[00:00:00] Speaker A: And according to Dawkins, we evolved and we evolved to pass on our genes, nothing more and nothing less. It's difficult to imagine, Andrew, a more materialistic message from a science museum being promoted to young children. And yet this really is the message that we are just survival machines that have been blindly programmed by our selfish genes to survive and reproduce.
ID the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent Design.
[00:00:36] Speaker B: Can evolution explain the origin and existence of complex human behaviors like regard for others, or altruism, as well as cooperation and even morality?
Hey everyone, Andrew McDermott here, host of ID the Future. We explore on this podcast the growing evidence for intelligent design and the debate over evolution.
Well, today I continue my discussion with Dr. Casey Luskin about these questions. Luskin is Associate Director of Discovery Institute's center for Science and Culture. He holds a PhD in geology from the University of Johannesburg, as well as graduate degrees in science and law, giving him expertise in both the scientific and legal dimensions of the debate over evolution. Dr. Luskin has been a California licensed attorney since 2005, practicing primarily in the area of evolution education in public schools, as well as defending academic freedom for scientists who face discrimination because of their support for intelligent design.
Now, in Part one, Cayce and I started off with several arguments critiquing the field of evolutionary psychology, a branch of psychology that assumes all human behavior can be explained as evolutionary adaptations developed in the prehistoric past.
Cayce reveals the weaknesses of such an approach to human psychology and behavior.
And then we started zooming into altruism, in particular to ask whether evil psych, as it's known, can adequately explain our acts of sacrifice, our regard for others, our willingness to put other needs before our own. The needs of others, Right? Just where does that come from? Today we finished that stimulating conversation, so let's jump right back into it now.
Okay, well, I think we have a good backdrop about evolutionary psychology and how how everything fits there. Let's zoom into the attempt to explain altruism through an unguided evolutionary process in particular.
First, one of the points that came up in my discussion with the commenters under my article was whether or not an evolutionary mechanism could select for altruism. One reader put it this way, cooperative tendencies absolutely could be shaped by natural selection. You don't need a gene for altruism any more than you need a gene for hunting in packs, lol. You just need heritable traits that make cooperation more successful than going solo in enough situations for it to persist.
Okay, Has a gene for altruism been discovered?
[00:03:00] Speaker A: I don't think anybody's going to claim that a gene for altruism has been discovered.
I think that they're going to claim that these are behaviors that are either hard coded in some sense into our genome in ways that we don't fully understand, or their, you know, maybe cultural evolution where they're learning behaviors that have been passed on from one generation to the next and it's not actually in the genes. And this gets into the whole nature versus nurture debate. But either way, you know, I don't think that anybody's going to claim that we know of a gene for altruism. Yeah, right.
[00:03:35] Speaker B: And when I said that no known gene for altruism has been identified, one of the commenters pushed back, saying, you're taking gene for altruism too literally. It's about tendencies reinforced over generations.
So is that the nature versus nurture thing? Is that true? Can natural selection actually help shape complex behavior patterns over time?
[00:03:55] Speaker A: Well, I mean, natural selection is so plastic that it kind of just can accommodate whatever you want it to. Okay, so if you want to say that natural selection is selecting culture that's being passed down, or genes that are being passed down. You know, Richard Dawkins has the idea of memes where, you know, we have ideas, behaviors that are being passed on from one generation to the next. That's the way it works. Okay. It's incredibly plastic. But I think the question I would ask is, you know, why are human beings, you know, we're not just. You have to have a being that's capable of having these altruistic behaviors in order for them to even adopt these cultural behaviors. Right. And adopt these altruistic tendencies. So it's not enough to just say, oh, we have culture. We have to have the minds to be able to understand, you know, why we should be nice to people or why we should care about others or why we should be selfless. We have to have brains and bodies that can implement those behaviors. So there's a lot more going on here than just, I would say, the raw implementation of culture.
[00:04:56] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:04:58] Speaker A: But if we want to get down to sort of brass tacks here, Andrew, and ask, do evolutionary scientists actually know what happened to give us our altruistic kind, selfless tendencies? The answer to that is really no. Okay. Yuval Noah Harari, in his book Sapiens, he talks about, you know, what? He asked the question, the appearance of new ways of thinking and communicating between 70,000 and 30,000 years ago constitutes the cognitive revolution. What caused it? He says, we're not sure. The most Commonly believed theory argues that accidental mutations change the inner wiring of the brains of sapiens, enabling them to think in unprecedented ways and communicate using altogether new type of language. And he goes on to say, we might call it the tree of knowledge mutation. Why did it occur in sapiens DNA rather than in that of Neanderthals? It was a matter of pure chance, as far as we can tell. All right, so here's what he's saying. Why did the human brain evolve? Well, he says, first he says we're not sure, but then he says it was due to accidental mutations. And then he goes on to say that it was a matter of pure chance as far as we can tell. So he has no idea what those mutations are. He's not sure how it happened, but somehow he knows that they were random chance mutations and it was pure chance as far as we can tell. How? How does he know that? How does any evolutionary psychologist really know that the reason that our selfless, whatever you want to call it, altruistic behaviors actually evolved through blind evolutionary mechanisms? Whether it's cultural evolution or whether it's random mutation affecting the genes, we don't really know that. Nobody really knows that. All they're doing is playing this game of evolutionary psychology with where their philosophical assumptions tell them you have to explain everything in evolutionary terms, as the journal put it, quote, without reference to divine creation. Okay. They're just playing this game. They don't really know what happened. And their game can predict behavior X just as well as it can predict behavior not X. So is this really a game that's giving us any useful information? At the end of the day, this is the way I would argue it, but go ahead, Andrew.
[00:07:12] Speaker B: Yeah, that's useful insight. Sort of paints a picture of these just so stories and how they're supposed to fit the evolutionary paradigm. Well, there are a few other terms that kind of come up when you're discussing these types of topics, and I just wondered if you could shed light on them. They include kin selection, group selection, and reciprocal altruism.
What do those terms mean in the debate?
[00:07:36] Speaker A: Sure. So I mean, kin selection is very simple. That's the idea that your family members, your kin, share some of your genes. Okay, so if you're actually helping your family to pass on their genes, your brother to pass on his genes, then you are actually helping to pass on some of your genes because your brother shares some of your genes. Right.
There's a great quote that actually Denise o' Leary quotes in the Comprehensive Guided Science and Faith. She says once the Biologist JBS Haldine was asked, would you lay down your life? Your brother, he said, no, but I would do it for two brothers or eight cousins, okay? Because the idea is that when you start to lay down your life for that many, you know, siblings, suddenly you're actually helping a lot of your genes to be passed on. Okay? Now, I actually have a joke in my family because my wife, her brother, they have four kids. We're very close to these kids, actually.
We are their godparents.
And I love these kids to death. You know, I would literally do anything for these kids. All right? But. And that's the true statement, but they have none of my genes, all right? They're not genetically related to me.
My wife has genetic relations to them, but I don't. Okay? So I always joke to my wife and actually her brother as well. I say, look, I just want you to know I have no evolutionary reason to take care of your kids, all right? I'm doing this, I guess, strictly out of the goodness of my heart, not because I actually am getting some benefit from this, but according to evolutionary psychology, you always are doing things because it gives you a benefit. Okay? So there's no kin selection reason for me to take care of my nieces and nephews that are related to me through my wife's brother, but I do it anyway. So this then comes up with another explanation called reciprocal altruism.
Reciprocal altruism is the idea, and we talked about this a little bit earlier. It's basically kind of the. My scratch. I scratch your back. You scratch my back. You know, sharing food with others evolved because your friend might share with you, share food with your friend today, and later, they might share food with you when you're hungry. And then this helps you and your kin to survive and pass on your genes. Okay? So, you know, that's. That's an example of how we're supposed to evolve traits like sharing with people who are not actually part of our kin. And.
And then you also mentioned group selection. Group selection is the idea that there are certain behaviors that add to, you know, sort of group cohesion, group cooperation, and group survivability. So even if the folks in your group, you know, might be a ragtag group of other hominids that you just stumbled upon back in the day, if you start to work together, then you're, you know, you're more powerful as a team than you are as a lone ranger trying to survive and reproduce and out there in the cold, mean, Darwinian world. And so by working together and cooperating your group can survive. And this helps you to cooperate and help others to survive. When you're in groups, of course, sometimes, you know, maybe certain people in the group, you know, you decide you don't like them, so you vote them off the island that side of sort of the survivor, you know, principle there, where you get rid of people who are not helping the group at least, or something to that effect. But so you can see that these, these principles, sometimes they work. Sometimes, sometimes they don't work. Sometimes I'm going to share with my neighbor, but then other times I'm going to go steal from my neighbor, all right, and steal food.
And so all these behaviors are supposed to be explained in evolutionary psychology, both cooperation and non cooperation, sharing and stealing and helping my kin to survive. But then, you know what also happens a lot? We also get killing of your siblings or infanticide or killing of relatives. That is one of the most common things. Right. We actually see people, tragically in the world around us, we see people killing their own relatives. So if you're never evolutionary psychologist, you've got to explain not just for how you account for, not just how we help our kin to survive, but why is it that killing your kin is one of the most common forms of murder? Okay, and, and you've got to explain all this in evolutionary psychology terms. And it's very difficult to actually do that through a compelling theory.
[00:11:49] Speaker B: Well, and I love the idea that if it's trying to explain everything, then it ends up explaining nothing. I think that's, that's a powerful rebuttal.
[00:11:57] Speaker A: Did I use that phrase? If I didn't use it, I should have used it. That, that's the key point here, Andrew, is the theory that explains everything actually explains nothing. And my goodness, evolutionary psychology claims to explain everything. I can tell you that.
[00:12:10] Speaker B: Yeah, definitely. Well, speaking of the whole idea of selfishness or selflessness and how we see both in life, I would ask, are genes selfish? You know, Richard Dawkins wrote this book of the selfish gene, you know, trying to show that the gene inherently is going to be selfish as it seeks what it's trying to do.
Are genes selfish? And if so, how can we be not selfish? You know, is that just neurological misfiring when we happen to be not selfish? Or what's going on here? Do you think he was onto something with the selfish gene?
[00:12:47] Speaker A: So Richard Dawkins has this quote. Let me actually tell a story here. When I lived in South Africa doing my PhD, when I lived in that, that part of the world, sometimes I would go to the cradle of humankind where there are many hominid fossils that have been discovered. And. And they have a, basically a human origins museum there. It's called the Marupang Museum. And as you walk into the main fossil hall there, there is a quote from Richard Dawkins. It's actually listed twice in this fossil hall. One of them, it goes, this quote is actually stretching from floor to ceiling to make sure you don't miss it. And lots of young kids are taken to this fossil museum and they see this quote from schools in the Johannesburg area. And here's the quote. It says, we are survival machines, robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecule known as genes. All right, this is Richard Dawkins, and again, I want to read this quote to make sure you don't miss it. Now, we are survival machines, robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. So what is the materialistic message from this quote? Simply put, it's at the purpose of our life on here on Earth and is nothing more than to survive and reproduce. And according to Dawkins, we evolved and we evolved to pass on our genes. Nothing more and nothing less. It's difficult to imagine, Andrew, a more materialistic message from a science museum being promoted to young children. And yet this really is the message that we are just survival machines that have been blindly programmed by our selfish genesis to survive and reproduce. Okay, so the question really becomes here is not so much. Can you come up with some ad hoc reason as to why a particular behavior might have helped your ancestors to survive and reproduce in some particular situation that you can invent in your mind today, in 2025, it's very easy to do that. Okay. We can almost always come up with some ad hoc just so story for why some behavior might have been advantageous in some particular situation. And if you do that, congratulations. You just figured out how to play this little game of evolutionary psychology. You won the game. All right? The question really is, which model is going to predict human behavior better? Okay. Is going to come up with a better explanation for what we see human beings actually doing? Does it look like Dawkins is right, that we were just blindly programmed to. To survive and reproduce and that that could produce all kinds of complex behaviors? But. Or is a model that says the human beings were designed and we were designed for higher purposes than mere survival and reproduction? Is that a better model? This is the question to ask is the right question again, that we were blindly programmed by natural selection and random mutation evolution to pass on Our genes or were we designed for higher purposes? And do we exhibit behaviors that indicate and suggest that we were designed for more than just survival and reproduction? I think when you frame the question like this, there's no question that an intelligent design based model is far superior. And let me give you some examples. Okay?
Why is it that human beings do things like building cathedrals, okay. Composing music?
Why do we practice religion, worship deities?
Okay. The evolutionary psychologist is going to say, oh, where religion adds to group cohesion and help people, helps people to survive and reproduce better. Okay. I, I can grant that religion, maybe that's how it was designed to operate. When it's working well, that actually people do, it does foster cooperation and, you know, camaraderie and brotherhood between your fellow human beings. It brings together a beautiful community. Maybe that's part of what religion was designed to do. I can go along with that. But has evolutionary psychology, through this group selection model really accounted for this peculiar behavior? That you will get up in the morning and worship God, you know, pray to him, thank him for the beautiful sunrise, for what, you know, you're on a bad day, for the fact that you, you've got breath in your lungs and you're alive and you know that you, you have food to eat or whatever it is, you know, that you worship God for his amazing qualities. Why do billions of human beings wake up in the morning and do that almost every day? Okay, that's weird. I don't think evolutionary psychology is going to predict that.
It might say that, oh, yeah, you know, religion gives group cohesion. But you know what? You don't need religion to do that. You need to get up in the morning and worship deities to have group cohesion. You could be an atheist with group cohesion where you, you think Darwin is great and you think that science is great and this lets you work together to solve humanity's problems. Okay. There's a lot of things that could give you group cohesion. So I don't think evolutionary psychology is really specifically explained the origin of human religious behavior. Okay.
But there's all these other things we do. Studying relativity, building cathedrals, composing music, painting the Sistine Chapel, you know, all these amazing. Writing a Shakespearean sonnet, composing literature, laughing at a great movie. There's all these things that human beings do which seem to be higher behaviors, you know, that are engaging our minds and our souls at very, very high levels. And I don't see any reason why, if all our ancestors had to do was survived and reproduced on the African savannah a million years ago. Why any of those things should be.
We should be doing those things. Why any of those things should have evolved.
They would seem to provide no particular survival advantage on the African savanna a million years ago, if that's all our ancestors had to do. So it really does seem like human beings are designed for much higher purposes than just survival and reproduction. What's. But I want to go meta here as well. Okay, let's talk about, you know, altruism.
Okay. People will often risk their lives for people who are outside of their genetic gene pool, you know, who are not part of their tribe or their kin. One of my favorite example is Oscar Schindler.
I have a lot of relatives who I actually never met, but undoubtedly. But hopefully they're still alive. But they lived in Belarus and they were Jewish, and we're pretty sure that we had relatives who were killed in the Holocaust. So what I'm about to share is very meaningful to me, and that is that, you know, think about something like Oskar Schindler, the German businessman who risked his life to save a thousand Jews. I actually had a friend growing up who was a Schindler Jew. She wrote a book called I will plant you a lilac tree from Simon and Schuster. It's a very good book about her personal story.
But why would Oskar Schindler, the German businessman, risk his life to save someone like this poor Jewish girl? Okay, he had no evolutionary benefit coming to him. None. As far as I can tell. He risked his life at huge cost to himself and no kickback to his selfish genes. Did he do something like that.
Oh, and you can say, well, well, he's going to then be praised by society who will then, you know, give him accolades and help him survive and reproduce? Okay. Why does society praise those kinds of behaviors? Why do human beings have this moral, this universal moral ethic that sees those kinds of behaviors as such a beautiful and valuable expression of human morality? Why do we see it like that? It does not make sense in evolutionary terms.
So many of the highest expressions of human morality are very, very difficult to explain in evolutionary psychology terms. Really, you know, reciprocal altruism is not going to cut it. Kin selection is not going to cut it. These people, you know, he was risking his life with no foreseeable benefit to him or his genes. So it's very, very difficult to explain this in evolutionary psychology terms. And yet these are the kind of behaviors that we look at as the most beautiful expressions of human morality. Why is that?
Why is there a conscience whispering to us in our, you know, sort of Silent moments that this is the right thing to do. You should go give food to that homeless person when nobody's looking, okay? There's no benefit to you. Why do we know it's the right thing to do? And the evolutionary psychologist, when they're back into the corner and. And they have no explanation, they will just say, oh, well, this is just the misfiring of neural modules, okay? This person was nuts. Their brain wasn't working the way it was supposed to be programmed to do. Well, at that point, you just lost the game, okay? You just acknowledged your model can't explain this, and you have to come up with some other explanation. All right? And they actually do this a lot. Daniel Dennett talked about misfiring of neural modules to explain things that don't fit within his evolutionary psychology scheme. So I really just find that evolutionary psychology, it's so plastic that it can explain just about anything. And then there are some very, very important things, some of the most cherished human behaviors that it struggles to explain. Andrew. And so this is why I find evolutionary psychology just be incredibly uncompelling.
[00:22:08] Speaker B: Yeah. Beautifully put. Yeah. It's not just that we do these things, it's that. That we laud them as a society. It's that we desire them as human beings. And, and we're drawn to them, as you're pointing out, you know, and you've got to ask why, why, why? On all of these fronts. And I think evil psych is just. It fails to be able to explain that.
[00:22:29] Speaker A: Let me give one last example here. Andrew, really quick. Whether you are a Christian or not, the idea of Jesus dying on the cross for his enemies, we all see that as a beautiful expression of human morality that you would die to thinking that your death is actually saving your enemies. Okay, number one, we could ask, why would Jesus do that if he's just another evolved hominin? But on a bigger question, we can ask, why do human beings around the world, both Christian and non, see that kind of act as one of the most beautiful possible expressions of human morality, that universal moral code is. And that particular aspect of the universal moral code is very difficult to explain it in evolutionary psychology terms. And as soon as you think you can do that, you can also have to realize that you can explain so many other things, you know, like. Like not dying for enemies, like hating your enemies. Okay? Why does evolutionary psychology explain everything? It's not a good predictive theory that gives you a useful model.
[00:23:28] Speaker B: Yeah.
Now, here's something else that's interesting.
[00:23:31] Speaker A: While.
[00:23:31] Speaker B: While you and I were, were going back and forth on this, this idea for an episode. We both independently found examples just in the last week or so of, you know, stories just like this. The one I found was of a former NFL linebacker, Glenn Kadres, best known for winning two Super Bowls with the Denver Broncos in the 90s. He is credited just a few days back with saving a man from his burning car after a highway accident in California that actually took the lives of several others. Very tragic accident on the highway.
Now news reports say Cadres is struggling now after this event with not having done more to save other victims of the crash. Here are a few things he said about the tragedy in the news reports. I've got kids, he says. Everything I do is with them in mind. I'd like to think that if they were in trouble, someone would help them. My only thought was, I have to get this guy out. I was there at the right time to do something. That's it. There really wasn't a thought process. I just wanted to help.
And so then the question becomes, okay, why? Why did you want to help? Why did you want to run towards this burning car? Put your life at risk, you know, risk your children. Losing a father at a key stage in their lives. You put your genes at risk.
Why would you do that? You know? And I know you came up with an example quite similar.
[00:24:51] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, it's really interesting. And we both found similar examples. This was a story of a young sophomore who is studying at West Point in the army, and he actually recently was driving home and saved the life of a man from a burning vehicle. This young man is named Larry Pickett Jr. And he's obviously a very accomplished young guy. He's going to West Point. He plays football.
Very, very upstanding young guy. And he saved somebody's life. And he said, here's what he said.
I mean, everything just happened so fast. It wasn't a lot of thinking, a lot of talking, just reacting. Okay, he saw a burning car. And this young guy, he just instantly knew it's what he had to do to go save that person's life. He wasn't thinking like, oh, this is going to bring me accolades on CNN and help me get lots of, you know, chicks, or something like that. All he was thinking was, I've got to do this, you know, And I think that, you know, if this is the kind of behavior that is encoded, I can tell you it's going to cause a lot of people to become evolutionary dead ends because he risked his life. That car could have blown up very easily. And so this is not the kind of behavior that you would expect to evolve, at least in my opinion, very easily. It's something that is putting your life at great risk. It's causing you to put your evolutionary success at great risk. And yet we look at this and we're like, like, can I have my daughter marry this man? You know, like, he's like one of the greatest guys ever to find somebody like this. Maybe that. Maybe. Just answer my question. Now he's going to get lots of, you know, reproductive opportunities or something like that. But in all seriousness, it is difficult to explain this because you're putting your own future at grave peril. And I don't think this is what you would expect from an evolutionary model.
[00:26:38] Speaker B: Right. And your example, you know, was a younger guy. My example was a guy in middle age. You know, he's got his life set, he's got his kids going, and, you know, different. Different seasons of life, and yet the same impulse, the same quick desire to act and not be thinking things through about risks and stuff. Well, speaking of risks, as we wrap up, Casey, what are the risks for science, for education, for culture, if we reduce the richness of human morality to evolutionary utility, such as evo psych does? What do you think of the risks of that?
[00:27:13] Speaker A: Okay, well, Andrew, I think one of the big dangers is that when we reduce human beings to just, you know, basically robot survival machines programmed by their selfish genes, we cause people to no longer be accountable for their behaviors. And we also are no longer accountable for our own behaviors in the sense that we don't see that there is an objective basis for what's right and what's wrong. Everything just becomes. Evolutionary psychology programmed me to do this, so it's okay to do it, or even if you don't say it's okay to do it, you know, you have no objective basis for saying this is right or wrong.
And again, I'm not saying that people who believe in evolutionary psychology are less moral or less good people.
At the end of the day, I believe that we were all made in the image of God. That. And we all know right from wrong because God put all of that into all of our, you know, souls, hearts, conscious, whatever you want to put it, maybe even programmed into our minds as well. We've all been made in that way. So all people know right from wrong, and everybody has the capacity to do good. And I'm not saying that evolutionists are less good because they're no less made in the image of God than I am, okay? And I have many friends who are evolutionists, who are wonderful people. So I'm not making an argument like that. What I'm saying is that when you believe that, you know, morality evolved, right and wrong is just what we are programmed to believe by our genes, you or, you know, some other evolutionary factor, you have lost your basis for believing in an objective basis for morality. And if you don't believe me, listen to Yuval Noah Harari, okay? This famous author, he's an atheist and evolutionary historian. Here's what he says in his book.
He says, quote, there are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws, and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings.
So listen to that. There's basically no objective right and wrong. And later in the book, he admits that this fact fully deconstructs any objective basis for human rights and equality. And he says under his vision of humanity, quote, the signs of biology unquote indicates that, quote, quote, people were not created, they have evolved, and they certainly did not evolve to be equal.
He goes on to say, sort of paralleling the Declaration of Independence, which says that we were endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights. Harari admits that in his view, quote, just as people were never created, neither according to the science of biology, is there a creator who endows them with anything.
And he so goes on to sort of admit that the impotence of his worldview, saying that we should believe in human rights, quote, not because it's objectively true, but because believing in it enables us to cooperate effectively and forge a better society.
So he goes on then to admit that his evolutionary based ideology makes it, quote, well justified to fear, quote, a danger that a society will collapse.
Okay? So in other words, he realizes that his worldview is so destructive that he wants his readers to believe in this fiction. What he believes is a fiction that we were created by God to have certain rights and certain moral values are supposed to live by. He wants us to believe in those fictions for the sake of holding society together.
So I would say that this sort of, this is sort of a very, very honest take on the implications of evolutionary psychology for both our individual lives and for society as a whole.
But this is sort of a dark vision of humanity. It lacks explanations for humanity itself, including, you know, it fails to explain how many of our core behaviors and defining intellectual or expressive features arose from design. And it destroys any basis for an objective belief in human rights.
So I don't find this very attractive and I much prefer a design based view as a Christian myself. The Judeo Christian vision where all humans are made in the image of God. We all have fundamental worth and value. We're all loved equally in the sight of God and deserving a fair and just treatment under human rights and the law. Regardless of your creed, your race or your culture, or who you are, what you believe, your nationality, your intelligence, anything, you all have fundamental worth and value.
And I think that when you really go down the evolutionary psychology road, it's hard to justify that. I'm not saying evo psych proponents are immoral. I'm not. Because at the end of the day, again, I believe that they are made in the image of God. They know what's right and wrong and they typically do that certainly no less than the rest of us do. Okay. I'm not judging them as people. I'm just saying that their worldview that they believe in and their model for where everything came from loses the ability to, to objectively justify human rights, human value, and also many moral behaviors. Okay? It just becomes very, very situational. Whatever works in that situation is what evolved. And so, you know, who was it John Keats who said that beauty is truth and truth is beauty? If that's true, then I think that the evolutionary psychology vision of humanity is very dark and it can't be true. I know that's not a rigorous argument to say beauty is truth and truth is beauty, but this is not a view that is something that I really want to believe and actually we give it a bunch of objective reasons why it's not a very compelling model. Anyway, throughout this conversation, Andrew. So I'm not worried about it being true, but I think it also leads to some very dark places.
[00:32:47] Speaker B: Yeah, very interesting comments that you shared from Hararis. And I was thinking, you know, as he said, sets up that argument that that's fear based, you know, hey, if you don't want civilization to collapse and everybody to kill, everybody do this, you know, and that's fear based instead of being inspired by a noble truth.
And I just don't think that holds up, you know, at the end of the day. Well, thank you for sharing that. Now, Casey, where can people go? This obviously piqued my interest, you know, when I was engaging with the commenters under my article.
Where can people go to learn more about this topic?
[00:33:26] Speaker A: Well, I wrote a review of Human Origins in the book Science and Faith and Dialogue a couple years ago. We can link to that article, I suppose from the podcast. It's titled it's an open access book and it's a free chapter you can download. It's titled Evolutionary Models of Paleoanthropology, Genetics and Psychology Failed to Account for Human Origins and it's review. So there you go. You can get more on this topic there.
Denise o' Leary has a very nice chapter on evolutionary psychology in the book the Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith.
And there's some other good treatments out there as well, but I think I would just probably stick to those for now.
[00:34:03] Speaker B: Okay. Science and Faith and dialogue with your chapter in it and then Denise's chapter in the Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith. So audience look out for those to take more of a deep dive. And I will say that if you jump onto scienceandculture.com, you know, our flagship news and commentary website, just type in Evolutionary Psychology. You're going to get lots of articles where we've addressed this at various points.
So anyway, Casey, thank you very much for this discussion. It's been very stimulating and it's a great topic to really look at and explore and see where the strength of argument lies. So thank you for your time today.
[00:34:41] Speaker A: Thanks Andrew. Really fun conversation and glad you engaged with the commenters. Congratulations, by the way, in your op ed and and I hope you keep doing it.
[00:34:50] Speaker B: Yeah, thank you. Fantastic four. Who knew I could unpack some of this with with a review of that movie. Well, listeners, viewers, I just want to let you know that this and other ID the Future Interviews are going to be available in video format on our new YouTube channel. So we need your help to subscribe to the new channel, like the content there, share it with a friend or family member. That's our new YouTube channel for video interviews. So not only can you listen to this now, you can also watch Idea the Future. You'll find
[email protected] idethefuture Go ahead and subscribe to that and you'll be among the first to know about the new content that comes out. YouTube.com do the Future well, I'm Andrew McDermott, this is Casey Luskin. Thank you for listening and thank you for watching.
[00:35:39] Speaker A: Visit us atidthotthefuture.com and intelligent design.org this program is Copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
