The Battle Between Gender & Biology - Colin Wright - #251

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Well, hello, my friends. Welcome back. I am finally returning to the UK after three and a half weeks in Dubai. Kind of weirdly glad to be coming back, if I'm honest. I think it's been very nice to have a break, but I'm ready to get back and knuckle down, make some huge growth on the channel. Also getting ready for that big 100K subscriber celebration party with video guide Dean upon which we are going to announce a bunch of new series and some very exciting stuff. Onto today's guest, Colin Wright is an evolutionary biologist and the managing editor at Quillette. The debate around gender and sex differences has taken longer to work out than Jordan Peterson's rehab. We're nearly at the end of 2020 and what constitutes a man and a woman are still being discussed. So hopefully Colin can shed some light on this. We also get an insight into the internal politics of the evolutionary biology world and his problem with Brett and Eric Weinstein's reticence around why they're not publishing papers on seemingly amazing theories that they've got. But for now, it's time for the wise and wonderful Colin Wright.
Colin Flipping Wright in the building. How are you doing, man?

**Colin Wright** (1:31)
I'm doing well, it's a good intro. Yeah, I like that it's the best intro I've had so far.

**Chris Williamson** (1:37)
What can you say? When I'm away, I'm on holiday, I'm just in a jovial mood, you know, just ready to discuss some evolutionary biology.

**Colin Wright** (1:47)
I'm down, let's do it.

**Chris Williamson** (1:48)
I love it. So what's the most undiscussed topic in evolutionary biology, which you think should be talked about more?

**Colin Wright** (1:55)
It's right out of the gates there.

**Chris Williamson** (1:58)
Yeah, there's very limited foreplay in this show, Colin. It's kind of straight in.

**Colin Wright** (2:03)
Yeah, I mean, so there's these bigger overarching questions about just like human evolution, how we evolve certain complex traits behaviorally and otherwise. But I'd say it's really going to depend on who you ask on some of these issues. Some people think that we can explain all the diversity of life and all the behavior with current models of evolutionary thinking, just gradualism, mutation selection. And then you have some people like I've heard people like Brett Weinstein, for instance, he thinks there's like a missing component that we need to have some sort of paradigm shift and we need something to explain things like peacock's tails and why there's so much diversity in the tropics and things like that. And I'm sort of in the camp that we've figured out like the main big trends and like how, at least in principle, how these things could have arisen. I haven't been totally convinced that there's any massive discoveries to be made in terms of, you know, that it's going to like completely change the way we think about evolutionary biology. I think from this point forward, it's going to be more like tweaking bits. And I'm sure, I mean, there can be some substantial insight we might gain from areas, but, yeah, I think it's going to be largely applying the same principles of, you know, Darwinian natural selection to sort of things that we already kind of know about. Then you can also go the other route and say, well, the important things to learn about are things that we kind of already know, but we're not really allowed to say maybe to some degree because there's sort of a social taboo against things. And I think that's probably more threatening to evolutionary biology in the short term and maybe even long term depending on how long sort of these cultural norms last that won't let people speak freely about certain controversial topics or something. Or even worse, they only allow sort of one side, the side that is sort of aligns more with our morality or something, that they only allow that side really to get published because it's just they'll go through review a lot faster because they kind of are leaning towards all the preconceptions and views that reviewers might already have or something. So then you get like a biased literature that's not really reflective of reality, but sort of reflective of what we'd kind of like to be true in a sense. So yeah, that's sort of my overarching take on sort of evolution at the moment.

**Chris Williamson** (4:36)
Got you. What's the bifurcating that you're talking about between Brett's approach and your conception of how evolution has worked?

**Colin Wright** (4:48)
You know, it's not entirely clear because he hasn't fully fleshed out the things he's proposing.

**Chris Williamson** (4:54)