#1665 - Carole Hooven

Joe Rogan (0:04)

The Joe Rogan Experience.

Joe Rogan (0:16)

Thank you.

Carole Hooven (0:17)

Thank you so much for having me.

Joe Rogan (0:18)

My pleasure. I'm excited to talk about this. What made you want to write about testosterone? What was the motivation behind this?

Carole Hooven (0:25)

So, I'll give you the short story first, and then later, I can give you the longer story. The longer story involves chimpanzees, so that's kind of fun.

Joe Rogan (0:34)

Oh, one of my favorite subjects.

Carole Hooven (0:35)

But the short story is that I teach at Harvard about hormones. I teach a course, behavioral, well, it's on behavioral endocrinology. It's called Hormones and Behavior. And I've taught that for a long time now. And I got my PhD at Harvard, studying testosterone and behavior, studying sex differences and the way we think and process information.

And I love, I just love the topic. I love how much understanding testosterone helps me understand the world, understand men. I'm not a man, I don't really understand men or how they work, but understanding this hormone really has helped me a lot. And then in teaching about endocrinology and specifically testosterone, I get so much feedback from students about how it changes their lives, changes how they understand themselves personally, how they understand their relationships, how they understand the world. And it's empowering for them, and it's been empowering for me.

And so I've just always had this natural intellectual enthusiasm for this topic. And but I'd say in the last five years, I felt like the science was coming under attack, and there's been kind of a program to dismantle the science of testosterone and how it shapes behavior, particularly the evolutionary basis of behavior, has kind of come under attack, the idea that sex differences are grounded in biology. And I know that testosterone is a really important part of that.

And there's a movement to kind of discredit that science or downplay the importance of biology, and specifically testosterone, in our lives, and especially in sex differences. And I'm fascinated by sex differences, and I'm fascinated by how evolution shapes sex differences across different species and how it works. And so that's ultimately why I wrote the book, because I kind of want to get all the science out there and kind of push back against what I see as an attack on really good science. There's nothing wrong with understanding who we are from a biological point of view. And I think we should all be open to that and learn as much as we can about who we are and how we work.

Joe Rogan (2:53)

Yeah, I agree with you, but I also think it's fascinating when I watch the attack on the science of biology, the science of how... I think that if we were an objective observer, like something other than human, and we're watching human beings, we would be really interested in the sex differences between the male and the females, and why there's this real clear pattern of behavior on both sides. Obviously, there's a spectrum in that pattern, but depending upon the levels of hormones and the genetic variants, there's a lot of consistency, and what is causing this, and what is it about male behavior that leads to this, and female behavior that leads to that.

But then you get into this weird thing where ideology has somehow or another overtaken science with a lot of human beings today.

So they're willing to abandon science if it's inconvenient for their ideology. And it's very strange, because you see really intelligent people doing this, which is where it's really spooky, because they're scared of being chastised and attacked on Twitter. They're scared of being canceled. So they're scared of going against the mainstream, which is ideologically based instead of scientifically based.

Carole Hooven (4:14)

That's right. And I think the fear is that the science is getting in the way of the ideology. So I agree with most of the goals of the people who are ideologically motivated. We wanna reduce human suffering. We wanna make sure that we have equal human rights for people who have all kinds of differences.

And so I agree with all that. But I don't think that if science tells us that some of these differences are grounded in biology, that means that A, these traits that may be like extreme male aggression, that doesn't mean that that's immutable. I mean, we have tons of evidence that it's not immutable. Humans have control over their behavior. It depends heavily on the culture. So denying the importance of say testosterone in male aggression isn't going to change the way that sort of differences in our natures or the impetus for males to feel more than females, that they want to be physically aggressive or to respond aggressively in certain situations.