How Civilization Alters DNA: New Study

In this data-rich episode, join the hosts as they delve into the study 'Pervasive Findings of Directional Selection: Realize the Promise of Ancient DNA to Elucidate Human Adaptation.' This groundbreaking research analyzes 433 ancient and 6,510 modern genomes to trace the evolution of genetic traits such as skin and hair color, intelligence, body fat, and diseases like bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. The conversation also explores the impact of cultural and religious adaptations over millennia. The episode concludes with a discussion on future genetic interventions and the potential ethical implications on societal norms.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Hello, Simone.

This is going to be a spicy episode with a lot of data. We are going to be talking about a study and a write up on the study. The study was called Pervasive Findings of Directional Selection, Realize the Promise of Ancient DNA. to elucidate human adaptation. Specifically, they took 433 corpses from a period that went from 14, 000 years ago to, to modern times, and they used 6, 510 contemporary people to develop baselines, and they determined that How much various things that we know have genetic correlates today, how those genetic correlates changed throughout history.

We're going to be talking about things like intelligence, earning potential schizophrenia, potential ratio. How white people were [00:01:00] how because this was all done in the European population. In an article that was bemoaning this called David Reich vindicates Corinne and Harpin's 10, 000 year explosion.

They were bemoaning that they're like, it's so funny that like, you cannot do this sort of work, even though we have tons and tons and tons of like Native American skeletons and stuff like that, or skeletons from different regions. They're all like, now, like, Re burying them and stuff like destroying these historic artifacts because it's like, oh, this is all like Western supremacy.

What it means is like, nobody cares when you mess with like white people's skeletons. And so, they, with all these other skeletons they're just not going to have good data and we're destroying the data to know about ethnic minorities, but we will know what happened with white people. And one of the interesting things that I guess I can go into first with some of the first graphs I shared with you, Simone, if you go to WhatsApp.

Yeah white people being white is actually a fairly modern thing. Okay, historically, we probably did not look that white. [00:02:00] Specifically, if you go 4000 years ago, or earlier, a lot of the genes, and this is just like across genes here, the so you can look at Look at that. Yeah, associate with whiteness or a darker skin color.

We're just significantly more common and actually a big part of this happened in the last 2000 years. It was like, like big spikes there. And so, the idea of For example, Jesus being black or dark skinned he was almost certainly more dark skinned than the most dark skinned Europeans today.

All those

Simone Collins: Mormon Jesus paintings. Don't really

Malcolm Collins: it was definitely not fair skin. Yes Very interesting though that that white skin is a fairly modern evolutionary phenomenon But one that has been regularly selected for since about six thousand years ago, huh? [00:03:00] Interesting You also see a similar phenomenon here with hair.

Simone Collins: Yeah, look at that.

Malcolm Collins: So, straight hair slash baldness increase. So, you've seen the hair within the European population becoming much, much straighter over time. You would have had much hair, or, I don't, is that an offensive word, hair?

Simone Collins: I do not know. Maybe. We can say more textured hair.

Malcolm Collins: More textured hair in a historic phenomenon. And they, they yeah, but also baldness came along with this.

Simone Collins: That is interesting. Are baldness and straight hair known to be correlated genetically? Apparently the

Malcolm Collins: genetics that code for them are correlated. Yeah,

Simone Collins: that is interesting. Alright.

Malcolm Collins: Same was, was, was a light hair.

This didn't start really getting selected for until about 4,000 years ago. So we probably all had black hair similar to Asians or Africans before this. That is interesting. So I've like,

Simone Collins: so pale blonde people are like these, these [00:04:00] new offshoot mutants and everyone else's.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

Simone Collins: The norm.

Malcolm Collins: Genuinely new mutants that over a certain period of history became common because they out competed other neighboring populations.

So body fat percentage I found really interesting. Hmm. If you're looking at this one here one is that in the past, it looks like a few hundred years. There has just been this really sharp, rapid decline in the genetics we correlate with body fat percentage since industrialization.

Simone Collins: So we're, we're, we're, we're thinner now. Is, am I reading this right? I'm, I'm, yeah, no,

Malcolm Collins: obviously this has changed. If you look at the recent genetic data, actually body fat percentage. percentage predictors alongside IQ predictors are the two things that are most tied to the low fertility of a person.

Like if I'm not IQ,

Simone Collins: but low educational attainment, low

Malcolm Collins: educational attainment and high body fat correlate to having lots of kids in the current context. But it looks like post the industrial revolution, you had an opposite pressure [00:05:00] and you had a very strong pressure. As you can see here, against body fat since the agricultural revolution from a period of about 10, 000 to 8, 000 years ago.

Simone Collins: That is interesting. It's hard for me to imagine a world in which we wouldn't be selecting for higher body fat. Why would we be selecting for leaner people? Is it perhaps that body fat gets in the way of agricultural collection? I mean, we would need to be leaner when we were hunting and

Malcolm Collins: foraging. Is granaries is really what you're seeing in the first selection event is, do the people have the capacity to survive the winter and other lean periods with stores of food?

Like, do they have food storage? In other

Simone Collins: words, is, is the, is the food storage exogenous or endogenous? Is it outside the body or inside the body? I see. That's interesting. Okay. That makes sense.

Malcolm Collins: I think that that's likely also what we're seeing with the industrial revolution with canned foods and everything like that.

You are always better if you're [00:06:00] trying to, you know, optimize for like the fitness and ability to do physical tasks of being very lean. You don't want to keep a lot of this. It's an expensive way to store your calories.

Simone Collins: That's true. Yeah. Yeah. I guess that there are the hazards and the downsides, both from a constrained movement standpoint and from the health burdens, but yeah.

If you don't have a choice, then you do need to store it. That's very interesting. Wow. Right? Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And I also think here what, what is causing us to be selecting for fatness now? I think it's that basically within our current society the less wealthy you are, when you're in this desperate degree of poverty, a certain degree of maladaptiveness to competing within our society leads to genetic fitness within this society, i.

e. the ability to outcompete others genetically.

Speaker 3: So,

Malcolm Collins: if you're the type of person who's living off of Medicare or the government and staying at home 24 7. You're just gonna have a lot more kids and you can see this in the data. And so that's what ends up selecting for like, high body [00:07:00] fat again. Now that we have this pathologically caring society that just won't say, well, you know, obviously.

They, they are not, you know, we shouldn't be supporting somebody who is so fat that they've grown into their bed, you know? Anyway, so we'll go to the next one here. Waist to hip ratio, I found really interesting. So it was waist to hip ratio. You can see it going down over time, but the big drop in waist to hip ratio Happened with the agricultural revolution where it basically went down to about a third of what it used to, maybe even like a 10th of what it used to be and then back out for a period.

So that's so

Simone Collins: interesting because the thing I immediately think of are those Venus statues. That have,

Malcolm Collins: yes, and they've got the huge way to hip ratio,

Simone Collins: quite sizable hips and fat.

Malcolm Collins: Yes. They were

Simone Collins: fat.

Malcolm Collins: And

Simone Collins: this checks out now, well, they were, they had bigger hips. [00:08:00]

Malcolm Collins: They may not be as cartoony as we imagine them to be today.

Yeah. They may have been describing what women actually looked like or the idealized or high status woman. Yeah. Which was And another thing about the Venus statues, which I've noticed and I hadn't noticed before, now that you mentioned this, is even the European ones had like, I don't know what to call it, African style hair.

I'm trying to find I don't remember them having heads.

Simone Collins: They mostly did not have heads.

Malcolm Collins: No, no, many of them had a like a heads was like, it almost looks

Malcolm Collins: little like grown in micro dreads is I guess what I'd call it. Oh, interesting. Which was probably common in the Europeans at the time. And I'd also note that a lot of the Venus Saturins are done on darker stones.

Which may have been intentional. They, they may have just been depicting, yeah, because everyone had darker

Simone Collins: skin. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,

Malcolm Collins: And so the, the guys who like the big waist to hip ratio, they are primeval men you could say now, why did this change happen? It might have been due to survival [00:09:00] rates of wives after, like, Basically, level of medical technology where it's okay to risk a woman's wife in childbirth more it makes her more

Speaker 3: efficient to walk.

Malcolm Collins: Cause somebody with these really wide hips, it causes problems in humans walking, that's the core reason why our hips shrunk.

Simone Collins: Oh, yeah, I guess because men, men don't have wide hips. So basically, if you don't need to give birth to children, there seems to be no reason to have very wide hips. I mean,

Malcolm Collins: we risk the child and the mother's wife with our smaller,

Simone Collins: narrow hips.

Yeah. Yes.

Malcolm Collins: And this was something that we evolved out of after, you know, descending from the trees. But what was the real pressure that caused this? And when we say medical technology, people would be like, what sort of medical technology coincides with the invention of farming? And I think it's what many people real like the, the ability to stay in one place with somebody who is injured and bring them water and food.

Like you may not see that as a miraculous medical technology, but it's a pretty big medical [00:10:00] technology to somebody who's just undergone a very difficult pregnancy. Can they rest for two weeks in one location?

And, and that is, it appears to be what led to the reduction here. Interesting, right?

Simone Collins: That is fascinating.

Malcolm Collins: Any thoughts before I go further in any of this?

Simone Collins: No, I want to hear more.

Malcolm Collins: Now we're getting into some really spicy stuff. Bipolar disorder. So, bipolar disorder, you see, go down a ton in the early agricultural period. It just continued to go down until modern times. Was this accelerating?

Yeah,

Simone Collins: what's going on? Why, why would there be more bipolar people in the

Speaker 3: past? I'm assuming like manic periods

Simone Collins: are really good for food storage. I'm pulling here

Malcolm Collins: I'm assuming the risky decision making led to higher amounts of pregnancy. Or, or,

Simone Collins: or because, you know, maybe there were more expendable people in the population.

At least some of them were going to make risky bets that really paid off high risk high [00:11:00] reward.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So that could be it. Well, I mean, a high risk is running away with somebody starting a new tribe, having way too many kids, you know, all of those things may have been rewarded historically. Now, it also might be tied to bipolar's correlation to schizophrenia.

So you can also, which

Simone Collins: also went down over time. That's so interesting, but I see that more as like, Oh, Maybe schizophrenic people in the past had more of a role in society because they were seen as spiritual leaders. They heard voices. They saw things. No, I think that's

Malcolm Collins: absolutely what we're seeing here is historically speaking, schizophrenic people were spiritual leaders.

And the currently schizophrenic, there's just like almost no advantage right now. I think having a ton of schizophrenia. Maybe a better ability to read other people. If you have like pro drama levels of it, i. e. pro drama levels of the genetic precursors. Whereas the opposite of schizophrenia, you can see our autism versus schizophrenia, what actually causes this video where I go into as somebody who studied these spaces as a scientist, as a [00:12:00] neuroscientist, somebody got so mad about that video when I argued that they're essentially opposites that they're like, you need to take this down, this narrative, this malpractice.

This is. But anyway, the that particular video we, we argue that these things are genetically, like, very distant from each other and, and might actually be opposites in, in like a really high theory of mind and a very low theory of mind. Now I have a different understanding of autism, which is autism.

Is partially a low theory of mind, but it's mostly caused by genetic by neural density in certain regions Which we'll do a separate episode on When one of our fans sends us I told him to email us the piece that he did on this because it was really good But I just didn't put up my notes because it's like he's gonna email it to us.

Anyway, But it causes hypersensitization really easily. So if you're in any sort of environment where you have a lot of stimuli, you're gonna do very badly and you're gonna need to separate yourself from that. And you're not going to fully process everything, but you're able to process narrow bands of stimuli much [00:13:00] better and longer and with less burnout.

And that this is hyper optimized for the online world. To the extent where like, again, my wife is diagnosed autistic. My kids are diagnosed autistic. I will say, I think a few things are, are called autism right now. But I think that one of the things we call autism, whatever the thing is that you have and Elon has, and a lot of other like really successful people have is like the most optimized iteration.

Of the human condition right now for the online environment and the the work at home environment that that's created and I think when we joke about like at the prenatal convention and really disproportionate of autistic people like are just going to replace other people. I don't know, but I could see that happening with schizophrenics being less and less.

Useful in our current population and we can see the downsides to this. You know, I've pointed out where I would point out Simone on like one side of like the extreme autism spectrum and I might be in the [00:14:00] middle. If you go to the side of me on the schizophrenia spectrum you're going to get like a Ruby art type character who I really, really, really respect as an intellectual, but I think we can see the negative consequences, which can come from having Like basically telling your AI to creativity max every decision they're making.

It's going to lead to some interesting ideas you hadn't thought of, but it's going to also lead to some very poor decisions occasionally. Which shows why that's selected against in modern times.

And I note here that I don't even see what happened with him. It's that big of a deal. , I mean, first you've got to remember Ruby ARDS, like 23. He's basically a kid. Like imagine if every. Bad Iowasca trip. You ever took it? 23. , was videotaped for the entire internet to see. With a lot of this is just like, oh, we caught a kid doing kid.

Like things like somebody like., Pearl Pearl Davis, right. Like Pearl Davis is a kid. Okay. She, [00:15:00] she makes the types of mistakes that kids make when they're exploring the boundaries of what's normal. , I'd actually say that I'm actually disconcerted by the young influencers who don't make these kinds of mistakes, like Brett Cooper.

Like it's weird that Brent Cooper never accidentally pushes things too far , So in a way I find this stuff. Humanizing to the young influencers who make the types of mistakes I would have made. If I had this level of nowhere notoriety at their age.

In fact, I'd go farther and find it shocking that he hasn't gotten involved in more scandals. I just ask you to think if you were 23 and had half a million people watching, like almost every video that you're uploading.

Why would you not push it too hard and flirting with some of your fans? Would you not? You know, Is there no boundary that you would Crow. How is this the only time he's really fucked up. And over across the boundary.

How is the only boundary that he's crossed the very boundary. that [00:16:00] people show up to his credit, his show for which is drawing insane connections between things and out there ideas.

I mean, that's what you signed up for. If you're following him.

Simone Collins: But I think the greater replacement theory has a lot more weight than other people might want to feel comfortable, might feel comfortable admitting. With

Malcolm Collins: Autists replacing? Yeah, I mean, it's just hyper optimized if you're in any sort of age group cast within today's space.

Well, I just, I love

Simone Collins: this idea, too, of having a lot of kids being a lot of Autists new special interests. I am here for that.

Malcolm Collins: Well, here's one that you're going to find really interesting. Is walking pace.

Simone Collins: Yes! Why would Why would we, why would we start walking faster? I mean, I guess this, this, I would assume there

Malcolm Collins: is no point to energy conservation in an industrialized society and little point to energy conservation in a society once you have agriculture.

Simone Collins: Okay, so this is about energy conservation that makes a lot more [00:17:00] sense.

Malcolm Collins: And you can see like me, I'm hyper on walking speed, like just everything. I remember thinking as a kid, like, why don't people run everywhere? And I, and I did that for a long time. Just whenever I have to go places that I always run, cause I'd be like, why wouldn't you run?

It's faster. It's healthy. You know, and you have to go between two locations, just run. And

Simone Collins: your family constantly haranguing you about the fact that you're constantly like twitching and, you know. Fidgeting and that ultimately

Malcolm Collins: Burning calories Burning calories, yeah,

Simone Collins: yeah

Malcolm Collins: Now, this next one is one of the most controversial from this, but I found it really interesting, is Intelligence You can see a huge spike of intelligence post agriculture.

This, I just

Simone Collins: feel like, is humans optimizing more. I mean, I would expect, on average, for humans to broadly get more fit over time because you have more time to select for stuff that is more competitive. And intelligence seems to be one of those things that is broadly more competitive. Is that what you think?

[00:18:00] Do you have something else in mind? Well, no,

Malcolm Collins: it's about calorie conservation. Thank you. Again, intelligence is actually really calorie heavy. And so once you have the calories to begin optimizing on intelligence, and I also think intelligence is more useful to, you know, if you're a hunter gatherer people, you just have to be good at catching the prey, right.

You know, and spending less calories than your neighbor and calorie conservation is really important to hunter gatherers in a way that I do not think that people really think through just how, You know, you don't get the game that week. You may eat once a week. You know, at times you may eat once a month at times, right?

Like, you need to be able to be that snake if you want to survive, especially in the winter when you don't have full food preservation methods and stuff like that. So it made sense to really be restrictive on this stuff where as soon as we became sedentary and farming. Intelligence allowed you to, for example, in business interactions in local politics, you know, begin interacting in these large [00:19:00] groups to outcompete your rivals.

And here I note that what does this mean about groups? That didn't develop farming.

I'm sorry. I didn't ask that question. I'm just saying if there were any groups, what conclusions could we draw from Europeans before they developed farming, which is controversial,

Simone Collins: but I guess 1 1 theme that you're putting out here that I didn't think was going to be the theme was basically What effect does the presence of agriculture or civilization in general have on our genetics?

And it seems to be more about energy conservation and where we store our energy, and less about a bunch of other factors that I would generally expect. Like, if you'd ask me to make predictions around the trends that we're showing

I would expect to see, okay, in general, people are getting smarter and more healthy and more fit. And instead, it is more like humans are adapting to their [00:20:00] environment. And they are living now in an environment that has exogenous food storage. An environment where they don't need to conserve energy as much and they have to compete on other factors.

And that is really interesting because we can start asking questions about, you know, What our future environment is going to put in terms of selective pressures on us and how we're going to change in the future because of that.

Malcolm Collins: Yes. Now the next one very spicy as well as household income. So this is what's correlated.

So these are the genetic correlates to household income within a 24th century environment. Obviously we don't know if these had the same correlation to whatever the equivalent of household income would have been, Okay. 6, 000, 10, 000 years ago. Well, actually I think we can see by this, and we do know, we do know that they were less correlated with this.

They were less correlated with genetic success historically because they began to become selected for more and more recently. And what's [00:21:00] really interesting here is you see basically after the fall of Rome, do you see the big dip in this? So after the fall of Rome, they began to have genetic selection for whatever the inverse Of of yeah,

Simone Collins: and you see that should have been Kierkegaard's research as well when they were looking, wasn't it Kierkegaard or was it someone else when they're looking at polygenic risk scores adjacent to educational attainment and found that around the fall of Rome.

That dropped so that this this is showing up in other people's research as well You

Malcolm Collins: can sort of genetically exhaust a population and create an environment Why the fall of rome matters is because there's a lot of analogs to the fall of rome and the genetic effects that may have been had at the peak of Roman civilization in our current civilization of the, you know, the wealthy or elite cast having very, very few kids because they can just indulge in the pleasures of this world instead of focusing on the next [00:22:00] generation or society or any sort of true moral good.

You'll also notice a drop in walking pace after the fall of the Roman Empire. Hold on, I want to look, did we get a drop in whiteness? No. Didn't affect pigmentation. Interesting. Now where the fall of the Roman empire was really big in its effects. Is the genetic correlates to being a current smoker?

Simone Collins: Yeah, this just seems out of left field. Why were they looking at this? I mean is does it have to do oral fixations that people have or the need for stimulation? I imagine

Malcolm Collins: it's, it's, it's addiction to specific pathways. My family, for example, has a lot of addictive tendencies, but not to smoking.

Naltrexone does not work on smoking. It's a unique addictive pathway. Something about this pathway was very advantageous in times of difficulty, you see it shooting up after the fall of the Roman empire and you see it shooting up, you know, When some groups were beginning to develop agriculture, but before they all had which is really interesting pattern here I'd also note that with schizophrenia.

We [00:23:00] also see a big jump in the schizophrenia genes was the fall of the roman empire Which is interesting. Yeah Super soft religion

Simone Collins: to your point, right?

Malcolm Collins: Sorry. I realized this requires some context, so super soft religion. What she's talking about here. Is in the pregnant described to crafting religion. We described religions existing on a spectrum from hard to soft, where a hard religion is, , you know, have the strict dress code, maybe even have the different language associated with.

It has a very large differentiators from the rest of society and a lot of very strict rules. Whereas softer religions, , would be something like.

Unitarian universalism would be a great example of it's soft religion or reformed Judaism would be a soft religion

now a super soft religion is a very specific religion. So super soft is what we argue happens when you drain all of the religion out of a pool, and you basically are looking at the pre evolved religious instincts in humans where you'll get, , Fetish worship. And by this, I don't mean like [00:24:00] sexual fetishes.

I mean like, , figures that you assigned spiritual value to you begin to categorize people, , very similar to a.

Star sign, stuff like that. , you begin to, basically.

Modern Wiccan ism is very similar to a super soft religion. , but these will reappear whenever you drain the built up religious. Foundation of a region and look at. What's underneath that ocean. , and we saw a period of flourishing, super soft religions.

After the collapse of the Roman empire.

And as I suppose, should be obvious. People will assume if somebody's seeing visions and they're of a super soft religion, that that person has access to some sort of extra degree of truth that other people do not have access to. And so they will. , elevate people with schizophrenia or schizophrenia related. Symptoms. , to higher social status, allowing these genes to be. , adaptive rather than maladaptive we're as we are currently, I [00:25:00] think civilizationally moving into a period where.

People who have fallen for super soft religions are having virtually no children.

And the only people who can really motivate reproduction are those who are incredibly mentally disciplined. And ignore random errant mental signals of the type that are associated with schizophrenia.

Yeah, and now to the final one here, years of schooling or educational attainment. So you see here, it goes up a ton with the agricultural revolution, then continues to go up and then you get the collapse in it as the fall of the Roman Empire and then you get it rising again in modern times.

Now note, all of these things, intelligence, years of schooling, all this, are declining in their genetic pool. Like, all of these markers right here, we can look at how many people these kids, these people are having, and they're declining dramatically. If you look at our video of, is an idiocracy possible?

We're likely looking at a one standard deviation decline in things like IQ within just the next 75 years. So, [00:26:00] dramatic, dramatic, dramatic. But historically, they've been going up and there was this narrative, which I, you know, I kind of believed it. I was like, is it true that people become sort of civilized and the civilizing forces tame them and leave them impotent?

Right? Because historically, whenever people like blew up onto the stage, they typically came from a population that civilization hadn't overly molested yet. You know, whether they are the Arabs with the Islamic Revolution or the Vikings or the, well, the original Romans or the like people are like what, the Romans, you've read the Greek myths and the you know, the myths from the Middle East and the myths from the Nobody was talking about what was going on in friggin Rome back then.

It was like a total barbarian backwater place. Or the Macedonians coming out of a backwater place it seemed [00:27:00] to me that genetic fitness was hampered by civilization, which the Rome timeline here could be arguing. But I actually noticed that a lot of the hits from Rome, well, they seem to start , A bit before 2, 000 years ago, so a bit before the time of Christ.

So yeah, it does seem that like the ultra bureaucracy of Rome ended up with a collapse of a lot of the, a lot of dysgenic collapse here. And I love when people are being like, Oh, that's so arrogant to say it's dysgenic because it was eugenic within that particular context. And I can mean, well, yeah, but like it's obviously dysgenic in a broader, plural context.

Like, you know, you can be like, Oh, when the bunnies have no natural parasites, it is eugenic to become big, good culture, cancerous blobs that have no, you know, it's like, yeah, but the moment a predator comes in, they're all going to go extinct that, that, that adapted those genes. So thoughts, Simone,

Simone Collins: I'm a little concerned about where [00:28:00] we are in society now, then, I mean, if we're talking about generally not healthy things, being more likely to be prevalent in future populations.

But where we are with science means that we can intervene with anything from germline, germline editing to PGTP. So maybe I'm not so worried. I don't know, but that is interesting.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I mean, hopefully, hopefully we can fix this before the you know, Civilization falls off a cliff here. Well, yeah, I

Simone Collins: mean, theoretically, relatively soon, we can just edit out baldness.

We can just edit out predisposition to be unhealthily overweight, predisposition to be addicted to smoking, predisposition to have damaging low levels of intelligence, etc.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Oh, by the way, an interesting one here is over 6, 000 years, blood type B also exploded in commonality. [00:29:00]

Simone Collins: Yeah, what's going on there?

It's not like anyone was doing blood.

Malcolm Collins: It has to do with something, probably some disease risk. But here's a fun one. You're talking about editing genes. That's one of the things that people are like, what sort of things is a heart EA foundation?

If I was going to. donate money to this foundation. What sort of things are you investing in? One of the things that we have already funded is a project designed to edit adult human DNA. So whether you want to invest in that project, you can let us know and we can connect you as a team. Or and I think it's one of the more competent efforts right now.

There's a number of efforts and we're aware of them and we invested in this one because we think it's one of the most likely to be promising. I think we might be actually invested in two companies doing that. With the nonprofit, but point being is we are trying to make this stuff a reality, not just talking about making it a reality and hardy a.

org, by the way.

Simone Collins: Yeah, that stuff matters. We have to rise above. It, it is clear, especially [00:30:00] given how I think plausible your theories are around these different tendencies and traits arising mostly reactively. In response to our environments that again, like you say, in the practice guide to crafting religion and other books of ours that that evolution is a lazy or dumb programmer.

Like, it's, it's not, it's going to reuse stuff. It's not going to be very efficient or intentional about anything. We should be intentional about it. We should be thinking thoughtfully. What, not what will the future shape us to be, but what do we want to be? What should we be? And in the discussion of things like germline editing and designer babies and polygenic risk score selection, there's a lot of discussion about.

Oh, won't it be terrible if people select for this or that? And people make a lot of assumptions around what we, what people will select for, but I don't think people are having a lot of very productive [00:31:00] conversations about what people should or likely will be selecting for their concerns. People are going to select for only super intelligence and height and aggression and sort of, specials and Scott Westerfield's ugly series, just these like terrifying, Strong, sociopathic, superhuman, you

Malcolm Collins: know, obviously

Simone Collins: that's our thing, but like Jonathan anomaly has found in his research, people are primarily selecting for kindness, pro sociality, and I mean, intelligence certainly correlates with that, but that's also because, you know, intelligence correlates with higher health, whether that be.

Because it's tied to those things just in general, or because also intelligent people are more conscientious, more likely to go, you know, brush their teeth every night and go to doctor checkups and try to eat healthy food. So, there's actually a research that I found last night that I was reviewing that was going over basically that [00:32:00] rationality and intelligence are extremely correlated.

If someone behaves rationally, it is, it is probably because they are. Very intelligent. So yeah, I mean, people should be selecting for intelligence, but people are also going to be selecting for kindness and pro sociality and all these things in the end are connected. So if someone just wanted someone who was super kind, they were probably going to end up with one of their more intelligent or a more intelligent human anyway.

It's just kind of going to work out that way. But yeah, I, I don't know. I, I would rather We take ownership of what we want, rather than reactively become things, just because, you know, humanity is next to a refrigerator now. Or now that humanity has smart phones. And this is a

Malcolm Collins: great thing about them being like, well, that's not really eugenic, whatever wins in the moment is eugenic.

And I, what I would say is, okay. Your population can take that hypothesis and our population will take the hypothesis that eventually these things will be eugenic and We'll see in a [00:33:00] thousand years which population ends up going to the stars and which one returns to the woods, you know, like it's, it doesn't take a big, you don't have to be big brain to see where this is heading longterm.

If you take this incredibly lackadaisical approach to something that I think that we really, now that we have the capacity to have a responsibility to take responsibility for.

Simone Collins: Hmm. Yeah. Rise above people. Rise above. We don't have to be animals.

Malcolm Collins: Well, anyway, I love you did ask Simone what are we doing for dinner tonight?

Simone Collins: I was going to sauté some onions and add some of the slow cooker meat that we have sort of saved. Add that to coconut rice

Speaker 4: and can you cook that with coconut milk and panang?

Simone Collins: I can

Speaker 4: remember to mix up the panang in the coconut

Simone Collins: milk before I add anything else. I can do that. Do you still want sautéed [00:34:00] onion?

And if so, do you want I don't want the

Malcolm Collins: onion that sautéed. I'm okay if the onion adds a bit of crunch. Like, onion is not something you need to go overboard about making sure it's cooked. If you're doing caramelized onion, yes, but nobody, and this is a big, the conspiracy of caramelized onion. It's something I got on about before, but people need to know it takes 30 minutes to caramelize.

Any recipe that tells you you're caramelizing an onion before 30 minutes is just creating a soggy onion.

Simone Collins: Well, anyway, okay. So you want lightly sauteed onion added to the, the meat and coconut milk after the penang is fully dissolved in it. Do you want ribbons or confetti?

Malcolm Collins: For onion, ribbon, confetti.

Simone Collins: All right. Well then I will get that started. I love you so much. And we'll see.

As a reminder, everyone, please don't miss NatalCon this March in Austin. It is going to be amazing. We're going to be there. [00:35:00] A lot of really incredible, cool people are going to be there. And you can get a 10 percent discount on your registration by entering the word Collins at checkout.

Malcolm Collins: All right.

Anything you learned today, Simone?

Simone Collins: Yeah, actually.

I thought this was really interesting because it's this is relevant from the perspective of where culture and religion has an impact that actually matters.

So there's a pre print

I don't know how they actually pronounce their name, but it's titled the freedom to believe in free will evidence from an adoption study against the first law of behavioral genetics. So, as you and I know, and most of our listeners know most. Most of the things that we do and believe end up being really heritable, largely genetic.

Yeah, somebody thought we were blank

Malcolm Collins: slatists in, in the, in the Discord today. That's

Simone Collins: wild. That is, yeah.

Malcolm Collins: the truth possible.

Simone Collins: We acknowledge that we are definitely not blank slatists and most research has found, most of the stuff people end up doing is really heritable when you, [00:36:00] when you separate twins at birth.

Oh, I

Malcolm Collins: understand what he meant by that.

Simone Collins: Oh yeah?

Malcolm Collins: Well, yeah, so I think that some HBD bros are so obsessed with ethnic non blank slatism that they are confused when somebody isn't an ethnocentrist non blank slatus.

Simone Collins: That's interesting.

Malcolm Collins: Anyway,

Simone Collins: what this research found was one of the few things that is not genetically determined is at very best, very, very weakly correlated to our genetics is belief in free will.

So the context and culture in which you're raised, the religion in which you're raised is going to affect your belief in free will and predetermination. And I think something you can extrapolate from that too is I think to a certain extent that will affect your internal or external locus of control.

And it means that religion and culture really does matter from that perspective because you're the way that you contextualize and believe in and think about things like [00:37:00] free will, predetermination. And your role in the larger universe really does affect your action,

Malcolm Collins: regardless of other things you could have Calvinist cultural clusters, which it believes in predestination.

And some people see that as invalidating free. Well, is you could have cultural clusters where individuals who lived alongside these communities, and they often lived alongside different Christian factions. Would disproportionately convert to the community where people who didn't have this genetic cluster would disproportionately convert out, which can lead to a genetic vortex really quickly, really, really strengthening of you like this, which I think is why some people like us find it so easy to hold views around predestination where other people who haven't been through this genetic washing machine around this find it to be so absolutely perplexing and difficult to engage with the concept.

Simone Collins: Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: very interesting. Well, so here's what he said. I thought it was interesting So one of our most hated episodes ever we did today. Did you get to the comments by the way?

Simone Collins: No, that's gonna have to be tonight thing. It turns out. [00:38:00]

Malcolm Collins: Okay. Well, anyway, was the h1bp set episode and I did not expect I thought like people knew our stance on this like i've been like we've signaled this many times But what i've come to realize is the real reason why this is so, I was like, our audience is like the tech, right?

You know, like it's, it's not like, you know, and that video only had an 80 percent upvote ratio, which is very low for us. We almost never break below 90%.

Speaker 3: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And a normal is like 97 to 95 percent upvote. So, and we do controversial topics too, you know? So, this was like, why, why? And then I got it.

I was like, Oh my God. When I was talking with about this. H 1B visas seem like the smartest thing ever if you are a tech right elite, i. e. you are an entrepreneur or you are a VC or you run a company, but if you are a tech right rank and file, you are, it's literally about your job and your income.

Yeah. But because [00:39:00] the tech right sorts it's income. Sort of like who you're going to hear from in the movement based on their proven competency at building and running companies The ones with the pro h1bd visa are the ones you're going to hear from where all of the masses like on twitter Or among our fans are going to be the ones who are predominantly affected by this

Simone Collins: That's rich because what i've seen a lot of people on twitter talking about is Well that we also need low skilled workers, too You who's gonna, you know, I can't do my job as a tech worker.

If there isn't some nanny to watch my kids and I need an immigrant to do that work and they're just, they just want someone else's job to be taken. It seems like they, I don't know. I honestly think that when it comes to a lot of the domestic work or whatever, like unwanted jobs that people want immigrants to complete.

I'm more of the mind that either you should be doing that yourself or you should be doing that [00:40:00] domestically. Leaving that for low skilled people in the United States, because we've taken all those jobs away. And I'm, I'm much more of the mind that we really need to bring in high skilled, high tax paying.

Malcolm Collins: I don't know. I'm actually moderating my views on this in response to the comments, because they're like, look, you've got to look into how many of these people are lowering the price that you would pay to American coders. But here I wonder if that's really true, you know, like large bureaucratic forms, it probably is.

Whereas like for us, like we hire our coding teams in Africa, you know, like, I'm like, why not just outsource entirely? Right. You know, their living costs are in Africa. But the thing I was going to ask you or no, the other thing you mentioned, which I thought was really. Big for me is he was pointing out and like I didn't realize this but it's totally true is it was in like the center of the trans community they've already accepted that this is mostly a social phenomenon [00:41:00] and This happened with the fight between the two cutes and the true scums and we'll do a separate episode on this but the true scums were the ones who wanted to medicalize transness and the two cutes were the ones who say no anyone who Chooses to be trans can choose to be trans.

Simone Collins: Okay.

Malcolm Collins: And I was like Oh, that's really true. I do remember that fight, but I hadn't contextualized it as them accepting that this is a social phenomenon and then, or I realized a, and he was pointing out to me, he goes, yeah, but also what this creates is a phenomenon in which the two cutes who ended up winning You, you can't have something like transness where you can't actively talk about targeting someone for recruitment, like this idea of an egg and then potentially recruiting them.

And you're not doing that. You know, if you, if you believe that this is all biological, you're not going to target people for recruitment in the same way, because you're going to think, well, they'll, they'll come to it at You know, but if you're, you're going to go out there and basically hunt for people and you can, you can see this in their internal [00:42:00] message boards, it makes a lot of sense.

And I was like, yeah, actually that's, that's true. That's going to grow much faster at the movement than the iterations that denied that like, you can really convert anyone who's socially isolated and autistic. If you try hard enough.

Simone Collins: Hmm. Oh, that's fascinating. Right. Okay. I like our talks.

Malcolm Collins: Right.

Speaker: All right, let's go. Okay

whoa. What did you make here?

Octavian, what did you make here? This is huge. Oh,

that's your fire exit in case there's a fire?