Irrationality

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Speaker 1 Hello, I'm Robin Ince.

Speaker 9 And I'm Brian Cox.

Speaker 1 And welcome to the podcast version of the Infinite Monkey Cage, which contains extra material that wasn't considered good enough for the radio. Enjoy it.

Speaker 4 Hello, I'm Robin Inst.

Speaker 1 And I'm Brian Cox. And we are at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, a month where the Edinburgh Zoo expands its boundaries across the whole of the city.

Speaker 1 A comedian in every possible cage, a dance troupe in every possible avery, and angry packs of Shakespeareans roaming the parks. Do not feed the Stephen Berkhoffs.
He's snappy.

Speaker 1 Also, as well as being a home to nervous, weepy, and drunk performers, it is the birthplace of David Hume, one of the world's great philosophers and empiricists.

Speaker 1 And today, much to Brian's annoyance, there is a possibility we will stray from science into philosophy.

Speaker 10 Hmm.

Speaker 9 Yes, today's show.

Speaker 9 Today's show was inspired by a letter from a listener.

Speaker 9 This was from Jago Tremaine, and he wrote or asked us whether there might be a genetic basis for narrow-minded intolerance, and if so, whether a cure might be found.

Speaker 1 So, to paraphrase basically what he said, what he was asking is: is irrationality genetic? The idiots are cockshaw, but the intelligent are full of doubt.

Speaker 1 That's what Bertrand Russell probably said, or G.K. Chesterton or Kurt Vonnegut.
It's normally one of those three. Can we blame all we are merely on the shortfalls of our own genes? Don't blame me.

Speaker 1 It's my base pairs. Your honour, I would like to take into account my clients' genetic code.

Speaker 9 We have a panel to tackle this ethical and scientific quandary, and they are.

Speaker 4 My name's Stuart Ritchie, I'm a research fellow in the psychology department at the University of Edinburgh, and my most irrational belief is that in the year 2014, it's still worthwhile listening to Morrissey.

Speaker 11 Hello, my name's JC Long, and I'm a comedian and champion outdoor swimmer.

Speaker 10 And

Speaker 11 thank you.

Speaker 11 And by that, I mean I was fast-tracked to the final because there weren't enough entrants and I came last.

Speaker 11 My rational belief is that I genuinely think that I can predict the future.

Speaker 9 Using differential equations, I just

Speaker 10 yeah.

Speaker 1 I warn you, Josie has just been doing her A-level maths exams.

Speaker 5 That's true, isn't it?

Speaker 11 I have, but it's not A-level, it's AS, which is the slightly easier one.

Speaker 11 But I get the results on the fourteenth.

Speaker 9 So you do you do calculus next year?

Speaker 11 No, I'm not, I'm not ready for calculus yet.

Speaker 11 If you want something differentiated and then integrated again, I'll do that for you.

Speaker 12 Thank you.

Speaker 10 There's a cue for me.

Speaker 9 X squared.

Speaker 11 X squared, just X mate. Oh, hang on.

Speaker 10 A different and wait, no, no, two X, two X, two X.

Speaker 11 Wait, adapt to it sake.

Speaker 10 Josie, you've just seen the future and you've seen your results. Wait, do another one!

Speaker 10 No, no, this is.

Speaker 10 Do another one, do another one.

Speaker 9 We're gonna do a contour integral then. Sine X.

Speaker 11 Oh no, I can't do them yet. That's the next year.

Speaker 11 Do like 6x cubed.

Speaker 1 6x cubed.

Speaker 11 Okay, that would be 18x squared. Thank you, you're welcome.

Speaker 1 Ah, it's like watching the blooper reel of University Challenge.

Speaker 9 Integrate it back again.

Speaker 11 Oh, I'll integrate it back. Okay, it's um six x cubed.

Speaker 9 Plus a constant of integration.

Speaker 10 Plus see, yeah.

Speaker 10 That was a real thrill.

Speaker 5 I have no idea what's going on.

Speaker 5 I'm Richard Weissman, psychologist from the University of Hertfordshire, and my rational belief is that I'm totally rational.

Speaker 12 My name is Paul Foote. I am professor of horse physics

Speaker 12 at the university,

Speaker 12 and my most irrational belief is that I'm a carrot

Speaker 12 and I live in a rabbit hutch.

Speaker 12 I almost live in almost constant fear.

Speaker 1 And this is our panel.

Speaker 9 Richard, first of all, some definitions. So, what is irrationality?

Speaker 5 I don't think, I mean, I'm sure we've all got our own definitions.

Speaker 5 I think that it's sort of just basically getting things wrong. That's what I would say.
And I would say that we all get things wrong all the time.

Speaker 5 There's lots of research that asks people, do you think you're an above-average driver in terms of safety? And about 80-90% of people go, yes, that's me.

Speaker 5 Have you got an above-average sense of humor? That goes up to 99%

Speaker 5 of people.

Speaker 5 So we hold on to these things. For example, if you support a football team and they win, then it's, you know, we won.
If they lose, then it's they lost. You distance yourself.

Speaker 5 So these sort of rational ideas that make life bearable, I think.

Speaker 9 That just seems to be a misunderstanding of statistics.

Speaker 9 I mean, is that you're using a statistical definition of rationality?

Speaker 5 I think I'm using it in the sense that psychologists refer to what are called positive illusions. Things we believe that aren't true.

Speaker 5 Often it's obvious to other people they're not true, but we hold on to them because they make us feel better. So I think as a social psychologist, that's the angle I would take on it.

Speaker 1 So Stuart, do you think, as a scientist, is there a point where you think, now I'm using my rationality, but at times there is a level of kind of gut instinct of things which are perhaps not at the forefront of your mind, where that is required, that if we were merely rational, I mean, there's experiments that have been done with people who, for instance, no longer experience emotion, and they find it a lot harder to make decisions.

Speaker 4 Yeah, absolutely. We take into account all this information when we're making decisions.
And as Richard said, we're often extremely poor at understanding statistics.

Speaker 4 So, yes, but as a scientist, there certainly are moments of gut instinct. But I would, so I do research into intelligence.

Speaker 4 I would emphasize the importance of high intelligence as well for real scientific breakthroughs and scientific achievements.

Speaker 4 You get very few very, very high-performing, sort of Nobel Prize-winning super scientists who are not way up the high end of the bell curve of intelligence.

Speaker 9 How do you define intelligence?

Speaker 4 You're scoring an intelligence test.

Speaker 9 And just very briefly, what would that mean?

Speaker 4 Well, so there are different tests you can do.

Speaker 4 So you can take vocabulary tests, and then you can take a reasoning test, a sort of puzzle pattern-based reasoning test, a test where you have to simply move your finger off a button quickly when a light goes on, and tests where you have to do reading comprehension and so on.

Speaker 4 And the big finding of psychology in the past century, the biggest, most replicable, well-attested finding is that if you're good at one of those things, you tend to be good at them all.

Speaker 4 And you can extract, so all those tests will correlate positively together.

Speaker 9 So it's not just an education test then, because reading comprehension, for example.

Speaker 4 Reading comprehension is one thing, so you have verbal and non-verbal things, but as I say, even just how quickly you can take your finger off a button, how quickly you can notice the difference between a shape that's shown to you, you have to decide whether it's one shape or another, that's shown to you extremely quickly.

Speaker 4 That will correlate with your performance on a vocabulary test, with your performance on a reasoning test, and so on.

Speaker 4 And you can extract this general factor, which is called the general factor of intelligence, G, we call it, and that is a great predictor of education, occupation, health, loads of stuff like that.

Speaker 11 Can I ask something?

Speaker 11 Because I genuinely have sort of been developing a little belief recently that people who move faster, like their education must be a little bit about how fast your brain works and not other things.

Speaker 4 That's exactly in line with the scientific evidence, yeah.

Speaker 11 That's so good because to my mind I like to walk really fast

Speaker 11 and I always see that as a sign of like superiority like I'm gonna get there.

Speaker 4 Well in our samples at the University of Edinburgh we've shown things like walking fast, having stronger grip in your hands.

Speaker 11 Got a very strong grip.

Speaker 4 Being able to exhale very quickly a large volume, forced expressive volume, those things will correlate positively with having a stronger grip.

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 4 is that all these things will correlate positively together.

Speaker 4 You have genes that will allow you to build a better system in general, and that includes your brain as well as your muscles and your lungs and all the other parts too.

Speaker 4 So, there's a kind of a theory about system integrity, and intelligence is just one part of that.

Speaker 1 Paul, you were you studied mathematics.

Speaker 1 Do you feel that mathematics could be seen as something which is very rational? They're the ordering of numbers.

Speaker 1 Certainly, some people who've gone into mathematics, some of the great mathematicians have been searching for kind of patterns and certainty.

Speaker 1 Do you consider yourself to be more rational because you're a mathematician?

Speaker 9 Putting aside the carrot thing.

Speaker 10 Yeah.

Speaker 12 I consider myself to be.

Speaker 12 My journey of my life has been to become the opposite of when I studied maths at university.

Speaker 12 I don't even understand when people say it, I can't I mean when you said that just now that I'd studied maths at university, I'd forgotten about it.

Speaker 12 I just, you know, like sometimes I've actually been on a campus doing a show there and I think, oh, that'd be nice to go to university.

Speaker 12 And then I think, oh, I have been.

Speaker 12 I can't remember it. And then often I go on shows like this this and I say, yes, we want Paul on because he's a comedian, but he combines that with mathematics.

Speaker 12 But I just find mathematics incredibly boring. And

Speaker 12 the absolute antithesis of comedy and humour. So I just try and think about it as little as possible.
I'm very annoyed that you mentioned it.

Speaker 12 It's got no relevance to my life now. I just make up silly things and on flights of fancy.
I think actually

Speaker 12 my life is better now because I spend less time rationally working out what the best thing to do is and more time just doing what feels like the right thing.

Speaker 1 So really it was good going to university because you got rid of all your rationality. In a three-year course,

Speaker 1 the final time you put down that calculation, you went, that's enough rationality. I'm now going to pretend to be a horse or a carrot for a while.

Speaker 10 Which is what the Edinburgh fringe is all about. So Richard, if we

Speaker 9 take the view that the so we define irrationality perhaps in one way as being not really reacting properly to statistical arguments.

Speaker 9 So let's say that you might say, I'd rather, I don't want to get on that plane, I think that's rather dangerous, I'll ride a motorbike instead or something like that.

Speaker 9 Does it make you happier as a person to be irrational or rational?

Speaker 5 I was say I think we are all irrational and it's that irrationality which keeps us happy because we end up believing things about ourselves that aren't true.

Speaker 5 So we think, oh, you know, this relationship will be great and we ignore the 50% divorce rate.

Speaker 5 Otherwise we just think the world is a dreadful place and we are dreadful people, which is the truth of the matter.

Speaker 5 And so there is some evidence that people who suffer from depression actually have a very realistic worldview. That's why they feel so down a lot of the time.
So, it's a slight irony.

Speaker 5 So, yeah, I do think it's part of being human is to have these positive illusions.

Speaker 5 But the problem is sometimes we can take it too far and we start to believe in things that really aren't true, like sort of you know, ghosts and homeopathy and other silly things like that.

Speaker 9 Girl, let's get some letters. Let's list them all:

Speaker 9 astrology, homeopathy, the supernatural. Carry on, what are they?

Speaker 10 Religion.

Speaker 1 That's an interesting.

Speaker 4 Well, are we allowed to leave in the show with the fact that some of my research has shown that religion is negatively correlated with intelligence as well? Is that possible? I don't know if that's

Speaker 10 interesting.

Speaker 1 That's interesting. Because you bring that up, and there have been.
So when you say for, again, we get caught up in definitions, don't you?

Speaker 1 When you say religion, well, that covers an enormous array of kind of very liberal beliefs.

Speaker 1 And then you have, are you at that point saying fundamentally religious? Are you saying dogmatically religious?

Speaker 4 Specifically, fundamentalist religion is most negatively.

Speaker 4 So, if you ask people questions, you know, rate out of five, how strongly you believe the Bible is the word of God, and you should only marry people within your own religion, I hear God talking to me every day, you know, how much do you agree, one to five?

Speaker 4 Those sorts of questions, if you ask them, they will correlate, not strongly negatively, but they will correlate negatively with score or an intelligence test, the kind of things I was talking about earlier on.

Speaker 5 Which is slightly odd because if I met a fundamentalist, I'd expect them to have quite a strong handshake.

Speaker 13 There may be exceptions.

Speaker 10 There may be exceptions to the

Speaker 13 exceptions to the matrix of correlations that we're talking about here.

Speaker 9 But is that just true of any dogmatic belief in anything? So are we unfair singling out religion? Is it just not been able to see many different sides of arguments?

Speaker 4 Yeah, no, I think we absolutely are. There's evidence showing that people with higher intelligence test scores will be, for instance, more socially liberal, so less racist, for instance.

Speaker 4 So if you ask them, you know, you ask people a questionnaire about, you know, I think people from different races should be allowed to you know marry each other and things like that and apparently that's still controversial in some areas, but but uh intelligence will correlate negatively with people being more racist on those scales.

Speaker 4 It'll correlate positively with people believing in gender equality and you know people should be paid equal money for equal work, et cetera, et cetera. These are not massive correlations.

Speaker 4 We're not talking that you know every racist is really stupid or whatever. Uh sorry if there's any races in the audience, I don't want to be you know

Speaker 4 offending you at all.

Speaker 4 But but the the the the general the the general point is um so one explanation is that there's an uh intelligence allows you more abstract thinking skills that allow you to put yourself in other people's shoes and allow you to think from their perspective.

Speaker 4 One thing I should say, it's all very nice, you know,

Speaker 4 less racist, more equal, etc. More intelligent people are also more economically liberal as well as socially liberal.
So essentially, more intelligent people tend to be libertarians.

Speaker 4 And I know that they believe that they are the most intelligent people, so it's quite annoying that it's also true.

Speaker 10 Well, isn't that.

Speaker 1 There is that for Josie. I wonder how you feel.
Because in one way, you can go, oh, well that's good. It turns out racists are idiots and all this kind of thing.

Speaker 1 But in another way, because you are a liberal, you go, well, I don't really like the idea of thinking that so much might already be, you know, what we are and what we genetically are potential, that so much is already ingrained that in some ways as a liberal, you want everyone to have the equal potential to kind of change and all of those.

Speaker 1 So there's a kind of clash.

Speaker 11 I think people always do down the general level of intelligence.

Speaker 11 And the way I see the world is that most people are more intelligent than you would think, and there's more talent and untapped potential and things like that.

Speaker 11 And so I definitely want to see it much more as like nurture as opposed to nature. I don't want to see it like

Speaker 4 the evidence from behaviour genetics which is the study of psychological traits and how genetic how much variance in those psychological traits can be explained by genes doesn't by any means say that intelligence is 100% ingrained in your genetics before you're born, not in any sense.

Speaker 4 But on average about 50% of the differences between people in their intelligence level on those tests that I was talking about can be explained by genetics and the rest is environmental.

Speaker 4 That environment of course tends to be what we call non-shared environment, which is not your parents, which is not things that you share with your siblings.

Speaker 4 It tends to be things that are out there in the world.

Speaker 4 We haven't actually nailed down what those things are in psychology, but we're working on it.

Speaker 4 And one of those things might, of course, just be going to school. It looks like for every year you stay in school,

Speaker 4 you gain a few IQ points. And that's not just people who are smarter staying in school for longer.

Speaker 4 There's kind of evidence from where governments have sort of made it m mandatory to stay in school for longer, you know, for everyone.

Speaker 4 And it does seem that there's a sort of causal effect of being forced to stay in school on your IQ.

Speaker 11 And what do you think about reading to kids when they're little? Is that have you?

Speaker 13 So

Speaker 4 there's a big problem with that kind of research in reading to kids. So you'll observe a correlation in the population that people who read more to their kids will have smarter kids.

Speaker 4 Now, is that because the reading causally affects their intelligence, the reading to them affects their intelligence?

Speaker 4 Or is it because you have passed on genes for being interested in reading books to the kids who then has those genes and is interested in reading books and therefore isn't is intelligent anyway.

Speaker 4 So there's this kind of genetic confound. You see a lot of this kind of research out there that doesn't take into account genetic differences between people.

Speaker 4 And so a lot of parenting studies and so on have this huge big problem where, well, you don't know if it's the parental behaviour or if it's the genes that the parents have passed on.

Speaker 4 And a lot of the cases, it is likely that it is the genes rather than the parental behaviour.

Speaker 12 So really the best thing to do would be to take all children away from their parents,

Speaker 12 put them with other parents for a whole generation, everyone in the country, mix it up, and then we could do proper study.

Speaker 4 Well, I mean, there are such studies, right?

Speaker 4 There are adoption studies where you look at kids who have been adopted into violence and you see whether their intelligence or personality or antisocial behavior or whatever it happens to be correlates more strongly with their adoptive parents or their biological parents.

Speaker 4 It turns out that things like intelligence tend to correlate more strongly with the biological parent than the adoptive one.

Speaker 4 Which shouldn't be, I don't think it should be too depressing.

Speaker 4 And it doesn't by any means say that you shouldn't read to your kids or whatever, because obviously reading to your kids is an amazing thing to do, and

Speaker 4 it's fun and it's it's it's emotional bonding and all that sort of stuff, great.

Speaker 4 But you shouldn't do it because you think it's raising their IQ, because there's not necessarily any evidence uh for that.

Speaker 1 I just realized I'm away for two weeks and I won't be able to read to my son, so very qu quickly.

Speaker 1 Um congratulations, today's your day, you're off to great places, you're off and away with your brains in your head and your feet in your shoes. You can choose any direction you choose.

Speaker 1 You're on your way. Anyway, I'll t read part two when I get back.

Speaker 10 Sorry,

Speaker 12 um I was thinking also about the racism thing, because that could be genetic, it might not. So the best thing to do would be to force two racists of different races

Speaker 12 to get together and have a baby.

Speaker 12 And then that baby, on one level, that baby would genetically obviously have all the racism genes in them, but on another level, the baby would think, Well, I've got one black mother and one white father, so I'm not really racist because I've got all the races here.

Speaker 12 I've got over the racism thing, so what would happen?

Speaker 1 That's like a spoken word version of the song Ebony and Ivory.

Speaker 10 It was really beautiful. Absolutely beautiful.

Speaker 9 Richard,

Speaker 9 just listening to the debate about the... Well, first of all, I should ask, do you accept the evidence that there's a genetic basis for intelligence?

Speaker 5 Well, it's interesting. When you look at all these wonderful things that people with high IQ apparently have, you wonder if the one thing they're all very good at is just lying on questionnaires.

Speaker 5 But I think that there's no doubt that whatever aspects of psychology we look at, there is a genetic basis to it. So personality, IQ,

Speaker 5 you know, any trait,

Speaker 5 religiosity as well. And and so all those things yes have a genetic basis.

Speaker 9 For me But that's quite just to dig down because that that's quite a to me anyway quite a a not shocking but an interesting statement because it's not been thought it's not been the case, has it, for for a long time that that's been accepted.

Speaker 9 No, it's been the the case forever, I do believe it's true.

Speaker 9 Well, not forever, but 200,000 years since I'm a sapiens person. But

Speaker 9 just in terms of academic research, is this a relatively new idea? Is it

Speaker 5 kicking around for a very long time? It has a fairly ugly history, as you might imagine, because it's coming from a particular, normally political point of view.

Speaker 5 But it's been kicking around, and of course, the data is there, and it's pretty good data, that every aspect of our psychology to some extent is genetically determined.

Speaker 5 But for me, that isn't the interesting part, because there you're putting the spotlight on what we can't change. What you have is a big area here that we can change.

Speaker 5 We can learn to grow, we can learn to reach our potential, and so on.

Speaker 5 And by always going on about genetics, then the message, particularly to kids, actually, can be very damaging, which is that you are what you are.

Speaker 5 There's us and there's them, and you're in this category, and that's that. And that to me is the damaging message.

Speaker 4 There are a couple of good reasons to still do this kind of research and understand which things are heritable and to what extent they're heritable.

Speaker 4 So, for instance, we used to believe that autism was caused by parents,

Speaker 4 there was the refrigerator mother theory where it's caused by parents being cold to their child, and people blamed the parents for the children's autism.

Speaker 4 But we know now that autism is strongly genetically influenced from these kind of twin studies, where you look at the difference between identical and non-identical twins, and you can look at the proportion of genetic influence on traits, on autistic traits.

Speaker 4 So, that's one reason to really get to the point where you can say to people, well, actually, let's stop blaming people for, let's stop blaming teachers for not getting kids, not getting every kid leaving school a genius Let's stop blaming parents for their children's problems which are not necessarily caused by their parenting styles So it is important to learn and I mean that's not even the most important thing about twin research because the genetic research because of course the genetic research is is attempting to understand the biological basis of illnesses like schizophrenia.

Speaker 4 There was a very major paper in Nature last week about schizophrenia and they found about hundred genetic loci now that are associated with schizophrenia.

Speaker 4 And this is a long time in the future, but we may, using this genetic research, understand the biological pathways that can then be targeted by treatments for illnesses on.

Speaker 9 What is interesting to me, Josie, is that this actually touches on a subject we covered in a previous monkey cage in this series about knowledge and whether it's always a good thing.

Speaker 9 So you can have the maximum amount of knowledge. The more knowledge you have, the better, which is what the suggestion is here.
Do you see a problem with this, a moral problem in a sense?

Speaker 9 If it were possible, for example, to test, to map the genome, which it obviously is, of every child that's born, and then select them out and say, well, you have this gene that may mean you're statistically less likely to be intelligent, therefore, we'll educate you in a different way.

Speaker 9 That seems to me to be intensely problematic.

Speaker 11 Oh, yeah, well, it's like what Richard said, it's not taking into account the fact that everyone's lives are wildly different and that people can achieve things that are astonishing.

Speaker 11 And I mean, in my own experience of like casual everyday sexism, you get that jump from

Speaker 11 I decided this is what is, and therefore, that is what ought.

Speaker 11 Like, it goes from descriptive to prescriptive, and all the time, like, you get people saying, like, you can't do what you're doing because of what you are, and it just makes you want to do it harder and sometimes worse, just to sort of get them.

Speaker 11 But so, no, I think it's wildly dangerous to think about limiting people in advance on the basis of things, no matter how accurate they are.

Speaker 4 But who says it's about limiting people in advance?

Speaker 10 So, for instance, well, sure, sure, sure.

Speaker 10 Who is he to say?

Speaker 9 For the purposes of argument.

Speaker 4 So, Simon Baron Cohen, I remember fairly recently, was talking about this.

Speaker 4 We need to have a debate now about what we should do if in X number of years we discover the genetic, the specific genetic associations with autism. That's his research topic.

Speaker 4 He's at Cambridge.

Speaker 4 And we need to have a debate now about what we're going to do with that.

Speaker 4 If we can predict from the womb that a child is highly likely to have autism or any other disorder that we're talking about, what do we do about that? Do we not interfere? Do we interfere?

Speaker 4 Do we give parents the maximal information? I mean, that's an extremely important ethical debate to be had. But I think there's no argument against having the information.

Speaker 4 It's not like we should just stop the science and tell people to stop.

Speaker 5 I think that's right. But I think we should also remember that in terms of being hardwired, the one thing we're hard-wired for of everything else is to change, is to respond to our environment.

Speaker 5 We are the least hard-wired creatures on the entire planet. And so people change their point of view, they change their religion, they change their political stance sometimes, they grow as people.

Speaker 5 And I'd rather put the spotlight on that aspect of human nature than on the notion of actually you're your genes or you're your brain, you're fixed, because that does lead and has in the past led to quite ugly political positions.

Speaker 5 So it's just a question of where you put the balance for me.

Speaker 4 But what if your propensity to change and adapt is also genetic?

Speaker 5 Well, that's fine as well. I and obviously it will be.

Speaker 5 But I'm just saying in terms of where you put that spotlight, I think it's damaging to say you are your genes, you're this type of person, because that stops people trying a lot of the time, particularly with kids actually.

Speaker 11 But if you knew in advance that someone would have really good genes for like, I don't know, baking or

Speaker 11 cold water swimming or whatnot, then you could be super prepared to like make them better from the get-go.

Speaker 11 Yeah, you could be like, right, we've looked at your limbs and they're good swimmers' limbs. We're going to start you off day one

Speaker 11 and then by 20 you would have created a man machine.

Speaker 10 But the thing is, the thing is people do that anyway, right?

Speaker 4 I mean, Mozart's parents brought him up to play music from a young age.

Speaker 4 Not because they did a genetic test, but because they were both musicians and they knew that and it was likely that the child would be able to, and it turns out that, yeah, he was pretty good.

Speaker 4 And although the early stuff's a bit facile, I think.

Speaker 10 But anyway, he was only four years old.

Speaker 13 He was only four years old, so I guess

Speaker 4 we can forgive him that. But we sort of do that anyway, right? We're genetically selecting all the time when we reproduce.

Speaker 4 You select a mate on some characteristics, whether it's physical attractiveness, whether it's intelligence, whether it's personality.

Speaker 4 There's statistical evidence for people assortatively mating on these characteristics.

Speaker 4 So there is a kind of, if you want to call it, the E-word eugenics going on just by people mating with each other and producing kids.

Speaker 5 And so we can't forget that. It's not a process you want to help along, though, is it? Let's be honest.

Speaker 12 Also, it is quite good, like, if two really musical parents or something, they have a child and they assume that child's going to be really musical and intelligent and it's absolutely thick.

Speaker 12 It's a great life lesson, isn't it?

Speaker 12 I mean, one shouldn't laugh, but it is great when it happens.

Speaker 1 But I wonder, Paul, do you ever, you know, that idea that some of the things we as human beings want to believe that we have made every one of our choices, that we are the person, that we have the freedom to do that, and actually, it does appear, even whether it's tests about free will, even if it is looking at certain predilections that are genetic, that maybe you are losing some of your possible individual powers.

Speaker 1 Does that ever kind of you've described that, I've made you sound like a wizard. Some of your individual powers.
You have the wizard gene, don't you, Paul? Of course, I do.

Speaker 12 But of course, as a comedian, you probably get this. Different relatives will say, Oh, you get it from your grandfather.

Speaker 1 He used to wear a dress.

Speaker 12 Or things like, oh, you know, it's always someone I've got it from. But if there's very unamusing relatives, they're not mentioned.

Speaker 12 But, you know, my father, you know, I've got things from him. My father's quite an irrational man.
For a start, he's got an irrational hatred of the clarinet.

Speaker 12 And then there's other things, like whenever he gets a pie out of the oven, he always drops the pie on the floor.

Speaker 12 and he always gets it out and he says, I've dropped the pie on the floor because he doesn't use oven gloves.

Speaker 12 It's totally against oven gloves.

Speaker 10 That's not irrational.

Speaker 1 He hates the clarinet, he tried to play it with his burnt fingers. Think he'd one day be like Hacker Bill.

Speaker 12 It might well be, but you know, it's sort of irrational. And I suppose I'm a bit irrational, a bit different.
I'm irrational, but I do use oven gloves. But then, on the other hand, I don't cook.

Speaker 1 Richard, I wonder about

Speaker 1 again, trying when we define rationality, when we think for the last hundred years, for instance, of psychology, where we see things which were seen as very rational at the time,

Speaker 1 we were seen as

Speaker 1 ideas that were quite accepted, that there was a man who used to drive around with a van giving people lobotomies.

Speaker 10 Nothing wrong with that.

Speaker 1 Tragically, of course, then killed by someone he gave a lobotomy to, suggesting it wasn't the cure he'd imagined.

Speaker 1 And these ideas, how do we, as human beings, when we're trying to take in the best examples, decide how we can rationally move forward? What rationality of today becomes the irrationality of tomorrow?

Speaker 4 Yesterday, both days.

Speaker 10 Well,

Speaker 5 so I think that that's why you need psychology, because psychologists do experiments, you have randomly controlled experiments, you randomly associate people with groups and so on.

Speaker 5 And you try and work out what is how the mind works and what is the best thing to do. And so I'm a social psychologist, so I'm interested in how people construct a sense of identity and that changes.

Speaker 5 So for example, in terms of the genetic debate,

Speaker 5 it's rather reassuring if it's something positive like high IQ to think that's imbued within you.

Speaker 5 And when you do something stupid, that's bad luck.

Speaker 5 So you make that attribution.

Speaker 5 Or if there's someone you don't like, then it's very easy to go, genetically, they're irrational because they disagree with me. What other explanation could there be?

Speaker 5 So that's about constructing identity.

Speaker 5 But psychologists do experiments to try and work out the best way of leading a sort of productive, happy, and successful life. And over time, you know, we'll get there.

Speaker 5 In the meantime, a lot of times it's a complete disaster because we come up with very silly ideas like doing lobotomies out of vans.

Speaker 9 The idea that

Speaker 9 we look back through history, I mean, so we're making a link between genetics and intelligence, and we're also using these words rational and irrational. It seems to me that it's self-evidently true.

Speaker 9 Let's take

Speaker 9 Scotland, England, the Western societies, have got more,

Speaker 9 they seem to they've got more liberal, certainly, democracies evolved, education standards have gone up. In general,

Speaker 9 I would imagine, well although this is a question, that the the intelligence level of the population has been raised not not by genetics, but just by the way we organize society, we become more liberal as societies, undoubtedly.

Speaker 9 We don't burn witches anymore, we're not a medieval society. Absolutely.
So there's a progression which is clearly not genetic.

Speaker 4 It's to do with society itself. So Steven Pinker's recent book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, was all about the the decline decline of violence across history.
And he talks about that exact thing.

Speaker 4 And one of the explanations, not

Speaker 4 the only explanation, but one of the explanations he brings in is what's called the Flynn effect, which is the increase in intelligence that we've observed since intelligence tests were measured across at the start of the 20th century.

Speaker 4 So every decade or so, there seems to be a three-point increase in intelligence.

Speaker 4 If the average person now did an intelligence test from the 1960s that was normed on an average sample from the 1960s, they would get a much higher result than 100, which is the kind of arbitrary average IQ.

Speaker 4 And one of the reasons, and so this is probably maybe because of better nutrition, better education.

Speaker 4 James Flynn thinks it's because we all wear scientific spectacles these days. We think about things in terms of abstract ways.

Speaker 4 So if you ask someone at the start of the 20th century, what do a dog and a rabbit have in common? And

Speaker 4 this was done.

Speaker 9 I just got to ask Paul,

Speaker 10 what do

Speaker 10 a dog?

Speaker 12 Well, they both live in my hutch.

Speaker 4 Right, but there we go. That's the kind of concrete thinking that was

Speaker 4 early 20th century, late 19th century. I'm not saying anything about it.
But nowadays, people might say, if you ask that question, the average person might say, well, they're both mammals.

Speaker 4 And that's a more scientific, abstract way of thinking. And that, you know, you see these things.

Speaker 12 They both bite sometimes.

Speaker 12 But it's the rabbit that's a real danger.

Speaker 10 Those teeth.

Speaker 10 So it's ones you don't expect.

Speaker 12 Loves the carrot. The dog just sometimes just nibbles and then throws me away.

Speaker 12 I like the dog. The dog's my friend, I hate the rabbit.

Speaker 10 I don't like cats from either of them. It's the cat's problem.

Speaker 4 This is a fundamental point, which I think is easy to lose, is that genetics, the genetic effect that comes out of twin studies and so on, and you don't even need twin studies anymore.

Speaker 4 You can look directly at the DNA to look at genetic effects on traits like intelligence. But the genetic effect is about the variance, right?

Speaker 4 So it's about that there's a sort of rank order of people and there's variance around the mean. It's not about the mean, and you could conceivably raise everyone's mean and retain the rank order

Speaker 10 of people.

Speaker 11 I just want to say that's AS level statistics.

Speaker 10 Right!

Speaker 11 Again,

Speaker 11 I was thinking about variance, and I was like, tell you what, I'll square root that, I'll give you standard deviation.

Speaker 11 Not a problem, mate.

Speaker 10 You can also do that.

Speaker 9 So, the width of the distribution stays the same.

Speaker 9 So, if it was everyone, in general, there was a 100 plus or minus 20, then you can go up to 110 plus or minus 20, 130.

Speaker 10 Well, the standard deviation is 15, but yeah, but 20. Yes, yes.

Speaker 1 No, I'm just trying to simplify it for the listeners.

Speaker 10 I know, I can't. Oh, I love it when it is.
Thank you, Elizabeth.

Speaker 10 You're making you look like you're wrong. You get so worried.

Speaker 11 Because it's a normal distribution, so all you need is the chart, and then you just standardise it, and then you can just read it off.

Speaker 10 Absolutely.

Speaker 1 Thank you for making that a lot clearer, Joseph, because I didn't have a clue what Brian was talking about. It's really succinct and proper.
Watch out, someone's on your turn.

Speaker 5 It's really simple, isn't it? It's just that everyone's got better.

Speaker 10 Yeah, that's right. Everyone's got better.

Speaker 4 But the rank order is still the same. So I don't think we should worry about because intelligence

Speaker 4 there's a genetic effect on the differences in intelligence, that some people are geniuses and some people are not geniuses.

Speaker 4 We shouldn't worry about it being immutable.

Speaker 4 We should maybe resign ourselves to the fact that we're not going to be able to equalize everyone. And I think there are still some people who think that people are blank slates and they're born

Speaker 4 with the you know that we can we can equalize them and you certainly get that impression from really a a lot of stuff in the media.

Speaker 12 There is a way to make everyone equal, and that is to reduce everyone to the bottom level. And

Speaker 12 find what everyone is least good at and make them do that.

Speaker 10 That is exactly.

Speaker 4 Right, but that's exactly a point that comes out of behavioural genetics.

Speaker 10 Imagine a world where... Imagine a world.

Speaker 4 I say exactly. I say exactly.

Speaker 4 Imagine a world where, in a world where everyone

Speaker 4 has exactly the same environment. They're brought up by robot parents who are exactly the same as everyone else's parents.
They go to a school,

Speaker 4 taught by robots, and everyone, you know, so imagine the environment is exactly the same for everyone. What's the only thing that can vary there? It's their genes.

Speaker 4 So, actually, in a world where everyone had a great environment, brilliant teachers, and everyone was raised up to that level, the heritability of intelligence would be 100%.

Speaker 4 I.e., the only thing that would vary is intelligence.

Speaker 9 So, actually, this is your recipe for utopia.

Speaker 10 So, here it is so simple to study.

Speaker 4 That a high heritability of intelligence can actually be viewed as an index of

Speaker 4 social meritoxy almost. So, everyone's doing, that you're doing quite well, a social equality index.

Speaker 4 That if in places where education is very poor, you'll find actually lower heritabilities because people aren't being able, being allowed to reach their genetic potential.

Speaker 4 And so heritability is almost an indicator of how well you're doing the environment, which is quite nice.

Speaker 1 Josie, would you agree with Stuart that perhaps the main problem of society is the lack of sentient robots?

Speaker 11 I know who's like robot teacher, I was like, I'm in.

Speaker 11 Robot parents, yes, please.

Speaker 10 It would be great.

Speaker 9 Well, we're arguably sentient robots.

Speaker 10 Oh, hang on.

Speaker 9 Not even arguably, actually.

Speaker 9 I'm a universal Turing machine and I'm proud of it.

Speaker 10 So is he here?

Speaker 1 That is so going to be solved. There's a mathematician old barn.

Speaker 1 Josie, you're someone who's campaigned for kind of opportunities for everyone for levels of equality and in arts and money and education.

Speaker 1 And do you feel optimistic hearing these things, at the idea that in some ways, when we sometimes see this reported in the press, there is a fear that it will be used as Stuart's, you know, the idea that it could be used negatively, but in fact, there's a tremendous positive thing of knowing what is it that you have that gives you the advantage?

Speaker 1 You know, you were talking there about, you know, the baking gene, for instance.

Speaker 10 I don't have that gene.

Speaker 11 I do feel optimistic because I think the thing that I find most inspiring is this idea that, like, we can push up our overall general mean of intelligence and achievement, and the idea that if society is better educated, then society is kinder and more cultured.

Speaker 11 And so, those two things, regardless of like variance and regardless of being able to identify certain things in advance or anything like that, those two things are tremendously inspiring and positive and just reinforce all my pre-existing biases.

Speaker 5 It has to be said that the genetics work there, Bing Scro, is very complicated and very expensive.

Speaker 5 And we still don't know the best way to run a school, the best way to inspire kids, the best way to teach kids, because those really basic questions don't get that much attention.

Speaker 5 And it seems to me that that's the really important stuff, because that's where you can change people and make the difference.

Speaker 5 And by focusing on genes and genetics and brain structures and so on, it's all fine, but where does it get you?

Speaker 5 What do you say when you're standing in front of a class of kids? You say, some of you have got the right genes and some of you haven't.

Speaker 10 Right?

Speaker 11 End of lesson. But it's not either or, it's not like

Speaker 5 in terms of where you put that attention.

Speaker 5 In terms of where you put that attention at the moment, the attention is is on genes and brains and so on, and we don't know the best way of inspiring kids, and I think that's a disgrace.

Speaker 4 But as far as that, as far as a good point, but as far as that goes, I think that's not necessarily because scientists have been spending all their time doing genetics, it's because educational researchers have

Speaker 4 become victim to a certain postmodernism and a lack of appreciation of doing things like randomized controlled trials of new ideas and education and so on.

Speaker 4 There's a certain, and I'm going to get myself into terrible trouble for saying this, but there is a I'm going to beg you on, though.

Speaker 5 Get after those postmodernists.

Speaker 14 Yeah, go on.

Speaker 4 There's a dreadful postmodernism

Speaker 4 and a sort of actual aversion to doing this kind of research. But I think that's changing now.

Speaker 4 And a lot of teachers, there are conferences popping up of people, you know, of teachers getting together who want to run experiments in their schools and try the new latest teaching technique and so on.

Speaker 4 I think we're going to get out of that fairly soon. And I'm quite optimistic about

Speaker 4 changing those things, exactly as you're saying, changing those things about how to run a school.

Speaker 9 Postmodernism is the problem.

Speaker 10 Well, I think the roots of all evil.

Speaker 12 It's got to complicate it. I mean, I think schools work perfectly well.
When I went to school, it was all right. We got went in there, we were locked in our rooms.

Speaker 12 They gave us a thing, we had to do

Speaker 12 off the blackboard. It's not complicated, you learn it, then you go out and kick a football for an hour and learn social skills.

Speaker 12 Then you go back and you do double chemistry and you write it all down and then you quickly memorise it and you go into the exam, put it all, spout it all out, forget about it, and get on with your life.

Speaker 12 It works perfectly well.

Speaker 9 And

Speaker 1 Richard, again, the ideas of genetics, the idea of society, that you do a lot of tests where you confront people that perhaps they don't have the knowledge or the abilities they have, and that even if we do find ways of going, we can make you more rational.

Speaker 1 I mean, for instance, you did a test, I believe, with wine tasting. We had some wine experts and they really knew their wine.

Speaker 1 And then you basically revealed that sometimes, the one they went, well, this is a 500-pound bottle. You went, no, it's four quid, it's around the corner.

Speaker 1 But did they leave going, Thank you very much, Professor Wiseman, I've learned. Or were they a little bit aggressive?

Speaker 5 They went into what I would refer to as a state of denial, and then they criticized the tech. I mean, I've tested lots of psychics and mediums over time, and it's always the same.

Speaker 5 They always fail, which is ironic for those that can predict the future.

Speaker 5 So, and I live for the day when even one of them would go, oh, it turns out I'm not psychic. Thank you very much.
I'll get on with my life.

Speaker 5 But they don't. So they start to criticise the test, and then they'll criticise me, and then it all gets very personal.
And it was exactly the same with the wine testers, the wine experts.

Speaker 5 We gave them a bottle of wine, which is about £1.99. And as you say, many of them, oh, my goodness, I would pay hundreds of pounds for this.

Speaker 5 And then we lifted the tube, and they went, oh, my goodness, I'm leaving now.

Speaker 5 So,

Speaker 5 yes, we don't like information that confronts our sense of identity and expertise.

Speaker 5 But we need to have that experience in order to change and grow and be laughed at by others. And

Speaker 12 it's not just wine experts. I mean, I'm not a wine expert, but I find whatever the price of the bottle of wine, after drinking a few, I also go into a state of denial.

Speaker 12 So a lot of crying,

Speaker 10 weeping.

Speaker 1 It's normally the next morning the state of denial begins.

Speaker 1 Do you think, Stuart, that there's a possibility we'll be able to isolate the psychic medium gene so that

Speaker 1 those people who do have the great, when it comes down the family line, I was talking to my great-great-great-grandfather the other day. He was in a lovely dress.

Speaker 4 If you're asking if there's a genetic basis to antisocial behaviour, deception, and lying, then I imagine there is, yeah.

Speaker 10 So

Speaker 11 do you think you could work out in advance who was going to be the biggest fantasist? At some point,

Speaker 4 you could get that. That is the kind of

Speaker 4 general sort of long, blue skies, long-term idea, but it's not going to be, we're not going to get anywhere near that for a very long time. Sort of that.

Speaker 1 But generally, though, the biggest fantasist is just going to be the one who walks in dressed as Napoleon. Surely.
You don't have to then go to the whole kind of genetic thing.

Speaker 4 And yeah, we shouldn't rely on brain scans and genetic scans and so on.

Speaker 4 When we do have psychological tests that can predict these things pretty accurately, and we don't necessarily have to give everyone an MRI to predict their behavior.

Speaker 4 And that is the kind of thing that people love to look at pictures of brains when really.

Speaker 5 That was the psychopath stuff. They did MRI scans on psychopaths and they said, look, we found out, you know, an MRI test for psychopaths.

Speaker 5 And you think, well, how did you know who to put into the scanner?

Speaker 10 Well, indeed. It did.

Speaker 1 How do you, Josie? I just want to know, when you are trying to, you know, collating kind of arguments on a, you know,

Speaker 1 do you have a system of thinking, I think I can trust these people, I don't think I can trust it.

Speaker 1 Who are, you know, again, this is always the problem when we're trying to be rational, is who do we trust to be the rational people?

Speaker 11 Yeah, I do think it's hard, like, especially when it comes to things that I am never going to be an expert on, but I do care about.

Speaker 11 I do find, like, like I'll try and have a pool of people that I consider to be reliable and I try to read their stuff as critically as possible.

Speaker 10 They've got that.

Speaker 9 They're called scientists.

Speaker 1 Some scientists.

Speaker 1 Paul, do you have someone who's your irrationality advisor or have you left all of that behind now?

Speaker 12 No, I have I have a si uh a whole team of people who give feed me irrational thoughts all day long. Irrational thoughts.
Yeah, irrational. Well I have to have I mean they're irrationality advisors.

Speaker 9 So you can't come up with your own irrational thoughts.

Speaker 12 Well yes I can, but obviously I can't, obviously I can, but it's so the rational thing therefore would be not to employ a team of people to give me irrational advice.

Speaker 12 In fact having a team of people to give me irrational advice was one of my first irrational thoughts.

Speaker 12 And in fact I'm going to sack them next week, which is the only rational thing I've done in years.

Speaker 1 So we we asked our audience a question as well just to find out to use their hive mind and see what they thought was their most irrational belief and that we actually live in the stomach of a giant named George.

Speaker 1 I don't actually think this is true, but it helps me get to sleep.

Speaker 12 Absolute nutter. Absolute nutter.
To think things like that.

Speaker 1 I think these are all from your irrational panel actually.

Speaker 5 I think they're all from the right panel.

Speaker 9 I was getting very annoyed about this and then I worked out, I just understood grammar for a minute. Because the question is, what do you think is your most irrational belief?

Speaker 9 And the answer was, there's no such thing as physics, there's only smoke and mirrors. But that's irrational.

Speaker 9 So it's a negative of that.

Speaker 1 That's what I like about you. You're always learning words on this show.

Speaker 1 That my cat cares about me.

Speaker 1 That's definitely a rationalist, isn't it? Because that's the sadness of that one, isn't it?

Speaker 9 This is unfortunate. This is from Dr.
Alex Thomas. It's that people care about my research.

Speaker 9 What's your research? Where is that?

Speaker 1 Alex Thomas. Alex.

Speaker 12 Isotope geochemistry.

Speaker 10 No, you're right.

Speaker 1 Thank you very much to our panel: Richard Wiseman, Stuart Ritchie, Josie Long, and Paul Foote. This is the end of the series.
We'll be back for a Christmas special and a new series of the new year.

Speaker 1 Thank you very much for listening and goodbye.

Speaker 10 cage.

Speaker 14 Feeling that nice again?

Speaker 1 That was the Infinite Monkey Cage podcast. I hope you enjoyed it.
Did you spot the 15 minutes that was cut out for radio? Hmm. Anyway, there's a competition in itself.
What do you think?

Speaker 1 It should be more than 15 minutes. Shut up.
It's your fault. You downloaded it.
Anyway, there's other scientific programmes also that you could listen to.

Speaker 9 Yeah, there's that one with Jimmy Alkaceltzer.

Speaker 1 Life Scientific.

Speaker 9 His Adam Brother Fiddle, his dad discovered the atomic nucleus.

Speaker 4 That's Inside Science.

Speaker 1 All in the Mind with Claudia Hammond.

Speaker 9 Richard Hammond's Hammond's sister.

Speaker 1 Richard Hammond's sister. Thank you very much, Brian.
And also, Frontiers, a selection of science documentaries on many, many different subjects.

Speaker 1 These are some of the science programs that you can listen to.

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