So they're kind of neutral as far as I'm concerned. And if anything, I think probably they put men in a worse light than women.

• 0:38Speaker 01

  So sometimes it surprises me, but I think really the main reason is our long history of sexism against women. And I think that we've got quite a long, science as well, has a bit of a sordid history in terms of how we've spoken about women, especially in the 1800s. I've got a quote, one of my favorite quotes, one of my favorite examples of this is from a scientist by the name of Gustave Le Bon. And he, he wrote that, sure, there are some women who are as intellectually accomplished as your typical man, but they're about as rare as a, as a two-headed gorilla. And so therefore we don't really need to think about, think about them. So with the stuff like that in our background is, I guess, not surprising that people are a little bit, a little bit nervous about talking about evolved sex differences.

• 1:23Speaker 01

  A little bit worried that if we start doing that, it's going to open the door to that kind of, that kind of sexism. I think they're wrong to worry about that. I think that really the science of sex differences has disproved those kind of ideas. And I think, I think as well that we can treat men and women respectfully and, and as humanely and treat them well, even if men and women are not identical on average, on every single trait.

• 1:50Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I suppose the history of science is to sex differences what the Nazi party is to behavioral genetics.

• 1:57Speaker 01

  Right, right, exactly. Yeah, yeah. And I do think that science is the solution to the early sexism rather than a continuation of it.

• 2:05Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's a great way to put it. All right, why is it important to study sex differences then? Why, why should anybody care?

• 2:11Speaker 01

  I think lots of reasons. The main reason for me is I think it's just deeply, deeply fascinating.

• 2:16Chris Williamson?

  It's the best. It's the best, dude. Me and you fell in love with the same book, The Moral Animal by Ronald Wright. It changed my life.

• 2:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, likewise, it changed my life. It shaped the rest of my career.

• 2:28Speaker 01

  Just, I think it's deeply fascinating. And yeah, I remember when I read that book, that's when I fell in love with, fell in love with evolutionary psychology. And in particular, fell in love with the evolutionary psychology of sex differences. And I got the same feeling that I did when I was a kid and I first understood how the phases of the moon work. And everything just clicked into place. Suddenly the whole thing made sense.

• 2:50Chris Williamson?

  That is why it looks that way. That is why people are different in that way.

• 2:56Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly. It all made sense. It was clear that it was true. And yeah, just sort of instant insight and yeah.

• 3:04Chris Williamson?

  Interesting, even as you're saying it, I can hear this sort of critic preparedness inside of my mind going, why would you, when you read a book, why would both of us, when we read a book, be so enamored by sex differences? Dot, dot, dot. That must be because you are secretly a sexist who is looking to try and keep people in their place and not ever have any progress. And duh, duh, duh, you know what I mean? Like the conversation around this has become so tarnished.

• 3:33Speaker 01

  And accusatory.

• 3:34Chris Williamson?

  Yes, yes, yeah. That you can't have an interest in something which is fundamental and fascinating and really important, right? So that you don't try and, people aren't trying to fight against something so that we don't fully account for and understand why behavior unfolds in particular ways that can allow us to have a better society, a society that's got outcomes that's more close to what we want. Fascinating.

• 3:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, it is. Yeah, so I do, I agree with that. And I think, yeah, sorry, I just, I just meant blank. What was I going to say about that?

• 4:09Chris Williamson?

  Not at all. Just why is it important to study sex?

• 4:11Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, why is it important? Yeah, so that is, that pointed another reason. So one big reason why it's important is just the fact that it's fascinating. But I think also that, like you say, it is important in terms of steering society in positive directions. And understanding ourselves, understanding interactions between men and women. In terms of, yeah, trying to keep people in their place and the like, that's certainly not the philosophy that I come away with from having studied all this over the years. I, instead of my basic philosophy, I think I can summarize in just four words. And those words would be let people be themselves. So if they, if they fit with traditional gender roles and expectations, that's great.

• 4:54Speaker 01

  But if they don't, that's great as well. It doesn't matter. The fact that something has evolutionary origin doesn't necessarily mean that it's good. It doesn't necessarily mean it's bad either. I think that it's morally neutral and that it's up to us to decide whether it's good or bad or somewhere in between.

• 5:08Chris Williamson?

  I think that's a big fear that people have, that by looking at the evolutionary explanation for why certain traits show up the way that they do, why certain differences occur the way that they do, it sounds like you're excusing away that behavior.

• 5:21Speaker 01

  Indeed, like a lot of people do worry that that's the case and that people will assume that it's the case.

• 5:26Chris Williamson?

  Naturalistic fallacy in your way through all of the bad behavior of men or all of the worst behavior of women or the most repressive ideas that we have for how people should behave.

• 5:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And I don't think that it does justify any particular behavior. But I do think it's right to worry that people might assume that it does, falsely assume that it does. So I do think when we discuss these issues, that we should take into account the concerns that people have about this whole topic of sex differences. And we should discuss them carefully. And we should always emphasize that most of the gaps are not huge. Most of the psychological sex differences are not huge. That there's a huge amount of variation within both sexes, tons of overlap between the sexes. And also that there's no normative implications of these generalizations. So no sense of, because something is evolved, because something is natural, that that therefore means that it's good or even permissible.

• 6:20Speaker 01

  Again, it's up to us to decide that.

• 6:22Chris Williamson?

  Right to say that the, the differences are modest at best.

• 6:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:26Chris Williamson?

  But when you start to stack them on top of each other, you end up with hu, you basically end up with two completely separate Venn diagrams, right? It's not just preference for violence and risk-taking and parental investment and duh, duh, duh, duh. It's when you put all of them together, you do have two very different groups of people.

• 6:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, those are called multivariate sex differences. When you sort of cluster the differences together.

• 6:50Speaker 01

  I think that while that's statistically true, I think we have, need to be a little bit wary about the concept of multivariate statistic, uh, multivariate sex differences, just because often we are thinking about single traits. So often we're thinking about sex differences in parenting, sex differences and sexual interests and aggression, risk-taking and so on. But also if you were to divide up, take, take a group of people, divide them into two based on a flip of a coin. They're not going to be identical on every trait. There's going to be small differences between them. But then if you add up all those traits, you could just as well stack up the differences between these two randomly chosen groups of people,

• 7:30Speaker 01

  stack up the differences and you'd find that they equally massively discrepant from each other based on the multivariate statistical approach. So I think we need to be wary about exaggerating the magnitude of human sex differences based on that statistical approach. Because you could just as well exaggerate the sex differences between New Zealanders and Australians or the British and the French. Or, or like I say, two randomly.

• 7:53Chris Williamson?

  British and the French do that enough already. All right, there's been a, the last few years, there's been a huge debate about what sex actually is.

• 7:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:00Chris Williamson?

  What's the definition that you land on?

• 8:03Speaker 01

  Well, there are a few definitions. The one that I land on is the traditional scientific definition via which sex is defined in terms of gamete size. So in the vast majority of sexually reproducing species, you have two different gamete sizes. And the small gametes are called sperm, the larger gametes are called eggs.

• 8:23Chris Williamson?

  Is that across the board?

• 8:24Speaker 01

  That is across the board.

• 8:25Chris Williamson?

  No way. Okay, so every, every, almost every sexually reproducing male.

• 8:33Speaker 01

  Yes, produces sperm.

• 8:34Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 8:34Speaker 01

  And sexually reproducing female produces eggs.

• 8:37Chris Williamson?

  And I know this might, this might be like the most facepalm thing. I'm like, wow, I didn't know that that was, those are the only two currencies at play.

• 8:43Speaker 01

  Um, I mean, it seems like so, so in biology, it's not like math, right? So in biology, there are very rarely generalizations that apply to every single species. Um, this is one of them, but the reason is that it's a definitional, it's a definitional truth. So we define males as the ones that produce the smaller gametes. The empirical truth that in principle could have gone another way is the fact that in the vast majority of species, you have, where the gametes are not identical, you only have two different types. And one is bigger and one is smaller. And that's true right across, uh, you know, all species except the minority where you, uh, you have. So that's called anisogamy, where you have two different sizes and you have a few isogamous sexually reproducing species, but the vast majority anisogamous.

• 9:28Chris Williamson?

  Can you, what, what's an isogamous sexually reproducing? So what are some examples of them?

• 9:35Speaker 01

  There are some very, uh, I think no animals and no plants, but I think maybe some simple bacteria and things like that. And I think that would, that would have been the starting position. So we all evolved from species that originally were isogamous. That's the first of all, sexual reproduction would have evolved, then I saw, and they would have been isogamous. They would have produced the same gametes and mixed them. But then that's evolutionarily unstable and that tends to, um, fall apart into, uh, smaller and larger gametes.

• 10:02Chris Williamson?

  Why is it unstable?

• 10:04Speaker 01

  Because when you, when you have same sized gametes, uh, the selection for any trait that will increase the chances of being one of the gamete, of producing gametes that are going to, uh, produce offspring that survive. So that creates a selection pressure for maybe loading up your gametes with some extra, uh, supplies to help them survive. Um, so, so some gametes, uh, get a little bit bigger because of that. But as soon as they get big enough, the larger gametes, you have a selection for smaller gametes that seek out the larger gametes and kind of ride on their coattails.

• 10:37Speaker 01

  And, uh, so, and you get this, it pushes them apart and.

• 10:40Chris Williamson?

  It's actually, uh, from a sexual survival or a gamete survival perspective.

• 10:46Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 10:47Chris Williamson?

  It's the gray area in the middle of the barbell is where you go to die. And the black and the white on either end are actually the ones that are most effective.

• 10:54Speaker 01

  Exactly right. Cause the ones in the middle, they're not big enough. They don't survive as well as the bigger ones. They pack a picnic for their offspring. But they're also.

• 11:03Chris Williamson?

  Motility, mobility by the, the smaller ones.

• 11:06Speaker 01

  Exactly. And, and just numbers, you know? So like, if you are producing small gametes, you could produce many more. So individuals that produce the medium sized gametes, they don't survive as well. Plus they don't produce as many.

• 11:15Chris Williamson?

  I can't remember what the stat is. There's some stat around. Jerry, can you look at, uh, Chat GPT? How many sperm are produced per day? Human sperm versus human eggs. It's, it's such a hilariously big difference.

• 11:27Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 11:28Chris Williamson?

  Um, uh, okay. So broadly across the animal kingdom, in almost every single sexually reproducing species, there's a binary.

• 11:38Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 11:38Chris Williamson?

  There's a sex binary.

• 11:40Speaker 01

  There's a sex binary. Yeah. There's also a ton of variation in terms of the phenotypic characteristics within each of those sexes. But yeah, there is, there is a sex binary, you know, and you do get, um, intersex individuals.

• 11:51Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. What about the challenges to this? We, we have hermaphrodites with in sex variation, intersex conditions. Does that disprove this?

• 12:00Speaker 01

  Uh, it doesn't. Um, so I guess the easiest one is the within sex variation. There is tons of it. So the variation in terms of levels of masculinity, levels of femininity, um, just, uh, size dimorphism versus size monomorphism where they're about the same size. But nonetheless, they are all either producing sperm or eggs.

• 12:21Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 12:21Speaker 01

  The vast majority within each, within each group.

• 12:24Chris Williamson?

  You've seen that, uh, image, right? Of the bell curve graph and you say, on average, something, something.

• 12:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:31Chris Williamson?

  And then somebody says, well, I know a person who is actually more that than the other group. I know a woman who's six feet seven and, and, and she's actually taller than most men. Most men on average are taller than women. Well, my friend's six foot two.

• 12:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:44Chris Williamson?

  You go, right. Okay. But that doesn't necessarily disprove.

• 12:49Speaker 01

  The generalization.

• 12:50Chris Williamson?

  Exactly. The fact that the generalization is there. And even more so, the fact that the gamete size is definitional, as you say, oh, here we go. I don't even know what that number is. Is that sperm, is that a billion sperm?

• 13:03Speaker 01

  Hundred to three hundred million sperm per day produced by healthy adult.

• 13:06Chris Williamson?

  Oh, no, no, no, no. I want this globally. Total global sperm production, two hundred quadrillion eggs released, seventy million. Step it up ladies. So, so I think fucking lagging behind. We need to up the egg production, should I say? So much of the debate falls around nature versus nurture.

• 13:24Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 13:25Chris Williamson?

  So much of it. How do you even begin to start to separate this out, right? No, almost no women have grown up in a society that hasn't had other women with the expectations of women and almost no men have grown up in society that doesn't have the expectations of men. How do we know that all of the sex differences aren't just socialization?

• 13:46Speaker 01

  It's a good question. And, um, I think the first thing I want to say about that is that evolutionary psychologists don't deny that socialization has a very important uh, impact on the nature of sex differences in any given culture. We know that it does have a big impact because we know that sex differences, their size and the exact details of them, many of them, vary across cultures and vary across times. But in terms of how we know that it's not just socialization, there are various lines of evidence that point in that direction. None of them are perfect. None of them by themselves sealed the deal. But the reason I'm persuaded is that they all point in, uh, when you get a sex difference and they all point in the same direction. That just makes a very strong case, I think, that is, that is not just due to socialization.

• 14:29Speaker 01

  And in the book, I, I lay out six different lines of evidence, uh, for an innate contribution to any given, uh, difference. See if I can remember the name. So the first one is, um, that a lot of sex differences, they appear very, very early in the lifespan.

• 14:46Speaker 01

  So early in fact, that even though it's conceivable that it could be a result of socialization, it just seems less plausible than that. There's actually also an innate push. So, uh, the aggression sex difference and the risk taking sex difference, both of those appear basically as soon as kids are mature enough that they can move around the place and are capable of risk taking, capable of aggressing. Uh, you get that sex difference, um, like immediately. And, and a good example of that is that, uh, right from the get go, right from early toddlerhood, more boys than girls end up in the ER from doing more risk taking.

• 15:20Speaker 01

  And, and also if it appears at puberty as well, um, like a lot of sex differences, innate, well, sex differences with an innate basis, they.

• 15:28Chris Williamson?

  What do you mean when you say innate?

• 15:30Speaker 01

  Unlearned.

• 15:31Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 15:32Speaker 01

  Unlearned. Yeah.

• 15:32Chris Williamson?

  Right, right.

• 15:33Speaker 01

  So there's an innate contribution, an unlearned contribution. And where that's the case, often you find that the sex difference, you may, you may get it to some degree early in the lifespan, but then post puberty, it just skyrockets and, and expands.

• 15:45Chris Williamson?

  Right. Okay. Which would suggest that there is a biological basis or else.

• 15:49Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 15:49Chris Williamson?

  Why would this big change occur when puberty happens?

• 15:53Speaker 01

  Exactly. And, and do so right across cultures.

• 15:55Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. But is, uh, would the suggestion from social roles, socialization theorists be that while during puberty, culture ramps up, it's pressure on people. There's a greater expectation on young men and women to change their behavior.

• 16:13Speaker 01

  That would be the way that you would have to, you'd have to try to explain it, uh, something like that. Yeah. Uh, I think in the case of aggression.

• 16:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. More plastic at that age, perhaps. Yeah. You could, you could do that as well. Um, and that's sort of implying an innate, uh, contribution to the plasticity, I guess, but yeah, not with a specific sex difference. The reason I don't buy that though, is that most cultures actually try to suppress male aggression, for instance. Uh, in every culture, male aggression, uh, post puberty, young male aggression, violence, risk taking homicide, uh, is a big problem that the society has to, uh, deal with. And so, uh, usually they're, they're trying to clamp down on it rather than trying to, uh, encourage it. And nonetheless, you get, uh, this, uh, increase in aggression. That's true. And actually this is the second line of evidence is that often these sex differences appear despite culture rather than because of culture.

• 17:05Speaker 01

  Culture is trying to push down aggression like right from early on. Uh, parents, teachers, early on, they, they actually tell off boys for aggression more than they tell off girls for aggression. Not because they disapprove of girls aggression, but just simply because boys are more aggressive.

• 17:21Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 17:21Speaker 01

  They have more cause, uh, more cause to do it.

• 17:24Chris Williamson?

  I think, uh, FMRI's of developing fetuses in the womb can detect sex differences at three months.

• 17:33Speaker 01

  They can, I think, I think even younger in some cases as well.

• 17:36Chris Williamson?

  Do you, what are they, are these boys and girls, these tiny, un, minus six month year olds, are they learning that their brains are supposed to develop differently?

• 17:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. They've been socialized to develop different brain.

• 17:49Chris Williamson?

  Inside of the womb. Yeah.

• 17:51Speaker 01

  It's not, not.

• 17:52Chris Williamson?

  Okay. So early development.

• 17:53Speaker 01

  Early development, um, appearing despite culture rather than because of culture.

• 17:57Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 17:58Speaker 01

  Uh, another one is that, um, they persist often for a long time. So for instance, uh, sex differences and mate preferences were really consistent right throughout the entirety of the, uh, twentieth century and in the US. Uh, sex differences and career preferences as well, or, or career related interests. Uh, they were evident from like the early nineteen hundreds, when people first started measuring them. And then they just stayed the same. So, so the average difference, the fact that men, for instance, on average, more interested in things and things related jobs. Whereas women on average are more interested in people and people related jobs. That was, that was the case right throughout the twentieth century. Uh, despite the fact that there was quite a strong, uh, social, there was a lot of social pressure to try to get more women

• 18:42Speaker 01

  into, uh, traditionally male roles and it persisted nonetheless.

• 18:46Chris Williamson?

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• 19:55Speaker 01

  Well, I think a lot of them do.

• 19:59Speaker 01

  You know, it's tricky. So I guess we know because of cross-cultural differences in male typical behavior, female typical behavior, and the size of the differences, that something is making the difference. But it is actually quite tricky to to figure out what, what it is that's making the difference. Because we know, for instance, that, okay, so like a popular explanation is that it's how parents treat their kids. And that seems incredibly plausible that it's going to have an effect. There are a few reasons to think maybe that it has less effect than we might think. So one is that a lot of research in the West finds that men, finds that parents don't particularly treat their sons and daughters differently in some important ways.

• 20:40Speaker 01

  Like they're equally likely to encourage them to be successful, equally likely to encourage them to be independent. And another line of evidence against parents having a big role is what's called the second law of behavioral genetics. And that's the finding that when two people, like I say, take identical twins, two identical twins, they grow up in the same home. You'd expect them to be more similar to each other than two identical twins who are separated at birth and reared apart. And in childhood, they often are quite a bit more similar than you would expect by chance. By adulthood, though, they're often not much more similar at all, and in some cases, no more similar than they would be if they had grown up apart, which is a surprising finding, but a very consistent finding.

• 21:25Speaker 01

  And it suggests maybe that parental treatment affects individuals less than we might think that they would. Which kind of pulls out the rug a little bit from the idea that parents are having a huge impact on sex differences specifically.

• 21:37Chris Williamson?

  What about the gender equality paradox?

• 21:40Speaker 01

  Well, that undermines another kind of socio-cultural explanation, which is the idea that the sex differences that we see are products of the social roles of a culture and shaped by

• 21:53Chris Williamson?

  The social roles theory?

• 21:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, social roles theory, exactly. And patriarchy theory, the idea that it's due to patriarchy.

• 22:01Speaker 01

  That as well is undermined by the gender equality paradox. Because both of those theories would predict that in like more patriarchal societies, societies that are more patriarchal, societies that have stricter gender roles, you'd expect that and predict that the sex differences would be bigger in those societies than they are in less patriarchal societies and ones that have less strict social roles.

• 22:25Chris Williamson?

  What would be some examples of how that would play out if that was true?

• 22:29Speaker 01

  Basically, any sex difference you care to name, aggression, sex difference, sex differences in masculinity versus femininity. All of those should be bigger. Sex differences and career-related preferences, they should be bigger as well. And the gender equality paradox is the deeply counterintuitive finding and incredibly fascinating finding that often it goes the other way, seems to go the other way, that actually in more gender equal societies, societies that are less strict in terms of their gender roles and societies that are less patriarchal, you actually find larger sex differences often rather than smaller ones, which is

• 23:02Chris Williamson?

  In the direction that you would predict as well.

• 23:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it's opposite to the direction you predict if social role theory was correct.

• 23:09Chris Williamson?

  Yes, yes, but in the direction you would predict if you were taking an evolutionary perspective, I would imagine.

• 23:14Speaker 01

  Well, actually, you know, taking an evolutionary perspective, I I didn't originally predict that. I I thought that in more patriarchal societies, e- even given that there's an innate push towards certain sex differences, I still thought that patriarchy and stricter sex roles would pry the sexes apart even more.

• 23:29Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 23:30Speaker 01

  So I was actually very surprised that it doesn't, and that it does the reverse is the real surprise.

• 23:35Chris Williamson?

  What are the rebuttals to socio- that socio-cultural explainers have for the gender equality paradox?

• 23:43Speaker 01

  There are a few. One is that people in more patriarchal societies, they tend to, the men and women have little to do with each other. And so they're, they have a more sort of exaggerated picture of the other sex. And so when they fill out personality inventories, for instance, they they're comparing themselves with other men, if they're men, or other women, if they're women. And they therefore see themselves as being more similar to the average for their comparison group.

• 24:11Chris Williamson?

  Right, okay, because they're just in, they're so siloed off in these patriarchal societies that they don't know what the fuck the other side's doing.

• 24:19Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 24:21Speaker 01

  It is, it is.

• 24:22Chris Williamson?

  You're just in a bunker so much that you don't know what's going on.

• 24:27Speaker 01

  It makes sense. It does. It does. But there's also plausible rebuttal to that rebuttal, which is

• 24:33Chris Williamson?

  I fucking love it. So good. This is my shit. This is my shit.

• 24:39Speaker 01

  So it doesn't just apply to self-report things like personality. You also find that for some cognitive abilities, I think spatial ability, for instance, you find it.

• 24:49Speaker 01

  You find that as well for physical traits like height.

• 24:53Chris Williamson?

  Are you saying that in more gender equal societies, boys get even better, better at throwing?

• 24:59Speaker 01

  I don't know if that is actually the case, but that that would be an example. If there's research on that, I'm not sure there is actually cross-cultural research.

• 25:04Chris Williamson?

  Throwing's my favorite one, dude.

• 25:06Speaker 01

  Huge, huge difference.

• 25:07Chris Williamson?

  It's one of my absolute favorites. Did you ever look at that study where, so the the difference in throwing velocity, accuracy is a pretty big sex difference. But one of the

• 25:20Chris Williamson?

  appropriate pushbacks was, well, men's shoulders articulate differently. The length of the forearm means that you've got more leverage, et cetera, et cetera. I think the the sex difference at eight years old in throwing velocity and accuracy is basically the same as adult men and women being able to detect adult women and men just by their face.

• 25:40Speaker 01

  Right.

• 25:40Chris Williamson?

  It's a ninety percent. It's a huge, huge, huge difference. So there was this, my favorite study on this was, in order to negate the articulation argument, the issues of sort of biomechanics, they got a tennis ball serving machine and fired tennis balls at students and got the boys and the girls to see if they could get out of the way. And I don't think any of the males were hit. And I think that this is before you wouldn't have been able to get this past an ethics board. But yeah, just the sort of spatial awareness, that spatial rotationy stuff is the sex differences is is pretty large and apparently, maybe, maybe in a more gender equal society, even more would be, women would be hit by the tennis balls.

• 26:23Speaker 01

  Well, that's possible. Yeah. So the gender equality paradox, it doesn't apply to every trait. So it might not necessarily be that. But yeah, but but you are right. I think that was probably a seventy, I think it was a seventy's study. I'm not sure you could do that. Yeah, you couldn't do that. You couldn't aim projectiles at participants in studies anymore, sadly.

• 26:39Chris Williamson?

  What's the largest sex difference between men and women?

• 26:43Speaker 01

  Well, the largest ones are physical differences, physical sex differences. So the very largest are sex differences and reproductive anatomy, where basically all males have penises, all females have vaginas and so on.

• 26:58Speaker 01

  But other physical sex differences are also very, very large. So the sex difference in upper body strength is is huge and there's very little overlap, close to no overlap for that one. The sex difference in voice pitch is another very, very large one as well. That's huge, which is quite interesting because the voice pitch sex difference in other apes is not as big, is nowhere near as big. And that's even the case for for other species that are much more dimorphic than us in terms of size, like gorillas and orangutans. So it's a bit of a puzzle. I'm not quite sure why that is, why that's the case.

• 27:35Speaker 01

  When it comes to psychological sex differences, the vast majority of them are much more modest. But there's one that stands out as being, as being almost as big as some of these physical ones. And I always ask people if they can guess what it is. I think last time I was on your show, actually, I asked you if you could guess. And and you didn't, but I mean, no one does.

• 27:53Chris Williamson?

  I've read the book now.

• 27:54Speaker 01

  You've read the book now, so.

• 27:55Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 27:56Speaker 01

  You've got a head start on that, yeah.

• 27:58Chris Williamson?

  Can you guess what it would be, Jared? The the single biggest psychological sex difference between men and women?

• 28:05Speaker 02

  Is aggression?

• 28:07Speaker 01

  It's not aggression. I'll give you a clue, and that's that it is, it's related to reproduction pretty closely. What was that? It's, well, actually, that is a big sex difference, but.

• 28:18Chris Williamson?

  Not as big as this one. Speak for yourself, dude.

• 28:22Speaker 01

  It's the sex difference in which sex each sex is primarily attracted to. So men, most, the vast majority of men are primarily attracted to women, the vast majority of women primarily attracted to men. And when I say it, it's obvious, right? It's this obvious that it's a big sex difference and but but it's curious. People don't think of it. Even scientists often don't think about it. I've read a bunch of papers that summarize evolved sex differences, and they don't tend to mention that one. They often neglect to mention that that very, very large one, but also that one that has quite a clear evolutionary rationale.

• 28:56Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, of course. Because if that wasn't the case, we wouldn't be here.

• 28:59Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 29:00Chris Williamson?

  Literally, literally.

• 29:01Speaker 01

  We literally wouldn't be here, yeah.

• 29:02Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so what are the biggest sex differences? Let's get down to some brass fucking tacks. What are the biggest sex differences when it comes to sex?

• 29:09Speaker 01

  When it comes to sex? One of the largest ones is the sex difference in interest and casual sex and sexual variety. And so basically socio-sexuality, the trait of socio-sexuality, no strings attached sex. Do I need to mention which direction it is? People might be aware of it, right?

• 29:29Chris Williamson?

  Someone can intuit it, I guess.

• 29:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. So so men on average score higher. However, you measure that trait, they score higher than women on that trait. The differences there, maybe they are not, not as huge as people sometimes assume. We're looking usually at an effect size of, you know, about Cohen's D equals one. So what what that means is there's about one standard deviation between the average for men and the average for women. So so yeah, between point eight and one. And that is pretty big. That is big for a human sex difference. But there is still quite a bit of overlap. So there are plenty of women who have a higher socio-sexuality than plenty of men.

• 30:10Speaker 01

  I guess an intuitive way to put it, a way to make it intuitive, would be to say, if you imagine plucking two people at random, one man and one woman, with effect size of point eight, point or one, probably two thirds to seventy, seventy percent of the time, the man will score higher than the woman on that trait.

• 30:29Speaker 01

  So that is a majority. It's not an overwhelming majority, though. In a significant minority of cases, you'd find that actually the woman scores higher than the man.

• 30:37Chris Williamson?

  Why?

• 30:38Speaker 01

  Why is that sex difference? That is getting right into the the central question of why there are any sex differences.

• 30:45Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I suppose we we probably need to talk about like the evolution of sex differences, why they, why they exist in the first place.

• 30:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. So we should jump to that.

• 30:54Speaker 01

  Can I, just as an aside, though, can I, we we mentioned three of the six lines of evidence for innateness. Do we want to jump back and do the other three and then maybe get into the, this other thing?

• 31:05Speaker 01

  So what do we do? We had the developmental sex differences. We had the resistance cultural pressure. We had the persistence across time. So another one is hormonal correlates of sex differences. And in particular, you find associations between prenatal hormonal exposure and traits found later in life. So high levels of testosterone in the womb, for instance, are associated with high levels of aggression later, high levels of risk taking, lower levels of parental inclinations. And so on.

• 31:43Chris Williamson?

  And that's regardless of sex.

• 31:44Speaker 01

  That is regardless of sex. Yeah, so you can look at within sex differences as well. And yes, so one actually very strong line of evidence for that claim is the fact that women who, when they're in the womb, are exposed to very, very high levels of prenatal testosterone due to having a condition called congenital adrenal hyperplasia or CAH. They, as girls and then as women, they exhibit a lot of male typical traits.

• 32:15Chris Williamson?

  Less interested in playing with dolls.

• 32:17Speaker 01

  Exactly, yeah. Less interested in getting married and having kids, more interest in things related professions as well. So that's pretty.

• 32:26Chris Williamson?

  It makes them more likely to be bisexual or lesbian.

• 32:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, it does. It makes them more likely to be interested in other women sexually as well, either as bisexuals or as lesbians. Yeah.

• 32:34Chris Williamson?

  Well.

• 32:35Speaker 01

  So, so like a wide range of traits seem to be influenced by testosterone.

• 32:38Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so the fourth one is it correlates with hormones?

• 32:42Speaker 01

  Yep. The fifth one is cross-cultural universality. So most of the key sex differences that we've been discussing so far, they are found either in every culture or in the vast majority. And if it were all just down to culture, you wouldn't expect that. You'd expect there to be more variation across cultures than what we found. But you don't, you know, you just always have, like in every culture, you find that men are more aggressive than women. And you find at the extreme of aggression in particular, the differences are particularly big. And you find that the vast majority of homicides are perpetrated by guys in every single nation to which we had data. Greater risk-taking, more accidental fatalities among men than women.

• 33:24Speaker 01

  Women across cultures are more involved in parental care and so on and so on. And then last but not least, and maybe this is the one I find most plausible on its own, is the fact that a lot of these sex differences, you find them as well in other species. You don't find them in all other species, but importantly, you find them in species that were subject to the same evolutionary selection pressures as ourselves. And actually, the selection pressures of question bring us to the ultimate roots of evolved sex differences. So basically, most sex differences emerge from the sex difference in what I like to call the maximum offspring number

• 34:07Speaker 01

  that male animals versus female animals can produce. And in most species, the males potentially can produce more offspring than females. Now, the average number of offspring has to be the same. At least in species where you have a similar sex ratio, the average has to be the same, but the variance in the number of offspring produced can be greater in one sex than the other, and it's usually greater in males.

• 34:32Chris Williamson?

  Why does the average need to be the same if the variance can be different?

• 34:35Speaker 01

  Because it takes two to tango. And so every offspring that's produced is produced by one male or one female. And then most species.

• 34:44Chris Williamson?

  But if you can have one male servicing 20 females, why not have a 20 to one ratio?

• 34:49Speaker 01

  Well, that'd be a 20 to one ratio in terms of the number of parents, but the average number for each sex would be the same. Because you've got the one male with 20 times more than any female. And then nine, and so that's a really high number. But then the other 19 bachelors who never get to have kids, that brings the average for males down. And then it's the same for all the females. So you average out across all of them and the average is the same.

• 35:13Chris Williamson?

  I get that. Maybe I'm being stupid. Why is it not the case, given that men, given that males are able to produce more children than women can, than females can?

• 35:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:26Chris Williamson?

  Why is it not the case that there is a bias toward fewer males in the animal kingdom?

• 35:32Speaker 01

  Right, right. That's a great question. And that is one of the sort of early mysteries of evolutionary biology. And if it were for the, if selection acted for the good of the group, that is what we'd find. We'd find if you only need one, one male for every 20 females and selection were for the good of the group, you get that. Because if you have 20 of each, then the other 19 are surplus and they're using up each of resources and they're competing with each other and fighting with each other. It's not good for the species as a whole. But selection favors what's good for the individual. And for the individual.

• 36:08Chris Williamson?

  I could be the one.

• 36:09Speaker 01

  You could be the one, exactly. And the average is the same. So the, I guess, useful to think about. Think about it from the parent's point of view. Like, is it better to have sons or daughters? And if there were 20 females for every one male, it'd be much better to have sons. Because each son is going to just have, there's going to be tons of females. And so that would mean that selection would slowly favor an increase in the number of sons.

• 36:35Chris Williamson?

  That's motherfucking, you can't beat evolution.

• 36:37Speaker 01

  Exactly. And the reverse, if there's 20, 20 males and for every female, then it would be better for parents to produce daughters because then they get the cream of the crop. And, and 20 males, probably they're going to have a low number. So it's better to have daughters. So the equilibrium point is 50 50.

• 36:53Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, obviously as well, there's survival and not just reproduction. We're not living in this perfect, hermetically sealed, safe environment.

• 37:00Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 37:00Chris Williamson?

  Males do other things than just reproduce, regardless of whether they can do 20 to one or not.

• 37:06Speaker 01

  Indeed. Yeah.

• 37:09Chris Williamson?

  Getting food, helping to protect, getting rid of other tribes, et cetera, et cetera.

• 37:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. And, you know, there are plenty of species where the male has, has role in reproduction is just the reproductive act. And then he's off looking for other females. But we're not one of those species. I mean, that does happen occasionally. There's an occasional male that will do that. But generally, we're quite involved in childcare. Yeah, so, okay, so the big difference there is you get this difference in the variance. Some males can have tons of offspring. And they can have many more offspring than any female can. Where that's the case, though, there's going to be some males that had no offspring, or maybe a few, a few or none. And where that's the case, you get strong selection on the males to be one of the lucky few males that has many offspring,

• 38:00Speaker 01

  rather than one of the few that has none.

• 38:02Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 38:02Speaker 01

  One of the many that has none.

• 38:03Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 38:04Speaker 01

  And so that selects for traits like greater aggression, within sex aggression, to try to beat up other males for, either directly for females or for the territories, the status or the resources that are necessary to attract female attention. A tendency to show off, a tendency to grow a great big tail. If you're a peacock, you might want to try that. Grow a great big flashy tail to seduce the peahens. Or just a tendency to seek multiple mates and seek no strings attached sex, basically. So that's the answer to your earlier question, is that what, that's why you have selection for, like stronger selection on males than females for an interest in multiple partners and sex without commitment.

• 38:47Chris Williamson?

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• 39:31Chris Williamson?

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• 39:43Chris Williamson?

  A check out. How does parental investment influence the evolution of sex differences?

• 39:49Speaker 01

  That is a major contributor. And the reason is that, so this variance sex difference is mainly a result of sex differences and parental investment. So the reason that some males can have many, many more offspring than any female in a lot of species is that females invest more in the young. So in mammals, for instance, to produce any one offspring, a female has to have a long pregnancy, has to give birth to the young, and then has to nurse the young for a while. Whereas a male to produce an offspring, just in principle, only needs to engage in one sex act. So he can mate with multiple females and have tons of offspring because he invests potentially little in any given offspring.

• 40:34Speaker 01

  Whereas the females, on the other hand, they invest a lot in each offspring. That lowers the ceiling for the number of offspring they can produce.

• 40:41Chris Williamson?

  Therefore, you have to be choosier.

• 40:42Speaker 01

  You have to be choosier about your mates. Exactly. Sleeping with or mating with lots and lots of males, less useful for females than for males. But so parental investment is really the core to.

• 40:55Chris Williamson?

  Is that the key driver?

• 40:58Speaker 01

  Well, I think the key driver is the difference in the maximum offspring number or the reproductive variance.

• 41:03Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 41:03Speaker 01

  Because it's not just shaped by parental investment.

• 41:05Chris Williamson?

  Behaviorally, that shows up as parental investment.

• 41:08Speaker 01

  Well, that's a big part of it. Yeah. So the parental investment is the major cause of the sex difference and maximum offspring number. But other things do come into it in different species.

• 41:17Chris Williamson?

  Gestation periods too is like a biological imposition on parental investment. Actually, is how long it takes to just make a baby considered part of parental investment?

• 41:30Speaker 01

  That is part of parental investment. Yeah. And parental care is, and nursing is.

• 41:34Chris Williamson?

  Obviously those two, but I wasn't sure whether or not it's classed parental investment is classed as actually the making of the baby.

• 41:40Speaker 01

  It is because it forecloses the option to make other babies.

• 41:43Chris Williamson?

  Understood.

• 41:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. But ecological things come into it as well. So one example of a factor other than parental investment that influences the reproductive variance is ecological factors. So you'll have some species where the males, where they're quite solitary. So the males and females might pair up and there aren't many other individuals around. Even if the female invests a lot more in the young than the male does, their maximum offspring number is about the same because just simply because they're isolated from other members of the species, the males don't have many other opportunities to sow their wild oats.

• 42:18Chris Williamson?

  What's Bateman's principle?

• 42:20Speaker 01

  Bateman's principle? So that is the idea that reproductive variance is greater in males than females in most species.

• 42:27Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 42:27Speaker 01

  And then Trivers' sort of refinement of that was that the main cause of that is parental investment. So Bateman put a lot of it on anisogamy. He explained the difference in reproductive variance in terms of the fact that females invest more per egg than males invest per sperm. Trivers said, Robert Trivers, who died recently, he said, it's not just that. Actually, it's all kinds of investment that you put into the young, not just the gametes, but also gestation and parturition, which is giving birth, nursing, parental care, all those things are what matters. And I would just add that parental investment is the big one, but other things as well determine reproductive variance.

• 43:10Chris Williamson?

  What is the, it's about 40% of males, but with human males ancestrally reproduced and about 80% of females, is that right?

• 43:20Speaker 01

  I have heard that number bandied about. I actually think that probably in our species, my guess is that it's not that big. I've also seen other evidence suggesting that it's called reproductive skew and suggesting that the reproductive skew in our species is quite a bit lower than you find in most mammals. And I think the reason for that is that.

• 43:40Chris Williamson?

  So the 40/80 number you think is wrong?

• 43:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:43Chris Williamson?

  Right, okay.

• 43:44Speaker 01

  I think so.

• 43:44Chris Williamson?

  What's the reason?

• 43:45Speaker 01

  It's smaller. Well, I think it's smaller and I think because males in our species very often invest quite a lot in the young. So it's not just the sex act. They often typically help out with the young as well.

• 44:00Speaker 01

  And so we have, we have high levels of bi-parental care in our species that reduces the maximum offspring number for males relative to females and brings it down, brings it closer to what we have for females.

• 44:11Chris Williamson?

  So if other animals have less of a reproductive skew, but also have less male parental investment, how would the reproductive skew for us be so great if we have more male parental investment? Is that what you're saying?

• 44:24Speaker 01

  That is what I'm saying.

• 44:25Chris Williamson?

  Bingo. I fucking know evolutionary psychology, dude. Don't test me on this. I fucking understand this. It's the only topic I understand.

• 44:33Chris Williamson?

  So you get variance in reproductive success. What do you reckon it was then? If it's not 40/80, feel free to just bro science it.

• 44:40Speaker 01

  I think I.

• 44:45Speaker 01

  I probably shouldn't put a number. I, other than to say I think it's smaller.

• 44:52Speaker 01

  I know, I know.

• 44:54Chris Williamson?

  I'm gonna put this thing on for the rest of the conversation.

• 44:58Speaker 01

  Well, you've got these as well.

• 44:59Chris Williamson?

  That's also, that's if you want to say something insane.

• 45:01Speaker 01

  Okay, cool. Well, I'll keep it here.

• 45:02Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. In case you want to say something absolutely insane, you're allowed to put that on. It's actually saved me once already. I got clipped talking about a slightly highly postulated theory. Put that on. It's gonna be interesting on you because you already have the moustache and the glasses.

• 45:15Speaker 01

  Well, indeed, yeah.

• 45:16Chris Williamson?

  Nothing's changed.

• 45:17Speaker 01

  Nothing's changed.

• 45:24Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, okay. So we've got a, it's like an interesting, I guess, an interesting pivot on what people think. That sort of 40/80 number, as far as I was aware, like actually, so you think the skew is different? What I thought might be true is that the overall number might be different too. That the whole, to me, like infant mortality.

• 45:49Speaker 01

  Right.

• 45:49Chris Williamson?

  Fucking ruthless. So the only way that we can work out how many of our ancestors reproduced presumably is due to some kind of genealogy stuff. And that means that it's not how many reproduced, it's how many survived.

• 46:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, survived to reproductive age.

• 46:05Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, the grandparent optimizing machine from yours. Previous book, which is fantastic and everyone needs to go and look at. The Ape Who Understood the Universe. 80% of women having grandchildren producing, 80% of women being grandchildren producing people.

• 46:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:26Chris Williamson?

  Seems insanely high to me.

• 46:29Speaker 01

  I guess the thing is that they would have had a bunch of kids and only about 50% would make it, about 50% would make it. And so if they, you know, have sex, for instance.

• 46:38Chris Williamson?

  That's what it is, around about 50%.

• 46:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:40Chris Williamson?

  That are born, go on to reproduce.

• 46:42Speaker 01

  Unbelievably high, right? About 50% infant mortality rate. So like half of them didn't make it.

• 46:49Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 46:49Speaker 01

  One of the great things, I think, of our civilization is that we had lowered that number to very close to zero. Because that was, I think, a massive cause of misery throughout most of human history.

• 47:00Chris Williamson?

  Was it Darwin lost a bunch of kids?

• 47:03Speaker 01

  He did, yeah. He had, what was it? He had 10 and three didn't make it to adulthood. I think that's the numbers.

• 47:09Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Is it your book or was it? I think this might have been The Moral Animal.

• 47:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:15Chris Williamson?

  Where Robert Wright talks about the fact that Darwin lost multiple children, but the one that was the most psychologically painful.

• 47:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:25Chris Williamson?

  Was his daughter who was 12 or 13.

• 47:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:29Chris Williamson?

  And the reason for that, the evolutionary reason that Robert gives for it is that parents are able to detect the moment at which the life cycle of their child would have allowed them to just about become the grandparent optimizing machine that evolutionarily were driven to be.

• 47:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:52Chris Williamson?

  And that if a child dies at two years old, that's horrible, but they weren't, they had a long way to go and many things could have occurred between now and being able to have kids. If a child dies when they're old, then they've had all of the opportunities to have had kids and that didn't, that didn't go well, or maybe it did go well. But if you are just on the cusp of being able to reproduce biologically and you die, that is, from an evolutionary perspective, the most painful. Am I making that up or is that the story?

• 48:24Speaker 01

  No, that is the story. Yeah.

• 48:25Chris Williamson?

  Bingo.

• 48:26Speaker 01

  There's pretty good evidence on it as well, that grief tracks reproductive value of the individual.

• 48:31Chris Williamson?

  No fucking way. So this has been reproduced? Because that book's 30 years old now.

• 48:35Speaker 01

  Yep, yep. Yeah, the average grief levels go up and up and up as reproductive value goes up as kids move from the very vulnerable, historically very vulnerable, early infancy to childhood. It's kind of peaks at about the age that reproductive value peaks. So a couple of years after puberty and then it starts coming down again as people get older.

• 48:57Chris Williamson?

  So fucking fascinating. How is everyone not obsessed with evolutionary psychology? It is so cool.

• 49:03Speaker 01

  Fascinating, right?

• 49:03Chris Williamson?

  It's so fun.

• 49:04Speaker 01

  And sheds light on some of the most fundamental stuff in life.

• 49:07Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. I mean, obviously, it's very.

• 49:10Chris Williamson?

  Bleak in some ways too. It's very stark. It doesn't paint a particularly flattering picture of human motivation. The reason that Darwin was particularly sad about his thirteen year old daughter dying is that he had this weird algorithm running in the back of his mind. He said, oh, so you're just saying that all the children are, that's reduced for you to be happy to do things. It's like, dude, you don't need to lord our ultimate evolutionary drives

• 49:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:38Chris Williamson?

  in order to understand and respect them and accept the fact that they are important influences on our behaviour.

• 49:44Speaker 01

  I completely agree. And even, you know, and I do feel the pull to what like, it is a bit bleak. I remember when I was first reading about that grief theory, it does seem a bit, a bit dark. But then when you think about it, it's not very flattering. Exactly. I mean, I guess one thing is that we don't actually, we're not actually thinking about reproductive value. We just have a built in tendency to react as if we are. But we're not actually thinking in the back of our minds, this is sad because I, this, this kid was close to having kids and then I would have been.

• 50:13Chris Williamson?

  Well, this is, this is sort of my least, I don't know, actually, I probably could write out a hit list of my least favourite internet rebuttals to anyone talking about evolutionary theory. But one of them is a lack of understanding about the difference between proximate and ultimate motivations for behaviour.

• 50:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. So one of the big ones.

• 50:35Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, like the

• 50:36Speaker 01

  Misunderstandings.

• 50:37Chris Williamson?

  Why you feel the desire to do a thing and the evolutionary advantage of you doing the thing, the fact that those two things are different. You eat food because it tastes good, but the reason for eating food is to keep you alive. You have sex because it feels good, but the reason to have sex is not the reason that it feels good.

• 51:01Speaker 01

  Exactly right. And, and it's quite annoying, right? When people say, so you're saying that, um, like sex and having like short term relationships or long term relationships is just about babies, but that can't be true because often the last people, the last thing people want is to have kids.

• 51:15Chris Williamson?

  And I don't want to have kids. I love to have sex.

• 51:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. So it doesn't make sense. But they've just misunderstood the idea. Yeah. Cause it's not a psychological theory. Like the, the genes I view explanations, the evolutionary explanations, those are not motivations. Those are just the explanations for why we have the, the proximate psychological drives that we do.

• 51:35Chris Williamson?

  Not the ultimate.

• 51:36Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 51:36Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, with the, the, what's it referred to as that theory of the sexual, not sexual value of Darwin's daughter dying? What's the?

• 51:50Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Reproductive value.

• 51:52Chris Williamson?

  Reproductive value. No one is, how horrible to say to a parent, well, it's actually, Mrs. Thompson, the reason that you're great, Mrs. Darwin, the reason that your grief is so high is because of the reproductive value that your daughter almost didn't cash in on. Like horrible, horrible thing to say. But it doesn't need to, it doesn't need to be something that's in your mind till I go, how could you claim that this mother is feeling that, thinking that at the time and that's contributing to a grief? No.

• 52:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. She's not. She just loves the kid.

• 52:24Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. It would be the same. It would be the same as going, um, why is it that people get depressed when they're lonely? I'm not thinking about potentially being kicked out of the tribe. And you go, well, yeah, like we're in a modern environment. Why do you think it is that depression and anxiety correlate with isolation?

• 52:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 52:41Chris Williamson?

  If it didn't matter. Well, it does matter. It doesn't matter anymore. Not in the same sort of a way, but that doesn't negate the fact that our system is basically ancient programming living in a modern world.

• 52:51Speaker 01

  Exactly. And even though it does seem bleak sometimes, I don't see that other explanations, socio-cultural explanations would be any less bleak, you know?

• 53:00Chris Williamson?

  So you're telling me that I'm at the mercy of the memes and trends of the modern world?

• 53:05Speaker 01

  Well, exactly. And

• 53:06Chris Williamson?

  Some guy decides to start a new cool movement somewhere and then that completely sort of blows the wind of whatever it is that I'm supposed to care about.

• 53:15Speaker 01

  Exactly. Or you might say, okay, the reason that you grieve this individual is just because you've been socialized to do so. Yeah. How is that any less, any less bleak?

• 53:23Chris Williamson?

  It's the same. This is why I think there's a lot of similarities between evolutionary psychology and behavioural genetics, that if you start to strip away the science and the evidence underneath it, what you end up with is an equally, or maybe even uglier perspective in the world. If, if, for instance, if you deny that there are genetic influences on outcomes in life.

• 53:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:44Chris Williamson?

  What you're left with is this world where everybody did start off equal and you are exclusively at the mercy of the entire world.

• 53:56Speaker 01

  Yep. And injustices.

• 53:58Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Yeah. The, the only reason that this didn't come out is all on your shoulders. It's all on your shoulders because you didn't try hard enough or your parents didn't try hard enough.

• 54:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:06Chris Williamson?

  Horrid, horrid.

• 54:07Speaker 01

  And I guess though, the thing is that whatever horrid truth, and they're not all horrid either, but whatever horrid truth, ultimately we've just got to accept what's true, whether we like it or not. And, you know, sometimes it is positive. So, so natural selection has given us a whole range of less than noble traits, but it's also given us some really lovely traits as well, like the capacity to fall in love and to love our children and to love our friends. You know, these are great things.

• 54:32Chris Williamson?

  Do selfless things.

• 54:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. To be altruistic.

• 54:35Chris Williamson?

  So I guess one, just to round out the, we haven't even got into the sex differences yet, which is the meat and potatoes of this, but I don't care. Um.

• 54:44Chris Williamson?

  Is it, are humans unique in this regard? Because we've got mutual mate choice and we've got bi parental care. So when we're talking about evolution of sex differences, parental investment, ability to produce children or volume of children across a lifespan, Bateman's principle, variance and reproductive success.

• 55:06Chris Williamson?

  But humans do seem to be somewhat of an outlier in mammals and especially in the animal kingdom.

• 55:12Speaker 01

  Yep. Yep.

• 55:14Chris Williamson?

  What wrinkle does that throw in?

• 55:17Speaker 01

  Uh, well, yeah. So we are, so the question, are we unique? Sort of yes and no. So the way in which we are unique, we're very unique among mammals. Like you say, and the fact that we have high levels of the tendency to pair bond, sort of fall in love and form relatively durable pair bonds and for both sexes, rather than just the females to invest in the young. That is found in maybe five to 10%, 10% at the most of mammals. So the overwhelming trend among mammals is that the females do all the investment in the young and the males are basically deadbeat dads. In birds, on the other hand, they are an outlier family of animals among animals in general, and that around 90% of birds

• 56:00Speaker 01

  form pair bonds and have bi parental care. And so this is a funny thing. I find this just very, very interesting is that in our primary reproductive behaviour, humans are more like the average bird than like the average mammal.

• 56:13Chris Williamson?

  No way.

• 56:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. That's because of our pair bonding and our bi parental tendencies.

• 56:18Chris Williamson?

  Is a reinforcement that the parental investment is, is the key driver of sex differences?

• 56:28Speaker 01

  Yep, exactly. And, and of the

• 56:30Chris Williamson?

  That's hilarious. Most birds, oh, hang on a second. Yeah. So

• 56:36Chris Williamson?

  most birds are kind of like dinosaurs and humans are closer to birds than they are to most mammals.

• 56:41Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 56:41Chris Williamson?

  Which means that humans are kind of dinosaurs.

• 56:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. So

• 56:44Chris Williamson?

  That's my evolutionary logic.

• 56:45Speaker 01

  That's great. That's great. Do you want this?

• 56:47Chris Williamson?

  Yes. No, no, I don't need that. I don't need that.

• 56:49Speaker 01

  No, no, you don't. Cause I agree. So we, we're mammals that are more like dinosaurs in terms of having the, the primary reproductive arrangement of, of today's dinosaurs.

• 56:59Chris Williamson?

  Fucking go.

• 56:59Speaker 01

  It's wild, right?

• 57:00Chris Williamson?

  Let's fucking go.

• 57:01Speaker 01

  And so, yeah, so we're an exception among mammals in that respect. A way in which we're not an exception though, is that the, the same evolutionary principles that apply right across the animal kingdom apply to us as well. So the fact that sex differences emerge from the maximum offspring number, the, the level of sex differences and reproductive variance, that is true across the animal kingdom. And the rules about that apply to us as well. And the fact that we have, we do have a sex difference and reproductive variance. Men do have, and have always had greater reproductive variance than women, but it's relatively low compared to most mammals.

• 57:40Chris Williamson?

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• 58:25Chris Williamson?

  to stop guessing with your health and start knowing. And right now you can get $25 off, bringing it down to 340 bucks. So get the exact same blood panels that I do and save $25 by going to the link in the description below or heading to functionhealth.com/modernwisdom using the code MODERNWISDOM at checkout. Isn't there an interesting inversion of this in spiders where female spiders are bigger than the males?

• 58:51Speaker 01

  Actually, most insects, it's that way around. And actually, there are more animals where the females are bigger than where the males are bigger. But that's not because of the difference in reproductive variance. It's because, um, and a lot of species, the main driver of sexual dimorphism is just the number of eggs that you can produce. And females, bigger females can produce more eggs. So there's a selection pressure on them to get bigger and bigger and bigger. They're typically bigger than the males. The males don't need to be much.

• 59:19Chris Williamson?

  They don't need that much room for sperm.

• 59:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So, so the gamete size difference, sperm are bigger than eggs, is reflected in the physiology of the species.

• 59:28Chris Williamson?

  That's so fucking cool. That's so cool.

• 59:30Speaker 01

  We're the weirdos. We're so used to males being bigger than females, but actually mammals and other large vertebrates were the exception to the rule. And the main reason for it is that, um, you still have the selection pressure on the females for producing more eggs. So, you know, they've got certain size, sort of push for them to be bigger. But you've got an even stronger push on the males to be bigger as a result of intersexual selection, which is selection for the ability to be able to beat each other up, basically. So a lot of species, bigger males do better in fighting than, than smaller ones. Males get bigger than the, uh, males get bigger and sometimes they get even bigger than the females.

• 1:00:07Chris Williamson?

  All right. Meat and potatoes. Getting back to sex differences and sex drive.

• 1:00:11Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:00:11Chris Williamson?

  What casual sex, sexual variety, cheating, what's going on there?

• 1:00:16Speaker 01

  Yep. That's all about producing more offspring. So, um, a male that is equipped with those motivations is going to be sort of like a heat seeking missile going out to seek multiple partners and is therefore more likely to have, um,

• 1:00:34Speaker 01

  More offspring, if he's successful than that, than he would if he just sort of sat back and wasn't interested in multiple partners. And you do find that in many species. Now, I don't think that the difference is as big in our species as in many others. And I think that's a side effect of the fact that because we have bi parental care, the level of reproductive variance among males in our species is somewhat constrained, still greater than among females. But because it's somewhat constrained, sex differences in our species have correspondingly come down as well. So we still have all the traditional sex differences that you find in most mammals and many other species, but they're somewhat muted. So you have the sexuality sex differences, but they're somewhat muted. The aggression differences, but they're somewhat muted.

• 1:01:21Speaker 01

  The parenting differences is the main source of this. So that, you know, is like the discrepancy in male investment in kids versus female investment has been massively reduced.

• 1:01:31Chris Williamson?

  And that's the driver.

• 1:01:32Speaker 01

  And that's the

• 1:01:32Chris Williamson?

  The bi parental.

• 1:01:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:34Chris Williamson?

  The bi parental investment is the nerfing.

• 1:01:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:37Chris Williamson?

  The reason for the nerfing of all of the others. Okay, again, I'm only going to make this fucking disclaimer once. But we said it, we said it previously, but I think it's worth saying again. Just because we can explain using evolutionary logic, the reason why men might be driven to cheat more than women is not the same thing as excusing why it happens.

• 1:01:57Speaker 01

  No, not at all. Any more than a sociocultural explanation would excuse it. But that's a funny asymmetry. People seem to think if you explain it in evolutionary terms, that excuses it. But there's no more reason to assume that than to assume that if you explain it in sociocultural terms.

• 1:02:11Chris Williamson?

  Because with both of those, you are outsourcing the culpability of the individual to something else. In one, it's evolution and ancestors, and in the other, it's culture and influence.

• 1:02:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And all our behavior must have causes, right? So if we're going to say that if we can identify the cause of a behavior and it's an evolutionary cause, we're going to have to not hold people to blame. We're going to have to say that for any cause, and we're going to have to say that for all behaviors, because all behaviors have some kind of cause, whether or not we know what it is, they have some kind of

• 1:02:41Chris Williamson?

  Whether it's evolutionary or cultural.

• 1:02:43Speaker 01

  Or most likely a combination of both.

• 1:02:45Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:46Speaker 01

  And so I think that basically the institution of holding people responsible, we have to keep that institution because it's useful, regardless of the fact that, of course, people's behavior has causes and it's not inexplicable.

• 1:02:57Chris Williamson?

  That's so good. Ashley Madison, the cheating website, had 20 million active male users and 1,492 active female users, despite women getting free lifetime membership and men having to pay.

• 1:03:09Speaker 01

  Yep, that's wild, right? That's a massive difference.

• 1:03:11Chris Williamson?

  20 million to 1,500.

• 1:03:15Speaker 01

  It's probably similar to that ratio we had up there before.

• 1:03:18Chris Williamson?

  Probably is almost exactly the same, yeah.

• 1:03:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:20Chris Williamson?

  What about men being more turned on by visual triggers?

• 1:03:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's another, another big sex difference. Both sexes are to some degree, you know, both sexes are interested in good looks in a mate, but it's stronger in men than in women. And the main reason for that is that the traits that we consider good looking are associated with, with youthfulness and fertility for both sexes. But men place a greater weight on those traits because, because of menopause, basically. So the fact that they place more weight on youthfulness in a mate because youthfulness is more closely linked to fertility in women than men because of the fact that women's fertility shuts off about, you know, two thirds of the other way through the lifespan. Yeah. So, yeah, so men much more interested in visual sexual stimuli, as psychologists call it.

• 1:04:07Speaker 01

  It's part of the explanation for the fact that men are much more avid consumers of porn than women are.

• 1:04:13Chris Williamson?

  What is the reason that women are much more avid consumers of romanticy and romance novels than men?

• 1:04:21Speaker 01

  It's, it's an interesting one, isn't it? So that's the standard sort of differences and consumer preferences that we hear about. Men are much more into porn than women. Women are much more into romance novels.

• 1:04:32Speaker 01

  Now, now it is interesting. We've talked about the fact that men on average are more interested in casual sex than women. And people often assume that the flip side of that is true as well, that women are more interested in long-term relationships than men. But actually, that's not the case. Typically, what we find is that men and women are about as interested as, as each other in long-term committed relationships and falling in love and forming a committed bond with, with a partner.

• 1:04:57Chris Williamson?

  So you haven't re-apportioned the sex drive, relationship drive desire from short term to long term for women. It's just that they don't have this addition that men do of the one night stand.

• 1:05:12Speaker 01

  Exactly right. But bearing that in mind.

• 1:05:13Chris Williamson?

  To the same degree.

• 1:05:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Bearing that in mind, the, the fact that women are so much more interested in romance novels is interesting and sort of slightly unexpected. You would, you might expect that both sexes would be interested in them. So, so why is the case that women are more interested in them? I guess evolutionary speaking, I don't know. They, they do seem to be, despite the fact that actually men do seem to be very invested in long-term relationships. A bunch of papers have come out recently, actually, saying that in a lot of ways, men are kind of more, more romantic than women. They are more likely to suffer after a breakup.

• 1:05:49Chris Williamson?

  Fall in love more quickly, say I love you more soon.

• 1:05:52Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly. So why aren't they more into romance novels? I don't know, maybe they're just too busy with, with the porn, but.

• 1:05:59Chris Williamson?

  True. I, dude, I mean, I sat next to a lady, lovely lady, floral dress, slightly, slightly older lady on a flight a few months ago, and she had an iPad up resting it, and it was a big, big fuck off font.

• 1:06:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:11Chris Williamson?

  And she was reading some romanticy thing and she was getting to the good stuff. And I mean, I couldn't, I was, we have legalized, we have legalized women reading porn.

• 1:06:23Speaker 01

  In public.

• 1:06:23Chris Williamson?

  In public. And it's not, I mean, I, it was, she was having a, she seemed to be having a wonderful flight and I got my, when someone sits next to me and they've got an iPad, I think, oh, that's, that's great because it's going to, or whatever, the Kindle or something, it's going to influence me to be, not be a degenerate. All I wanted to do was put a pair of blinkers on and like focus on some

• 1:06:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:45Chris Williamson?

  brain slop stuff.

• 1:06:46Speaker 01

  I've never, I've never, I've been meaning for ages as a sort of anthropological study.

• 1:06:51Chris Williamson?

  Excuse it however you want, dude. Excuse it however you want.

• 1:06:53Speaker 01

  I haven't got around to doing it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to read a romance novel at some point. I have heard that the general theme is boy meets girl, boy is a bit of an asshole, girl tames boy, and then they live happily ever after. And they do involve sex, right?

• 1:07:07Chris Williamson?

  Well, yeah, I mean, there is some sex in them, at least there was in hers.

• 1:07:10Speaker 01

  And the one that she was reading.

• 1:07:11Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, exactly. I mean, there's some interesting stuff, right? The number of, if you have a single, a sexual fantasy, mental sexual fantasy, men will cycle through, I think it's between four and six different partners on average during

• 1:07:25Speaker 01

  Is that four and six or 46?

• 1:07:27Chris Williamson?

  Four and six, I think, but it depends who you are. Whereas for women, they tend to have fewer.

• 1:07:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:32Chris Williamson?

  Or maybe, maybe just one. Now, I don't know, but I'm going to guess that this would be reflected in romance novels. In fact, I know that this is the case because I've been on the cover of a bunch of them. And during those novels, at least, I would say on average most.

• 1:07:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:48Chris Williamson?

  The women who are the protagonists aren't cycling through multiple male suitors. And if they are, even if you look at movies, movies like The Notebook or Titanic or whatever, it tends to be a pivot between two different life directions.

• 1:08:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:05Chris Williamson?

  It's not a kind of ruthless conveyor belt that is closer to sort of the, the typical male fantasy. But yeah, the, the men being more turned on by visual triggers thing, I think makes, makes an awful lot of sense. I remember in Bad Men, Boss's book, he talks about how there is an area of the brain that exists in men that lights up when they just see something that's remotely sexual, a pair of rocks that look like boobs.

• 1:08:33Speaker 01

  Pulling a coin into a vending machine.

• 1:08:35Chris Williamson?

  Putting a coin into a vending machine? You're fucking kidding me.

• 1:08:37Speaker 01

  Although that was a joke, I'm not sure. There's actually research on that.

• 1:08:40Chris Williamson?

  That obviously wouldn't surprise me.

• 1:08:41Speaker 01

  No, no, likewise.

• 1:08:42Chris Williamson?

  There is something penetrative.

• 1:08:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:44Chris Williamson?

  About gambling and it was on top of the risk taking, on top of ta, ta, ta, ta, ta, ta, ta. That's it. Overperception bias as well. Another, another great example that I learned from Bad Men by David.

• 1:08:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And that's some research by him and, and spearheaded by his former student, Marty Hazelton. Yeah, the sexual overperception bias. Yeah, that refers to the fact that men are more likely to infer sexual interest on the part of a woman falsely, like falsely inferred than women are in the case of men. There's, they're more likely to think, yeah, she's into me, when actually they're just in a little dream world and that's not actually true.

• 1:09:22Chris Williamson?

  Men are more likely to think that women are interested in them than they are. And women are more likely to think that men aren't interested in them when they are.

• 1:09:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:32Chris Williamson?

  And I think that the data shows the level of attraction that men assume a woman has toward them is roughly equal to the amount of attraction that the man has toward the woman.

• 1:09:44Speaker 01

  Right, right, yes, right. Yeah, exactly. So it seems to be maybe some kind of projecting yourself into the world kind of bias.

• 1:09:51Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, so it's a failure of cross-sex mind reading.

• 1:09:54Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:09:54Chris Williamson?

  But it's also specifically in a, in an overperception bias here too.

• 1:09:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:58Chris Williamson?

  And this is smoke detector principle. If you as a man had the opportunity to potentially bag an available and attractive woman, and because you weren't sufficiently vigilant and detecting it, because you underplayed your potential success likelihood as opposed to overplayed it.

• 1:10:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:16Chris Williamson?

  You are going to have an error of missing the opportunity as opposed to the error of an awkward and clumsy rejection.

• 1:10:22Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:10:23Chris Williamson?

  And this, again, fuck, I'm just going to have to keep saying it, does not excuse guys in the workplace with the receptionist in the printing room.

• 1:10:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:32Chris Williamson?

  Having an awkward fumble that she absolutely didn't give off signals for. However.

• 1:10:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:38Chris Williamson?

  This does explain how you get to that situation or why it is that on average men seem to be, unless you're the CEO of, who was it? Procter and Gamble? Who was the one that that Indian dude made the whole fucking conspiracy theory about? It went insanely viral. I bet your fish head Asian wife doesn't have these cannons. Do you remember that?

• 1:11:00Speaker 01

  Goldman.

• 1:11:00Chris Williamson?

  Goldman Sachs. Goldman Sachs. Yasmin's mom works at Goldman. We should get the inside scoop.

• 1:11:08Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, my, my guess, Buck's mom is like real, real high up at Goldman Sachs. And then there was that, did you see this thing kick off a couple of months ago?

• 1:11:15Speaker 01

  I don't think I did actually.

• 1:11:16Chris Williamson?

  About a month ago or so. It just, it was a guy me tooing a very, very high up.

• 1:11:21Speaker 01

  Right, okay.

• 1:11:22Chris Williamson?

  Exec.

• 1:11:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, bit of a role reversal.

• 1:11:25Chris Williamson?

  At Goldman. But as soon as the proposed accusations came out, there was no, it was so rare. It was like the most, it would have been incredibly extreme.

• 1:11:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:36Chris Williamson?

  For a guy to do.

• 1:11:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:11:38Chris Williamson?

  And the fact that everybody intuited, like, really?

• 1:11:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:43Chris Williamson?

  Sex differences.

• 1:11:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:44Chris Williamson?

  Sex differences. All right, how do gay men and lesbians reveal what each sex wants?

• 1:11:49Speaker 01

  They do so in a very interesting way, which is that gay men have more casual sex than straight men and lesbians have less casual sex than straight women. And the reason is that gay men and lesbians don't have to compromise with the typical sexual inclinations of the other sex. And therefore their behaviour is like a clearer window on to the sexual motivations of men and women in general.

• 1:12:15Chris Williamson?

  Unsullied by the other sex.

• 1:12:17Speaker 01

  Exactly, yeah. So men are compromising by having less because basically women are thwarting their plans.

• 1:12:22Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:12:23Speaker 01

  Whereas.

• 1:12:23Chris Williamson?

  There's no gatekeeper.

• 1:12:24Speaker 01

  Exactly. And yeah, whereas straight women are compromising with men and maybe having more than more casual sex than they would choose, at least as revealed by lesbian behaviour.

• 1:12:35Chris Williamson?

  There's an interesting study that Rob brought up, which was inside of marriages, typically men say that they would like to have twice as much sex as they are having, and women say that they are happy with the amount of sex that they are having.

• 1:12:49Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:12:49Chris Williamson?

  Which suggests that there is a compromise going on.

• 1:12:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:52Chris Williamson?

  But that the compromise is.

• 1:12:54Speaker 01

  The guy going, okay, fine. She's setting the level more than he is.

• 1:12:58Chris Williamson?

  With that regard, I do think that there's kind of a, and this is, I mean, look, are we really gonna say boo hoo, poor men not getting exactly what they want? But I do think that it's a kind of compromise that might be invisible to women because sexual entitlement comes wrapped in some really ugly paper. But there is an argument that you can make there to say something like, look, men are

• 1:13:31Chris Williamson?

  doing a type of containment, a type of desire containment there that isn't a burden that is that they are paying, that isn't being paid in the same way inside of a marriage by the women. And huh, that's, well done, well done for doing that, for compromising what it is that you want.

• 1:13:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, indeed. And I guess, and I guess it's more, I guess that men are doing that more often. Like some women are doing the same thing, no doubt, but it's just fewer women than than men in that situation.

• 1:14:00Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. There's also more dead bedroom in lesbian relationships.

• 1:14:06Speaker 01

  I've heard that, yeah. What is it, there's some phrase like that, isn't there, the lesbian dead bed or something? Yeah, yeah.

• 1:14:13Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so mate preferences.

• 1:14:15Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:14:15Chris Williamson?

  When it comes to mate preferences, is it surprising how similar men and women are when it comes to what they look for in a partner?

• 1:14:25Speaker 01

  Well, I guess it fits with the generalisation that in a lot of ways we are quite similar, that we, that sex differences in our species are not as huge as in some others. And I guess also just on a everyday level, when you hear about some of the sex differences that we have in common, they're all things that I think it's obvious why we like them. People tend to be, men and women tend to want somebody who's pretty intelligent and who's kind and who loves them and who is attracted to them and who is pretty good looking and who's not like mentally unstable. Both sexes want that, not just men, not just women.

• 1:15:06Speaker 01

  There are some areas though where you do find sex differences and the strength of different preferences. So both sexes want someone who's pretty good looking, for instance. But on average, in long-term relationships, that's a bigger deal for men than for women. Men put more weight on looks in a mate than in a long-term mate than women do, for the reasons that I mentioned, that I mentioned earlier. Women, on the other hand, tend to put more weight on resources and status in a long-term mate than men do. Now, in neither of those cases is that the, it's not like looks are the most important thing to most men. For most men, it's important, but other things are equally important or even more important. Traits like kindness.

• 1:15:50Speaker 01

  And likewise with women, resources and status in a mate, they're important, but other things, again like kindness, tend to top the list of the things that are most important for women.

• 1:16:01Chris Williamson?

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• 1:16:45Chris Williamson?

  first purchase by going to the link in the description below or heading to drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom. That's drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom. What's the evolutionary logic of non-physical mate preferences, like wealth and status?

• 1:17:01Speaker 01

  It all comes down, I think, to the fact, well, there are two main explanations for it. So one is that it's part of our evolution of a pair bonding by parental species. So a guy who is able to access resources, you know, bring in food and also has good standing within the group, that's gonna be someone who is better able to invest in the young. It's a co-rare, the children. And that's the explanation I think's most popular and most likely. There is also an explanation though, that it's primarily a human equivalent of the peacock's tail. So that any male that is capable of bringing in resources and climbing the status hierarchy, that's a male who's got good genes and he's gonna pass on whatever traits enabled him

• 1:17:45Speaker 01

  to do that to his male offspring, they're gonna be able to do the same, they're gonna attract more mates. So those are the two main explanations. I think it's quite possible that both of them shed light on it, that it's both a fitness indicator, but also is actually useful in the context of bi parental care.

• 1:18:01Chris Williamson?

  You mentioned this is to do with long-term relationships.

• 1:18:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:18:06Chris Williamson?

  How does this change when it comes to short-term relationships? Do women place more or closer to equal weight on physical attractiveness in men?

• 1:18:15Speaker 01

  They do, they do, yeah. So that sex difference in good looks, we sometimes hear it discussed as if that's a difference between men and women right across the board in every context. But actually it does just apply to long-term relationships. And when it comes to low commitment relationships, then that difference basically evaporates and women are at least as interested in physical attractiveness in a mate as men are. If not, you know, some research suggesting maybe even more interested in physical attractiveness.

• 1:18:43Chris Williamson?

  Why would that be the case using evolutionary logic?

• 1:18:45Speaker 01

  Because, well, the best explanation is that in a short-term context, that's likely to be, basically, there's gonna be no further investment, probably. Likely no further investment. The only investment is the genes that the male is going to be passing on and therefore traits that are indicative of good genes are much more important. They take centre stage in terms of what women are looking for. And yeah, with the basic evolutionary logic that when you're reproducing, you are finding somebody to mix your genes with. If you want your genes to go on in the gene pool, you've got to mix them with a good set of genes from another individual.

• 1:19:29Chris Williamson?

  And what you want, if it's, you have a short window to do this assessment and you want the most obvious representation of those good genes as you can?

• 1:19:37Speaker 01

  Exactly. And physical looks are bad.

• 1:19:39Chris Williamson?

  I'm sorry, your ability to do non-kin altruism and reciprocal care and kindness and your ambition over time, it's like, yeah, great, but I don't have time to assess that in the same way.

• 1:19:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:19:53Chris Williamson?

  As I do your status and your resources, I suppose it's another one of the reasons. And both men and women, if this sex difference didn't exist, if this preference didn't exist, why would it be the case that both men and women seem to play into a caricature of that in an attempt to get sexual access? Why is the caricature of dudes in Miami nightclubs wearing a Rolex and having a fast car outside?

• 1:20:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:20:16Chris Williamson?

  Well, that's a way to turn wealth, ambition and status, or buying a VIP booth, status, into an immediately transactable and obvious advertisement in case there is some of this short-term mating that's going. And why is it that women do more beautification when they go on a night out, et cetera, et cetera? Like because you're playing into, even if you don't intend on doing it, it's always nice to sort of be window shopped against, I suppose.

• 1:20:46Speaker 01

  Totally. And it's interesting, right? Because these are human equivalents of the peacock's tail. And whereas in peacocks and every other species, basically their peacock's tails are non-negotiable, that's just how they do it. Whereas we, because we're a cultural animal, we always have our peacock's tails, we always have our way of showing off status and whatever else, resources. But it varies from culture and culture and time to time.

• 1:21:09Chris Williamson?

  Why isn't it that women aren't turning up in a fast car with an expensive watch outside?

• 1:21:13Speaker 01

  That's a very interesting question. And I guess that, I guess because that's more indicative of resources and resources are more important to women than men. I don't know, there was this, the study where this guy, it wasn't a study actually, this guy in his class, his evolutionary psychology class, he was showing a photo of this amazing Rolex and people saying how great it was and what a great way of attracting a mate that it would be. And then he revealed the trick, was that actually it was a woman's Rolex rather than a man's. And his point was that actually this goes both, in both directions more than we kind of think it does. Yeah.

• 1:21:55Chris Williamson?

  Have you seen, I think it's Andrew Thomas that did this study, have you seen the? Preferences that women state when it comes to sperm donors.

• 1:22:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:22:08Chris Williamson?

  So this is fucking fascinating. Cause what's interesting is when you run a, a, a kind of a split test or you're able to separate out certain motivations from a, a behavior that people are typical with. So in order for you to do the, I want to have kids with this person. Typically you need to go through courtship phase and get to know them. And even if it's a one night stand, be seduced by them.

• 1:22:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:22:32Chris Williamson?

  But that means that you're optimizing for two different things. You're not just optimizing for the genes that your kid gets. You're also optimizing for the expression of traits that make you want to get into bed with somebody. But if you get rid of the seduction side of this, all you're optimizing for is what do I want my kids to have from a trait perspective?

• 1:22:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:22:53Chris Williamson?

  And that difference of when you get rid of the need to actually be attracted to somebody. And you can just optimize for what do I want my kids to be like?

• 1:23:01Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:23:02Chris Williamson?

  Kind of fascinating.

• 1:23:03Speaker 01

  It's really fascinating, right? And, and just the same mate preferences emerge in that context as emerge in an actual, uh, interaction, social interactions.

• 1:23:12Chris Williamson?

  Is that Clark Hatfield study as well, right? The on the street interview?

• 1:23:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, that's the one where, um, uh, basically they got a bunch of good looking guys, good looking gals to go around a campus on a nice day, uh, walk up to random people on the campus and just say, hello, how you doing? Um, I've noticed you around the place lately and I find you very attractive. And I was just wondering whether you wanted to, dot, dot, dot. And then they would finish that sentence with one of three options. Option number one was, I was wondering if you wanted to go out with me tonight? Option number two was, I was wondering if you wanted to come up to my room? And option number three was, I'm wondering, wondering if you wanted to go to bed with me? And they got men to ask women, women to ask men. And the, for the, um, for the first question, the go out with me question there.

• 1:23:59Speaker 01

  And the first study that there was basically no sex difference. So it was about 50%, 50, 50 likelihood of saying yes in both cases. Uh, other replication studies have found that it's not a huge difference, but that actually men are more likely to say yes than women are. But then with the other two questions, the gaps get bigger and bigger. With question number two, which is, would you want to come up to my room? What was it? It was basically 67, in the first study, about 67% of men said yes. So actually higher than the date rate.

• 1:24:31Chris Williamson?

  More likely to go up to your room than I am to go on a date with you.

• 1:24:33Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:24:34Chris Williamson?

  Hilarious.

• 1:24:35Speaker 01

  With women, on the other hand, it, uh, sank down to, I believe it was 6% said yes to that. Uh, and then the gap was even bigger for the last question, unsurprisingly. So would you go to bed with me? 75% of men said yes, uh, to that offer. So at even higher rate of men, whereas, uh, exactly 0% of women said yes to the, the kind offer. And not only that, but actually the, the manner of the refusal differed between men and women. So of the, um, 25% of men who said, thanks, but no thanks. Well, they kind of said that they were polite about it. And, uh, some of them said, I'm really sorry, I'm, I'm meeting my fiance or whatever. A bunch of them even asked for a rain check, apparently.

• 1:25:17Speaker 01

  They said, I can't, I'm not very busy, I'm meeting my fiance or whatever, but maybe we could postpone the sex till later. Whereas, uh, none of the women, uh, who were refusing were polite about it at all. They were more, they were reacting more like, are you crazy? Um, how, how dare you ask me that? None of them, um, apologized and asked for a rain check.

• 1:25:36Chris Williamson?

  Why do you think that the manner of refusal was so different?

• 1:25:42Speaker 01

  I think that it reveals, uh, well, two, two reasons. So one is there's this average difference in interest in casual sex. And because men are more interested in it, they are more likely to be flattered by the request. Uh, because men are much more likely to approach women than vice versa, traditionally. Uh, women are much more likely to get sick of it and, and have to, you know, uh, push guys away. Whereas guys are much, it's a rarer event for them. So they are more likely to be flattered and, uh, and hugely grateful on the rare occasions when it happens. Uh, the other thing though, and the reason I think the difference is quite so big is because it's, it's not just a reflection of sex differences and interest in casual sex.

• 1:26:25Speaker 01

  I think also in that situation, like, like if a woman were to go off with a guy that she doesn't know, she's at a greater physical risk than if a guy goes off with a woman that he doesn't know. So the fact that the, the difference was massive is partly due to that as well.

• 1:26:42Chris Williamson?

  Feels like a danger.

• 1:26:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:26:44Chris Williamson?

  Some of that emotional activation of, hang on, I'm going to go with this person who I don't know, who is physically stronger than me.

• 1:26:52Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:26:53Chris Williamson?

  Explosion.

• 1:26:54Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:26:54Chris Williamson?

  As opposed to this just way less of a, it feels less of a physical threat to me.

• 1:26:58Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:26:59Chris Williamson?

  Those both make, those both make complete sense. There's a, an interesting wrinkle in this. Now I'm, I'm going to guess that when they did this, the Clark Hatfield study, they must've done some sort of rated assessment of the attractiveness of the man or the men versus the women to ensure that they were similarly high in terms of physical attractiveness.

• 1:27:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:27:20Chris Williamson?

  Right?

• 1:27:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:27:21Chris Williamson?

  So something that I learned that I think is absolutely fucking hilarious is one of the reasons why women, and I presume men would be too, if women approached men at the same rate. One of the reasons why women are sometimes quite rude when guys come up to them is if they feel like there's too big of a disparity in mate value between them and the person doing it. Because they go, hang on, you think that you've got a chance with me?

• 1:27:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:27:49Chris Williamson?

  Oh my God, it's basically an insult.

• 1:27:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:27:51Chris Williamson?

  It's essentially an insult. If you as a woman think that you're an eight, and nobody thinks like this, it's not the whatever podcast. You as a woman think that you're an eight.

• 1:28:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:28:02Chris Williamson?

  And a guy that you think is a three comes up to you, that is.

• 1:28:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:28:07Chris Williamson?

  It, it tests your own self-perception and you go, fuck, maybe this is how the world sees me.

• 1:28:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. Do you not think I'm an eight?

• 1:28:15Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:15Speaker 01

  As well?

• 1:28:15Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Yeah. And I think that, that it feels like an insult and the same thing like, fucking no, get away. Because rightly so, you're kind of pissed that this thing happened.

• 1:28:25Speaker 01

  I wonder if guys would feel the same in reverse. See, my, my hunch is that they would be less likely to take it as a huge insult if the guy felt he was an eight and approached by a three.

• 1:28:36Chris Williamson?

  Well, preference for casual sex.

• 1:28:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:28:38Chris Williamson?

  Uh, rarer approach in any case.

• 1:28:42Speaker 01

  Indeed.

• 1:28:42Chris Williamson?

  Um, and because women are less likely to approach.

• 1:28:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:28:47Chris Williamson?

  I think that most guys would actually see it as closer to, you know what? I'm so good looking that I got that girl to overcome her non-approach predisposition.

• 1:28:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:29:00Chris Williamson?

  That's the power of my attractiveness. I think that's, I think that's how a lot of guys would take it. And I think that's why it is, it is flattering. It's like, um, somebody running for a bus fast that they really, really want.

• 1:29:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:29:12Chris Williamson?

  You're like, well, you must really want this bus because look at how fast they're going.

• 1:29:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:29:15Chris Williamson?

  As opposed to how slow they would usually.

• 1:29:16Speaker 01

  And guys tend to be more overconfident than women.

• 1:29:19Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 1:29:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:29:21Chris Williamson?

  What about sex differences in aggression?

• 1:29:23Speaker 01

  Sex differences in aggression are very, very consistent, um, especially for direct aggression. So face-to-face aggression and guys predominate. And a really interesting fact about the aggression sex difference is that it's, it's for like verbal aggression. It's there and it's significant. It's fairly modest though. So the effect size might be about like a point five effect size. So half a standard deviation between the mean for men and women. And maybe, you know, pluck two people at random, uh, guy and a gal, two thirds of the time, the guy's going to be higher in verbal aggression. But as you go further out to more and more intense forms of aggression, the size of the sex difference gets bigger and bigger with every step.

• 1:30:02Speaker 01

  So when you go to low levels of physical aggression, slapping, pushing, that kind of thing, that you have a larger sex difference, men doing it more. Then you get into serious physical aggression, violent crime, that's much more men than women.

• 1:30:16Chris Williamson?

  Independent of who the victim is.

• 1:30:18Speaker 01

  Independent of who the victim is, is, yeah. And then when you get to the extreme of one-on-one aggression, which is homicide, uh, men vastly predominate. So across different cultures, every single nation, uh, every data set I've, I've ever seen, 90 plus percent of homicides are perpetrated by men. Men are also, they're the majority of the victims as well and, and almost all data sets that I've seen. But, but yeah, the 90% plus perpetrators, very, very strong effect.

• 1:30:48Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Uh, men commit more than 90% of homicides in every society on earth where data is available. And this gap is remarkably invariant across cultures, not just the absolute rates. In humans, males commit 95% of homicides and a 70 to 80% of homicide victims. In chimpanzees, male commit 92% of chimpicides and are 73% of victims, virtually identical numbers to humans.

• 1:31:10Speaker 01

  It's wild, right? Yeah. Now they are more aggressive than us. I think some, sometimes people hear that and they think that the claim is that we're just as aggressive as chimps. But they are more, but the size of the sex difference and lethal aggression is the same. And the size of the, the targets, the sex difference and the targets of aggression is about the same as well.

• 1:31:27Chris Williamson?

  Why?

• 1:31:28Speaker 01

  Uh, that is a direct offshoot of the fact that, um, it's the selection for getting to be one of the few males that has many offspring rather than the many that have few or none. And one of the ways that males do that is they compete with each other, uh, for status and resources,

• 1:31:51Speaker 01

  uh, which increase their mating opportunities. And so you get selection and many, many species, not just humans, selection for greater aggression in the males and particularly for greater male male aggression, which is why you have this, this skew toward not only the other males more aggressive, but the targets of their aggression tend to be same-sex individuals as well. For women and for female animals in general, they are capable of aggression in many species. But there's just less of a selection pressure. It's less, it's less useful for them evolutionarily to engage in same-sex combat for status and resources. Because of the fact that the, the ceiling offspring number that they have is lower.

• 1:32:29Speaker 01

  So they can't vastly increase the number of offspring they have by fighting each other and getting lots of status, resources and ultimately mates. You know, that, that won't boost the number of offspring they have because the ceiling is lower. So it's, it's costly for them. The costs aren't worth the risks.

• 1:32:44Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Plus more fragile.

• 1:32:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:32:48Chris Williamson?

  More easy, more easily killed, like just generally.

• 1:32:51Speaker 01

  Yeah. Um, but that's, that's possibly just an offshoot of the fact that there's been less selection on them for aggression.

• 1:32:56Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 1:32:56Speaker 01

  So there's been more, more of that on males.

• 1:32:58Chris Williamson?

  Build up the defenses in order to be able to.

• 1:33:00Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:33:00Chris Williamson?

  That's why we have a brow ridge. That's why we've got bigger hands.

• 1:33:03Speaker 01

  Exactly. Yeah.

• 1:33:05Chris Williamson?

  To what's interesting, again, talking to Andrew Thomas about this, he said,

• 1:33:10Chris Williamson?

  Why is it the case if violence is rightly so such a huge fear that most women have, that lots of women are attracted to powerful men who are able to be violent? And Andrew's theory is that it's a perspective that a guy who is violent is able to turn it on and turn it off in service of the family unit. As opposed to violence being a trait that just is more global across the board. I think, is Andrew in Krav Maga, he's into martial artsy type stuff, I swear.

• 1:33:49Speaker 01

  I think so, yeah.

• 1:33:49Chris Williamson?

  And he was explaining how many, at Krav Maga, this Israeli martial art, very lethal supposedly martial art. A lot of the guys that he trained with, unbelievably lethal physically.

• 1:34:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:34:06Chris Williamson?

  And a lot of the training was them learning to turn it off, not turn it on.

• 1:34:10Speaker 01

  Interesting.

• 1:34:11Chris Williamson?

  And that, the number of men who are physically imposing and might seem like somebody that would be really great to be able to protect the family unit.

• 1:34:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:34:23Chris Williamson?

  That have done the work to be able to learn to turn that off.

• 1:34:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:34:27Chris Williamson?

  To the trigger that makes this person likely to be a flash in the pan, you don't want to fuck with me, bro, guy.

• 1:34:36Chris Williamson?

  At least non-zeroly are also going to have some triggers that will be more sensitive when it comes to interpersonal communication and domestic disputes.

• 1:34:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:34:47Chris Williamson?

  And things around the house.

• 1:34:48Speaker 01

  Indeed, as interesting as having that kind of temperament, violent temperament and the capacity for physical aggression is a it's really a mixed blessing for women, you know, it's great if the guy's going to protect them, protect the family. But it's not so great because he can potentially turn that against them as well.

• 1:35:06Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:07Speaker 01

  So, you know, you get the evaluation of those traits. It can increase attractiveness, like aggression itself, I don't think increases attractiveness, protectiveness does.

• 1:35:18Speaker 01

  Muscularity and the like can increase attraction somewhat, but because it's a mixed blessing, I think women are also interested in the guy's character.

• 1:35:24Chris Williamson?

  Muscularity seems pretty reliable at improving attractiveness.

• 1:35:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:35:27Chris Williamson?

  And it's probably the most easily modifiable thing that guys can do.

• 1:35:31Speaker 01

  Right, yeah, yeah.

• 1:35:32Chris Williamson?

  I think, in fact, I think William said that this is exactly the case because he's, he's looking at his incel stuff.

• 1:35:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:35:37Chris Williamson?

  Did you see, now I, Bro Science this, I put the, I put the captain of Bro Science hat on when Macken came through last time.

• 1:35:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:35:46Chris Williamson?

  And I said, I'm pretty sure that I've seen a study that says a woman would be,

• 1:35:53Chris Williamson?

  would lose more attraction if her partner didn't protect her during a physical altercation than if he cheated on her.

• 1:36:02Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:36:02Chris Williamson?

  And then the guys went and replicated it and.

• 1:36:06Speaker 01

  And you were right.

• 1:36:07Chris Williamson?

  I was right, I was right. I mean, it wasn't my original insight because I found it in a study that I couldn't discover again. But the same insight being true, the protectiveness, the ability to protect. In fact, do you know what it is? It was the willingness to protect.

• 1:36:20Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:36:20Chris Williamson?

  Wasn't even the ability to protect.

• 1:36:21Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:36:22Chris Williamson?

  But I suppose willingness to protect is the most important part of protectiveness. Cause you can be the biggest guy in the world, but if you're not prepared to step in between your misses and this potential assailant.

• 1:36:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:36:32Chris Williamson?

  Doesn't mean anything.

• 1:36:32Speaker 01

  You might as well not be.

• 1:36:33Chris Williamson?

  Exactly.

• 1:36:34Speaker 01

  You know, yeah.

• 1:36:34Chris Williamson?

  I wonder, do you know what it is? I wonder if this would be, this is another new skew that the guys should do.

• 1:36:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:36:40Chris Williamson?

  Is it more or less attractive for a guy who could protect you to not than a guy who couldn't protect you to not?

• 1:36:49Speaker 01

  That's an interesting one.

• 1:36:51Chris Williamson?

  You know what I mean?

• 1:36:51Speaker 01

  I do know.

• 1:36:52Chris Williamson?

  Separating out here.

• 1:36:53Speaker 01

  But in terms of the character trait, it would be less attractive.

• 1:36:57Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:36:57Speaker 01

  For the guy who could protect you but doesn't, right? That shows a worse character.

• 1:37:01Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:37:03Speaker 01

  But I guess it does also matter.

• 1:37:06Chris Williamson?

  I just need to train him to be able to in future.

• 1:37:09Speaker 01

  There is that, yeah.

• 1:37:10Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. I need to teach him to be able to, like, be strong enough to be protective. Or I need to be able to change his character in order for him to use his strength of potential protectiveness.

• 1:37:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, but if he's definitely not going to do that, that's going to be very off putting. And you might just want the person who is not quite so good at protecting but is willing to do it.

• 1:37:31Speaker 01

  If they, if they can do it.

• 1:37:32Chris Williamson?

  Fascinating.

• 1:37:33Speaker 01

  There's trade offs though, right?

• 1:37:34Chris Williamson?

  Why is it, why is it that women care more about a man's height than women do? Does it play into this?

• 1:37:39Speaker 01

  I think it probably is, I think it must be, I think it's the same, within a cluster of traits that determine protectiveness and the like. Muscularity, height, they're all part of the same package. And it's interesting, right, that does seem to be really, really high on the list for women, seems very important.

• 1:37:53Chris Williamson?

  You know why this makes the most sense? And it's the probably.

• 1:38:01Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I would, I would go as far as to say it's the most commonly cited, well, you bitches, internet kind of rebuttal that guys have around, I think Tinder released as an April Fool's joke about 10 years ago, a height filter that people could use, like, wouldn't it be funny if we gave you a height filter?

• 1:38:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:38:21Chris Williamson?

  That's now an actual feature.

• 1:38:22Speaker 01

  It's an actual feature, right?

• 1:38:23Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. And many women don't need to date or don't want to date men that are under six feet. Especially not men when you get sort of like five, seven, five, six, five, five, very few would. And I had this insight, the tall girl problem. And it was born out of a friend whose sister is five foot two, sorry, her sister's five foot 11. So if she wants to wear heels on her wedding day, she's like a professional athlete.

• 1:38:50Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:38:51Chris Williamson?

  And they were going around the supermarket and she saw this guy who was like six, five, like tall dude, like you, tall guy. And she sort of nudges her sister and says, I might go up, I might go up and talk to him. And they round the corner and they say, see him with this five foot two Latina bombshell. And she kicks off at her sister quietly and says, like, this fucking bitch. Like she could date five foot, five, five foot six, five foot seven. Why'd you have to take a guy that's a foot and a half taller than her? But the point here is, if we're talking about protectiveness as the driver.

• 1:39:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:39:30Chris Williamson?

  The fact that your chick is a five, two Latina, not a five, 11 American, does not make your height any more or less useful when it comes to protectiveness. I don't need to protect you less just because you're smaller.

• 1:39:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, indeed.

• 1:39:46Chris Williamson?

  You know?

• 1:39:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:39:47Chris Williamson?

  And this is why I think you don't see much of a height compensation effect.

• 1:39:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:39:54Chris Williamson?

  Other than, I guess if you're five foot two, you can't really tell the, like, above probably five, 10, it's all just up there.

• 1:40:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:40:02Chris Williamson?

  It's just like, it's all there, you know?

• 1:40:04Speaker 01

  In the clouds, exactly. Yeah, my cousins, my cousins are quite tall because I'm from a tall family. And I know they were complaining often, I remember them complaining, female cousins, about guys, taller guys dating much shorter women. But guess how, guess how tall my wife is? She's five foot four, so.

• 1:40:22Chris Williamson?

  These bloody bitches, how dare they take the tall man? All right, sex differences and stalking, what about that?

• 1:40:29Speaker 01

  Women do a lot more of it, joke, men do a lot more of it.

• 1:40:35Speaker 01

  Men do a lot more of it, it's, I think it's just an example of the fact that men are more, you know, proactive, seeking out mates, seeking out multiple mates. And stalking is the subcategory of that when it gets into extremely inappropriate examples of that. And also, I guess, yeah, it's also, it's not just mate seeking, it's also when people get fixated on somebody.

• 1:41:00Speaker 01

  And both sexes can do that, they can get fixated on somebody.

• 1:41:02Chris Williamson?

  Sort of limerence type thing.

• 1:41:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly, limerence, yeah. So sort of falling in love, except that we call it limerence because it's in an inappropriate circumstance, i.e. circumstance where the other person does not reciprocate. Both sexes can do it, but men are more prone to aggression and risk taking and just bad behavior. And so they're more likely to do more of those kind of behaviors in the context of, of limerence and being fixated on somebody.

• 1:41:27Chris Williamson?

  Surveillance, surveilling of a partner checking in, because I could see two, two reasons why either side might be doing it more. Male parental uncertainty, which we haven't talked about yet.

• 1:41:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:41:40Chris Williamson?

  But is super important.

• 1:41:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:41:42Chris Williamson?

  That no woman has ever given birth to a child and wondered whether it was hers.

• 1:41:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:41:45Chris Williamson?

  But many men have looked at, maybe even all men to some degree. In fact, it would be evolutionary useful for you the first time that you look at your kid to be, I'm so beautiful and are those my eyes?

• 1:41:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:41:57Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I think they're my eyes. But given the fact that you have high male parental uncertainty.

• 1:42:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:42:03Chris Williamson?

  Because you've got concealed ovulation and you don't have the same kind of sort of harem, hermetically sealed sphere when it comes to men and women, human and women.

• 1:42:15Chris Williamson?

  Stalking, I could see, or surveillance surveillance behavior make could be a part of make guarding.

• 1:42:22Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 1:42:23Chris Williamson?

  To try and counteract that, but I could also see how it would be useful for women in order to ensure that their partner doesn't leave them high and dry, because there's more of a dependency, especially if we are going to have a kid or do have a kid.

• 1:42:38Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:42:39Chris Williamson?

  The the man doesn't need the woman as much for survival, but the woman doesn't need to check on the man as much to ensure female parental uncertainty.

• 1:42:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's exactly right. And both sexes do get jealous. Paternity uncertainty or parental uncertainty is uniquely an issue for guys. But you're absolutely right that there is the danger of desertion for women. And so for different reasons, both sexes have evolved to be to be jealous and prone to jealousy. And one way that that manifests, so jealousy drives make guarding behavior. And one subset of make guarding behavior is surveilling and just keeping keeping an eye on what the person is up to. And are they getting on too well with that good looking next door neighbor or the good looking guy or woman at work?

• 1:43:27Speaker 01

  And then if you take that to an extreme, that's where it becomes surveilling behavior.

• 1:43:31Chris Williamson?

  Isn't it interesting that you have a an extreme insight of men about other men and an extreme insight of women about other women?

• 1:43:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:43:41Chris Williamson?

  But the failure of cross sex mind reading still occurs even when you add other individuals in.

• 1:43:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:43:46Chris Williamson?

  So when we're talking about surveillance, jealousy, mate guarding, et cetera, the, I mean, William put these stats up recently about how what the percentage is of men who would sleep with a female friend.

• 1:44:00Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 1:44:01Chris Williamson?

  It's huge.

• 1:44:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:44:02Chris Williamson?

  It's like 50% of relationships used to be friendships.

• 1:44:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:44:08Chris Williamson?

  So that's like 50%.

• 1:44:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:44:11Chris Williamson?

  That's a huge amount. And I think when you put all of this together, you end up with a world where inside of a relationship, men are trying to explain to women what they see in other men that are around them. And women are trying to explain to men what they see in the other women that are around them. And just because it's not them talking about themselves, doesn't mean that they can explain it. A woman is no better at understanding another man than her own husband. And a man is no better at understanding another woman than his own wife in these sort of more subtle, hard to detect motivations and behaviors.

• 1:44:50Speaker 01

  That those data that that William was talking about. So, so, yeah, so like a lot of guys would be interested in sleeping with friends that they have, right? But it's not true in the other direction, like fewer, some women, but fewer of them are particularly interested in sleeping with male friends that they have.

• 1:45:09Speaker 01

  But because of the sexual over perception bias, the male friends in question would probably assume otherwise.

• 1:45:15Chris Williamson?

  What's the sex difference around sexual violence?

• 1:45:18Speaker 01

  Sexual violence, men are much more likely to do it. And that is just partly just an offshoot of the fact that men are more aggressive, more aggressive.

• 1:45:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. And the numbers are pretty big. So sexual violence is much more often perpetrated by men than by women. It's not, it doesn't only go in the one direction, though, but it is just much more common for men to do it.

• 1:45:40Chris Williamson?

  You got any idea what the numbers are?

• 1:45:42Speaker 01

  I probably do. Let me have a think. Okay, so I do have a few numbers coming to mind, but I'm not actually sure if they're the right numbers. So I'm going to, I'm going to again do the annoying academic thing.

• 1:45:52Chris Williamson?

  Directionally correct, specifically vague.

• 1:45:54Speaker 01

  Indeed. So directionally correct. And, and I'll, you know, I've got to say that it is a big difference.

• 1:45:59Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:46:02Speaker 01

  I think the effect size might be something like two. So like two standard deviations between the mean for men and women for the extreme forms of of sexual violence and sexual assault and harassment and the like.

• 1:46:16Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Another situation where it's kind of hard to talk about evolutionary explanations for bad behavior, like the worst behavior, right? Between this and homicide without sounding like you're excusing it as natural, but.

• 1:46:27Speaker 01

  Exactly. But again, natural doesn't mean good.

• 1:46:28Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:29Speaker 01

  Often, you know, you can explain bad stuff without saying that actually the bad stuff is not good stuff. It's still bad, even if it has an evolutionary explanation.

• 1:46:37Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Yeah. That's an analysis is not justification.

• 1:46:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 1:46:42Chris Williamson?

  You know, that's a fucking Hassan Albi quote. It's like a Hassan Piker quote.

• 1:46:46Speaker 01

  Is that right?

• 1:46:47Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, he got cancelled. He got cancelled for talking about some stuff to do with the right wing.

• 1:46:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:46:50Chris Williamson?

  That is an absolute slammer of a line, analysis is not justification.

• 1:46:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:46:54Chris Williamson?

  But we can see sexual violence, if men are

• 1:47:01Chris Williamson?

  able to

• 1:47:04Chris Williamson?

  procreate without having to do any investment, the ultimate form of that is to not even have to ask for consent as well.

• 1:47:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, indeed. And, you know, it has been argued that the tendency in some men to do that, to take that path, does have evolutionary roots.

• 1:47:23Speaker 01

  And I guess really, you just have to have two things. You have to have men's greater interest in sexual variety and casual sex, coupled with their willingness to use violence in certain, you know, certain situations. So because men are more interested in casual sex, it's going to be not uncommon for a man to want to have sex with a woman who doesn't want to do so.

• 1:47:45Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:47:46Speaker 01

  And because men are willing to use violence, sometimes to get what they want.

• 1:47:51Speaker 01

  Every now and then you are going to have that situation where those those factors add up and the man is going to try to force the woman to have sex. That's not as found in our species. Males in many species try to coerce women, females rather, into sex. It happens in our species. It's also been argued, though, that because preserving female choice is so important across the animal kingdom, including in our own species, so important to women, that that helps explain why sexual coercion and rape is so upsetting to women. You know, it's not, we haven't just been socialized for it to be upsetting to women. It's very, very deep in females' nature to be upset by it because it compromises female choice.

• 1:48:34Chris Williamson?

  Oh, that's interesting.

• 1:48:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:48:36Chris Williamson?

  That's interesting because not only, not only is it fucking heinous, but you know

• 1:48:44Chris Williamson?

  that because somebody, because this male committed that behavior, they've had to disregard the entire female wide value that is supposed to be universally

• 1:49:01Chris Williamson?

  protected.

• 1:49:02Speaker 01

  Well, right. Well, I mean, she's evolved this tendency to be choosier about her mates than men have. And she's got these mate choice criteria and that that's because she can have fewer offspring and therefore each offspring counts for more. So she's got to be wiser in every making decision that she makes. And this other male has come along and has just taken that away from her, taken that choice away from her.

• 1:49:28Speaker 01

  Has gone against the, she's evolved to be more, to be choosier and.

• 1:49:31Chris Williamson?

  I think this, I think that the inability of men to fully understand what fear of sexual violence must feel like.

• 1:49:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:49:44Chris Williamson?

  Is one of the reasons why any guy who's seemingly sort of flippant or callous about any type of male female aggression, even non sexual violence.

• 1:49:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:49:57Chris Williamson?

  Is treated with a very strong antibody response from from women.

• 1:50:04Speaker 01

  Indeed. Yeah. And guys do, you know, guys, the idea of going to prison and being raped in prison obviously is terrifying to a lot of guys. So they do get it to some degree. But and I guess particularly when it comes to the sort of lower level stuff, like, like I think in Buss's Bad Men book, he talks about research suggesting that men often will underestimate just how upsetting it is to women to be to be sexually harassed and to have stuff done to them against their will. And that's another very good example of a, and a very important example of a failure of cross sex mind reading, where the guy just doesn't really appreciate just quite how upsetting it is for that to happen. Because if it were to happen in reverse, if it were to happen to him, he might not like it, but he on average is not going to be quite so upset by it.

• 1:50:46Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. It's interesting that people who denied sex differences seem to sort of not want to argue for parity, that if women weren't so held back, they'd want to commit just as much violent crime as men do.

• 1:50:58Speaker 01

  Indeed. Yeah, indeed.

• 1:50:59Chris Williamson?

  There's a directionality.

• 1:51:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:51:01Chris Williamson?

  To the way that this analysis happens.

• 1:51:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, there is.

• 1:51:06Chris Williamson?

  Why is it not that we've got 50 50 in terms of homicides, that we should do?

• 1:51:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:51:11Chris Williamson?

  Women should be free to commit as just as many killings as they want to.

• 1:51:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. And that's been kept down, the fact that they're not doing it.

• 1:51:16Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, the patriarchy, the damn patriarchy.

• 1:51:19Speaker 01

  And I guess the thing is that they and we all would want it all to come down. And it's a good example of how equality is not necessarily a good thing in itself. So men are more aggressive than women. The solution to that is, so we want to kind of.

• 1:51:35Speaker 01

  Reduce male violence. And in the process of doing that, we're going to reduce the size of the sex difference. And and that's a that's a very good thing to do. But the reason it's a good thing to do is not because there's anything inherently wrong with the sex difference. It's because violence is bad. It's not because the sex difference is bad, it's because the violence is bad. And we know that because another way to get rid of that sex difference and violence would be to increase the female level of violence. And that would be big thumbs down on that, right? That is going to make the world a worse place rather than a better place. So point is, yeah, equality is not a good thing in itself.

• 1:52:10Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, what about the differences in parenting?

• 1:52:12Speaker 01

  Differences in parenting, that's quite a controversial one, actually. That's one of the ones that people like least. The aggression sex difference, no worries about the parenting sex difference, people aren't so keen on. And that refers to the fact that in every culture, again, where we have good data, women do more of the direct parenting than than men do. And they invest more in the young, that they do more parental care. Men in every culture do more than your average male chimpanzee or male walrus, but they they do less than women in every single culture. And it doesn't seem to just be because men are forcing women to do it. There do seem to be average differences in terms of parental inclinations with women

• 1:52:53Speaker 01

  being more interested in doing it than men are on on average. And, yeah, I guess the reason that it's controversial is that there's a concern that people are saying, making up an excuse why you should do it. So so like the guys are using it as an excuse. It's just it's just natural that you should want to be changing the nappies and doing these things that coincidentally I would rather not have to do. So that I think is the concern. But in a way, it's ironic. So the fact that people consider it to be kind of an insult to say that on average women are more interested in parenting than men implies a negative valuation of parenting or doing more of the parenting.

• 1:53:35Speaker 01

  Because if it didn't imply a negative valuation of that, it would not be an insult to say that women on average are more.

• 1:53:40Chris Williamson?

  This has been one of my most, one of my, one of the best ideas I think I've come up with over the last couple of years, which was the the soft signal of male expectations.

• 1:53:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think you mentioned that when we met the first time, right?

• 1:53:52Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:53:53Speaker 01

  The soft bigotry of male expectations.

• 1:53:55Chris Williamson?

  Soft bigotry.

• 1:53:56Speaker 01

  It's like as if we treat the the male standard, whatever men do, that's the standard of what what is right. And if women do it less, that's a bad thing and we should make them more like males, but not so much, not so much the reverse. Yeah, and it is very ironic because.

• 1:54:10Chris Williamson?

  Really misogynistic worldview.

• 1:54:12Speaker 01

  It is really, isn't it? It is, it is. And so if we're taking a negative valuation of of parenting, which is what we are implicitly doing, if we say that it's an insult to say women are more parental, we're implicitly, and if it is actually true, that women on average are more parental by nature, then we're taking a negative valuation of a more female typical trait, and that is really sexist.

• 1:54:35Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah. What's the kibbutz experiment?

• 1:54:37Speaker 01

  The kibbutz experiment, so there are, there were these kibbutzim that they had in in Israel. So these were these communes, like highly egalitarian communes, where they wanted to get rid of all traditional kind of structures, including traditional male female ways where where the woman is expected to do all of the childcare and the guy is out in the public doing the public stuff, she's at home doing the private stuff. So what they did was they would, they would get all the kids and they would house them in communal houses. And then they would have dedicated adults within the group who would be the primary, primarily in charge of looking after all the kids.

• 1:55:19Speaker 01

  So the kids weren't living under the the roof of their biological parents. They didn't think, you know, the idea was everyone should care for everyone, rather than having this traditional, what they saw as bourgeois approach, where people are specifically interested in their own biological children, they want to get rid of them. They tried it, they did manage to make it work for a while, but what happened was that just the parents hated it, basically. The parents hated not having their own kids living with them under their, under their roof. And they agitated and complained about it and and eventually it broke down. And the interesting thing was that although both parents hated it, most of the, the mothers particularly hated it.

• 1:56:01Speaker 01

  And a lot of the agitation came from the mothers more than the fathers. And it's a great example, a great case study, because we often hear that that women are placed in the primary caregiver role by men. They may have kind of forced them into the, into that role. But here was a case where actually the women in particular were rebelling against the male leaders.

• 1:56:23Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:24Speaker 01

  To try to put themselves into that role instead. So it's another example of a very common phenomenon where you see certain behaviours and certain aspects of human nature that emerge and persist despite culture, rather than because of culture. Culture is pushing in the opposite direction.

• 1:56:41Chris Williamson?

  Actively going against it.

• 1:56:42Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:56:43Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah. I saw this really heartbreaking video of a woman on TikTok. She was at work in a cubicle, looked like a sort of normal office cubicle, and she had a screen up of maybe the daycare that her kid went to, and she was seeing, watching her kid say its first words or take its first steps. And it was just one of those ones with the caption over it that said, like, me being devastated that I'm at work while my kid is going through one of the most meaningful experiences at the start of its life and I'm missing it.

• 1:57:20Speaker 01

  It's tough, right? There's a real, that's the, the work, family, you know, clashing roles that that both sexes do experience, but it does seem to be still a bigger deal to women than men.

• 1:57:33Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's not, it's certainly not something that, people are happy to talk about maternity leave and the lack of maternity leave. It's been kind of barbaric, and I agree, I think, I mean, the UK gives nine months, which is still not enough, but feels at least remotely humane.

• 1:57:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:57:48Chris Williamson?

  And the US is basically, once you're out of the hospital, you're back to work.

• 1:57:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:57:54Chris Williamson?

  But very few people, I think, it's not a big cultural conversation around what is missed by either the need to go back to work to keep yourself financially stable or the desire to go back to work because of expectations that have been adjusted on women about where their value comes from, this soft bigotry thing again. I don't want to be just a mum.

• 1:58:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:58:16Chris Williamson?

  But by being not just a mum, I'm also missing out on a lot of the joys of motherhood.

• 1:58:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:58:22Chris Williamson?

  It's a, it's a kind of, it's kind of hard to win that situation. Women really don't have a good, a good outcome there.

• 1:58:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, and people in general, I mean, in a way, you know, there are, there are these kind of trade-offs for everybody always, and choosing one option always does mean not choosing another one. I know that a lot of people solve that problem to some degree, to the extent that it is solvable, a lot of women do, by taking some time off, you know, more time off, taking a career break, in other words, when the kids are young. But then particularly when they go to school, then, you know, getting back on their career, career course, yeah.

• 1:58:59Chris Williamson?

  What about differences between men and women in sexual jealousy?

• 1:59:02Speaker 01

  That's an interesting one. So both are prone to it, like I mentioned, but for the reasons that you mentioned already, men, men's jealousy is more focused than women's on sex. So a sexual infidelity, like if you ask men, which would upset you more? Your partner, who you love, going off and sleeping with somebody else, or just forming a close emotional bond with somebody else? Now, both of those are upsetting to most men, but men are more likely to say that the sex is more upsetting than just the bond. And you pose the same question to women, and again, it's, both of them are upsetting to the vast majority of women, but they're more likely to say that the emotional bond,

• 1:59:46Speaker 01

  the sort of falling in love, maybe falling in love with the other person, that that's more upsetting than just sex per se. It's interesting, right? And it comes out of the fact that men had this, this problem of paternity uncertainty. Like you say, no man in the history of the species has ever, no woman in the history of the species ever given birth and thought, now, how do I know that this is my kid and not some other woman's kid? Whereas, you know, for most men, more than likely it is their own kid. But there is always some non-zero chance that actually it's not, that it's the the good-looking next-door neighbor's kid instead. So, yeah, that's why sex is a more important issue for men than women. Women are more likely to be left holding the baby, and that is not good for their fitness,

• 2:00:31Speaker 01

  because it's going to reduce the time before they can have another kid and just make things a lot more difficult for them. And so the, it's obviously not great if their partner sort of sleeps with somebody else. It's not great, they'd be very, very upset about it, very often destroys the relationship. But it's even worse for most women if the partner gets emotionally involved with somebody else, because then the, whether, whether they want the relationship to end or not, it's going to end because they're going to leave, very likely going to leave and set up shop with the other woman.

• 2:01:02Chris Williamson?

  I have an example that I heard about from a while ago, that a, a friend was on 23 Me or Ancestry dot com, and one day in their thirties, got an email notification saying, you've got a new half-sister.

• 2:01:19Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:01:20Chris Williamson?

  And she says, how the fuck have I got a new half-sister? What it turns out was that thirty-two years ago, the dad had had a one-night-stand affair, that kid had never met the father, never been involved again.

• 2:01:34Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:01:35Chris Williamson?

  But three decades later, this situation unfolds, and, oh, obviously awful, awful to try and live through. But I would have been fascinated to have done a study to work out what happens to.

• 2:01:52Chris Williamson?

  What happens to sexual jealousy and intimacy jealousy? And the fear of resource provisioning needing to be split?

• 2:02:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:02:01Chris Williamson?

  When you've gone past all of those things? Because you have this, you know, three decade, assuming that there's not been more infidelity, this three decade example of someone committing to the family and raising the kids and doing the rest of this stuff. And also, the person that would have been the dependent is no longer in need of any of the provisioning. You understand why I'm getting that? To like, separate out all of the typical areas?

• 2:02:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:02:27Chris Williamson?

  Trust, infidelity, all of those things, like, obviously horrible, but kind of fascinating too.

• 2:02:36Speaker 01

  It is really fascinating, and I wonder if this could be an example where proximate and ultimate, like, thinking about the proximate and ultimate might solve the mystery. Because it's possible that, because we don't necessarily think about, we don't necessarily think it through, we're not necessarily thinking, well, I'm going to lose this partner. He's going to fall in love with her and he's going to go away. And then I've got this baby and I'm going to have no one to help me with it. That's evolutionary rationale, but it could just be a gut reaction, like, he's getting close to somebody else, I hate that, I feel jealous, I feel bad about it. And so that could kick him just as strongly, 30 years down the line, when it doesn't matter anyway. You know, like you say, trust issues and those kind of things are going to kick him,

• 2:03:17Speaker 01

  could kick him just as strong, even though evolutionarily, the circumstances, it doesn't matter anymore. The gut reaction that evolved might be, might not discriminate those details.

• 2:03:30Chris Williamson?

  What do we know about sex differences in personality?

• 2:03:33Speaker 01

  Well, there are some, and they're pretty consistent, they're not huge. Two of them are bigger than the rest. Now, if you're thinking about the big five personality traits, so the OCEAN acronym, right? So openness to experience, neuroticism, extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. I got that in the wrong order, that wasn't OCEAN, but those are the, those are the five. So the two sex differences that are largest and most consistent, the sex difference in neuroticism, which is proneness to negative emotions like depression and anxiety, plus emotional volatility, so ups and downs.

• 2:04:12Speaker 01

  And that is about a medium effect size, so I guess it's usually estimated between about point two and point five, standard deviation between men and women. There's that one, and then the other consistent one is the sex difference in agreeableness. And women on average score higher. Again, it's not a massive difference, heaps of overlap, but again, it's point two to point five, I would say, it's a medium, small to medium sex difference as well. There are some sex differences in the other three big five traits.

• 2:04:45Speaker 01

  Often, not always, you sometimes find that women score a bit higher in conscientiousness, but not always, some studies don't find that. Extraversion, on average, women slightly higher on extraversion, but again, not always, and it's a smaller difference if it is one.

• 2:05:02Speaker 01

  And then, what's the other one? Conscientious?

• 2:05:08Chris Williamson?

  Openness.

• 2:05:08Speaker 01

  Openness, yeah, openness, slightly higher for women as well, or no difference.

• 2:05:12Chris Williamson?

  What's the explanation for why those would be the case?

• 2:05:16Speaker 01

  Well, I don't think we know for sure, but my best guess, so the neuroticism sex difference, so that's proneness to things like anxiety and depression, and I think women, there's a general trend where women seem to be more self-protective than men, which is kind of the flip side of the fact that men take greater risks than women. They're more risk-taking, I think that that evolved because that is about trying to propel yourself up the status hierarchy, you've got to take risks in order to do so. And men have evolved to do that more than women because they have a higher maximum offspring number. But yeah, the flip side of risk-taking is to be more self-protective. Part of that is to be more prone to anxiety. Anxiety, the function of anxiety is to, is the same as the function of the turtle shell,

• 2:05:59Speaker 01

  it's to protect yourself, it's about protection. So I think that's why women are more neurotic. Now, the agreeableness sex difference, so women on average are more agreeable, but I have quite as strong an idea about that. I do think that, well, I guess, I guess it could be the flip side of the fact that men are sort of more aggressive, more pushy, and that evolved, like we've discussed, to try to, again, get up the status hierarchy, beat rival males to go up in the world and achieve status and resources. Women have evolved to do less of that, and one manifestation of that is the fact that they're more agreeable, more friendly, more compassionate.

• 2:06:41Speaker 01

  And just the way that women have evolved to form social bonds, it does tend to have a high level of compassion and understanding the other person. That seems to be more common in women than men.

• 2:06:54Chris Williamson?

  What about the people versus things divide?

• 2:06:57Speaker 01

  So that's an interesting one, right? That is a bigger difference, that's actually quite a big difference, it's one of the bigger psychological sex differences, and the effect size there is like one standard deviation or even a bit more when it comes to people, people versus things. Very, very consistent, I think there's a good case that it is not just due to socialization. So one thing is that, like I mentioned earlier, it has persisted for as long as we've been measuring it, very, very consistent, even when the culture's trying to push against it and get women more interested in things-related professions, traditionally male professions. Seems to be related, as we also mentioned, seems to be related to prenatal hormonal exposure. And one thing I haven't mentioned already is that it's also very, very cross-culturally consistent.

• 2:07:42Speaker 01

  So there was one study that had about 200,000 people in it and found that sex difference in career-related interests, found it in 53 out of 53 nations. And another one had half a million people and found it in 80 out of 80 nations.

• 2:07:56Chris Williamson?

  Wow.

• 2:07:56Speaker 01

  And that level, it's amazing, right? That level of cross-cultural uniformity, you just hardly ever find it in the social sciences, but you do find it for that difference.

• 2:08:05Chris Williamson?

  And this has been around for 100 years?

• 2:08:07Speaker 01

  Yep, yeah.

• 2:08:08Chris Williamson?

  It was first documented in 1911?

• 2:08:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, that's right, yeah, that's when they first documented it, and it's been consistent ever since. It's one of the biggest differences, and I always find that pretty interesting, really, because the kind of careers that we have today are evolutionarily novel. So you might not necessarily expect that to be one of the biggest sex differences, you know, interest in careers that just haven't existed throughout the vast majority of evolutionary history for our species.

• 2:08:32Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:08:32Speaker 01

  But it's there, and very consistent.

• 2:08:34Chris Williamson?

  And there's been some deliberate effects, attempts to try and close it as well?

• 2:08:38Speaker 01

  Indeed, and they're ongoing, and it just doesn't seem to, doesn't seem to budge, really. Yeah.

• 2:08:43Chris Williamson?

  It's interesting that the soft bigotry of male expectations happens with get more women into STEM as well.

• 2:08:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, indeed, as opposed to get more men and to traditionally female dominated, exactly, exactly. But, you know, Richard Reeves, who's been on the show, right? And that he's trying to get more men into those kind of professions.

• 2:09:03Chris Williamson?

  He's trying to do it, but again, I think the reason that there is a publicly loaded push toward getting more women into STEM is because of that soft bigotry.

• 2:09:15Speaker 01

  Agreed.

• 2:09:16Chris Williamson?

  And if you look, I'm going to guess that if you look at the gender equality paradox, you're going to find that in more gender equal nations, fewer women end up going into things-based roles.

• 2:09:28Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:09:29Chris Williamson?

  And more men go into things-based roles.

• 2:09:31Speaker 01

  That is exactly right, yeah. And just the interest in it gets bigger in those cultures as well.

• 2:09:36Chris Williamson?

  Regardless of what you do, that's an interesting one to have, to separate out what jobs are available to you and can you get from what ones are you interested in?

• 2:09:43Speaker 01

  Yep, exactly, and both expand. And it's interesting, now, I think that you're right, that it does reflect the soft bigotry of male expectations. I think, I think people who want to close those gaps also will typically point out that those kinds of professions pay more as well. And that's another reason to try to close the gap.

• 2:10:02Chris Williamson?

  But that doesn't change the interest.

• 2:10:03Speaker 01

  It doesn't, it doesn't change the interest.

• 2:10:05Chris Williamson?

  I mean, some people are interested in things because, I went to university and did business.

• 2:10:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:10:10Chris Williamson?

  Because I thought I could get a job in it.

• 2:10:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:10:12Chris Williamson?

  So I became interested, but it was a very transactional type of interest.

• 2:10:18Speaker 01

  Interesting.

• 2:10:20Chris Williamson?

  So, yeah, how many people develop an interest in a thing because it's functionally useful for them to acquire resources in it? I, you know, you're not.

• 2:10:29Speaker 01

  It might depend, I would say that in a pretty wealthy society, that more men than women do that. Now, in poorer societies, I think it's more common for everybody to do that, you know? Some poorer societies, you just think, well, I would love to do whatever it is, impressionistic dancing or whatever.

• 2:10:46Chris Williamson?

  But you get some, in high inequality and high poverty environments, you get some really interesting outcomes. You seen Candace Blake's work on the female beautification?

• 2:10:56Speaker 01

  I have, yeah, remind me, remind me the details.

• 2:10:58Chris Williamson?

  They analyzed, it was either Instagram posts or tweets, and correlated them with the level of income inequality in the local ecology.

• 2:11:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:11:05Chris Williamson?

  And in areas with higher income inequality, women did more self-sexualization and more beautification.

• 2:11:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:11:10Chris Williamson?

  And supposedly, the proposed mechanism for that is when you see not only how high you could climb, but how low you could fall, you try to maximize your ability to be assisted in being dragged out of that.

• 2:11:21Speaker 01

  Interesting.

• 2:11:22Chris Williamson?

  From a resource provisioning perspective.

• 2:11:24Speaker 01

  It's cool research there, right?

• 2:11:24Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's really cool, but basically, it's just when material.

• 2:11:31Chris Williamson?

  Restrictions are in place. Stuff gets warped and squirrely.

• 2:11:35Speaker 01

  Indeed.

• 2:11:36Chris Williamson?

  Because people are concerned about survival.

• 2:11:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:11:38Chris Williamson?

  I mean, you've seen the um environmental security hypothesis as well about men are more attracted to bigger women in times of

• 2:11:46Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:11:47Chris Williamson?

  a poor uh economy and

• 2:11:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:11:49Chris Williamson?

  more attracted to skinnier women in times of bad, uh in times of good economy.

• 2:11:53Speaker 01

  And and good, yeah, it's interesting, right? And that does seem to be pretty good data on that. I am not a hundred percent persuaded of the evolutionary arguments for it, though.

• 2:12:01Chris Williamson?

  You could survive a famine. There's a famine imminent. You couldn't survive a famine, but it doesn't matter because we got loads of food.

• 2:12:06Speaker 01

  Indeed. And I mean, it does make sense, but the the logic there does make sense. But I mean, is it the case that for a long enough fraction of human evolutionary history, uh we had feast and famine, feast and famines, I'm sure we did have that, but were the feast periods big enough that people were actually getting bacon? I mean, my impression is that hunter gatherers, they just didn't really get uh big enough that there would have been selection.

• 2:12:29Chris Williamson?

  See a fat person, it would have been very, very, very rare.

• 2:12:31Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 2:12:32Chris Williamson?

  It would have been almost impossible

• 2:12:34Speaker 01

  Indeed.

• 2:12:35Chris Williamson?

  before, what, thirteen thousand years ago?

• 2:12:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:12:38Chris Williamson?

  It would have been almost exactly impossible.

• 2:12:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:12:40Chris Williamson?

  Definitionally, because you could only eat what you could carry.

• 2:12:43Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 2:12:44Chris Williamson?

  There was no surplus at all. That's interesting.

• 2:12:47Speaker 01

  So I sort of feel like it couldn't have.

• 2:12:47Chris Williamson?

  Well, Macken's here today, we can fucking grill him about it.

• 2:12:49Speaker 01

  We can talk about that, yeah, because he's a he's a fan of that, right?

• 2:12:52Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, he is. Well, he likes he likes the sort of behavioral ecology approach to things. He likes humans as plants as well as humans as as animals. So we grow toward the sun and how is the local ecology

• 2:13:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:13:02Chris Williamson?

  imposing and warping. Uh but definitely the the self sexualization in high income inequality makes makes sense.

• 2:13:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I do agree with the general principle that uh that we've evolved to respond to the ecology. I'm just not sure in that case, it could have it could have evolved

• 2:13:21Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:21Speaker 01

  because of there weren't, you know, fatter people around the place for long enough.

• 2:13:25Chris Williamson?

  What about cognitive abilities? Is there a sex difference?

• 2:13:28Speaker 01

  Um, that's, if anything is, I would say that's probably the most controversial topic that I deal with in the book.

• 2:13:37Chris Williamson?

  Let's bury it two hours into the episode.

• 2:13:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. Um, so there are some, I guess, a few things to say uh to avoid, try to avoid getting cancelled. It's first of all that there are there are no sex differences in the cognitive ability that matters most to most people, which is IQ or general cognitive ability. There is basically zero sex difference in the average there. Um, now, people, when you say that, some people will say, but that's because IQ tests have deliberately been constructed to create equal averages. And that is true. Some of them have, some of them have, but there are some IQ tests.

• 2:14:12Chris Williamson?

  To offset the sex difference?

• 2:14:15Speaker 01

  Well, that that's the that's the theory. And so some some of them have been deliberately created that way, but some haven't. But even those ones that haven't been created specifically to give the same the same outcome and balancing spatial versus verbal and that kind of thing. Even when they haven't, they they give basically the same averages with representative samples of people. Now, sometimes you'll get uh some studies that will have males doing slightly better on average. But uh I'm persuaded by the argument that that is because the very low IQ males are more likely to fall off the map, fall through the cracks and kind of disappear and and not end up on the samples.

• 2:14:53Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 2:14:54Speaker 01

  The low IQ women bringing that bringing down the female average.

• 2:14:58Chris Williamson?

  Because we do have a higher variance.

• 2:14:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:15:00Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 2:15:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And cognitive abilities, there's higher variance, yeah. Average is the same, the variance is slightly greater in men than in women.

• 2:15:08Chris Williamson?

  More male geniuses and more male retard.

• 2:15:10Speaker 01

  That is exactly right, but uh important uh note that that's quite a small effect. And that is, this is the controversial area, and that's maybe the most controversial claim within that controversial area.

• 2:15:23Speaker 01

  So I always like to follow that up by saying, so that that people hate that because it's a cognitive advantage that gives an advantage to guys. But there are also other cognitive um ability sex differences that give the advantage to women. So women on average um are better verbally. That is one. And another one is that among the minority of people who are really, really gifted at maths, the women are more likely than the men to also be gifted verbally. So they're more likely to be a double threat.

• 2:15:53Chris Williamson?

  That's cool.

• 2:15:54Speaker 01

  Uh, so that's, so no average differences in IQ. Where you do find differences, they're just as likely to favor women as men. Some of them, in some cases, men are slightly better, spatial abilities. That's an example. Verbal abilities, though, women tend to be somewhat better. And then most of the differences are small. So the personality, they're smaller than the personality differences, they're much smaller than the differences in interests. So when it comes to cognitive abilities, we're much more alike than different.

• 2:16:24Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 2:16:24Speaker 01

  But having said all that, there are these average differences in these specific abilities.

• 2:16:30Speaker 01

  And that, likely or not, that is the the fact of the matter, and that's been measured for a hundred years as well. There's there's tons and tons of data on it. Typically found across cultures, very likely, I think, to be to be partly innate, you know, that uh it's shaped by culture as well. You can you can minimize it. Uh, and and I guess also in principle, you could increase it as well. But yeah, I would be surprised if it's just due to socialization.

• 2:16:55Chris Williamson?

  What about physical health?

• 2:16:57Speaker 01

  Physical health, um, there are some definite sex differences there. One of them, and the one that's probably best known, is that men are more prone to cardiovascular disease, than women more prone to heart attacks in particular. At least among, you know, like like in fifties and sixties, until until very old age, men are more prone to those. Women are more prone to immune system disorders. They're more prone as well to to pain disorders.

• 2:17:26Speaker 01

  Men are more prone to most forms of cancer, other than sort of reproductive cancers that only strike one sex or the other. Men are somewhat more prone to cancers as well. And actually, one of the big ones is that men die younger on average than men in the vast majority of cultures. Uh, including even most cultures where women have high rates of of death during childbirth.

• 2:17:45Chris Williamson?

  Hmm, hmm.

• 2:17:47Speaker 01

  So we drew the the short straw there.

• 2:17:50Chris Williamson?

  Unics in the Korean Chosun Dynasty lived longer than intact males of identical social standing.

• 2:17:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:17:55Chris Williamson?

  Demonstrating that testosterone has a direct biological cost to male lifespan.

• 2:18:00Speaker 01

  That is very true. So I touched on that in the book, in a billion billion years of sex differences. I write about how actually, most people probably don't know this, but we do actually already have an intervention that we could in principle do, which would completely obliterate the the average difference in lifespan between men and women, and would extend men's lifespan, and that is castration. It's got to be um castration before you hit puberty, though. So, you know, sadly enough, if anyone wants to take that approach, if you've already hit puberty, it's too late. But yeah, the fact that it would work is it's interesting. Those show that it's testosterone that is making us bigger, stronger, more aggressive, but also shortening our our lifespan as well.

• 2:18:38Chris Williamson?

  If male mortality rates were lowered to female rates, Randy Nessie, who did the evolutionary medicine studies,

• 2:18:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:18:44Chris Williamson?

  calculated we would save more years of life than if we cured cancer. Male mortality were at female rates, we would save more years of life than if we cured cancer.

• 2:18:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. So we're so used to it, so used to the fact that men die younger, that we don't really think about it, I think. But then when you do think about it, yeah, you find that that is a it's a massive, massive difference.

• 2:19:05Chris Williamson?

  And then we've got eighty eight percent of Darwin Award winners, which are people who die through spectacular self inflicted stupidity, are men.

• 2:19:12Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:19:12Chris Williamson?

  But ninety percent of Carnegie Hero Awards, which are given to people who risk someone's life in order to save a stranger, also go to men. So the risk sort of cuts both ways. It's almost exactly the same. Eighty eight percent of people who die through stupid, self inflicted ways are guys.

• 2:19:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:19:27Chris Williamson?

  Ninety percent of people who risk one's life to save a stranger are also guys.

• 2:19:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. So that is the trade off there of of risk taking, right? Is that, in fact, almost by definition, taking risks can pay off big time, but can also kill you.

• 2:19:41Chris Williamson?

  Winners and losers.

• 2:19:42Speaker 01

  Yep, exactly. And because men do more of that risk taking, I mean, that's one of the reasons, I think, that um that you get more males than females will start a business that does really, really well. And people focus on that and they think it's it's unfair.

• 2:19:56Chris Williamson?

  I'm gonna guess more will go bankrupt too.

• 2:19:58Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly right, yeah. They're more likely to go in both directions, so they're more likely to succeed because they take bigger risks, more likely to fail because they take bigger risks. Some people, when they hear about that, they think, well, we should encourage women to take bigger risks. But the problem is that they are then, to the extent that they do that, they're opening themselves up not only to greater chances of success, but also to greater chances of failure.

• 2:20:18Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, risk doesn't just cut one way.

• 2:20:20Speaker 01

  Totally, exactly. And so my solution there, I think, would be just tell everybody all the facts, tell men and women all the facts. This approach to life, this risky approach, uh cuts both ways. You could go up, you could go down. Do do what you want with that with that knowledge.

• 2:20:34Chris Williamson?

  Uh huh.

• 2:20:35Speaker 01

  And that's my approach to just uh a lot of gender gaps in general, right? So like workplace gender gaps. Tell people all the facts, try to get rid of, I mean, just do everything we can to get rid of bias and barriers. But then, having done that, um, respect people's choices about their own lives and how they want to live them and what careers they want to do.

• 2:20:54Chris Williamson?

  What's really interesting about that is if you try to

• 2:21:00Chris Williamson?

  Compartmentalize the information that people see. And you don't give them full access to the information.

• 2:21:07Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:21:08Chris Williamson?

  What you end up with is actually a world in which there's more likely to be resentfulness. And you need to do more compensation on the back end because people have made decisions under imperfect information.

• 2:21:21Speaker 01

  Yep, yep, that's exactly right. And some of the steps I think that people take to try to balance out gender gaps in the workplace, I think, can have exactly that effect, creating resentment.

• 2:21:35Speaker 01

  There's one of the dangers really, I think, of overstating the extent to which gender gaps in occupations are due to bias and barriers.

• 2:21:45Speaker 01

  You know, I do think it's absolutely essential to look at the extent to which they are due to those facts, but I think we just to bias and barriers, I think we also don't need to look at the extent to which they're due to preferences as well. Because if we don't, first of all, if we say any kind of gaps that you see are products of discrimination, first of all, it's going to create unnecessary resentment because you're going to say, look, look at these gaps. That's because of men mistreating women.

• 2:22:13Speaker 01

  Second, it's going to lead to like costly interventions to try to eliminate the gaps. And those interventions are probably not going to work because they're targeting things that are not the causes, the primary causes of the gaps in the first place. Then what happens is because they don't work, we start doing more and more coercive things to try to eliminate the gaps.

• 2:22:33Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 2:22:34Speaker 01

  In some cases, we do anti male discrimination, kind of inadvertently, just trying to eliminate the gaps. We get a bit more coercive and end up, instead of getting rid of discrimination, which is what I think we should do, we end up reversing the direction of discrimination, which I think is just creating, it's not undoing past injustices, it is just adding to the

• 2:22:56Chris Williamson?

  Additional injustices.

• 2:22:57Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly.

• 2:22:58Chris Williamson?

  On top.

• 2:22:58Speaker 01

  And reverse, reverse ones. And then that can create a backlash among guys. And then also, if we exaggerate the extent to which discrimination is behind those gender gaps, like in STEM, for instance, we say, there's the, you have these gaps in STEM, more men than women go into it, and it's just because STEM is just riddled with sexism, is a horrible, horrible, hotbed of sexism, that's going to put a lot of women off, girls and women off, who might otherwise go into it. So ironically, this effort to try to fight it could actually be, you know, create the reverse.

• 2:23:34Chris Williamson?

  You touched on it earlier on, what about differences in mental health?

• 2:23:37Speaker 01

  Mental health? So there's the neuroticism sex difference, first of all, women are more prone to depression and anxiety, just sort of day to day depression and anxiety, rather than clinical levels of it. But at the extreme of that distribution, they are also more prone to clinical depression and clinical anxiety disorders.

• 2:23:58Speaker 01

  Men are slightly more prone to schizophrenia. Men are much more prone to like antisocial personality disorders, so sociopathy, psychopathy, more likely to be psychopaths. What else is there? I'll tell you one that where you don't find a sex difference is bipolar disorder. That is, I'd say in the book that that's the least sexist disorder on record, because it's basically the same, across cultures, it's about the same frequency of both sexes.

• 2:24:26Chris Williamson?

  What's your explanation for why we would have these differences in mental health?

• 2:24:31Speaker 01

  Well, with the depression and anxiety, I think that's just a side effect of the neuroticism sex difference. So at lower levels, it's adaptive for women to be, girls as well, but especially women to be somewhat more anxiety prone, because they protect themselves more and they're not taking risks in the way that is more adaptive for males, because of the higher maximum offspring number. So it's adaptive at that level, but I think that because you have a distribution, it means that inevitably some people are going to be the extreme of that distribution. I don't think it's actually adaptive out there. So I don't accept adaptive explanations for clinical depression or clinical levels of

• 2:25:14Speaker 01

  anxiety disorders. I think that that is a sort of non adaptive, or actually maladaptive often byproduct of

• 2:25:22Chris Williamson?

  Spandrel type thing?

• 2:25:23Speaker 01

  Kind of a spandrel, yeah. So just a side effect, exactly, of differences that closer to the mean are adaptive. The schizophrenia difference, I don't have a theory about what that is, and I don't think there is, that there is a theory yet about why that is more common among men than women.

• 2:25:40Speaker 01

  Some that I didn't mention, actually autism is more common among boys and girls. ADHD is more common among boys and girls as well. So yeah, ADHD, I think that, again, that's just a sort of offshoot of the fact that boys are kind of more active on average than girls, and sort of less attentive and more likely to get distracted and running around the place. And it's not a problem, and the usual, I mean, it might be irritating for parents and teachers, but it's not a big problem in the normal range. But at the extremes, it is quite a problem, and it's a problem more often suffered by males than females as an offshoot of the differences at the mean.

• 2:26:22Chris Williamson?

  After going through all of this, doing all of the research, obviously you've been deep in this for a long time.

• 2:26:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:26:27Chris Williamson?

  And then doing the book, what happens, what's your fear when people don't respect sex differences or they deny them? What, what's the sort of world that we live in if that happens?

• 2:26:39Speaker 01

  It's a good question, and I think it's a particularly good question because we're always focusing on the dangers of exaggerating sex differences and moralizing sex differences. And I think there are lots of problems with doing that, and we need to be careful not to do it. But where I think I disagree with a lot of folks is that I think that there are also problems with doing the reverse, that there are also problems with minimizing sex differences and denying them. So one thing is that just as, in exactly the same way that some people who exaggerate and moralize sex differences, they try to push people into traditional gender roles, people who deny the differences or massively minimize them, they're in danger of trying to push people out of gender roles. So kind of replacing

• 2:27:20Speaker 01

  one gender straitjacket with another unisex gender straitjacket, or like a maybe reversed, gender role reversed straitjacket. And then we've actually touched on another of the big problems, I think, with minimizing the differences, which is the fact that trying to explain gender gaps in society, like occupational gender gaps, there's just a whole host of problems with doing that, that we discussed. Other problems with minimizing sex differences is that there are certain physical health problems and mental health problems that, so not only do the frequency of different problems differ between the sexes, sometimes the symptoms differ as well. They present differently.

• 2:28:05Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 2:28:05Speaker 01

  So like cardiovascular problems present differently for women than men. Women are more likely than men to have shortness of breath as a symptom, rather than sort of shooting pains down the arms and the other kind of classic problems like that. And if you don't focus on sex differences, you might be more likely to overlook the symptoms of heart attacks in women. Traditionally, doctors and people themselves have been, have overlooked it for that reason, because they've underestimated the sex differences. Mental health wise, same deal. So even though autism is more common among boys than girls, there is a strong case that it's under diagnosed in girls. And part of the reason for that is that it presents somewhat differently in girls. It's less likely, for instance,

• 2:28:47Speaker 01

  to involve repetitive behaviors. So people might not, if they're not aware of that sex difference, they might overlook it in girls, and that means girls won't get the help that they need. And yeah, likewise with social problems. If we're looking at social problems like intimate partner abuse, if we assume that all intimate partner abuse only goes in one direction, like male to female, then we're gonna like underestimate the extent to which it sometimes goes in the other direction.

• 2:29:20Chris Williamson?

  The vast majority of it is bidirectional, right?

• 2:29:23Speaker 01

  At low levels it is, yeah. Sort of low levels, verbal abuse, pushing and shoving. And actually, in the West, there's even some data suggesting that like verbal abuse might be more common, women toward men. Other cultures, that's not the case. And it's more likely men to women. And when it comes to severe

• 2:29:42Chris Williamson?

  Damn gender equality paradox.

• 2:29:44Speaker 01

  Indeed. When it comes to severe aggression, though, even in the West, men do predominate. But you know, it's not 100%.

• 2:29:54Chris Williamson?

  And what are the harms of exaggerating sex differences?

• 2:29:57Speaker 01

  So one of them is trying to push, push people into traditional gender roles. And like if you just let people do what they want, probably a majority are going to kind of gravitate in the direction, in traditional directions. But not everyone does. We, because we don't have massive, massive sex differences, somewhat modest sex differences, there are always going to be some folks who are not going to want to go into the traditional directions. And my view, my let people be themselves view would say, well, that's fine, just let them, let them be themselves. It doesn't matter. But if you exaggerate and moralize sex differences, you're unlikely to think that. You're going to think, well, no, no, this is the way of nature. Any exceptions to the rule, that is by definition a problem,

• 2:30:39Speaker 01

  and we need to push people into, into those roles. What else? Other problems with exaggerating differences, if you exaggerate the frequency of cardiovascular health problems, you will say, well, you find them in men, not women. So that's another reason that you might overlook them in women, just because you just, it doesn't occur to you that, okay, she's got these symptoms, what would that be? Well, it's not going to be cardiovascular problems because those are men's problems. Get the same thing with, with mental health problems. If you're really fixated on the fact that depression, for instance, is more common among women than men, you might overlook it in men, because you're exaggerating the size of the sex difference. And you know, like a significant minority of people who suffer

• 2:31:23Speaker 01

  depression are men, you know, about a third of cases are guys. So if you exaggerate that difference, you might not be on the lookout for that. Anxiety disorders as well, and social problems, yes. So social problems like interpersonal violence, sexual harassment, if you exaggerate the extent of those, you are more likely to focus on just the cases where men are doing it to women. And those are the majority of the cases, but there are cases, the majority of extreme cases anyway, but you do find the reverse. And the reverse is a problem as well. And it's a problem that we overlook if we exaggerate those sex differences. There's an irony there, though, which is that the sex difference

• 2:32:06Speaker 01

  and sexual harassment, sex difference and interpersonal intimate partner abuse, the people who are most likely to exaggerate that and say it's all men, tend to be gender role progressives. So people who generally are trying to minimize and deny sex differences, in those cases, they actually, funnily enough, flip to the reverse and adhere to them. And in fact, just reverse it and massively exaggerate those differences.

• 2:32:32Chris Williamson?

  Fascinating. Steve, you're the best. I appreciate you, man. You've done a wonderful job with this book. Everyone should go and buy it, Billion Years of Sex Differences. What else? What else do you want to plug?

• 2:32:40Speaker 01

  Could I plug my Substack? So that's the, the thing I'm most excited about.

• 2:32:44Chris Williamson?

  Nature, nurture, Nietzsche newsletter. Dude, I'm a Steve Stuart Williams stan, bro. I mean, you're, the AP understood the universe is in the five books that everybody needs to read for my first reading list. And had this one have been out, it would have been in the second one. Yeah, your, your Substack rules, and everyone should go and check it out. I love it. My favorite thing that you do is the Linkfest

• 2:33:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:33:05Chris Williamson?

  Breakdowns. Once a month, you just send like 40 or 50 different studies or insights that you found. You're the best, man. I really appreciate you. Thank you so much for coming to see me.

• 2:33:14Speaker 01

  Thanks very much for, for making this happen. This is great.

• 2:33:17Chris Williamson?

  I got you. All right. Goodbye, everyone.

• 2:33:18Speaker 01

  Okay. Later, folks.

• 2:33:19Chris Williamson?

  Dude. Yes.

• 2:33:22Speaker 01

  All right.

• 2:33:22Chris Williamson?

  Nailed it, nailed it, nailed it. Fucking awesome.