Pseudoscience Psucks

Today on the show we’re talking PSEUDOSCIENCE! Did you know that sometimes people claim things are scientific, but whoops, they’re not? We’ll be looking at some scammers, some flim-flammers, some people who claim things are scientific but they’re maaaaaaybe not really. With special guests Katy Stoll and Cody Johnston.

FOOTNOTES:

1. Study on redness and association with sex

2. Snub nosed monkeys

3. Bearded vulture makeup

4. Baboon utopian society

5. Testosterone not correlated with attractiveness

6. Races do not differ genetically

7. LET'S GIVE BIRDS TEETH

8. Whoops, sometimes snakes have legs

9. Horses with extra hooves

10. Neural crest cells are what make dogs so cute

11. Pseudoscience whistleblowers

12. Hey, guess what? Physiognomy is still dumb!

13. Darwin almost thwarted by pseudoscience

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
Welcome to Creature future production of I Heart Radio. Today,
on the show, we're talking pseudo science. Did you know
that sometimes people claim things are scientific, but well they're not.
We'll be looking at some scammers, some flim flammers, some
people who claim things are scientific but maybe they're not.
Not really so, science can sometimes be misused, especially evolutionary

(00:28):
biology and psychology, which is often used as a way
to justify certain moral or ideological stances. First, I would
caution against using evolution as a moral compass. After all,
if you listen to this podcast, you know that evolution
is one twisted sister full of murder, baby eaten and cannibalism,
body snatching and so on. Pop evolutionary psychology often make

(00:52):
sperious claims like women like jewelry because we picked berries,
and men like cars because of all those saber tooth
cars back in caveman times or whatever. And here's the thing.
Evolution is in a linear, simple process. It's full of
weird twists and turns, bandrels, detours and pit stops that
make tracing back the origins of behavioral tree It's extremely difficult.

(01:13):
It's like trying to thread a needle through the roots
of a tree, or if you'll allow another comparison, trying
to thread a male duck's corkscrew weener through a female
duck's labyrinthian vagina. The point is evolution is like a
duck's puzzle genitalia, twisted, freaky and weirdly beautiful. But just
because it's difficult to trace back human behavior to our
evolutionary roots doesn't stop a lot of people from trying.

(01:36):
And some of those people are well kind of bad
at it. They cherry picked from the evolutionary tree to
justify their cultural preferences, often with hateful consequences. Joining me
to talk about some of the pseudo scientific flim flammery
is Katie Stolen, Cody Johnston, hosts of the podcast Even
More News, producers of Some More News, and also they've
got some kind of new podcast. That's right. First you're

(02:00):
ever here. We're with my Heart Radio and other hosts
on their shows, Robert of Behind the Bastard's Fame. It
will be premiering. Uh, it's going to be premiering before
you hear this episode. Probably it's available now for you
to download listen. Yeah, we're the hosts of Fan Favorites

(02:20):
worst You're ever available now in the future, but not
in the future when you hear this in our future,
in our current future, low dude, your current past and
your current future and your current cool. Yeah. So I
chose this topic because I actually feel like we've you guys,
like I've talked to you guys about my frustration with pseudoscience.

(02:42):
I just wanted to take this opportunity to to bunk
a lot of the evolutionary psychology and pseudoscience that seems
to kind of plague or political discourse. Now I love it.
I'm so excited. Um. First of all, uh, you know
a guy named Jordan Peterson, familiar a favorite special boy,

(03:02):
familiar with the Canadian gentleman. Yeah, he's a psychologist and
he makes a lot of claims that aren't really you know,
backed in fact. Kidding, Yeah, Jordan, Jordan Peterson. I thought
it was for bad boy Peterson. Man Peterson. He has
an appeal. I can get it because he kind of

(03:24):
talks like a dad, and he tells you things like
clean your room and stand up straight, and those are
solid advice, and then he gets into like weird like
gender and race sign He's got very specific views that
go back to his like whole his whole world view
is very interesting and where it comes from and his
his upbringing, but like he really tries to push it

(03:47):
based off of like random cherry pick fact. But you
know when he talks about his all meat diet that
I think we can accept as being based in science, right,
that that's good for it even water for your depression,
only if you're eating We actually talked about this on
last podcast. You can only have an all meat diet

(04:08):
if you like to eat raw meat and raw fish
and uh, if you basically follow a very strict diet
based on some Inuit cultures where you you got to
eat like raw organs to get vitamin c um and
they don't even eat it like the entire year there,

(04:28):
it's like sixty percent of the year. Is the does
seem like something he would be a proponent of though,
back get back to like you kill the animals. It's
just that can you imagine him killing the animal? There's
no evidence to suggest this is healthier, just that we
can do it. It's to do it, yeah, And I
don't recommend it because, as I talked about last time,

(04:52):
if you do it wrong, you can die of malnutrition, like,
if you eat only rabbits, you can starve to death
because rabbits do not contain enough nutrients to sustain you. So, uh,
you can go very wrong. So his not a nutritionist
daughter is wrong about this meat and water die. Yeah,
I'm not sure if it's completely right that you should.

(05:15):
I'm not familiar with what the meat and water diet is. Yeah,
I'm not sure. I don't even think fishes included, do
they are they supposed to cook the meat just beef,
just beef and water, and I don't think that's Yeah,
I'm not I mean, look, I want a nutritionist, but
I don't think he can or should. I think we

(05:35):
can rule it out as as being not true. Um So,
one thing I wanted to talk about, which I think
is kind of his more one of his more viral
moments is his opinion on lipstick in the workplace. What
is it? So here's here's a quote. This is from
an interview. So I've cut out some of the like
back and forth like answer questions, but this is a

(05:58):
this is what he says. He says, quote, here's a rule.
How about no makeup in the workplace? Why should you
wear makeup? In the workplace. Isn't that sexually provocative? Why
why do you make your lips red? Here he gets
very confrontational. He's like, why why do you make your
lips red? Because they turn red during sexual arousal. That's
why why do you put rouge on your cheeks? Same reason? Um,

(06:20):
And he's in in the interview, they're discussing sexual harassment,
and Jordan Peterson is saying, can men and women work together?
I don't know. I don't know. I don't know if
they can, doesn't know. We don't know the rules yet, right,
we don't know the rules. In the same in that
same conversation, he also complains about how one of the
rules at his university was to have open door meetings
with students and he will not abide by that rule. So, uh,

(06:44):
we don't know the rules yet. But also we do
and he doesn't like them. Unbelievable. Yeah, No, that that
whole quote makes me so angry when I hear it. Also,
he also thinks that a woman who wears makeup in
the workplace who doesn't want to be sexually harassed is
being hypocritical. Okay, cool, So obviously, uh, this is bad

(07:05):
because of moral reasons, so you don't understand what you're
really saying. Well, And it's funny because, like an interviewer
asked him again, like she's wearing red lipstick, and she
asked him what it means, and he said, you're enhancing
signals of youth and fecundity, which is a very normal
way to talk about things. Dislike that way. So, but

(07:28):
I often hear the refrain reels before fields. Facts, don't
care about your feelings, that kind of stuff. So let's
let's look at the facts, you guys, let's look at those.
I just like, what about like black lipstick? What about
like colors that he's not referring to? What about saying
you bring that up? Code? I may in fact have
something about that in just a minute here if you

(07:51):
just wait this Cody. Um. So, studies do indicate that
women with redder lips are concern that are more attractive. Uh.
It's been conjectured that this is due to sexual arousal
and health. But there's an obvious problem with this conclusion.
And when they do a study like this, it's like
they say, oh, maybe it's because of this, They don't

(08:14):
really know, they can't prove that. But One of the
issues is that men and women's when we're you know,
doing the sex, both of our lips get read. It's
not like only women. Um, and their face also, their
faces also get flushed. You know what else. People's faces
get flushed when you're walking, when you're embarrassed, when you're

(08:34):
excited about something. I have attractive embarrassed people. I like
to humiliate people. It's very attractive when someone's really awkward
social and going like a Jesus. Uh, yeah, I warn't
make up because I want to look nervous, right. Um.
And in fact, lipstick has been worn by men throughout history,
So this idea that it is strictly a gender thing

(08:56):
is uh not necessarily true. Eloys were dresses. That is true.
But it also this idea that redness is associated with sex,
that itself is not necessarily true. So there's a study
that examined this and they explored the idea that red
lips are associated with sexual arousal and uh red genitals,

(09:18):
which is interestingly. One of the theories is that, oh,
red lips are supposed to look like a red Volvo.
I guess well, I'm always but yeah, I'm always putting
lipstick on my vagina. Yeah yeah, I mean, you know,
gotta gotta get that vagina on fleek. I guess. Um. So,
they found that in heterosexual men, and I'm sorry, a

(09:40):
lot of these studies are heteronormative, the redder vulvas were
less attractive. Uh So, they had like these photoshopped images
of women's volvas and they made them redder or less red,
and the ones that were redder were deemed less attractive.
I guess because they don't want, like Rudolph the rain
your vaginas. I don't know. Um so, uh the study,

(10:06):
so the researchers said, quote, we found in fact that
men showed a strong aversion to red or female genitals.
Is not a sentence I normally like to say. Anyways,
the researchers continue, quote this, this study shows that the
myth of red is a proxy for female genital color
should be abandoned. This view must be replaced by careful
examination of precisely what the color red in clothing, makeup,

(10:28):
and other contexts is actually signaling to men. What it
isn't signaling is female sexual arousal. Um So, you know
that's not to say that it I don't necessarily think
that that study proves and negative, like it doesn't mean
that there can't be any context. So much red lips
uh signal sexuality, but to just reduce it to it's like, oh,

(10:50):
you know we see flushed bodies as more attractive because
it's sexual. It's making that connection is very tenuous. Yeah,
I mean you could say people wear that rugie lips
or pink lips for a youthful blush something like that.
But like you said earlier, like yeah, what about the
blue lipstick the other things, Like it's about so much

(11:11):
more than that, right, And so speaking of which, throughout history,
both men and women have worn lipstick for a variety
of cultural reasons. So ancient Sumerian men and women wore
lipstick made of crushed gemstones, which sounds hard to that
doesn't painful, but you know that's true. Um. Ancient Egyptians

(11:32):
used red lipsticks to show status rather than gender demarcation.
Red lips was traditional, but orange, magenta, and blue black
were also popular colors to show your social status. There
is more than one color exactly. During the Roman Empire,
lipstick was also an indicator of social status and not gender.
Purple lip color became popular amongst women. In addition to

(11:54):
the kind of more traditional red. In Germany and Britain
during the Dark Ages, orange lipstick was all the rage,
so that was the most popular lip color. In England.
During the Middle Ages, religion made red lipstick fall out
of style as it was unnatural and going against God's plan. Instead,
women would wear rose tints as that was associated with purity.

(12:16):
And during Edward the Fourth Sign in England, both men
and women of the court would wear lip color. And
so as you can see throughout human history, first of all,
it's not strictly associated with gender. It's also not just
red lipstick. Yeah, there's so many variables. This is why
he's he and people like him are so interesting to

(12:37):
me because they skip everything. They take this this little
bit that they assume about evolution, and they look at
the modern day and what they don't like about it,
and they skip all culture and all of history and
make their conclusion because they trust that most people aren't
going to go and look back at history and right,
and even when you look at the Animal Kingdom and

(12:59):
you look at they're both the use of makeup, which
is very rare, but when it happens, it's quite funny uh,
and just the presence of red lips. Uh. It's more
complex than just being like a sexual indicator. So we've
actually talked about this before, but I think it's a
really important example. It's the uh snub nose monkey. Uh.
Their old world love Old World monkeys who live in China.

(13:23):
They're really weird looking because they lack nasal bones, so
they kind of have a no nose look. And then
they have really juicy lips uh. And the males are
the ones that have the jiciest lips. That what they're uh,
they live at really high alstitudes, so that's why they
don't have a nose because their nose would get frost

(13:44):
bite otherwise, like they're just like, well we don't need
a nose then, so they're plump red lips maybe a
sexual selection thing to show uh, sexual availability. But the
older the male, the redder the lips. So first of all,
it's not youth, it's not showing youth and virility. It
is thought to also be a dominance signal, so like

(14:04):
I'm older, I'm more dominant, and so that right exactly right,
And again like these are we're not these aren't are
like direct ancestors. So any conclusions you draw from these
monkeys is specific to these monkeys. You can't necessarily apply
to human So many things from just like they pick
any animals like that about that animal, this suits whatever

(14:28):
I want to say, right, you know? And I mean, like,
so take an animal that's very distant from us, like birds.
So bearded vultures will use iron rich soil to give
them a blush basically a reddish hue. And we talked
about this the last time I was on here. I think, yeah, yeah,
that makes sense. It'll enhance the red hue, and the older,

(14:49):
the older the vulture. As you may remember, like the
more reddit is. And so it's not just to attract mates,
although that's part of it. It's also to signal their dominance,
so their social status, which I think is interesting because
throughout human history it's been a signal of social status. Obviously,
we didn't evolve from vultures, we didn't evolve from birds.

(15:10):
But would you say that the desire, the instinct to
paint yourself, uh, to decorate yourself in certain ways as
a form of attraction, is a form of like expression
is very natural amongst many species. It could be I mean,
it's something that obviously doesn't occur in a lot of species,
like most animals don't necessarily decorate themselves. But you can

(15:32):
also make the argument that birds who are attractive, which
are typically the males, the females are typically more drab,
a little browner, and blend in with their environment more
so that they don't stick out, and it's a protective technique.
But the males are really beautiful and vibrate many different colors,
and the idea there's this more it used to be like, oh,

(15:55):
this is just an honest indicator of their fitness, but um,
more recently the ideas that like, maybe it's just the
females thought it was pretty and liked it, and it's this, Um,
it's a sexual selection that's for esthetic preference and not
just fitness. So it's not just an honest indicator of fitness,
but it's also they are stimulated by those colors and

(16:16):
they like them, and then they select them, and that's
how you get these crazy birds that in fact, their
plumage can sometimes be have a negative effect on their
overall fitness. So I think this is I mean, this
is one of the problems with looking to evolution for answers,
it's so complicated and you have so many different reasons

(16:37):
for you can have parallel evolution, like a bird putting
blush on, right, or a decorator clab crab decorating itself,
but the decorator crab is doing it to be camouflage.
Like it it'll pick up a little bits from its
environment and put it on. It'll like wear jewelry. If
you give it a pearl necklace, it'll put it on
because it's it just thinks it's part of its environment exactly.

(17:00):
So another problem with looking to evolution for answers is
that culture is a huge influence and it's really difficult
to separate like what's biological and what's cultural evolution, even
in animals. So we've seen this in primates. So savannah
baboons in Kenya are often aggressive bullies. Dominant males will

(17:23):
at tax subordinate males and they'll bully females basically to
get their white way. They'll bully them into submission. And
I think it's often thought that this is like an
innate behavior, it's an instinctive thing that the baboons do,
but there's some evidence to contradict this. So a troop
of Savannah baboon's found themselves suddenly rid of their most
aggressive males. The dominant males had been aggressive enough to

(17:47):
fight their way into a garbage dump and eat all
the spoils, and in a karmic twist, this gave them
bovine tubercular want want did you get? Just the bullies
because they were the only ones that were able to
like fight their way to the garbage dump. Uh, So
they died off. Uh, And now the troop was populated

(18:08):
by females and subordinate males, and they became more peaceful
and pro social. So when they wanted things from each other,
instead of like smacking each other, they would groom each
other and like display affection and kind of just it's
a lot nicer, a lot more more peaceful. And then
this new pacifist culture has lasted over two decades. So

(18:29):
even after most of the original males have died off
and been replaced by new males. Uh, the newcomers are
being taught the pacifist lifestyle by the female. So these uh,
like a lot of animals, these, even though the males
will display like the aggressive males will sort of dominate
maybe um, the females form the core of the troop

(18:50):
because they don't migrate away from their natal homes, and
it's the males that will disperse and migrate around, so
they kind of have the core of the culture. So
so if they enforced this idea of being peaceful and
then new males come even when all the original males
die off and new males are coming around, the females
are creating this culture of being nice, just being chilled,

(19:12):
right exactly. And this even happens in interspecies interactions. So
captive Reese's monkeys, who are typically kind of aggressive, were
raised with peaceful sump tailed monkeys, and they learned to
be more gentle and they, according to the researchers, they
engaged in hip hugging as a form where they like
touch each other's hips and they're like, like, I like you.

(19:34):
That's so intimit and sweet, it's very cute, and other
things not just aggressiveness, but just other kind of cultural things,
like certain groups of chimpanzees learned to like tickle themselves. Uh.
Last time on the podcast, we talked about potato dipping
monkeys monkeys UH in Japan who would dip potatoes in saltwater,
or these were maccaques, and they copied a female macaque

(19:56):
that would dip potatoes and saltwater and eat it. And
then that propagated throughout their whole whole thing. And now
even though all the original monkeys are dead, they still
do that. Um And different groups of primates who use
tools will use different kinds of tools, and it doesn't
really seem to track with like their environment necessarily. It's
just like a preference of some of them will you say,
they're cracking open nuts, some of them will use rocks.

(20:18):
Some of them you will use like sticks and stuff,
And it seems to just depend. It's like learned culturally.
So I think it's we when we think about animals,
we think about their behavior as being the static, unchanging
thing determined by their biology, which is it can be
the fact. It's often the fact that animals are born
with some kind of instinct. But I think in them,

(20:39):
especially the more intelligent animals, you see that influence of uh,
if not culture, at least learning certain habits from their cohort. Yeah, yeah,
shared behavior transferring over there. There's also like there's a
thing I think that it also happens where It's it's
assumption that anything that has come about from evolution means

(21:00):
it's automatically good, as opposed to just well that's how
it happened, right exactly, Because I mean, you know, if
you I hope that the people who listen to this
regularly have this sense of like, how screwed up because
you know, just eating babies, uh, you know, killing each other, cannibalism.

(21:21):
Nothing that would track to like morality, right, unless you
think that stepfathers should kill all the existing children like
lions do. I don't know about that. I'll have to
think about it, but I gotta gotta think about it.
I mean, that sounds dicey to me, but it's it's questionable,

(21:43):
you know. I mean, but it's like you said, it
really is kind of a It's not a moral compass evolution.
It is what it is. And one of the great
things about being humans is we kind of get to
rise above just like we can change our behavior, can
make value judgments and things like that. That's why I like,
even despite all of this stuff, when I hear that

(22:04):
Peterson argument about lipstick, my reaction is, so what right
even if even if it was true, which like I
explained is probably not true. Yes, there's no, there's not
any definitive evidence that it's true. There's always a chance
that there there could find something feeling that he wants
to be true. But right, even if it is, like, so,

(22:26):
what we can we get to change, like we've seen
throughout history how lipstick use has changed, you know, from
orange to purple, uh to like mean different things we
get to do that. That's it's just there's a there's
a lot of reasons, there's not just one. And we
are evolved people that know how to control our impulses.
People were lipstick literally everywhere. So yeah, that's true. That's

(22:49):
very well stated. Also, like even if that's like, so
if you want to ban lipstick from workplaces, do you
want to ban like shoulder pads and like stuff that,
Like I do actually because of the the kind of
door situations where you're trying to brush past someone in
their their shoulder pad smacks you in the face. I
think that's specific to like your height range, our height

(23:11):
range for people. But yeah, yeah, you can take our lipstick,
but you don't get to wear your shoulder pads. That's
a good compromise. It seems that testosterone pills are flooding
the market. These promised to prevent you from becoming a
quote soy boy, a term for someone with low testosterone
based on the erroneous, unscientific idea that eating soy lowers

(23:34):
your testosterone. The idea is that high testosterone will make
you more manly and attractive, but is this actually true.
Researchers at the biology department of the College of William
and Mary and Williamsburg at least found this not to
be true for heterosexual women. They showed women images of
men's faces that were digitally altered to mimic the variation
of facial differences due to testosterone levels. They found that

(23:57):
while women did perceive the high test doosterone individuals to
be more quote dominant, this had no effect on their
perceived attractiveness. Another study, conducted at the University of Aberte
Dundee in Scotland, took pictures of men and measured their
testosterone levels. Then they had women ripe the men's faces.
They found that there was no link between actual testosterone

(24:19):
levels and perceived attractiveness, masculinity, or health. So maybe you
shouldn't be taking testosterone supplements to try to look more
manly as it could lead the heartbreak. Literally, the FDA
warns that testosterone supplements can cause heart attacks and infertility. God,

(24:40):
so you know, maybe those a is Alex Jones still
talking those codes. Oh yeah, he's got it all. Oh
my god. And the grill on mindset. Yeah yeah, it's uh,
you know. And actually, guys, if you want to be
a girl alike, you're going to have very small genital

(25:11):
Sometimes pseudoscience can have dire consequences. The Bell Curve is
a book that was written by psychologist Richard J. Hernstein
and political scientists Charles Murray. It makes a variety of
claims that have received criticism, such as intelligence being more
heritable than determined by socioeconomic status, and that race is
different intelligence. It's often used in a racist social Darwinist

(25:35):
context to justify inequality by claiming that there are inherent, static,
biologically determined differences and intelligence which determines our quote ranking
in society. Often when a controversial claim such as this
is criticized, critics are accused of putting feelings before facts.
But hey, guys, let's take a look at those facts.
I would love to very exciting. So um, I think

(25:59):
this is one of those uh flashpoint things where it's
like this book has been often used as like, oh,
political correctness gone mad on college campuses because students don't
like for him to come speak and they they there's
a lot of criticism of this book, and it's kind
of held aloft as like oh, well, science should be controversial,
and the problem with this example shouldn't be anything right exactly.

(26:24):
Science should just be uh, you know, scientific. Um. So,
the book has been criticized by scientists for various methodological
issues as well as for their erroneous interpretations of the data.
So Stephen Jay Gould, who was a Harvard evolutionary biologist

(26:44):
and major contributor to the field of evolutionary biology, had
some pretty harsh critique of the book. Uh. He said
that the main argument of the book was based on
four false, unproven assumptions. So first, it's that intelligence must
be reducible to a single number. So like, um that
i Q is the absolute determinant of intelligence. He likens

(27:05):
it to like soil, like the phlevel and soil, or
like the quality of soil or something doesn't. Yeah, it
was like you look at soil and like, oh, that's twelve. Yeah,
well I do, I like, I like my men, like
I like my soil A number. Um. The second assumption
is that intelligence must be capable of rank ordering people

(27:29):
in a linear order. So like, you know, it's just
like this, the more the higher your number, the more
intelligent you are. And there's no like, if you're smarter
than a person, you're just absolutely smarter than them, not
that like, hey, you may be better at math, but
they're better at not getting run over by cars um
or you know, like they're better at looking at like

(27:51):
someone's feeling and going what if I look that up right?
Or even like if you're good at math, you could
be bad at evolutionary biology. So it's not just like
arts for the sciences. It's just various intelligence and very
it's it's a multifaceted thing. Intelligence is not just one thing.
The other assumption is that intelligence must be primarily genetically based,

(28:12):
and then also that intelligence must be essentially immutable, so
it doesn't change. You're born with it, you you die
with it. Basically, as we'll discuss, these assumptions are not
only unproven, but there's actually a scientific evidence that contradicts them. So, uh,
let's see first of all, One of the problems is

(28:32):
that it's so they make the assumption that racial and
gender differences in test scores must be due to genetics
rather than social influences. Um. They claim that when compared
to the influences of socioeconomic status, the biological influence is greater,
but the way they reach this conclusion is extremely flawed. Uh.

(28:55):
First of all, it's almost impossible to control for cultural
influence on is on i Q unless you like, uh,
you know, go with Elon Musk's wet dream and drop
some people off at Mars as babies and then just
have them like grown up in a sterile environment. But
even then they would develop their own culture. And because
we're humans and it's just like so like the culture

(29:17):
that brought them there, right exactly, So you can't. It's
one of the biggest problems with evolutionary psychology is it's
so hard to separate culture as a conflicting variable. So
here's an example of that in action. There's a known
phenomenon in psychology called stereotype threat. It's where your test

(29:40):
score is affected by just being reminded of your gender
or your race. And an example of study found that
students who were women or black or Latino Latina did
significantly worse on tests just by being reminded about who
they were being reminded that of their gender or their race,
as opposed to the same demographic of students who weren't

(30:02):
given that. Um. This has been reproduced a few times
and sometimes it's even like, if you remind boys and
girls of the difference in uh their performances in math,
like reinforces that makes right make sense to me, and
it bums me out. Another problem with this book, which

(30:25):
has got a lot of it's it's it's it's a
book of problems. Yeah that's the Yeah, that's the thing
with this book, where like you just gotta you have
to delve into every single bit, right, and I'm not
gonna I'm really not going to be able to. I
don't have time to literally don't have the studio time
to debunk this entire book. But there are a lot
of problems. But one of them is that the Bell

(30:47):
curve our authors pointedly don't control for education levels. Um.
They make the assumption that education is a result of
i Q and therefore is not an independent variable at
so maddening our school funding on the wealth of the
people that live there. Did they mention that in the book?

(31:08):
I think there was like two footnotes about it. So
at the same time, this doesn't stop them from studying
socie economic factors, but then they exclude education. So I
think the problem with this is kind of evident. This
essentially has a minimizing effect on the power of wealth
by like excluding education as a factor. Uh, and the

(31:31):
ability to pour more resources into education because someone who
goes to it's this idea that someone who goes to
a fancy school goes there because they have a higher
i Q and they have it a higher i Q
because they're born with it, rather than maybe um, their
education from a very young age has been better and
they're going to these better schools and as they get

(31:55):
older and older, like, yeah, maybe their i Q is
going up because they're getting better education, so they wind
up at these you know, right, And I mean the
brain is the most malleable very early on, and like
if you're if you're a baby, what happens to you
in the first three or four years off your life
is going to greatly affect that. And yeah, I mean

(32:16):
it's you see that very markedly with say, um children
who are in some ways either severely neglected or somehow
accidentally excluded from society. So like children who are just
grow up in the woods, very rare cases, but they
cannot learn language. If you don't acquire language as basically

(32:37):
a baby and toddler and you're not around other people
and you don't pick up language, you can't really learn it. Yeah,
maybe you can learn one or two words, but it
really you have this crystallization period as a very young person.
So and the fact that we pick up on so
much in terms of culture and uh, language and all

(32:58):
these things from a very young age were just little
sponges that soak up everything around us. To try to
separate that out from the effects later in life is
it's very difficult. It's very tricky. So uh, even just
like the nuts and bolts of their statistical methodology has
been called into question. They concluded that the haritability of

(33:20):
intelligence is around but Carnegie Melons statisticians, that's cool, But
Carnegie Melon statisticians used the same studies um that we're
in the Bell curve and subjected them to a new
meta analysis and found that only around thirty heritability, which
is a pretty massive difference. UM which suggests that their

(33:44):
findings would suggest that intelligence is primarily not inherited, which
also makes sense, right, Um, but I mean it's not
I don't even know if this study is definitive because
they they're just studying these studies that are in the
Bell curve. So it's it's essentially saying that, you know,
the the statistics that the authors in the Bell Curve

(34:06):
came up with may not be right. So you have,
like the data they have the day they have might
not be reliable, but also the way they interpreted the
data was not necessarily correct, right, I mean at every
step basically, like the data collection may not have been reliable,
the statistics that they ran on the data may not
have been good, and then the conclusions they draw from
it have a lot of assumptions. This sounds like an

(34:29):
irresponsible book a little bit that it's mainly just this
book and then a bunch of other people saying the
book is wrong, as opposed to more and more people
writing books like that. Yeah, I mean that is a
little bit interesting. Although I mean if you believe that,
then you believe in climate change, and that the like

(34:50):
handful of sciences who are saying it's not a big deal.
Are like not not true? Is that? That is what
that would if the thing? If a thing is against
the scientific sense, is that means that thing is right?
Because Um, I don't know if you've heard, because at
one point we thought that the earth was actually the

(35:13):
center of the university, the sourcism and everything revolved around
the earth, and someone was like, and they were right. Therefore,
anything that's controversial it means that, um, it's right because
that thing that example I gave was actually before the

(35:34):
scientific method was developed. Tell me, was that before after
we were wiping our butt holes with our like thumbs.
It's it's undetermined around the current, around the time. Um,
we're not supposed to do that. That's just I hear that,
So okay, I don't want to hear about it. Here's

(35:56):
another issue with the book, and also just with this
kind of ideology in general, is that research has found
um repeatedly that genetically speaking, between group differences like between
different races or regions, are on average less than between
individual difference. So the difference between me and you, like

(36:17):
you butt scraping people, it's probably greater than me and
some random person in another country. Hopefully um. In fact,
differentiating between races based on genome is not really straightforward.
We're a really young species, were like a hundred thousand

(36:37):
years old, so a lot of the differentiations that we
see between different races and ethnicities are skin deep, like literally.
Dr Jade Craig Venter, head of the Solero Genomics Corporation
in Rockville, Maryland, says that quote, race is a social concept,
not a scientific one. We all evolved in the last
hundred thousand years from the same number of small the

(36:59):
same small number of tribes that migrated out of Africa
and colonize the world. Um. The number of genes and
alleles that control external experience appearance like skin color are
very few and have like really drastic effects. So those
kinds of genes that you know can like change the
pigment of your skin, it's like it's a lot more.

(37:21):
Just a few genes can have a much more drastic
effect in terms of your appearance versus the many many
genes that are thought to control intelligence, which are it's
we don't even really understand that, and they also interact
with each other your environment, right, right, It's much more complex.
So it's like the idea that intelligence would somehow be

(37:43):
just as easily mutable as like skin color is kind
of ridiculous. And a study published in two thousand and
seven in the journal Genetics by Witherspoon and all I
didn't know reest was this, Yeah, you know, she's really
all trade. She gets a reverse Google. So um. They

(38:03):
found that random individuals within a population are far more
genetically dissimilar than the average difference between two groups. So,
I mean, that's kind of what I said earlier, the
chance that you're just more it's like, you take two
random people in a population, they're going to be more
dissimilar than the kind of group differences between like an

(38:24):
entire population. Um. But they also found often like a
random individual from one population will be more similar to
a random individual in another population than within their own regions.
So it's basically just kind of confirming the previous finding that, like,
you know, I have a good chance of being more
similar to someone like in Australia than I am. Take God, no,

(38:50):
so uh now is the part of the show that
I really kind of don't want to talk about, but
it's eugenic. Yeah, it's the Nazi stuff kind of have
to talk about it even though it's very upsetting. It's
a viciously racist and bigoted ideology. It's the same kind
of genocidal rhetoric used to justify the Holocaust and the

(39:13):
justification for this hate. It's like the hatred of Jewish
people predated the Holocaust, and they just kind of used
that as a way to justify it. My Jewish side
of the family was ousted from Russia or just because
they didn't like Jewish people. Uh, and then like later
there there's all this like pseudoscience, like, oh well it's
because of this so um, not only is eugenics morally

(39:38):
terrible and indefensible, it's also just wrong. So the presence
of recessive genes and alleles and also spontaneous mutations mean
that you can't like do a gattica like you can't
get a gatica situation. You can't effectively get rid of
certain traits because they will basically kind of we have

(40:00):
like a genetic library, and we can kind of we
can have variations within that genetic library, but without like
evolving over millions of years, we can't drastically alter that
library to exclude certain traits. So even back in nineteen fifteen,
that had already been discovered, so we really had no excuse. Um,
there was a study that found that red eyed fruit

(40:21):
flies without a history of any white eyes uh blue
dragon uh or it's a Yugo card game joke. Very yeah. Um,
so they were able to give birth to white eyed
fruit flies despite the fact that they didn't have previously
these red eyed jens just due to spontaneous mutation over

(40:43):
millions of years. You can have an accumulation of mutations
that change your genetic library, but you can't like eliminate.
You can't because it's like a it's kind of a memory,
right like right, So like an example is, um, what
you're kind of thinking of, I think is atavistic traits
where you can have an evolutionary throwback sort of spontaneously

(41:07):
pop up again, like having supernumery nipples, which used to
be thought to supernumery, like an extra nipple, yeah, which
used to be thought to be a trait of witches,
that they had these extra nipples to feed their familiar,
which were demonic animals. But it really is because like
when we were more simple mammals, we had a lot

(41:30):
we had scaz and nipples, lots of nipples and now
we don't nipples and this disappeared hundreds of thousands of
years ago, but still up. Sometimes a nipple just pops up,
like Chandler Being had an extra nipple. That's true. There
you go. Treated I knew that. I keep track of

(41:51):
all these celebrities that have extra nipples. Um, like Crusty
the Clown. Yes, like Crusty exactly. Um. Also, tail stuff
can sometimes happen where it's like you're it's just like
an overgrowth of your spinal cord into like the the
caudle region, like the tail region, and it, uh, you know,
just like pops up sometimes and it's like we haven't
had that for if you if you quote got rid

(42:14):
of it, it would still be there. Yeah, exactly. Interestingly,
atavistic traits has been used by racist social Darwinists who
claim that certain races are inferior, despite the fact that
it just like disproves that whole idea. It proves you
can't like selectively quote unquote breed out entire swatches of
d n A because like every you know, every human

(42:38):
has the capacity to have a child who has supernumery nipples.
I'm sorry to break it to you, but it is true.
And you know, it's like these attavistic traits also pop
up in animals, which is kind of fun. So snakes
sometimes grow legs just like what we got legs again not,
are they like little legs? Yeah, they're just little leg

(42:58):
leggies kind of like just like dragging across as they
slither around. Your legs have feet? Yeah, well feet, we'll
use have toes, sure, yeah, why not? What's so gross
about it? It's just like a long, long, long, long lizard. Yes,
that's exactly correct. Sometimes horses grow extra toes. Yeah, yeah,

(43:23):
just like an extra It looks like a little miniature
hoove growing on the other and so it's like on
the on the other hoof, well know, so like at
the back of their hoofs, you know, because like some
like some ungulates like animals that are hooved to animals
will have like not just the one big toe like
the that horses have, they have like more, yeah, exactly.

(43:43):
Researchers have even used genetic modification to grow teeth and
embryonic birds bringing back in dinosaur times, like the universe
already decided that the dinosaurs lost the bird to losers,
why do we have to bring them back? Teeth. Well,
I mean, why not give birds teeth? Look, I'm not

(44:04):
saying I'm on this side of the bird. I'm not
saying I'm biased in favor of birds, or that I
have an entire Twitter account devoted to making birds the
supreme rulers of the planet. I'm just saying that I
funded this research. I may have funded this reason. It's
like it's Katie funded research, and I think birds should

(44:25):
have teeth just for reasons. I don't worry about it.
Don't don't worry about it. Don't worry about it. It
scares me, Katie. I got to be honest. So, as
you may know, lack of genetic diversity and humans and
animals can cause problems. Which is yeah, so um, recessive
genes stick around because they're overshadowed by dominant genes. Um,
so they're not expressed an offspring who have inherited the

(44:47):
dominant genes. And right exactly, in recessive genes aren't always bad.
Like I've got red hair and blue eyes doesn't make
me well, it does mean it doesn't mean I don't
have a soul. Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly with my
mini extra nipples with which I use to feed my

(45:11):
toothed birds. Oh how they bite and pinch? But uh so,
but sometimes recessive genes are like diseases that that heart
harm us. But um, lack of diversity means that recessive
genes are more likely to double up. And if the
recessive genes happens to be harmful such a disease, we

(45:31):
have less protection against that. Uh. And also look, determining
which genes are good and bad is beyond our humble capabilities.
So pliotropy is when one gene affects multiple traits. So
like if you get rid of a gene that you
think is bad, it could have had a bunch of
positive benefits that you've accidentally and eliminated, and like vice versa.

(45:53):
You could think, oh, this is a gene for being
good and strong, and then it turns out it makes
interacts with other stuffen exactly yeah, and in certain environments
it will express itself and so exactly yeah. And and
gene expression is a big thing where it's like it's
not just you know, you've got certain genes and that's it.
Like gene expression is very mutable and react yea, and

(46:15):
so even uh in the womb, like you can have
like development that affects certain traits that become tied to
each other. So have you noticed that like all domesticated
animals have floppy ears and they usually have spotted coats,
So floppy ears are associated with calmer demeanors and domesticated animals.

(46:36):
So a wolf rigid acuiote and a wild boar versus
accuate at all. Peggy, um, So this is actually potentially
do Recent research suggests uh. The neural crest cells, which
are a type of stem cell that is an embryonic
development and the ideas that in domesticated animals these cells

(46:57):
are suppressed during development. And these neural cells are stem
cells that control brain and head and other parts of
the body development. And having fewer or suppressed neural crest
cells leads to a less developed adrenal medulla adrenal medulla.
It's a wonderful um. Having a less developed adrenal medulla

(47:20):
means a friendlier, more social dog or other domesticated animal.
And the neural crust cells also control things like your
cartilage and for for coloration. So that's why when you
take a wild fox and you try to this was
an experiment where they tried to breed more calm, domesticated behaviors.
In these wild foxes, they get floppy ears and spotted

(47:41):
coats to despite the fact that they're not like the
closest relatives to dogs. Yeah, it's just yeah, and a
side side effect. Yeah, it's fascinating, It really is. And
I think it's kind of interesting that, you know, you
would if you were using sort of like the pseudoscience perspective,
You're you're like, oh, they have more repressed medullas or

(48:04):
adrenal medulas. That means they're not as intelligent or or
you know, but actually, in that case, it means they're
more socially, you know, Like you look at the ears
and you'd like to be like, oh, well, the actually
the floppiest of the ears actually indicates, like I don't know,
some bullshit to write, like them from being able to
vote or whatever, like like, let's let's pretend to be

(48:24):
sort of a pop evolutionary psychologists just sort of trying
to spin a yarn where you're like, Okay, they have
floppy ears because they look cuter and we selected the
cuter dogs, uh, you know, or like they don't need
their ears to perk up anymore because we're protecting them
so they don't need to be so like, you can
come up with all these stories, um like fearful of sounds,

(48:47):
so they're like trying to mask themselves or whatever. Right,
So it's like you can come up with all these stories,
but it's actually really difficult. Sometimes these are just a spandrel,
which in evolutionary terms means like a physical change that
doesn't really have any function. It's just the result of
other constructions, sort of like in a building, a spandrel
is the space between like two archways, and it's just

(49:09):
it's not there for any real architectural purpose. It's just
there because it has to be there for the Yeah,
exactly like a corel. I don't think that's where it
was going. Oh that's great. Sometimes pseudoscience not only threatens people,
but animals as well. Industries can use their political wealth

(49:30):
and power to pervert the course of scientific research to
the detriment of animals. Take, for instance, the humble salmon
and the early two thousands of fishery biologists working for
the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration blew the whistle, and
the fact that he was being pressured to change the
conclusions of his research to downplay the negative effect that
hatchery has had on the salmon population, and now currently

(49:54):
under Trump, the Energy Department's International Climate Office received instructions
to not use the term quote climate change, emissions reductions,
or Paris agreement in their memos. Attacking real science to
fit a political ideology is often referred to as licendiism.
It's a Russian word lysand Coism, which was coined from

(50:16):
the term used to describe the Stalinist policy of quashing
any science that went against the theory of trothen Lysenko,
who did not believe in natural selection. The fact that
even killed some of these scientists who believed in natural
selection and who were against this theory troughen Lysenko thought
that the genetics of crops could be changed by exposing

(50:36):
wheat seeds to humidity such that the crop yields would
be higher. Well, this wasn't true, and it's screwed over
a lot of people who needed the crops to you know, eat.
This feels especially relevant now as climate science deniers and
the current administration tries to downplay the seriousness of climate
change as it could mess up the planet which we
need to you know, live on. So when we return,

(50:58):
will discuss even more science quests. And I don't mean
adorable ducks were scientists. I'm sorry, but if you have
a picture of a duck in a nab coat, send
it to me. We'll be right back. Throughout history, science
has had a few growing pains, but for some reason,

(51:18):
even as we prove certain theories wrong, they just keep
popping up in modern society. Even today, there are flat earther's,
anti vaxer's, evolution deniers, and so called race realists who
try to lend credence to their ideologies by using suit
of scientific explanations that may have the veneer of truthiness,
but when you actually think about it, they make no sense.

(51:39):
The lack of science behind these truth the ideas are
even more clear when you look throughout history. Unfortunately, some
of these ideas are weirdly making a comeback. Like rhrenology. Okay,
let's talk about phrenology and get your caliber clowder. Such
a creepy thing like so connected with the Nazis, just

(52:00):
like let's nest so the little background, uh s. Phrenology
is an old discredited pseudoscience claiming that skull shape determines
personality and intelligence because when they're like distinct parts of
the brain that like, this is your intelligence, this is
your ability to cook, this is your And when they're bigger,

(52:24):
they make bumps in the skull, and each bump correlates
to a personality trait, so you can feel someone's skull.
And phrenology has taken many shapes and forms, but like, um,
that was that's sort of the main thing that that
popped up in the eighteen hundreds, and there's kind of
been a resurgence of people talking about skull shape where
they point to it as an indicator of a difference

(52:44):
in intelligence between like different groups of people, like based
on sex or race, which is a problem because it's
just there's no science to indicate that it's true. Here's
one big problem that it's kind of off es. So
Neanderthals had much bigger skulls and much bigger brains, and

(53:06):
they lacked the I mean, it's always hard to compare intelligence,
but if you're like looking at it at the metric
of human intelligence, they weren't as smart as us in
that kind of aspect, like humans were able to develop
complex kind of second and third order tools where it's
like you use a tool to make another tool to
make another tool, which Neanderthals, it's thought that that's like

(53:28):
one reason they didn't advance socially as much as we did.
And obviously so Neanderthals were around a lot longer than
we've ever been around, and we've like just kind of
exponentially developed in terms of our civilization, for better or
for worse. But you know, obviously, in nature, there's not
strong evidence to indicate that brain size and intelligence are

(53:50):
always directly correlated. It's not that brain size and shape
and stuff doesn't necessarily like have an effect on on
how that brain functions. But it's just it's not like
as simple as a bigger brain or a smaller brain
are less or more intelligence, right exactly. Like it's really,
first of all, it's hard to measure animal intelligence, as

(54:11):
kind of a disclaimer, but if you use sort of
human metrics of what intelligence is, you're good at being
a smart human, right right exactly. So, for example, an
African parrot's head and brain is very tiny, but it's
considered one of the smartest birds, capable of outperforming for
your old human children on simple physics test. Really. Yeah, so,
like you know, the whole thing where you give a

(54:32):
child like a liquid volume liquids and they're like, here,
I'm gonna pour this liquid into a taller glass. And
then they're like, I want the taller glass because it's
taller and that's more orange juice that I want more juice.
You can't fool an African gray parrot with that. Each other, Like, no, dude,
trying to scammy. I've seen the scam. I invented this scam.

(54:54):
Of course. The sometimes the argument is that it's brain
to body ratio. So African grain parrots are more intelligent
because they have a high brain to body ratio. So
research has been just like kind of basic facts about
animals doesn't really seem to indicate this is true. So

(55:15):
here's here's kind of an example of why this is
a problem. Humans have a brain to body ratio of
on average about one to forty. Tree shrews have a
one to twenty brain body ratio, dolphins have a one
to seventy eight brained body ratio, and dogs have one
to one and ants have one to seven. Yeah, so

(55:38):
according to this, ants are the most smart. Uh. Tree
shoes are also very very smart. A lot of people
are saying this, yes and uh, that humans are not
as smart as the tree shoes, um, which obviously is
you know it's true. I mean, have you seen the
tree shows either they don't even know to treat shoe

(56:00):
is well, see that's the thing. They're so secret, They've
got their entire secret society. So tree shoes are so
smart that they know what treaties are. But the point
is that the idea of like brained body ratio meaning
like more intelligent less intelligent, it's not to say that like, Okay, yeah,
if you have a brain that's like two neurons, yeah,

(56:23):
that's going to be more simple than a brain that
has like hundreds of thousands of neurons. But it's you
can't just like look at an animal and be like, okay,
that bird is small and that whale shark is big,
therefore bird dumb, whale sharts. So you can't take like,
i mean size and density or different things, right, and

(56:45):
density in terms of brain is like you know, one
of the things is like brain folds can be an
indicator of it, Like smoother brains are considered like maybe
not having as much neurological activity. But you know, even
then it's like you can't know measuring these things doesn't
necessarily like the difference between gray matter and white matter,

(57:06):
like we don't really know how that translates to intelligence,
Like that's often pointed to in gender differences, is like
an indicator that like, oh, well there's a difference, but
we don't actually see that reflected in like you know, say,
like you know, women and men who take like get
the same scores on like Ravens tests, which is a
type of UM. It's another kind of type of i

(57:27):
Q test that tries to eliminate a lot of cultural factors.
Of course you can't. Um, there's no test that is
going to eliminate cultural influence. Yes, it's yeah, it's trying
UM and you know, the gender scores are basically identical,
and so it's you know, it's one of these things
where we don't we just don't understand the brain well

(57:50):
enough to be able to like point out like, ha,
that brain is a lot a lot more you know,
fat than that one, so it's better. So much of
this just seem it's just a lot of grasping it strong,
like knowing like I really want this to be a thing, right,
and and speaking about it definitively when you just can't
write exactly. Um. I've seen like several conversations between like

(58:13):
Jordan Peterson and like Stephan Mall and you, who speaks
so definitively about these things, and it's like, well a
lot of times they're just wrong or they're just it's
not decided and it there's so much nuance to it
that to speak diffinitively about it makes me question what
your intentions? So frustrating We know that you don't know
this answer. People don't know. The brain is hard to study,

(58:35):
like and that's the thing, and I think that's an
important distinction, is what is their motivation for doing this?
Because obviously evolutionary biology and psychology are both fields that
are plagued by um just it's really difficult to study.
And that doesn't mean that it's not they aren't worthy
disciplines or that you know, obviously, I think they're extremely

(58:58):
worthy disciplines. And I think that you know, trying to
find out why behaviors came across and stuff, that's not
it's not it's not all garbage science. It's just that
it's so hard to figure these things out. It requires
such detailed analysis and studies to parse out all of
the um conflicting variables and that you know, we will

(59:18):
try things sometimes and then like genuinely good natured studies
that are really intellectually honest will sometimes be proven wrong
later on. So it's like, what is your So that
motivation is actually very important because if you're doing a
study where it's like, well, I think this beetle maybe
uses its um chills rae in like sexual selection, and

(59:39):
I'm just curious about this, and I'm proposing this thing,
and I'm doing the study you're doing that, it's like
your your whole motivation is you're curious about this thing.
You want to find out the truth. When you're like,
you know, maybe chicks can't just do can't do math,
and maybe it's okay to that they you know, are
pressed in society or something, right, David blatant motive for

(01:00:01):
why they're trying to extrapolate this specific conclusion from something
that doesn't have a conclusion, And usually the motivation, in
my opinion, is to justify social inequalities, so like to
say that if certain like if if a gender or
race is not doesn't have as many resources or rights
as another one that's okay because they're in fear. That's

(01:00:24):
how it is. Yeah, that's just how. And I'm it's
like any time, like the burden of proof for that
kind of claim. It's not only high morally but just scientifically.
It's like, I feel like you should just be very
skeptical of anyone who makes a sweeping claim about human behavior, uh,
in any capacity, especially though if it's in that vein

(01:00:44):
where it's like everything's don't don't rock the boat, stop
trying to Yeah, it's yeah, you see it a lot again.
I keep coming back to Jordan Peterson, but like his
like his lobster thing, it's very much like no hierarcharies
is good, don't rock the boat because the way lobsters operated,
therefore society works the way it's as if. Yeah, I

(01:01:05):
mean that's so funny to me because of all the
animals that you could have picked, like a lobster is
maybe one of the furthest it isn't the furthest, but
so far back on the evolutionary tree, like uh, sea bugs,
like what are you doing man? And and like just
the idea that because it's also although they are remembering
little merdmaid like wasn't that Sebastian, Oh it was a crab,

(01:01:29):
So maybe we should be looking to crabs, right, that's
actually a Disney propaganda for some feminisms bat or something. Um,
but these also these It's always interesting because as we've
sort of you've been talking about this whole time, uh,
making a claim like that from evolutionary biological standpoint without

(01:01:54):
like saying like have you have you talked to an
anthropologist about this and historian about this, and people who
are aware of these kinds of things that are like, oh,
actually that's related to this, or like that wasn't always true,
and uh, they don't seem to be open to all
of the variables and the nuance that is required. I

(01:02:14):
wonder why. I wonder what we'll also, I mean, like
Peterson doesn't want ethics panels for science, so he has
a specific agenda. He has this he wants he basically
wants like the fifties again, where women are in their place.
You have sort of like you know, uh, white people
have all the privilege and you know, and science was

(01:02:35):
king dips into like low i Q people not participating
in society and eugenics, yes, eugenic yes, he does well
speaking of all this, I wanna in the show with
something that is very funny. Well it's terrible, but funny.
So physiognomy. Physiognomy, which is a Nazi Furries wet dream. Look,

(01:02:58):
I'm not by the way, I'm not slandering all Furries.
Good job, good job on kicking Polo Annapolis out of
that convention. So they're really taking a stance against the Nazis.
Nazi Furries are right, very vigilant about keeping fascist Nazis
out of there. That's great. Yeah. The So physiognomy is

(01:03:20):
the idea that someone's outer appearance, such as facial structure,
is an indicator of personality and intelligence. So this was
popular during ancient times like uh in in ancient Greece,
uh and in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Um. One
of the claims is that animal like features indicated a
personality similar to that animal. So like a lion like

(01:03:43):
face meant that the person was going to be more
bold and brutish, and like a dog like face is
going to be more like submissive. Um. Actually, let me
show you some of these because it's extremely funny. Here's
a here's a science for you face face looks more
like lyon, therefore person more like lyon. Uh. It's so

(01:04:10):
fascinating well because also like there's an element of like
people might treat you differently if you look like a lion,
and that might affect your personality behavior. But it's not
because of that, but also just it's also they weren't
like doing studies ums like the same, same, same, same.
Like here's one see he looked like dog. They're funny.

(01:04:34):
Maybe he's like a dog. Dog therefore is right And
this uh sounds like something that would just like how
it would just be dismissed um before the eighteen hundreds.
But so this almost derailed the course of evolutionary biology research.
So Charles Darwin was almost barred from sailing on the

(01:04:56):
the Beagle because the captain was a fan of physi agnomy,
so he didn't like the shape of Darwin's nose. So
Darwin wrote, quote, this captain was an ardent disciple of Lavador,
who I guess as a physiognomist, and he was convinced
that he could judge a man's character by the outline

(01:05:16):
of his features. And he doubted whether anyone with my
nose could possess sufficient energy and determination for the voyage.
But I think he was afterwards well satisfied that my
nose had spoken falsely drag him Darwin. Ye oh, my gosh.

(01:05:37):
It's so it's just I mean, it's silly, it's funny,
but I think it's kind of like it's fun to
laugh at it. But I think it's a really good
reminder that, like, just be alert for these kinds of things.
Anyone telling you something that kind of seems like snake oil, Like, hey,
if he's got a face that looks like a bird,

(01:05:59):
maybe he's bird like, Like that doesn't make any sense,
but you know, I mean I've seen just kind of
anecdotally like this a sort of more of these kinds
of things of like well maybe you know, like skull
shape or like face shape or whatever, you know, has
some kind of thing to do with personality, and it's
just just be alert to that and like being legitimized

(01:06:26):
by people who have the air of and there's so
many grifters that have a platform and being elevated that
you know, things are happening today across the board that
you wouldn't have been able, you wouldn't expect it happened.
So yeah, it's a very good warning to be on
guard for this kind of ship. Yeah. Yeah, it's uh.

(01:06:48):
I don't know if you're familiar with the Prigger You website,
but yeah, we're familiar the website that says not an
accredited universe, but that's the one. It is weird how
because they do get like they will get professors on
there and such. So it's like it's not that it's
all just like Ben Shapiro, you know, whining about pronouns

(01:07:10):
or whatever. But oh Benjamin talking about how comedy is
dying running into a Nazi whoops. Um. But yeah, so
it's like it's kind of trying to legitimize a lot
of these these things, and is he looking at it
as a whole, like, I mean, even have a video
about how the Civil War was actually about slavery. It's
good job. Oh they do have Oh I see, Okay,

(01:07:34):
that's confusing to me because typically yeah, um, but again
that's like they try, they try to make it legitimate.
But then they'll have one on They had one where
it was like it was by Praeger himself, Dennis Trager,
where he was talking about the power of the visual.

(01:07:54):
I don't know if you guys saw this one. But
it was like saying that men are just hard wired
to be more attracted to visual stimuli, and they were
aroused by visuals, whereas women won't aren't and they can't
understand it and so um and and he's like, that's
this is not to justify sexual assault, like whoa buddy,

(01:08:14):
what this? Um? Yeah, they know they know that that's
but it's basically saying women or men are attracted by
visual stimuli like hot ladies. Of course, it's it's right exactly,
it's all heteronormative, of course, like it's always been attracted.

(01:08:35):
Although he does mention like, oh, well, you know, women
don't look at pornography, but game in look at pornography
or whatever. I don't even know why speaking of citations needed.
A study found that even though women when they were
sort of surveyed they may report less being like visually stimulated,

(01:08:58):
when they actually measured their brain responses brain activity identical
to men when they were shown um, you know, like
sexual image. Yeah it was so you know, it's like,
I mean, it's it's one of these things where you
can have Again, it's so hard to separate culture from biology,

(01:09:18):
right exactly, so I mean, for example, obviously different cultures,
different clothing styles, different things are considered attractive. We used
to get hard about ankles, you know. So it's I
just if you take one thing away from this whole
fun journey through pseudoscience is if something sounds like a

(01:09:39):
big claim, it might be and just check out the CITA,
like read the studies it's based on. Oftentimes those studies
will you know, maybe not actually say what the person
is saying. They're saying right and there, and it's not
like all It's not like studies are always perfect. Like
there could be a study that makes a claim like

(01:09:59):
or they do something and then in the discussion section
they're like, we think maybe this, but they don't. That's
just an assumption right there. They're Oftentimes studies like that
are used to say that the thing is true when
studies like, yeah, they're speculating right exactly. So, uh, you know,
and studies can be flawed too. I mean that's not
I don't think people you know, don't not trust the

(01:10:22):
larger body of scientific research, but just you know, I
think being having a sort of critical eye for things
is really important, especially if someone is trying to trying
to tell you button up your shirt, keep your shoulders straight,
and don't have women in the workplace. Yeah, if it's
like if there's like a political or social agenda that's clear,
or like a conclusion that's being made and it's based

(01:10:44):
off of this kind of stuff. Question that right? Uh,
it's yeah, it's really misused a lot and again more
and more and more by publications and figures. That's fun.
That is cool? How fun? What fun we've had? What
fun we've had? I feel like if I if you
did physiognomy on my face, I'm trying to think what

(01:11:07):
I would look like. I feel like human being, human being.
That's a good one. Yeah, I think I think a
human being, right, I think definitely being You know, you
look like human being, an act like a human being,
you might be being human being. Also like the idea
that like all like one species of animal has like

(01:11:30):
a personality. It's also weird, like I mean, look at
any dog. Probably not true. Also the lion like face.
I might post this online, but like the lion like face,
it was also their mustache and beard hair like the
hair style Cody, you have a beard, so clearly you're

(01:11:54):
like a lion. You eat babies. But if I were
to shave, if I personality would change with you would
stop eating babies, which I mean, maybe you should shave.
No you haven't. I mean I've been trying to say
it for a while now. It's very distracting, the eating
the babies. Yeah, I mean, and then he doesn't finish them.
So we've got like that. But like we get ants.

(01:12:19):
And one time we came back to the office and there,
which is a room full of lies, was that the
baby though it might have been my coffee. Well, this
has been a delight. So do you guys want to
talk a little bit about all the things that you do,
because you do a lot of things, a lot of sure. Um,
we have our own podcast called even More News. Our

(01:12:42):
YouTube show is called some More News, and you can
check us out on patreon dot com slash some More
News if you'd like to support us. Hear all that
kind of stuff. Social media is all some More News,
and then our news show with Robert Evans is called
Worst Year Ever. It will be released releasing when you
hear this, um social media first year pod. Yeah, I'm

(01:13:05):
so looking forward to that. It's gonna be fun and
all basically we're yeah, we're doing everything. Uh, you know,
for the rest of this year, we're gonna be going
in depth on candidates and talking about different issues and
things like that. In the next year news sources. Um.
Next year we're gonna start traveling around going to contention.
Now you not thank you for taking that weight upon

(01:13:26):
your shoulders. It was exciting. It still is, but now
it's like, oh God, there that's happening. And you can
find us on the internet Creature feature Pod dot Com,
Creature Feature Pod on Instagram, Creature feak Pod on Twitter,
at t tee that is a um and you can

(01:13:48):
find me at Katie Golden and at pro bird Rites
where I say we give teeth to birds. And thanks
to the Space Costics for their awesome song Exo Lumina.
Cre 's Your Feature is a production of I Heart
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