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Episode 194: Evo psych of punishment and revenge, Fairness in male female dynamics
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why do people seek revenge and compensation pain from a person who has angered them even if they lose as well so why do people take an approach of I hurt you back even if it means I get hurt as well when they're in a rage the what people are trying to do there is as best as I can tell is they're attempting to alter the future of disagreements so the originally what's happening is is that they feel like they're being aggressed against quite unfairly and they're not able to through normal negotiations and normal level of threats actually assure themselves that they're going to be able to get change and the other party so what they have to do is that they have to exact pretty pretty severe damage to the other team to let the other team know that even if you you may be able to dominate the situation you may be able to defeat me however it will be extremely costly for you to do so and so so this kind of sort of we're going to call this a protein a protein price protein meaning unpredictable price so by by being so unraised and then enraged and unstable in exacting a revenge the the advantage is the person on the other side who could be having the upper hand in the situation doesn't know what it's going to cost them in order to continue to press this advantage and continue the exploitation so I would see graphic evidence of this in my time working in the prison where some some small skinny guy about my size would be being exploited by some big monster who would be taken their lunch and or something of the nature and so what they're or whatever whatever the conflict was but the and so what would happen was that you know a lot of these guys not not everybody that's in the prisons this way certainly but there's a higher percentage of people in prison that have the capacity for pretty significant violence sort of a lower threshold when that gets released and that includes some of these people that are not very big and very not very imposing and so as a result they could go off or they could certainly threaten that they were going to go off and and they might and so in doing so the notion is yeah you may you may take five of my teeth with you but I'm going to get a big bite out of your ear and you'll never see that ear again okay and so the the notion is is that you may you may harm me very significantly but you will get you will pay a price to do so so this and so the individual that is in the upper hand has to think twice about going after somebody who's a little crazy and or is that enraged so this is the this is the way that we can balance the scale against exploitation so that's the that's the fundamental reason I think that we see this as a as a an adaptive system because it's a what we might call protein price unpredictable price by advertising that you don't know what the price is going to you know the other person cannot anticipate fully what the price is it makes it inherently more expensive to provoke the person who's in a submissive position all right mmm talk about how we come back yeah me ah that's fantastic okay all right sorry about the I know words good good to hear your voice glad to have you here otherwise said I getting retired or just listening to myself well I've spent a hundred ninety four episodes we aren't tired yet yes all right all right all right so so you I heard you go over that first question about evolutionary psychology of punishment and how yes is essentially preventing people from aggressive you further future conflicts and so some of the article we were going to go over isn't about it's called punishment isn't about the common good it's about spite and it's Patrick for burr associate professor at Tufts University and Rory Smith faso professor of philosophy at the ronald and linda rosetta professor humanities in north and east university in Boston so they they basically there was an article published but essentially they're talking about punishments when people get caught doing something and so it made me think of the prison system so people say oh you got a you know we will put you in prison and let you think about it but but from it sounds if just from our episode long time ago about the inside the criminal mind it seems like you know what are your thoughts on punishing somebody for for something like this well punishment is a is a useful mechanism and the threat of punishment is useful mechanism because the the there's sort of we have to understand that criminal minds are not deranged or different than anybody else's mind they are the same mind it's the same gene pool it's the same same cost-benefit analytic mechanisms inside the machine and so these folks they do criminal acts going don't think of them as criminals per se think of them as people who who choose to do things that at the moment they think are in their best interests but they are running the risk penalties and so and so of course they are not your rational beings they may be beings that they don't do a very good job of computing their long-term best interests but that's different than thinking in them is irrational and so they they are undoubtedly responding to to their perceived probabilities success and failure with respect to what it is that they're doing so you need have a system in the civil society where there is a price to be paid for transgressing the rules and you want those prices to be essentially logically related to to what makes sense to people so that they can rationally compute them it doesn't do any good to have very severe penalties if the if the 84 IQ criminal that's about to do that criminal act doesn't know that that's what the penalty is okay so this is why you know it it would be it behooves us to have you know the odd actually have a class in high school on crime and punishment so that you actually know what that what the prices are might not that people find out on the streets in those in those neighborhoods where those behaviors are common people get some sense of what the what the justice system is likely to throw you as the price everybody knows if you shoot somebody to death you are in serious trouble whereas if you if you robbed them at gunpoint that's a different kind of trouble and if you sneak into their house and steal their watch that's yet a different kind of trouble so anyway crime and punishment is a is simply a part of of a wider context of us essentially rewarding and punishing or penalizing behaviors that other people do with respect to us in order to optimize our own personal situation in a social context so social social relationships have have both prices and benefits and they're the benefits overwhelmingly outweighed the costs the costs are that when we live in in close proximity to a lot of people who have lower conscientiousness lower intelligence higher impulsive 'ti and more disagree ability than we have there will be criminal behavior that will take place so our job is to recognize that these differences not only do they exist they're stable they're predictable and you know keep yourself out of harm's way as much as you can that's fascinating a second article that we were going to go over is called group punishment doesn't fix behavior it just makes kids hate school and now we're talking about individual punishment but now if we talk about group punishment I guess by the the one that comes to mind most is such that like in the military where they punish a Natalia an entire entire group for the actions of one so what are your thoughts on group punishment in that sense what we're probably going to find that in general it's not very effective just because the individual themselves who is running the see beyond that isn't isn't probably overly concerned with their compatriots the individual that's going to break ranks and do something that's self-serving but costly to the group probably isn't isn't in other words it's going to work fine for everybody to type conscientiousness who wouldn't do the thing anyway so I think that we're going to find that that style of punishment is not going to be very effective just because you know obviously we could change the context where it would be so if it's like well if we've got five of you in the room and we say that everybody better do it right and it's five it's if the five of you are related these are people super important to you so suddenly everybody's on the same page more than they would otherwise be so we can see that for example in the famous Milgram studies that were so amazing the people would ostensibly shock people to death and so you know folk folks went inferring that oh my god this is what people will do if they're told by authorities to do this well not if it's your mother they won't so when we start changing the specific cost-benefit we instead we go from a general principle to a more refined principle and genetic cost-benefit analysis that's actually running the Machine we can start to get more precise and our understanding what's happening so if I'm in I've got you know 40 people but I don't really know and I've got a that I don't really care that much about and there's some rule that we will all have to do 100 pushups if I get caught dogging it on my push-ups but I I can't do these push-ups very well and I might not even be able to do them so I'm going to start very cleverly skipping them okay as best I can so I'm running the see beyond that and the fact that that I may cost my container and it's a bunch of work really is not my chief concern my chief concerns myself okay so once again the solution to any of these mysteries is to strip away any concept really of group action and think in terms of individual life units analyzing their own personal genetic cost-benefit analysis this certainly will encompass their analysis of the value of their group membership and the loss of the scheme processes that could take place with respect to transgressions however the the group is not everything what's everything is their own personal genetic interests and once we understand that these mysteries of human nature strip away pretty easily so the mystery of human nature in a sense of punishment in this sense also is one of the questions that we got is are there any evolutionary reasons for harming oneself or cutting and sending signals to others by by harming yourself oh yeah so this is the cutting that takes place is very often will get diagnosed with quote borderline personality disorder or whatever that is and and so what we're really talking about is a this is going to be what we call costly signaling so these individuals that do this and I met many of them they're not crazy they're not they're not not anything remarkable about them other than they're usually very competitive you know often very highly crunchy just driven individuals who are really frustrated about something and as a result costly signaling you know by cutting there's there's these theories that you know they feel a lot better they get an endorphin rush or whatever I I don't know what transpires in the in the mind and nervous system of these folks specifically but the question is why why would there be an evolutionary profit from self-harm well there we can see more than one interest more than one angle by which there's evidently profit from self-harm so the the ego trap is clearly an example where you harm your ability to optimize your your potential by handicapping yourself or bluffing that you are not wanting to try in order to protect your status so you can see how self harm could absolutely be a function its way through any kind of motivational equation that would make perfect Hamiltonian logic and in the same way would be true with cutting so cutting winds up being a essentially instead of chopping somebody on the shoulder and said hey I'm really in trouble and I'm really frustrated that's one signal that you could make but a more costly signal is to actually start to do very dangerous looking quasi suicidal damage now now it is not so easily dismissed ok so now we don't you can imagine imagine two parents with a fifteen year old daughter and the daughter complains about you know her frustration or anxiety or depression and her feeling overwhelmed okay so we've got to concerned parents they talk to or they tell her to you know relax don't worry about it it's okay do the best you can etc they do this and yet her frustration is really acute so the kids in trouble and so the next level of or an additional gear that she could hit would be to start cutting a wrist okay at that point this is a discernible you know there's evidence of self-mutilation here so now now the anxiety goes up and those parents considerably now they mobilize more resources as they try to figure out how can I reduce the burdens or stress on my kid okay so once again costly signaling is telling people that we mean business and and that just as we're talking about in the earlier issue but little pipsqueak on the prison yard who gets into it with a big guy you know is getting exploited and then just goes off and completely you know he bites the guy's ears off and swallows it just like little Arliss doesn't Old Yeller okay so it actually does it okay and then he gets pounded and he's in the infirmary performance recovering but when he comes back on the prison yard what do we see okay we see like whoa look out yeah you may pound him that you don't have an ear okay so everybody gives this guy wider berth ie costly signaling so the same same concept people are interactions with all people are being run through their cost-benefit analysis as we bring both threat and opportunity in every interaction that we have with them so they're having to run what their assessment is of us our personality and our and our analysis of the situation the circumstances as we clearly are running a Seabee on them and their interactions with us and so what we signal makes a big difference in what it is that they do and that's that's how all of these sort of any of these mysteries can be unwound by looking at it through that lens you mentioned the prison yard and it reminded me of an email a listener sent us a long time ago saying what would your advice be to somebody who goes into prison like what would dr. Lisle do if he was in a prison yard we just beat up the biggest guy there first maybe we know a little closer the answer no I think that the right answer would be you signal that you have something that's really valuable so this is how the guy in Shawshank Redemption in other words he starts doing everybody's taxes so you you start to figure out how it is like Alan Goldhamer and I actually talked this over and Alan said that he would immediately go up to the toughest guy and start to explain to the guy how he could improve his monetary situation so that you would get in with get in with that and that's how we would do it and Alan being Alan you know Alan was selling cinnamon to ticks on the bus back and forth from school when he was six years old so yeah he knows a little bit about how to how to make a buck selling the plated rep at a young age that's right we got it how about you dr. Lao now never made a nickel never happened no no I mean no no what would I do hmm god I'd probably get in with a bunch of basketball players and and I would I would see to it that they knew that I was I was going to give them a lot more shots as a result and I'd become known as the very unselfish ball player and therefore worth protecting that's what I would yeah all right I love it mmm all right so our next question is actually a little more lighthearted this is about me all the sternest of male-female dynamics your doctor well it's kind of a weird question but why is it so hard to convey to guys and male partners that they should simply put down the toilet seat after they are done peeing I've had this discussion with my significant other and my brother as well and they both tell me that it's the same effort for me to put the seat down even in my own apartment although they have to put it up first when I was on the toilet before since it is obviously down so they would have to do an extra step I find this conversation extremely unnecessary and childish however it seems to me that there's something deeper behind us otherwise it doesn't make sense to me to make such a big fuss about I know it sounds dumb but I'd like to hear your take on it well I think this is really interesting so let's look at this because once again we're just going to look through the lens of evolutionary biology to look to the heart of what's driving all behavior and what's driving all behavior is simply efficiency at translating muscular action into DNA so why why do they not put the toilet seat down because it would take effort why is she bitching about it because when she comes in the toilet seat is up and she's going to have to put it down okay so she leaves in the toilet seats down does she then put it up because they're they're statistically more likely to be the next one in the bathroom no she leaves it down for from her standpoint it's in its proper place from their standpoint it's in its proper place when it's at so I don't really see how she has any room to complain here it's a it's essentially two different entities with two different idealized positions for the toilet seat and and they're complaining about you know that there's a right way and a wrong way to do it so we could get further that I guess when they poop they would want it down so maybe in principle the best but the truth is is a guy at will urinate seven times a day on average and they're going to poop maybe once so six out of seven times they're going to want it up so it's basically they want it up so they just energy conservation and complaining that the other party isn't doing what we want that's the end of that misery yeah some someday there will be a button right next to a light switch that puts it up or doesn't know what you want so yeah well it'll probably go again which gender you are okay and it will raise or lower the seat okay that's how that we're all the way things are doing but what do you do in a modern environment you you have his hers and then things in the middle will you do that yeah no my seven my lights were marvelous colleague Jen Hawk is now is cringing she's just crazy I said all right let's move on well thank you for that mystery because growing up in a household with two sisters and a mother it was a yeah fun discussion I mean I never had a problem doing it but it was always like now you know yeah all right good Wow all right now let's go on dear dr. Lao what is it about human social psychology that makes Stone Age tribes or villages to max out at around 50 or 150 people or so was it that nothing could invite more people than that under any common purpose no that's not sort of but not quite the common purpose the only common purpose makes any sense is a common purpose that that the purpose of the entire organism is to reproduce DNA so therefore the common purpose would be what sin if I'm doing something that's in my interest is also in your genetic interest and vice versa so that would lead to the cohesiveness that would leads tribes now apparently I don't I don't have great evidence for this although I've read it in multiple sources but I never somebody somewhere that I that I read you know 15 years ago talked about how some mathematician I think built a model about what we're going to what we're going to talk about is these sewell right coefficients or I would call them Hamiltonian so these are these are coefficients of genetic relationship and so you can see that that if you're in a family and everybody's 50% genetically related except mom and dad who aren't related to each other but they have a bunch of children of which half of their genes each are in each of those children so they have extraordinary common interests and you're going to find out that this is going to be a situation that will minimize the conflicts of interests between the individuals now you might say that you had a lot of conflicts with your siblings over resources but the truth is those conflicts would be far as a result of the the coefficient of genetic relationship then they would be under situations where you were not related to those people think of yourself stuck in a boat on your you know you're lost on a boat in the middle of the Pacific and it turns out the one other person that dumped into that boat off the big ship is not related to you so now you you've got you know two candy bars in your pocket so you can imagine that you know what you might be extremely interested in hiding those candy bars from them way together asleep and then consuming a bowl because the truth is is that you might compute that maybe that's my best move to increase my likelihood of survival whereas if it's your brother you're very likely to give them one of the candy bars that's because genetically his survival is very important to you genetically so people might roll their eyes but this is exactly this is exactly how inheritance law goes down and this is how you know so many decisions get made not only for humans but throughout the animal kingdom so you see mama lions sacrificing their own health in order to defend their cubs and they'll also defend their nieces and nephews but they won't defend the next degree relative over they want to defend a third degree relative over ie a cousin so these these coefficients of genetic relationship are super powerful in attempting to understand the way that an organism evaluates the the well-being of another organism and what they're going to do with respect to self sacrificial behavior now you can imagine that if there's conflict of interest between two people the the system would essentially say I think you know when it's 50/50 two people both feel like the other person may be exploiting them to some degree this is what I call you know the 10% bias so the average person feels like they're getting chiseled a little bit at work and the average employer feels like they're getting shows a little bit by the employees so you know when you buy a car you feel like you're getting chisel a little bit by the dealer etc so there's there's just a concept that you're the set point in the nervous system for a human being is going to be suspicious that it's being chiseled a little bit that's an adaptive distortion inside the system the this is what I call a Darwinian distortion so this is similar to inferring that when a twig snaps in the woods that it's a predator that's a Darwinian distortion it's similarly a distortion to feel like in a 50/50 deal that I got a feeling that I'm being chilled a little bit okay now the that being the case you can see that the feeling that the adaptive mechanism of feeling like I'm being chiseled a little bit is going to be significantly dampened down if the person on the other side of this is my is my brother because even if I get chiseled in a transaction and he winds up benefiting seven extra percent in our transaction the truth is is that half of my genes are located in him so he's actually only making off with three and a half for himself and three and a half I'm getting paid back indirectly because my genes are located inside of him so as a result the the first degree or the degree of genetic relationship that sits commonly within a small group for example it's going to be an extraordinary buffer in reducing the acrimony that's going to go on when there's going to be transactions where an individual's feel like they're being chiseled this is going to aid and abet group cohesion because the reason they are there is that there are advantages to being in groups because there's insurance policies that get generated as a result of group action you cannot insure yourself as a single individual so there's a cohesiveness that naturally emerged in humans that there was an advantage to being close together Richard Wrangham believes that it was fundamentally began with the protection of food he's probably right makes a lot of sense that that would be true it's a fascinating work that he wrote called Catching Fire really quite a great story about the evolution of human cohesiveness around fire food and then also really spelling out the details of romance about how romance evolved in humans along with the tribal mentality and and essentially the same tribal structures that we see today you know in hunter-gatherer societies around the world the now so now from there we go to the interesting observation that it would appear that these tribes don't typically get bigger than about 150 so now they tend to split off and gets go into them smaller groups now that that what is what's fought what's what the thought is is that the the willingness to be at peace with transactions where somebody is exploiting somebody at 10% in the transaction but if we're first-degree relatives half of that winds up being reciprocated back to me any way through the djinns and so therefore I'm not into you know it's not a bad transaction and I'm willing to get to get screwed over in a transaction by a few percent because the overall benefit of the trade is actually valuable remember I'm not trading at all if they're if I'm not trading oranges for orange I'm trading essentially some kind of division of labor and division of luck my nurses mares and the trading process creates it consumer surplus on both sides of the trade so therefore even if I'm being chiseled in the trade I'm probably still ahead or I wouldn't do it and then if it's my brother there's an additional kicker in it that that my genes are being are benefiting now as you start to move our way out to 150 people what's going to happen is is that the coefficient the average coefficient of genetic relatedness in the entire group of 150 starts to drop to very low levels to the point where the the Hamiltonian advantage of the kickback from trades starts to be negligible so now it's going to turn out that now it's we're no better off there than we are if we just had a whole slew of people that we were not related to so what happens is this would drive people then probably if anybody studied it it's a great doctoral dissertation or quite frankly it's an entire career for some for some fo cultural anthropologists that you know was sensitive and understood selfish in theory that probably what you're going to find is that when people break apart out of that group of 150 they take with them 25 or 30 people who are a tighter gene pool who have a coefficient of genetic relationship that is that is very substantial so now we we begin again a insurance pool that has that kicker in place so that's almost certainly what is happening and that what that's what did happen now the question is how do you get to the modern environment where you're able to have these huge coalition's etc and the answer is that with the dawn of Agriculture you massively intensified human populations so you made it far more possible to support a hundred times more people on and given the unit of land and it was also more efficient in other words there was more calories per unit of effort expended so what's going to happen behind that is that you're starting to get division of labor as a result of the increased efficiencies of Agriculture as well as you get people starting to get up for some pretty sophisticated learning curves and you have a lot of teaching that's going to be able to go on as a result of a lot of people in close proximity and so you're with the specialization of Labor of the myelin sheath and other knowledge is going to start to get specialized in individual brands and the trading process is now wound up being super worth it okay so even if you're getting exploited in a trade remember if you're in a simple village with very people there there isn't that much specialization of ability and so the trading process your trading often for things that you could really do yourself but you're not quite as good at it where that wasn't your day or you weren't that lucky and so whereas when you start to get an agricultural society that has 500 or a thousand people and only half of them are involved in in the land and the other half or specialized in in getting very effective at doing other things very very efficiently now they are so good at what it is that they do that you couldn't just do it yourself so the advantages of trade become quite spectacular and the fact that you may often feel out-negotiated in the trade you feel like they've got a better deal than you have you choke it down more often because it's still in your best interest and so probably the vast consumer surpluses that were involved that were derived from trade processes under under large populations under agriculture made it possible for human beings to build vastly larger aggregates of humans peacefully something that could not happen in Stone Age societies where the consumer surplus and exchanges were far less mm-hmm I remember watching a video from Milton Friedman who said he shows a pencil and he said there's no no way that that someone could have made this pencil on their own by mining their upper for the eraser and I mean getting the rubber trees and all I mean it's it's it's fascinating what we can do collectively yes absolutely that's a famous essay I forget who wrote it but it's called I pencil and people can google it I think it was all the way back written in the 1950s yeah it was a spectacular demonstration of the collective genius of human beings as a result of trade something that was explained the best I ever saw it was in the rational optimist by Ridley as he takes us from the paragraph 1 page 1 of that book is the shows a hand ax and a mouse computer mouse and explains how did we get from a hand ax 10,000 years ago to a computer mouse today and what what caused that was you know a whole series of changes driven by agriculture that that lead to large populations huge divisions of labor until the average individual is now sitting in the middle of trades where they are trading with the collective genius of the earth and their trades are incredibly efficient as as a result of that so as much as people sometimes feel like they want to quote get back to the land when they go back to the land they're going to find out that they're working awfully hard for almost nothing and it's it winds up you know there may be satisfactions from doing that but it's going to turn out that that's a very very hard way to go mm-hmm yeah all right well dr. Lee we've got a caller has been on hold for the show do we have time to caller so sure let's take a caller and see what happens all right caller welcome to show what's your name where you calling from hey this is Brian from Jacksonville yes hey Brian all right Ryan either write one with that I'm going to ask you again nothing I'm going to ask a pretty controversial question from my show you guys did earlier um I heard you guys talking about - parents are smart and heard about something about the the offspring of those parents facing return to the mean in intelligence now I know what that term means as far as economics where if one company is having excess profits that will attract competitors which will drive the profits down to basically the marginal cost that means to me or the same thing with arbitrage in finance but for as far as for um you know genetics and evolution I thought that if there was a trait I was advantageous the parents would be more likely to pass it off to their offspring and that's how absolution worked and I've heard certain pundits say that and this is the the controversial part that different races have different average IQs even if we bring in say there's a really smart guy from India and he comes it's the West if he has kids his kids won't necessarily be super smart his the intelligence of his children would return to average of that population from that country or that race or whatever so I was just wondering what your thoughts on what your thoughts were basically about that and how that works return to the mean with intelligence and how it works with evolution yeah it's a really good question and and recent recent evidence has come to light to make this much more PC than we might have thought I can remember I read an article Brian just a few a couple years ago was Jeffrey Miller and Miller was you know people that have listened to me know that I have I have great admiration for Jeffrey Miller intelligence I don't necessarily have great admiration fresh personality yeah he's a he is who he is he's his own man and he he makes his own mistakes and that's that's fine by me but that I have that I have legitimate admiration for a searing intellect that he carries and so when he wrote at peace I don't know three four years ago maybe somebody could find it where he was basically saying that the the Chinese government by virtue of their you know draconian control over the population was busy looking for these genetic indicators of high IQ and he had said that they had found such an indicator in other words they'd found a specific gene that was associated with super high IQs and and so he said listen it's game over for the West that the West will no longer be dominant in in in world history because the Chinese government is going to go about its business of essentially selectively breeding individuals that carry this gin and and essentially what they're going to do is that in a single generation they can massively increase the average IQ and in two or three generations they can spectacularly increase the average IQ as a result of this and so he's basically saying listen you're going to have an entire population of a billion people or three generations so they're going to be walking around with what would be a 99th percentile IQ relative to the West at which point you can forget it bill they'll out-compete you in every single aspect of commercial and military problems that there is and I read that and I thought oh my god I can't I can't believe what I'm looking at like I'm not going to have to worry about it because I won't be here but I could literally see the possibility that such a thing could be true that there could be people in the leadership of China that would be thinking along those lines and there would be nothing to stop them in a society like that from actually executing on it whereas of course the nobody in the West would ever even think of doing such a thing and there won't be such a thing that will ever take place and so I thought oh my god that that's literally possible and it's not it not only at the end of that article was not only possible I mean it's fantastical as it is as a concept I mean there's there said there's a you know a tremendous logic pivot and I thought wow I wonder you know I you know it's not like it happens overnight it just gently starts happening in the mean IQ of China goes from you know 107 to 108 109 115 221 226 135 and then it's just like unbelievable the the productivity of IQ juxtaposed high-technology you know makes a very smart person you know super but potentially valuable as a witness the salaries in Silicon Valley okay so now I looked at that and I kind of put it away in a corner of my mom and shrug my shoulders and said well nothing I can do about it and I don't really care that much but it's weird and and then I read plumbing and plumbing explains something that Geoffrey Miller didn't know when he was writing that article even very recently which is that there even though there may be a marker chin that is associated with these very high IQs that gene isn't responsible for it therefore if you select on it isn't going to do any good and so the truth is is that there isn't one gene or five genes or 13 genes or 27 genes if there's five genes you're sunk anyway okay but it's not IQ differences differences in physical appearance differences in propensity to gain weight athleticism beauty anything that you look at it turns out thousands of genes are involved so all every gene has a tiny little influence essentially the genes are like little tiny grains of sand and together they collectively build a sculpture but no one gene is responsible and no fifty genes are responsible so this is a very heartening and pleasant discovery that is not controversial and is now settled the issue so it was no surprise then well I mean we wouldn't have known the parameters of this issue until we had done the scientific research but behind the this this understanding that plumbin says was way off the radar twenty years ago like nobody had any idea but what I'm saying is true well a few people had an inkling that it might be true but no nobody really thought that this was true everybody thought that you know the differences in people's weights might be due to four five six seven eight nine ten genes the differences in IQ might be as a result to ten genes that made sense the differences in whether people are depressed or not depress might be a certain amount of genes they were looking like crazy for the gene or genes that might be responsible for schizophrenia okay so they knew it wasn't one gene because it didn't fall along DeLeon genetic probabilities but it turns out that I mean they were thinking oh I don't know maybe five maybe ten maybe John chromosome 17 like whatever all kinds of ideas everybody was wrong it turns out it's thousands and thousands of genes and so as a result it turns out to be the case that shown offsprings IQs are are expected to be thirteen points different than the parents IQs and if tube to regular unrelated people in the population drawn randomly from crowd in Times Square on New Year's the average difference between those two people is only 17 points so the of course very intelligent parents are likely to have intelligent children but they're also likely to have children that are average and so it's not going to be the case Chinese or anybody else is going to be able to selectively breed a pair of hundred fifty IQ parents and wind up with 150 IQ child if they breed a couple of parents that have 150 IQ prepared 750 IQ so the child is very likely to have a hundred thirty-seven IQ okay and then if they breed that child second generation to 150 IQ superstar then the mean of those two people would be 144 so therefore the child would the next child out it's likely to be 131 okay so they aren't able to maintain it as we see the high IQ parents who started out at 150 they're a grand shot their child will be 137 their grandchild will be 131 it's not going to fly okay so this is the regression to the mean phenomenon and that's you know that's why there's a there's a young man out there who loves basketball and his name is Michael Jordan and he's Michael Jordan's son and he's pretty big guy I think he's 6-2 6-3 played college basketball it's a tiny little podunk school you very good he got heckled because he wasn't anything like his dad but he loved the game and he played anyway she was basically a small-time will you know small college hack basketball player good for him I'm glad and I'm proud of the guy that he went out there and played because he loved the game even though he can't you can't even sniff the big-time even in college ball so that's that's regression to the mean and and so that's that's how it actually works with when it comes to races there are racial differences in personality there's racial differences in physical abilities of various kinds on average okay within every with every what you would call a race there's a huge diversity of individuals in there but within within each of those that you could you could plot a bell curve and those barrel bell curves are going to be different on on every every possible to mention including the structure of their teeth okay so I have a friend of mine a good friend of mine that went into a dentist finally finally got there and the dentist looked at her teeth and said are you part Asian and she said no not to my knowledge goes are you part Indian she said yeah in fact I am so it turns out there's some characteristic that is discernible in to structure that you know eight generations ago her you know somebody somebody made it with a Native American you know one hundred years ago another fifty years ago so but that characteristics typically seen in Asia so anyway an answer your question or their differences sure but that's that's not I'm not particularly interested in those differences for any particular reason the we don't peak groups don't get jobs groups don't achieve individuals do so what we're really interested in here is the impact of of genes on individuals and our personal individual offspring and what this means and how evolution would work here and what we find is that that to to very smart people are likely to have an of average child they may have a really smart men they may have an average one so I know of two people whose IQs I can definitely tell you are north of 140 I know both of them and their child is literally in the middle of the bell curve okay so this is this is regression to the mean and whatever we said that you heard last time is true and anybody that thinks that the that like like begets like and very tight tolerances and therefore there's a stratification of genes and capability that was essentially predicted by the bell curve in 1986 this turns out to be not true that the genes and their attendant strengths and weaknesses flow reasonably freely up and down the gene pool and that's actually how inheritance seems to work in our species okay okay then alright that makes plot it all right yeah red and green all the way oh no give them a false go ahead Brian oh yeah it is that is there a a book that you would recommend if I want to learn a little bit more about that and also a book you'd recommend if I want to learn a little bit more about personal personality psychology Dybbuk sighs yeah it's actually the two books that I would recommend if you want to understand behavior genetics is Plomin blueprint it's the standard of the field at the moment and and the book on the big five an excellent book on the big five is Miller's book spent it's a superb document so I'm raise you very well but that's because Miller is crazy you know all right all right everybody I'm going back to you thank you very very much just one follow-up question on this is it possible then to average parents can give birth to a child that's above average or that's higher like in the parents are I've got no question so that the unexpected range if you if you had two parents that are right on the mean at 100 IQ their child could reasonably be expected to be all the way down to 87 or all the way up to 113 so it wouldn't be surprising at all that that would be a very fairly normal range of variants that would take place so yeah what we're finding is these this is oh you know I go ahead and upset some people now just why not that's what we do here this is for secreting people okay this was like you're doing you're breeding horses all right and so you can take a couple of fancy people and and breed them you can take a you know a couple of champions and it turns out that you get an egg this is how it is or it turns out you get Secretariat where he turns out you get some in the middle but but most of the most of the sons and daughters of Secretariat didn't do much so the whole idea is that once in a while they get a superstar that generally is not as extraordinary as the parent that is might be very very good okay but most of the sons and daughters of Secretariat are are you know not not too special because they've they've regress to the mean and the reason why that's true just very briefly to to clarify why this would work it's not some magical process it's that Secretariat himself was was a particularly bizarre configuration coming out of his own gene pool so if you can think of a I don't know think of a very heterogeneous chocolate shake where there's parts of it that are chocolatier and park scimitar the more vanilla and parts of it didn't get any sugar in it okay and you stick your straw in there you have you suck it up and it turns out BAM you hit the really good part it's like you might not have but you just happen to so that's Secretariat so Secretariat is you know has a whole slew of genes and the ones that happened to be the ones that that happen to be represented in that particular individual as active that combination gave rise to a superstar now he say but he carries with him a whole bunch of other genes and that when he breeds those other genes are are likely to be the ones that get expressed in the next generation and they're not as fancy so he was a particularly superstar of his own particular gene team so you can think about then what this is what I call meet the parents okay so you're dating some girl and you think she's pretty hot and then you kind of before you get serious you want to meet the parents so you meet the parents and you meet the two sisters and it turns out your girl is the superstar relative to the two sisters and you're looking at the mom and you're looking at the dad you're like how the heck did you drop out of this group and now this is going to make you realize wait a minute you're a nun representative sample of your Jing Bowl all right think about how you feel about it a little bit differently if it turns out that the sisters are just as beautiful and the moms goddess and the dad's cool looks like Cary Grant it's like wow you're an honest representation of your gene pool so I'm saying so this is what the person is is that they just happen to be a particular representation of a whole host genes that they're carrying and so when you see somebody that's particularly outstanding good or bad in other words a far away from the middle of the gene pool it is extreme I mean far away from the general gene pool of the general population it's exceedingly likely that they are an outlier risk with respect to their own gene pool and so that their offspring are going to be reeling it back towards the middle that's an almost certainty okay so Shaquille O'Neal is clearly the outlier of the gene pool at 72 now his son is 611 but that's a pretty big fall okay so he's already come three whole inches which is a lot in terms of does seem much to us obviously the kids giant but but his child will probably be 67 okay so two generations out Shaquille O'Neal's tallest grandchild is likely to be 67 so we see that that Shaquille himself was an outlier and we watched the process of the recirculation of new jeans and that's why that's why the socio-economic consequences of this well an inner intermediate or long-term are far more fluid than has been hypothesized previously
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