Marc J. Defant on Evolutionary Psychology, Feminist Studies, and the Limits of Academic Rigor

In this episode of Faithful Politics, we’re joined by Marc J. Defant, a professor of geology and geochemistry at the University of South Florida, to discuss his controversial peer-reviewed paper Evolutionary Psychology and the Crisis of Empirical Rigor in Feminist Studies.

Marc explains how his scientific training shaped his concerns about how some areas of feminist scholarship handle evidence, critique, and falsifiability. We walk through the core claims of evolutionary psychology, how it differs from social constructionism, and why Marc believes certain academic fields have shifted away from empirical methods toward ideological frameworks.

The conversation also explores academic peer review, cancel culture, emotional safety versus intellectual inquiry, and what universities lose when dissenting ideas are treated as harm rather than arguments. Along the way, Marc reflects on backlash to his work, the changing culture of higher education, and why he thinks truth-seeking requires discomfort.

• Marc's website: https://www.marcdefant.com/
• Article discuss: Evolutionary Psychology and the Crisis of Empirical Rigor in Feminist Studies https://link.springer.com/epdf/10.1007/s12119-025-10465-7?sharing_token=xhLL_kUU3AJoozWOStCtNPe4RwlQNchNByi7wbcMAY7qhjlkYrDnv0nFUr1VvYzTCYBHSTVW-yEPNQylsA981gK0c23F0a6k3aPlfqm7DyZEyCJfPpG8vxwrAaQNK1T4wUIgNwdfhLSIcCOOkeI5yj6S2np70SCryX2HcwsAUaQ%3D

Guest Bio

Marc J. Defant is a professor of geology and geochemistry at the University of South Florida. Trained as a physical scientist, his academic work spans volcanology, geochemistry, and evolutionary psychology. In recent years, he has published peer-reviewed research examining methodological weaknesses in feminist studies and critiques of evolutionary psychology. Marc has appeared on platforms including TEDx, The Joe Rogan Experience, and numerous academic and media outlets, where he focuses on evidence-based inquiry and scientific stan

Transcript

0:17

Hey, welcome back, faithful politics listeners and watchers. We are so glad to have you back. I am your political host, Will Wright, and I'm joined by your faithful host, Pastor Josh Bertram. What's going on, Josh? Hey, what's going on? Well, doing great. Yeah. And today we are joined by Mark J. Defante. He is a professor of geology and geochemistry at the University of South Florida. He recently published a peer-reviewed um paper called Evolutionary Psychology and the Crisis of Empirical Rigor and Feminist Studies and has been on a bunch of different platforms that you've probably heard of, such as like Ted Talks and Joe Rogan and Dinesh D'Souza's podcast and a whole bunch of other places. And we're just so glad to have him. here with us today. So welcome to the show Mark. Well, thanks for having me. I appreciate it. Yeah, so I have to ask. So you've written quite a bit about sort of this, the feminism and psychology, yet your professional pedigree is kind of rooted in geology and geochemistry. So help us kind of like, you know, start there, like help us work through, you know, what is it about your background that, you know, kind of helped inform the questions you were asking for the paper that you wrote that we're going to be talking about today. Well, I'm glad you asked me that because I get asked that a lot. When I was a younger professor around the 1990s, I was teaching an honors science honors course in our College of Honors. And I got interested in evolutionary psychology when I read a book by Robert Wright on evolutionary psychology. He was one of the early sort of people that popularized the whole idea and area. And I got so excited about it, I started teaching my science honors course in evolutionary psychology. And then we went from there to, uh I just got so interested and I started reading everything I could get my hands on until I felt like I was in a position to start. writing research articles in the field. So although I don't have any formal degrees in the field, I do feel like I'm at least in one area, evolutionary psychology, pretty well versed. I know that's strange. I spent the majority of my career on volcanoes all over the world, traveling, getting funded, and then Doesn't that make you a vulcanologist? Isn't that like the coolest word? You speak Vulcan or something? studying Vulcans, though. You don't want that. But that's an awesome word. Sorry, go ahead. No, it's a good point. So anyway, just got off into, uh I guess around the time I had kids, which is kind of unusual, I started um wanting to stay home more and doing less road work. And now it kind of timed it well for evolutionary psychology because that's when I started getting into this whole area. And if I'm talking too much, just feel free to cut me off. Well, you're good to go. I would love to just jump right into this. I said I would love to dump. That's not good. That's not what I meant to say. I would love to jump. Maybe it is. I would love to jump into kind of the core thesis of your paper that we're going to talk about. Because it's controversial. It's certainly going to be controversial to feminists who are in the field, is my assumption. based on what I understand of the paper when I was reviewing it. But I would love for you to kind of give us in like a paragraph or two, what's the main thesis of this most recent paper and what are you trying to, what are you trying to? Well, I think I want to say first that because I've had a lot of training in science and got my PhD in geochemistry, uh published a lot of research in geochemistry, I feel like I bring to the table a pretty rigorous and rational approach to whatever field I might get into. And that's where I really started having trouble. When I got into evolutionary psychology, I started seeing a lot of papers that were very critical of evolutionary psychology, primarily from feminists. And they were pushing this idea of social constructionism, which is basically they believe everything is generated by culture. I mean, obviously, you know, if you take a thing like money, that is a social construction. It doesn't have any value. uh unless culture gives it value. So I understand where they're coming from, but when you're talking about sex or you're talking about gender, I just find it very hard to understand why they take that, well I think I understand why they take the attitude, but it certainly at least appears from my perspective of not being very rigorous scientifically. I never read any papers which try to address the science that's put forward in evolutionary psychology or do I see any positive research papers or at least not many attempting to substantiate social constructionism. So I started worrying about that. I tell you I wasn't out to critique feminists necessarily. I was just seeing evolutionary psychology critiqued. and felt like it was somewhat unfair because they weren't coming at it from a scientific rational perspective, or at least in my opinion that was it. So I wrote this paper and I tried to find areas in feminism which seemed to exemplify the lack of rigor. of course I started out with evolutionary psychology and social construction and how social construction lacks what I think is rigorous. I don't know how your positions are and I'd like to hear them, but as far as I'm concerned masculinity and femininity are kind of the yin and yang of how we propagate and I think for example we're attracted to the opposite sex or most of us are attracted to the opposite sex because they have either masculine or feminine characteristics. And there's a whole host of information and data out there uh that suggests that this is a physical process and not a cultural process. example, uh hormones, testosterone is 10 times higher, and that's an amazing amount, 10 times higher in men than women in general. And so uh you have that suggesting that it is physical. There's also a lot of neurological data that suggests that we have it hardwired into our brain that we're either men or we're women. And so I think you just can't overnight change that. You can't all of a sudden become necessarily feminine or masculine unless you change some things. And by the way, if you start taking hormones oh that would make you more woman-like, oh then you can develop feminine characteristics. but I don't see any of that addressed in the social construction world. They seem to be, you know, hung up on this uh cultural impact rather than the physical impact. And so I'm just saying, look, if you want to take this attitude, which is fine, but maybe it doesn't belong in the university where we're after something called truth or at least getting as close to it as we possibly can, maybe that belongs in a political think tank somewhere. but I don't see why it should be a whole curriculum uh in our uh institutions, academic institutions, excuse me. just to kind of level set for some of the folks, and myself included, can you help just define some of the terms used? Like uh evolutionary psychology is one, and then uh social constructionism, which is new term for me. I've never heard that term before. ah Sorry about that. didn't mean to come in assuming you knew all this. uh Yeah, no, you're right. A lot of people don't know that. Social construction is the belief, and I used the belief because I don't see any hardcore evidence supporting it. There is a belief that everything is constructed by culture and it's all society. So, uh They would say that if you're masculine uh or feminine that that was uh culturally, for lack of better term, construed in you so that you would be feminine or masculine. And it has nothing to do uh with uh physics or biology or chemistry. And of course uh it has some problems right away when you think about gay people because uh gay people uh have characteristics that are the opposite. So how does society and culture, which seems to be fairly heterosexual, how does it create then gay people if it's just cultural? So that, you know, it's a question I constantly ask and I haven't gotten any good. oh Somebody wrote a critique of my paper and she She never mentioned things like that. She never tried to argue against those kinds of things. It's kind of interesting social construction because James Daymore, do you remember this guy? He was at Google and they fired him because he wrote, they asked people their opinions about women in their company and they were having a discussion on it. and he brought up all these ideas about evolutionary psychology which I'll get into in a minute. And he said, look, know, it seems like it's not cultural, it's all physical. And he went into some of the reasons and the women that were working at Google at the time didn't come back very interestingly and say, you're wrong because of this, and give rational reasons. They came back and said, I don't feel safe. uh You're creating an unsafe environment for me. And of course the PR people then got in and just, you know, pretty much kicked him out. uh So that's what I fear most. I fear that we're, you know, sort of under this misnomer that culture is everything. On the evolutionary psychology part of it, if you don't mind i would just take a little bit of time to explain some of the evolution that went on here i don't know how you guys feel about evolution sometimes people get upset when i talk about evolution so okay all right good news all right um well if you think about how the human brain has increased throughout time uh humans have been around, homo sapiens have been around only about 300,000 years. And if you go back and look at some of our ancestors like Australopithecus, it was an ancestor that lived between four and seven million years ago. And it had a brain about the size of a chimpanzee. And then once we evolved, was a phenomenal increase in brain size over a extremely short period of time, geologically speaking. And some things happened to humans because of that. When you have an increase in brain size like that, the head of course increases and it makes it so that women cannot deliver a baby that is full grown. There's only 25 percent development of the brain inside the womb and so the fetus comes out practically helpless. if you compare this to say a deer, uh a deer will give, I guess I should say doe, will give birth to a deer. That deer is up and running, what do you call baby deer, fawns. The fawn is up running right away and they have to be because, you know, lions are out there or whatever eat deer, bears, whatever. And so that's crucial. With humans, of course, it's dangerous out there too. And a baby, no way of course a baby is going to get up and be able to run. So it makes the mother and the baby totally dependent on each other, particularly the baby dependent on the mother. And the mother, because she's got this baby to take care of, you can see in a hunter-gatherer society, might be very dependent on the male, the father. And so we have this dichotomy here in a way where women are looking for support. We call it parental investment from the male. This is kind of unusual in the animal kingdom that humans have this. so we see this interesting thing developing where women are much more unlikely to have promiscuity, a lot of sexual encounters, because they'll get pregnant potentially and not have someone that will want to take care of the child. And so I hope you can see where this might be a dilemma for females and why they might be rather hesitant to have sex with a male if it was uh not supported by, you know, what the female would deem as something that will give me support if I do have a baby. uh so women selected men on a very different basis than women select or than men select men. women select men on the basis of how well they can obtain resources. How well do they hunt? How well are they going to bring home the bacon? uh And of course strength uh is an important factor in that. And good genes of course come to play. If you compare that to what men are selecting for in a person they want to have babies with, they use beauty as away, whereas women are using potentially the amount of money a man makes, which is way of saying, hey, I want to know how much uh he can bring home the bacon. How much is he willing to support me? uh And how much can he support me? So we've gone from hunter-gatherer society now to uh our current civilization, where it's just been too short. The 10,000 years that we've had civilization is just too short. for these kind of evolutionary patterns to change. we still are, if you will, we still got this caveman brain that's operating in society today. if you've ever wondered then why there's a difference between female and male behavior, this is an attempt by evolutionary psychology to explain that. And there's a lot of physical basis for this. uh But what I want to talk about, if I've covered evolutionary psychology enough, is to say that feminists don't like this because it doesn't support their ideology, their idea that women and men should be treated equally. That it claims that evolutionary cytology is trying to take them back to the caveman days where they were supported. And that's not at all true. That would be a deterministic view of evolutionary psychology. As a scientist, all we're trying to do is say, hey, this is how this looks like it happened. We're not saying that necessarily you have to behave that way now uh to make this oh scientifically viable. All we're saying is this is what we might want to focus on if we're trying to understand uh sex and gender and all of those things. I may have left some things open for confusing you and I'll be happy to explain those in more detail. No, I mean, I really appreciate it. I appreciate hearing someone who's been trained in this kind of talk about, you hear the reasons that we understand why in general women are attracted to men and men are attracted to women, right? So it treats anything that might be an A productive, which is not like a sexual behavior. that isn't for the purpose of reproduction, say it's like a same sex act or something like that, would just be, you know, there's some other evolutionary explanation for that beyond reproduction. Because it doesn't make sense that it would be for reproduction. Maybe dominance, maybe cultural strength, maybe who knows. And that's not what I'm really trying to get into. Thinking about your paper, um When I'm thinking about this thesis, it's almost as if what I see saying is that, and how I read it, that in feminist as a discipline, what it's essentially doing is it's taking certain things as assumed in a starting point, certain things like patriarchy, certain things like a definition of gender. And it's starting from there and then creating some kind of, you know, interpretation based on that, which is of course going to skew the data because you're starting not from an empirical claim about how we've observed this, there's measurable data, these are the methods that we've used, it's falsifiable, it's testable. There's an assumption that's made that isn't being tested, isn't being falsified. that basically is creating the foundation of this academic discipline. And you're like, hey, claims about the world should be constrained by observation, measurable data, methods that allow correction. Is that kind of a starting point of the issue? what, like, yeah, go ahead and you can respond to that and kind of build on that. Why is that a problem, what they're doing, where they're starting? A lot of people are going to listen to this and they're going to say, I mean, again, I feel unsafe. So you're going to have a lot of people that listen to this and think, well, that's a good reason why someone should be. Yeah, feeling unsafe is just saying feeling unsafe. And I'm not saying I agree with this because I don't. But I'm saying that there will be a lot of people even within. I've even talked to an expert on Gen Z, and safety is the highest priority for Gen Z. highest priority, emotional safety. There is no other um priority, like value higher than that, that someone is safe. And so it seems like, yeah, the person being safe, but ideas being safe, that's where it feels like really the ideas are safe. And so I would love for you, like, there's a lot of people that just aren't going to understand why it's an issue that they have these assumptions that they start from that are essentially unproven. And I would love for you to say, why is this a problem? Well, Josh, I think first of all, I think you described it very, very well. Yes, these assumptions are made. uh And let's not forget that this has come through 40, 50 years of feminist thought. So, you know, they haven't just yesterday come up with this. And I think that now we're down the road and people are saying this evolutionary psychology stuff. Not that we weren't saying it all along, but uh they're having a lot of difficulties with it evolutionary psychology has gotten into the universities also now and a lot of psychology departments to have uh... evolutionary psychology programs uh... but i getting back to what you're saying about safe all of the all of the studies that have been done recently uh... through mainly polls show that the the number one objective for for women is to be safe, like you say. if you look at what guys, their number one interests are certainly top interests. oh You know, they seem to be interested in facts and uh information and openness. So we have, probably seen society change in many, many fields because safety has become a priority. for a second there, Mark? Yeah, just thinking again, I'm just, what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to take into, I'm trying to put myself into the place of a critic, someone who's thinking about this. And because I really don't, I I reviewed the article, I understand the argument, but I wasn't able to get into depth and the, right, all any of that kind of stuff. So I'm thinking about someone who's like, you know, they're from the place of a critic and they're, like they might hear you say something like, you just said that there are certain things that, um, that, that men want, they're, they're, they're after something different than, than women are. They, they want safety and then men want information, which may, which in our society, someone might say, well, that sounds offensive to me. That sounds like you think women are dumb. That's not what I'm saying. You're saying, I know you're not saying that, but people might think, they don't care about uh truth, or they don't care about data or information, right? And it's like, um where are those studies coming from? How can we trust those studies, I guess? This is what I'm trying to go like, where do those studies that are talking about, um like men want a certain thing, uh like they want information. their value is, you were just saying poll information, right? That the highest values are women, thinking safety, men, information. Is there, like, behind that, and I actually, like, I agree with that, and I'm trying to say, okay, so how do we communicate that, like, why, how are we coming to these conclusions um that there is something durable about men or women? that can be ascertained from these studies to the place where someone could say, yeah, this is a characteristic that differentiates men and women pretty clearly. And we're not making this up. We're not saying this out of ideological desires or some desire to subjugate women or define women in some way or whatever or men in some way. We're saying this out of this is literally the factual data. I don't know if I'm describing this right. I'm just... You can respond to it. Go ahead, sorry. Well, you bring up a good point. How can we know anything? And uh I would answer that by saying, particularly in polls, people could be lying. I'm only able to repeat what the polls are showing. There's a wonderful paper, in case your audience is interested in it, um about these polls that have been taken. And she just came out with a paper. called From Warriors to Warriors, The Cultural Rise of Women. And she does an extensive amount of polling in there. Her name is Corey Jane Clark. And uh it addresses this whole issue. She is uh quite a good statistician. And so I think uh that we can be fairly certain, at least, that that's what women answered and that's what men answered in these polls. That doesn't mean that there's any absolute right to it. That make sense? Now getting back to the issue of safety, oh how does that, I guess you'll have to explain, because I don't quite understand it. From my personal standpoint as a scientist, I'm not sure how what I say as a scientist affects someone's positively or negatively. Right, and should that be a consideration even? just attempting to try to... Well, it may be an important factor, uh but me telling you that we may have some characteristics left over from hunter-gather society hundreds of thousands of years ago doesn't change anything today. uh We're not making society different, nor are we trying to make society different. We're just trying to explain why we behave the way we do. Does that make any sense? that clarify? So I hope that I'm not creating a lot of uh angst among women listening to this out there that I'm trying to make society... Yeah, I know, it's a good point. You know, I'm curious, Mark, like you mentioned a few times that there's been a lot of criticism about, you know, your paper, your work. The paper was published in August of last year or September or something like that. And I remember, I think, looking at it. Yeah, well. Oh, OK, well. Well, given all the criticism that you've gotten about it, like how much do you think um the criticism is connected or tied to like cancel culture? um And the only reason I'm asking is because there's a really great book by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff about, um yeah, the canceling of the American mind. It is a good pick. And the book really, really opened my eyes to just sort of the systemic like cancel culture, especially in the academic world. I had no idea. So I'd love to kind of just get your thoughts. Two things, really. Just one, like, would you have received the same criticism about your paper 20 years ago? ah And then two, I'd love for you just talk to us a little bit about like the academic peer review process ah and maybe where some of the ah stop gaps are that are kind of creating these, I don't know, unbalanced sort of uh world of truthiness, you know, that's only pushed by one particular political party. Well, that's very interesting. I say that because I'm working on a paper right now related to the great feminization. um This past year, Helen Andrews just wrote a paper called The Great Feminization where she thinks that some of the characteristics she's seeing suggest that they're the result of women becoming the major entity in a lot of areas like for example women are taking over now they're in the majority and law students they're in the majority of number of people with PhDs they're the majority in on college campuses not only in the student body but now among faculty and her contention is that a lot of the things that she sees happening are the result of uh women having the power to make change to the way they want things. And so we've gone from what we normally experience to this thing called wokeism. And she would argue, and I think I happen to agree with her, based a lot on my work too, is that women, the things that we refer to as woke, oftentimes are those things that women say that they prefer. For example, freedom of speech. uh women much prefer to have a uh control of the society so that there is no harm being done. And this is very, very uh feminine attitude if we can believe the data. And so if silencing people makes the community safer, then they're all for set silencing people and so what we may be seen as part of woke ism is this lack of freedom in our universities that you know in a in typically uh... what used to be a bastion of free speech has now become very very tight-lipped and you're right a lot of people are getting canceled I'm an old fart so I haven't been canceled yet because I know that probably if they cancel or try to cancel me I can just retire early. But I think a lot of young men need to be careful. I know several men that have been canceled and even a few women. So we do have to be careful and I think that's one of the reasons that Helen Andrews is raising this point. and she's got some wonderful videos out there and podcasts she's been on maybe you'd even be interested in trying to get uh her. She emphasizes this and sees it as a real threat to what we know as civilization particularly in the area of law where they are uh where women tend to you know have things like uh no bond and Oh, not bringing harm to anyone, whereas the protection of the society over the individual in this case seems to be, uh you know, put on the individual. So yeah, it's a very interesting topic and I think it's going to get a lot more publicity as time goes on. So I'm trying to, with my research, I'm trying to take that concept and see if I can. either document that it's true or document that it's wrong through the data. Just real fast, can you just define, again, like, wokeism? Because it is a term that we hear all the time, right? And everybody, I think, kind of has their own definition of it. So just in the context that you're using it. Well, the best way to define woke-ism, I think, is the way Helen Andrews did, which is to take the example of Larry Summers. Perhaps you're familiar with Larry Summers. He was a former president of Harvard. He worked in the Clinton administration. oh he... Oh, well, yeah. Yeah, that's been his kind of ending his career a little bit there. the first time I've ever heard his name was like connected to the FC files, which I'm sure he's probably done all kinds of other things too, but sorry. he's a huge name in uh academia. being president of Harvard, you have a lot of power. And so he was at a meeting uh which was supposed to be addressing why females were having trouble getting into fields like computer science, which are dominated by men in engineering and STEM. And so in this meeting, which was supposed to not be, everyone had agreed before they went in there not to talk about this outside of the meeting. And during the meeting, Larry Summers said something in effect that he thought uh that a lot of the reasons that women weren't getting into these fields is because their disposition isn't such that they want to get into those fields. They're more interested in sociology and maternal kinds of things. You can imagine how that might have upset some women, even though this is based on the data, I might add. uh And so the women that were in there, some of the women, not all of them, some of the women came out quite upset. uh their reactions were things like, want to throw up. uh This was incredibly upsetting. I feel uh like my space is not safe, those kinds of things. And not one person though came out saying this is why he's wrong. They just came out making those general comments. so eventually he lost his job over this very thing. And uh if that doesn't tell you what wokeism is, I don't think anything can better. I would say if you want a definition, it's that uh We are placing the safety of individuals uh over uh what might be best for society. That might be a general way to say it. And I may be off on that because it's something I'm focusing on. But yes, I think that's part of it. Yeah, I mean, I it's like, what's the root cause of so much of this? And there's this I do think there's an ideology that comes in. It's the spirit of ideology. I don't know what to call it. I've been accused of us having a spirit of Jezebel. So I'll just say a spirit of ideology. There's a it's this sense that, hey, these uncritical, untested, uncritically tested assumptions. that feel very right to me and probably out of very real experiences of being uh marginalized, hurt, or not thought of, whatever it is, right? These things grow out of certain experiences, certain people forge the field, they're pioneers, something happened to them, they had to kind of make their way into it. Yeah, but that ideology, though, that stays there, it serves as a filter. And then I think thus, not only a filter, but also uh almost like a poisoning of what comes after. Maybe that's not the right word, because that implies a negative. But it's affecting everything coming out of there. um And when thinking about like so. It's this idea and again, just bringing us back to thinking about this thesis contemporary uh feminist studies Essentially, they lack empirical rigor uh They function maybe more as ideology or advocacy than scholarship and so you're saying it should they these kinds of things that are that lack empirical rigor and Function more as ideology and advocacy are better suited to be in activist or political settings rather than in the academia, which is supposed to have these kind of values, right? And then, but we see those values being attacked, which I even hear you kind of saying that uh there seems to be some kind of correlation. We don't know what the causation is maybe, or maybe we do, between this rise of maybe, oh, like females becoming majority in these spaces. and some of these changes that are coming along with it, maybe even unintended, I would assume. Like no one was like, had some master plan, we're going to change all this, but just kind of the, yeah. So it's like, I want to focus in, well, one, you can critique anything I just said there, if like I didn't get your thesis right. I want to go into kind of the data that you use, you talk about patriarchy, pay gap, fat studies, objectification, rape. etiology, how like what are the causations of rape culture kind of, or just the action of rape. And then even epistemology. uh Can you kind of talk about like this, uh like what these things are and what the issues that you're seeing in these domains are? question. In fact, this would help to give you some idea about why we may have wokeism because uh feminist studies turns out to be sort of a almost like uh an experimental area where women's ideas are brought to the front, much more so than we probably have in general society. And in the feminist community, it does seem like safety is an extremely important issue. And so if I'm out there saying, know, gosh, being fat or overweight uh is bad for your health, uh this might make people that are overweight feel bad and as a man uh... my attitude is well gosh you know we don't want these people to die young do we i mean i i think we need to be healthy and so i think it's best to tell people there they seem to have a different take on it they their their whole thesis as far as i can tell is uh... safe at any size and they have this phenomena where they have tried to sell this idea that you can be fat and and it's okay and I'm I'm telling you that after I thoroughly searched the literature on obese and and even overweight that it is not healthy for you to be overweight is not health is certainly not healthy for you to be obese unless you're a sumo wrestler and how many of us can claim that sumo wrestlers have this wonderful ability because they actually work out you know they're pounding on each other day in and day out there they're in incredible shape and they have this this intake of food consumption that's very carefully monitored uh and so they can have all this weight on them but inside in the core they're massively uh in shape a lot like tackle football tackles. So to take that to the next step, you can imagine where people might get hurt, but at the same time it might be better for society to let people know that this is not a good path to take. And I see this in evolutionary psychology too. The feminists see evolutionary psychology as something that people might get hurt on. uh For example, when I say men are looking for beautiful women, they're looking for beautiful women because beauty is uh an example of how men sort out health. We find that all of the characteristic of beautiful women and beautiful men too are characteristics that correlate uh with health. So men are using beauty We don't know it, but we're using beauty as a way to search for health. And we find it must be very important. Men are willing to fight and potentially die over, you know, the most beautiful women. And as a result, oh it seems like it's pretty important in our society. And a lot of women downplay it because it looks like it's shallow, but it's not shallow at all. It's something that's very, very important. and uh something that men prize. And it's the same way with women prizing a man's ability to uh gain physical resources. That isn't shallow, that's very meaningful. We see this in our society. If you look at porn, uh the major proprietors of porn are men. uh It's just the opposite with uh the cosmetics industry and the beauty industry. uh Women are the uh major people involved in the cosmetic industry. it's something that we see uh from a physical characteristics that support the evolutionary psychology. Women, though, I think don't like the idea. They feel unsafe about hearing that men are looking for beautiful women. and they're trying to change us, they're trying to say, hey, don't look for beautiful women. Treat us not as an object, but treat us as a human being. And sure, that's great to say, but I think that from what I know about men, you're going to have a hard time changing men to ignore beauty and those kinds of standards. oh It might help your audience to think of it as actually beauty is the average. find if you combine faces that men tend to choose the average looking face. So really what we're looking for is not really the beautiful models. We're looking for someone that has average, that is average health, average beauty, that kind of thing. It's very, all very interesting. Yeah, no, no, I want to want to clarify something you said, because you mentioned that um that some women specifically, maybe in the feminist world are encouraging women to to stay obese. um Like is that is like are you are you hearing from people that like because I've never heard that before. Like I've heard of like body positivity, you know, like, hey, if you've got you know, more weight on you than normal, then it's fine. Just love yourself kind of thing. You know, like, like that's fine. I mean, I think we all should love ourselves, right. But but like, don't think I've ever heard anybody say, hey, it's OK to, you know, just have to be in poor shape or something. Well, I was able to document in the literature, looking through the feminist literature in particular, oh that there is a whole area of research called health at any size. And within that, they mean, I don't think they're encouraging women to go out and get fat. What they are trying to do is to say, if you're fat, we still love you, you know, and that kind of thing. oh And I don't think that's wrong, but I think that it indirectly encourages maybe people to stay heavy or overweight and find reasons to stay that way. Whereas my perspective would be if I was uh obese, I think I'd be trying to find ways to not be obese knowing how dangerous it is for our health and our fecundity. If you wanna talk about your ability uh to become pregnant and handle a pregnancy, uh if you're overweight or obese you have less of a chance of that so there's another reason and I see I mean I'm looking at these I have a graph in the paper which which plots I don't know if you can see this but it plots uh it plots I didn't give you enough time look at it probably but it's the height and weight and I put BMI there and it plots it from nineteen sixties women had an average of a hundred and twenty six pounds and By 2018, when the latest data is available, they have around 165 pounds. So that's a huge increase of 40 pounds on average that women are putting on today. When I have friends come over to work here, they're always amazed at how big Americans are. So I don't know that we're all that healthy as society. Oh, I mean, I think we're very overweight as a society. seems like to me, mean, that's seems like that's just an empirical fact. I think you can look at the studies of that, right? Of what, right? You have a body, you have a frame, you have a certain, you know, ability that your body would have at max potential, let's say. And it's like you're adding like, it's like you have this core frame. of all your organs, your muscles and everything. then on top of that is where you get that fat. And then I don't know if it's if it's on top of the muscle or under I forget. anyway, the idea, though, that there's this fat that's there and it's unhealthy and we have it all over the place. And then to make it's because it's so funny because it's like we want to say, yes, well, of course, like we want people that are overweight. I'm overweight. I've been overweight. you know, most of my life, I think, after I was like in elementary school. And it's like, I've always kind of struggled with my weight. And I'm like, yeah, there's a part of me that's like, yeah, I just want people to just accept me. But then it's like to say that I'm beautiful or to say that I'm my fatness is handsome. Yeah. I just don't buy it. I don't buy it, dude. I don't think that people actually think that. We might say that. I'm not saying that's a nice thing to say, but I don't think people actually think that. But I don't want people to misunderstand me, Josh, either by... I'm certainly not suggesting at any level that we should discriminate against people that are obese or overweight. oh Certainly we need to accept people as they are. actually, the physical requirements, they couldn't make it. Maybe there's a test you do, right? You don't just say, look at someone, and then you say they can't do that. But right there, there are jobs that have certain physical requirements. Am I saying something like controversial there? Maybe we'll get the robots to do that. Yeah, I'm not really arguing with you. that I'm talking about is where you say, I don't like fat people, and then you discriminate against them. I'm not saying that we should not have standards for various jobs. Being fat doesn't make you unworthy of love. know what saying? Like, basic dignity. lot of women have taken this in particular too far, like getting on planes and demanding that we pay for two seats, not her but us, the public, so that they can fly. I think that does take it to another whole level, where people are demanding that the public pay for their transportation. Yeah, that's tough. And that could probably get us down a whole rabbit hole that we don't have time for. I wanted to, again, just continue to bring it back to the argument that you're making and why this is important and what you're actually saying. And the idea, the reason that there is an issue here is that if a discipline is repeatedly advancing um claims that essentially can't be supported. There's not the kind of rigorous rational evidence that you would want to see to say this is true. Then um if it resists critique and correction, it's actually failing core academic norms. I would love for you to kind of describe that more and kind of help us understand what that means. uh How is it failing core academic Okay, truth, first of all, truth is a hard thing to come by. mean, uh have, we have truth in the physical world, which is fairly easy to come by. You know, we can go out and test for gravity and see that it doesn't change from place to place and all that kind of stuff. And, and so we can have a truth. Does this correspond to the physical world? We might be attached to a computer and there is no physical world except the you know made up by the computer but even in that case inside the computer we can tell what is physically true about our world. When it comes to a lot of other things it gets to be a little dirtier. For example in history trying to say what somebody did in the past might be difficult but what we can do is we can bring uh data to bear on this and we can make one maybe one story more reasonable than another story. And that's all I'm asking. I'm asking for an empirical approach to anything that we do in the universities. And I think over the last 50 years, interestingly, a period when we had the rise of social construction, when we had the rise of women in our academia, we have seen a progression away from a more rational approach uh where empirical data supports or is needed to support an idea. I find in the feminist literature after reading a great deal of it uh that someone throws out an idea out there and if some if a whole group tends to like that idea that then becomes you know sort of the idea du jour and I'm afraid of that kind of of decision making because it's based on opinions and opinions come dime a dozen. Yeah. you know, Mark, this has been a really, really um great episode and this, this is my, this is my last question and it's not even pertaining to your paper. So hope you're prepared for this. I was looking at your, I was looking at your, website and it's got a whole bunch of really cool like links to those interviews you've done. And really it's like, uh, I love kind of like your range on just being able to talk about stuff. Um, so like, I don't think it's weird at all that, you know, you're a volcanologist. and you write papers like this because like my day job, I'm a safety guy. You wanna know something about OSHA, like I'm your person. But like there's a few. interviews you did that I just got to ask you about. Can you help us understand aliens? I forgot what podcast that you did, but you were talking about life in the universe. This is a safe place for me to ask you this question because our metrics show that our listeners drop off right around the 45-minute mark. So they're all gone, okay. All right. me. This is just for me. So is there are we alone? um Well, this, can I give you some background on this? I don't want to take too much time from you guys, but I gave a TED talk, a long time, TEDx talk on why we are alone in the galaxy. And my thesis was that, well, there were all kinds of reasons. And I gave three examples. And, um well, just the fact that, you know if we have all this life out there, you know why haven't we, you know, had some contact. So, uh don't, I didn't think of that as a terribly uh hot topic of debate, but I was wrong. And I went on the Joe Rogan show, and on the Joe Rogan show we were simply talking about, I was asked to be there with Michael Shermer. I'm a skeptic and I write for Skeptic Magazine and Michael's the editor of Skeptic Magazine. And he asked me to be on the show with him when we talked to Joe Rogan and Grant Hancock. And I don't know if you're familiar with Graham Hancock, but he's written several books on why there was a civilization before all civilizations, which gave their knowledge so that all these civilizations could evolve. I think he is unable to give any concrete evidence for that. And it's another example. of me not just focusing on feminists. I focus on this in every field. I want to know what the date is. I want to know why you're saying that. And he was unable, in my opinion, to give very good evidence. It turns out Graham Hancock is very popular with a large number of people that listen to Joe Rogan. And a lot of them to the tune of about a million people went over and listen to my Tedx talk and just went crazy that I would have the audacity to say that there wasn't uh alien life out there. I'm not saying there wasn't, or there isn't alien life. I'm just saying that the evidence is not out there yet. And um I'm wondering, at least in our galaxy, whether it's ever going to be found. Now when I say life, I'm talking about intellectual, mean uh intelligent life, I don't mean single cell. I think there's probably a good case for single cell on Mars. Interesting, interesting. Now I want to talk about all that. evolutionary psychology junk. All right, well, we can talk about that. I like it too, actually. I mean, I don't know. mean, it's like, yeah, is there some, so I'm, you I'm a pastor, obviously. I'm a theist. And I'm like, I mean, why couldn't God make more? There's no, there's no, like certainly no philosophical or logical reason. that God wouldn't have made or couldn't have made more. it's like, sure. There might be some theological tensions that people would have to work through, but I don't think they're any greater than the theological tensions we've already had to work through with things like evolution, with things like the flood, with things like, I mean, essentially the first 12 chapters of Genesis, right? um Just to start there. So it's like, there's all sorts of tensions that you always had to deal with, but What do we want to do? We want to figure out what reality is. I think, and this is a little bit of a soapbox, but Christians, their main priority should be figuring out what the truth is. uh Yeah, we're fallible interpreters. OK, that's fine. But we can still focus on method. We can refine method. And we can continue to move into a space where, yeah, we're getting closer and closer and closer to the truth. Just because I don't know it doesn't mean. It doesn't exist, right? It just feels like logically necessary to me that the truth would be some kind of correspondence with reality. We should never be afraid of reality. So if reality is that there's aliens, OK, bring them on, dude. Let's, I don't know, let's create alien human alliances and do whatever it is. Get Star Trek up in here. you know, because. like there to be aliens. It might give us some technology that might make us live longer. Yeah, that would be nice as long as they're friendly. um Yeah, that would be important. Anyway, well, man, thank you so much, Mark, for coming on and hanging with us. It is such a pleasure. Thank you. Yeah, it is really great. So how can people get the article? mean, is there a space that you would push them to and kind of sell yourself here? What do you do? Where can they follow you? Where can they read your stuff? What do you have going on? on my website is the best place to catch any of that my papers are always put up there i don't think people be looking for papers on walking on g but there will be some papers on evolution or psychology there if they're interested uh... and i've my tits talks on there and you know the things in my emails on their somebody wants to contact me so thanks for no i just can thank you again you guys are really easy to talk to nice you well same to you and I appreciate it and to our viewers guys. Thanks for joining us Make sure you like subscribe. You're probably not even here. So I'm talking to nobody But if you're here like subscribe do all this stuff. This is why we got to say at the beginning Yeah, the people that made it this far are already liked and subscribed. right. So thank you. should say thank you for liking and subscribing. I appreciate it. And guys, until next time, keep your conversations that right.