The Truth About Sex Differences (Steve Stewart-Williams)

Hey everybody, it's Michael Shermer, time for another episode of the Michael Shermer Show. Here we are again, live in in person in the UK. I'm at the How the Light Gets In festival. My guest today is Dr. Steve Stewart Williams, also here at the festival speaking. He's a professor of psychology at the University of Nottingham, Malaysia. Before taking up his current position, he was a senior lecturer at Swansea University, and before that he spent two years as a postdoc fellow at the McMaster University in Canada. Working in the lab of Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, epic big researchers in the area of crime and human aggression. He did his PhD in psychology and philosophy at Massey University in New Zealand. His second book, The Eighth That Understood the Universe, was published in September twenty eighteen, and an audio book version is now available and revised paperback edition releas the following year with a forward by Me.

The host of this show. Steve, nice to see you. How are you? It's great. Your um new book is A Billion Years of Sex Differences, How Evolution Shaped the Minds of Men and Women. So you're trying to stay out of trouble. That's exactly right. I'll start this off with uh one of my favorite uh experiments from uh a colleague of mine who asked undergraduates do you accept Darwin's theory of evolution? They're like, Oh yeah, of course, yeah. All right, explain it. And they're like, uh well, you know, the giraffe stretch its neck and the baby giraffes have longer necks. No, that's not it at all. So they're just signaling, yeah, you guys usually get it right, and you're probably right. Even not knowing it. Give us just a short premiere. What is natural selection? What's the point of evolution? Sure, no worries. Um so my favorite uh way of making that point of talking about what it's about and how it works, um and and specifically how it applies to the human mind and behavior is first of all to ask people about uh So think about

an adaptation, like an anatomical adaptation in another animal. So think for instance about the fangs of the lion. So so why does the line have the the fangs that it has? What are they for? Why do those evolve? And and the answer, of course, is quite intuitive, right? It's so that the lion can capture its prey and then devour its prey. Uh, why do gazelles evolve the long legs that they have, uh and the fast legs that they have? And the answer again is quite intuitive. It's that it's uh so that they can um escape from the clutches of hungry lions and other predators. Um so what uh so those those evolved through natural selection, the idea would be that those came about Because um y you have variation.

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