thoughts on sports, politics, and race in america. on our author interview program "after words". after that american enterprise institute director argues that supporting american institutions rather than replacing them over unite the country. and lori and pratt discusses the next article of check your guide for more information. now here's charles murray. [applause] thank you their many friends in the audience and thanks to dalton conway for making the trip down here to be with us tonight. "human diversity" is a big book and we don't have much time. my job is to give you an overview of the main findings of the books and 12 minutes and professor conley's job,

dalton's job, is to point the conversation in any direction he wants and will take it from there in the discussion. i wanted to write "human diversity" for many reasons, but at the center is this fact. we are on the cusp of an enormously exciting era. advances in genetic genetics and neuroscience gives new tools that will enable us to take giant strides in understanding human behavior, human society, policies and economies. we are like physicist, i'd like to say at the outset of the 19th century, poised at a moment in history that would protas faradays in the coming years. so people like me and dalton are to be excited and i think we both are. but a lot of social scientists are not. why? because for almost a century now the social sciences have been in the grip of an orthodox events straits and

tran scared stiff biology. at the moment takes the form of three widely and loudly proclaimed truths. gender is a social construct, races and social, class is a function of privilege. i have stated this tenants very boldly. if you go on to university campus and check privately with faculty members who have researched on these issues you will find many of them have a nuanced view of that. they acknowledge that biology plays a role, but only a few of them, dalton conley being one of them is willing to say so in their lectures, articles or books. what it amounts to, is that i have set out in this book, with the aim of demolishing the academic orthodoxy and making it easier for the same members of academia to do their work. i am probably overreaching and that goal. the findings in the book, things that i think we really don't need to argue about

anymore, i set out ten propositions. the quickest way to summarize the book is with those tens e propositions. the first four are about gender differences. consistent with currentdi practice among a growing number of specialist, i dispense with the word gender and return to. i also dispense with this folder because it is playing havoc with my ability to read my text. hang on a second period the first proposition is differences in personalities are consistent worldwide and tend to widen in more gender and gala tearing cultures. that consistency is quite remarkable. everywhere women are on average, always stressed about that word we're talking about differences in meansns with big overlaps and distributions. they are on average hires on measures of warmth towards others, altruistic concerns,

sensitivity, sent sympathy and sociability. conversely men are on average, more reserve, utilitarian, unsentimental, dispassionate and solitary. theseia tendencies hold true in theseia tendencies hold true in no exception for the most traditional to the most advanced. furthermore, contrary to the expectations of with the socialat constructs, those differences tend to widen in cultures that are a more gender egalitarian. differences in personality are wider in the country like denmark than they are uganda. very interesting phenomena we have i hope we have a chance to talk about. second proposition, on average females worldwide have advantages in verbal ability and social cognition, also many forms of memory while males have advantages in abilities.advantages in within the normal range mathematical ability is about the same in both sexes, but male have a substantial advantage at the extremes of mathematical ability.

there is no netet advantage eithernt and g and the general manufacturer of men and women just have distinctive cognitive profiles. proposition three. on average, women worldwide loare more attracted to vocation centered on people and men to vocation centered on things. this people, things dichotomy with men and women is a very old way of thinking about male-female differences. and it is actually widely accepted by a lot of people now. it certainly holds true for personality and cognitive strength as i have just described if also holds through for women's vocational choices. here, we do see a definite shift in the data in the 1970s. as you had a variety of educational and vocational opportunities for women, especially in sciences, the hard sciences that opened up.

and you also see a very definite response by women during the 1970s as the proportions of women going into those fields increase. but then the increase in the things associated with occupation leveled off, and by the late 1980s a new equilibrium had been reached that has persisted now for three decades. it's not that the trendline shallow than the last three decades, it has effectively the last three decades. i will add that the people's things distinction applies to, within the scientific disciplines. so when women were plucked into the sciences, it was primarily biology. and when they flocked into medicine it was primarily those specialties and medicine that are very patient intensive in terms of interpersonal reactive. proposition four, is that many differences in the brain are

coordinate with differences in personality, abilities, and social behavior. for me this is the most fascinating material in the book, it is also the most dense chapter. i wish i could have made it easier but it's very complicated stuff. i wish i could at least give a glimpse of what this give fascinating material is, but i've got six more propositions to get through. maybe during the q&a we could come back to this. it's really cool. now he moved to the propositions regarding race. once again, i am going to follow contemporary practice among specialists, i discard the word race and substitute for its ancestral populations. this is not some silly politically correct change, race as a word really has acquired a lot of cultural baggage and it's appropriate to substitute something else when talking about genetics. opposition number five, human populations are genetically distinctive in ways that correspond to self identified

race and ethnicity. i made this point i don't need to make into a proposition why is that you can send in some of your saliva to 23 and me, plus a hundred bucks, and get back information that you are 45% bavarian, 24% french, and 31% polynesian. they can do that, reflecting two decades of very sophisticated work. that identified the kinds of genetic distinctiveness that characterize populations around the world. but i want to note, these distinctions are not based on genetic bits of information that are known to affect traits. on the contrary, they are on vertical non- coding of the dna. they simply show distinctive patterns for different and nested cities. if races and ethnic city, work socially constructswe that would

be impossible. it is actually a sure thing. proposition number six, evolutionary selection pressures since lou's humans left left africa is extensive and mostly local. a linchpin ofa the race is a social construct, the opposition advance most famously by steven jay cool is that humans left africa too recently for significantly at evolution evolution to evolve. if we are talking about evolution through random mutation. in the last 15 years, since the genome was sequenced, it is found that evolution through changes in what is called standing variation. that can be and often has been rapid. such changes had been usually confined to one continent. in proposition seven, i know i'm going through these things but we didn't want to spend 45 minutes presenting the contents of the book. proposition seven katsina populations differences

associated with personality abilities and social behavior are common. over the last five years, hundreds of thousands of genetic variants have been identified that are associated with traits such as ability and personality and social behavior. within continental populations, let's say we are comparing chinese and japanese, these differences and trying to avoid the jargon, the difference in the leo frequencies i'll just have to spit it out, are very small. the correlations within continental populations of these variants is .97, .98, .99,.9 close to absolute perfect correlations. when on the other hand you begin to compare these with europeans or these stations with africans or africans with europeans, those correlations dropped markedly. they are still hi, by the

standards of social sciences ranging from about .5 to about .8. but even with correlations that size, you got lots of differences that were in areas that are known to be in for affecting important traits. we know very, veryab little about adding. [inaudible] for a variety of reasons. technically it's very complicated, secondly yound need to have very large samplesom from all of the relevant populations in order to make authoritative statements. those very large databases are being collected, but they are not here yet. i am sending a very simple warning, the reality is the geneticists are looking at genetics distinctions across continental populations that are radically different from the expectations implied by race is a social construct. the next three pop --

proposition number eight, the shared environment usually plays a minor role in explaining personality, abilities, social behavior. i'm pretty sure dalton and i are going to be able to argue about this one. parents hate this finding by the way. me among them. he says that our parenting and the schools we find forur our kids in the neighborhood, where we live doesn't make nearly as much difference is how her kids turn out as we would like to think. this is old news for those who have been paying attention to what was printed out for the general audience in 1998 and nurture assumption and steve tinker madepi it famous in 2002 in the blank slate. i will leave it at that now. proposition nine, class structure is importantly based on differences in ability that have a biological component. the discussion amounts to a documentation of the premise that richard hornstein, my co-author and the bell curve,

first famously or notoriously stated in 1973, he had symbolism and differences in mental abilities are inherited and success requires those abilities and earnings and prestige depend on success, than social standing will be based is some extent on inherited differences among people. the denominator has already added a lot to our knowledge of these relationships as i described in the chapter involved. in the final proposition, outside interventions are inherently constrained in the effects they can have on personality, abilities, and social behavior. probably, this will be the most fiercely contested of the tenorer propositions. people hate the idea that we are quite limited in our ability to change personalities, abilities, and social behavior foror the better in large numbers of people by design. crucial distinction, can an

inspirational teacher change the trajectory of a board so and student's life? absolutely. can friends intervening with another friend who has a drug problem, can they change the trajectory of that person's life? absolutely. i'm talking about programs that are trying to change lots of people in a kind of cookie-cutter fashion.ge my readingpe of the evidence is we can change lives on the retail basis occasionally, but not wholesale. the book and concludes with two chapters the shaping revolution in the social sciences. you can't attach propositions to these because her so much up for grabs. some of you mayso have seen my article in the wall street journal talk about powergen asked gores and transcending sciences. it has already attracted denunciation from unknown scholars, i semesters the beginning. because the discussion of anything involving gender, race, and class attracts so

much anger and angst, and name-calling, let me conclude by spelling out what i do not argue. i do not argue for genetic determinism. race, class, or indeed partly social constructs. the role of the environment and shaping personality and abilities and social behavior is important. many aspects of the roles of both genes and b environment will remain elusive, for decades to come. we human beings, built our lives with an abundance of unpredictability both genetic and environmental, and we are not helpless to change her own lives. i do not argue that biology will let us sorts groups of people, be they sexes, races, classes. in theas hierarchies that go from superior to inferior. human beings are way too complicated for that. on theej contrary i explicitly reject such claims. i also explicitly rejects

james a differences among groups have any relevance to human worth andva dignity. i submit that no one who reads the book can have any confusion about my position on these things. the problem i have found is to get people who writes about myob books, to read them. [laughter] do i have a hidden agenda? well i do sort of. the subtext of "human diversity" is that everybody should just calmev down. i hope the book leads readers understanding the biological differences among human groups areg not scary or earthshaking. there are no monsters in the closet, no dread doors must fear opening. but the other subtext of "human diversity" is that the doors will open whether we like it orth not. in the proper response to the discoveries to come is that's interesting. i fear that the orthodox is frantic the genic league ground did prove difference in

the personality abilities and social behavior g cannot exist ensures the discoveries initially won't be greeted that way. but they should be. thank you very much. [applause] >> since i don't have formal remarks i will speak from here that'sth okay. first of all, thank you very much for having me, and i think you picked the right sociologist in terms of sharing your enthusiasm about the role of the genomics revolution for social science. as not quite a proposition, but one of your assertions is that in ten years, in 2030 you will no longer be able to publish any flagship social science journal without having to consider or give good reason for why you are not controlling for, that is

holding constants in your fiscal monitor apologetic score for a particular trait such as civic participation, political science, or educationaeducational attainment and sociology, and so forth. i pretty much agree with that proposition and think -- agreed that this is an incredibly exciting time in the social and behavioralg sciences. much like your metaphor of the physics at the end of the 19th century. but i think that enthusiasm needs to be tempered for where the science is right now. and while i am just stand by your ability, i think you said you startedsa this book three years ago, to come into a thickets and not just genetics, where i've been spending a lot of time, but also neuroscience which is above my pay grade and be able to not only assimilates a wide

sloth of literature, but actually make it completely accessible to an educated lay audience is incredible to me. so the remainder of my remarks i want to divide into three sections. one is, this notion of what will i say as a strongman about this social construction of race. i'm going to focus on race and class. i'm not an expert on gender or neuroscience. so i am happy, we can have an exchange in the q&a or after my remarks if you'd like. i have some thoughts, but that's really not my wheelhouse so i will talk about the other two areas. so whats is race and what is its relationship to ancestral populations? second thing i will talk about is what do we know about biological differences between these population groupings? and particularly for social behavior traits.

and thirdly, what are the policy implications of all of this? so let's start with the social construction of race and gender for that matter. i think that you kind of dispensed with that and say you're going to stick with talking about for example and ancestry. but this a really good reason why social sciences are sociological want to preserve a distinction between let's say gender, which is specifically about the social relationships that generally correlate with these differences, but not necessarily so. and change across place and ethics of history, likewise raise is a social category which evolves and changes over across timewh and place, that's as you point out, and our current moment, country, can be very well predicted by a drop of saliva, but it's not

the same thing. for example, it is absolutely true that if we took everybody in this room probably and got their dna from their saliva and scented three and br ancestry.com, we would probably be able to predict with about 98% accuracy what someone self identified race is using the classical u.s. definitions of a white non-hispanic, white or black hispanic, african-american or black, asian, and other. however, that is a very particular moment in history pawhen -- and a particularly diverse population of the u.s. that allows that to happen. so other instances of race that are entirely divorced from. [inaudible] take for example race in japan where there's a group that

appraises 3% of the population and suffer from all the same social and health disadvantages that native americans are native africans do in the united states. lower test scores, lower higher diabetes everything we read about minority populations in our country. yet they are physically indistinguishable from the majority of the japanese the really more like a social castes that resulted from the homeless people that were displaced refugees displaced of j the 14th and 15th century. they kind of coalesced and went against perspective parent research on their perspective daughter son-in-law to make sure they don't have this blood in them. it functions as we know race is, there is no genetic basis. or take my wife's a former homeland, the former

yugoslavia, where you can't imagine a more racially charged or ethnically charged conflict in the 1990s including genocide. n yet there are basically no, with a little bit of caveats, there's no genetic distinction between those groups that are literally murdering each other in the form of yugoslavia. on the other hand, a place like rwanda, there is genocide the same time, there are very distinctive genetic between that to see in the hutu populations there. there very biologically clear forms of race and sometimes there is not. that's all you need to preserve ancestry and biology. so i don't think you would disagree majorly with that. i think the bigger issue is what do we make of those differences and hear we get into a lot of complicated

science. so i will try to explain what apologetic score is really quickly. if your memory or high school biology, there are four bases of dna to go with two and the with the other two, and there is variation across the genome in which base individuals might have been a particular location. so what we do to create apologetic scores of powerful new tool we are both excited about, is we take a population , and one of the papers you're citing, as apologetic score that predicts how far people go in school. olit was a paper i was involved in it was actually a series of papers. we took 1.1 million people and about 3 millionion people and locations in the genome where there's common variation, where you might have gigi and that's why you're smarter than me and i have aa.

we see in the population level, how mean geez you have predicts a very slight increase in the likelihood you went a little farther in school. we then -- this is a gross. [inaudible] we send that across the 3 million locations, get a singlele score and charles this is probably plus two variation, greater than mine, and we predicted he's going to go further in school. we take that score, and we take it to a new sample, so it's not biased for any aspects of the samples we tested and developed in, and we tested and we see how much variation in a population in that new sample we can predict. currently, the best prediction scorein for something like educational tendencies is about 13% of variation. which is not the majority, but it's not trivial either. it's a real effect.

it turns out, one of the discoveries of the last ten or 15 years of genetics is almost all human traits that we care about, areet extremely polygenic. so we started this era looking forward these single big genes that alzheimer's or the brocket gene for breast cancer, or looking for the five or ten genes for a flood say educational entered attainment or iq, personality, or non- communist skills. there is now even dozen genes there's thousands may be a million affects all across the genome. if you try to discover those genius effects, you need massive sample sizes hence are 1.1 million person genome wide association study. the problem is, that once you magnify those small effects in order to detect them, you are magnifying all sorts of biases as well.. so for the state is now, at

actually ten to 13 to 14% that we are predicting, we now realize is actually wrong. because part of it is sweeping up a lot of environmental variation. that is people in -- let's forget about people and let east asia and africa just in the netherlands, there are different frequencies on a north-south axis in an east-west axis. any and probably talk about just like we did predicting people self identified race here, with 98% accuracy based on dna. in the netherlands you could probably locate people and wish region of the netherland they are in, pretty darn well with their dna as well. but that means that the smaller frequency differences are associated with different environmental conditions asdi well. light up in the north of england or the south of england, the uk bio bank. even with constant modules

studies, one state in the united states, one birth cohort in 1958, it was a class of 1958, and yet you can see serough the genetics, you can see that you can separate people outph geographically in the state. and therefore their environments are also different. so this population structure means that we are not taking up pure genetic effects, we are also sweeping up environmental differences. the greater the difference is in the population, even far western europeans and eastern europeans let alone, asians and europeans. you are necessarily also sweeping up much more in differences in and history and culture and so forth. there is a second kind of confounders that we are allnd dealing with in the issue and it's called genetic nurturer which you briefly mention the book as well. because i share 50% of my

jeans with my parents with each of my today.f my it's going to be scores based on a number of very different models, which i can discuss more in the q-and-a but basically identified the effects in family differences. a brother or sister, i have a

sister and if i looked at i have gg and she is g1, that is a difference unassociated with any ancestry. we grew up in the same household. that is a nice experiment and where the literature is moving to family-based studies can be more certain it's a genetic effect and unfortunately, family-based studies are at one point a million individuals right now. so, we are kind of starting again and it will take a few years before we get to those good actually more pure testament of the genetic effects. it has really important consequences for yours. conclusions f about which proposition is that human behavioral differences across either continental ancestry groups or other groupings that

have a biological basis. wewe simply don't know that. it's a lame defense to say there's evidence against that. there's actually a paper that just came out yesterday. i think coincidentally it showed those differences on the sort of educational or iq promoting are just no bigger than a few picked random wheels from african and asian populations for example. we know that all of the research has been done in european populations in an effort throwing out minority groups within the u.s. and australia andd the uk when we do this research to try to limit the founding of the environment but then that g means to take a noncontroversial example,

height, you take the best performing, currently the best performing predicts an enormous amount of the variations partly because height is genetics in nature. if you pick the best performing polpolygenic score-which has ben trained in predicting s people's dissent, you systematically protect them to be 6 inches shorter than they are so it doesn't work for the biological reasons you talked about the frequencies and what they are tagging in the genome as different. and we have a paper that is led by [inaudible] that shows the growth of white

british if you estimate on men and predict when and vice versa where it can estimate into the highest or vice versa where all that genetic stuff is held the frequency is the same and it is really just socia a social differences, the prediction falls apart. so, we are not there yet to have these kind of universal scores across the population. at the infancy of the science i'm very excited about it as well. this leads to policy. before my reincarnation in genetics and i was doing more social policy i used to claim that losing ground as the best pics of the ideas to policy i think if that was 1984 if i remember correctly you get welfareil reform.

itaelizabeth warren might have given you a run for your money now without the creation of the credit protection bureau after her own but those are two examples of basically write your book and maybe wheny, you are dd you will have the policy. when you speak, policymakers listen. i'm wondering what is the policy goal, what do we get by even if it were true to say the frequency differences across racial groups dated explained achievement gaps and how does that inform the policy, i will ask you. you have a long takedown on the policy that focuses too much on the policies like the school

reform. i'm always as skeptical of the view about the scalability of the policies. adjust the reduction of lead in gasoline has been incredible. the particular clean air act actually was one of the biggest factors in reducing the racial test score gap. then we want to think about the policy for improving either reducing the spea these beer yer improving everybody's. we can broaden the environmental policy and so forth into the real effects.

to talk about the policy, i would love to hear what they get out of policy. i forget one last thing. one other that happened, we sold affordability across the problems and we know the effects and everything. we don't know the mechanisms. more african ancestry letter to lower test scores and more genetic test scores. the mechanism could entirely be through skin tone. if you are darker skin and means you are treated differently in

society. we don't know. that could be the mechanism even if we showed that. and there's almost no way to falsify that possibility. and stay tuned i just want to say that model of using the comparisons when i do that i find there is no effect compared to the other siblings and the effect on educational test scores. so to me that is more of the ideal experiment, and it does not support the hypothesis that genetic differences arees explaining in racial differences and tasks or jobs. by making sure that i have my t.'s crossed and my eyes dotted, but stay tuned. >> let me just respond as directly as i can. first place, there is incredibly

little that dalton said that i disagree with in the book or in general. the reason that this is exciting right now is because of its potential, and i use the analysis in "the wall street lyurnal" and in public the analogy in "the wall street journal" is the scores right now is where aviation was in 1908 and the best code comparably do anything so eight years later over the battlefield of world war i hundred of planes shooting each other down and so, a great many of the issues raised by say of that fun to disentangle all fat and find number one that i

agree with is the incredible complexity of a beautiful thought experiment in his blog, ada geneticist who said supposee want to see the difference of tea and coffee drinking habits in the british and french as a genetic component. he says everybody's being reasonable and he runs through this long list of ways in which it is very difficult to figure it out. i think that he is more on my side than graham, although finding out about that, certainly more on my side than what i would call a very well-known eminent geneticist named eric church heimer but he is joined by many others and he

says the scores don't tell us one thing we don't know't alreay and they never will. he isn't saying there's complications that have to be unraveled. he made the case in great detail saying some in like divorce or marriage as an heritability we know that from the studies it has substantial, but it does not have a specific genetic ideology and it doesn't make a difference how long we look we are never going to understand the molecular pathways whereas i am of the view that we are in the bottom of the rapidly rising curve the progress in the last decade has been phenomenal just to give you an illustration i was going to a conference i think in 2014 and i wanted to find those that have been

associated with a specific kind of new trade or something or behavioral trade and that was six years ago with numbers in the hundreds of thousands. that is the extraordinary progress, a great deal of what i agree with and i'm just saying it is exciting and we don't know where it is going to take us. what good will this do us particularly you mentioned race specifically that i would throw in a gender attack because if you want to know the truth, i think in terms of making a good policy, it is much more important that we identify the genetic differences between males and females then among the ancestor population and i tell you why because right now we

have all sorts of policies ranging from sports teams in high school to the selection of people for combat units which are explicitly predicated on the statement that there are no relevant defenses between males, females, and that can lead to herrible type two errors when you have a hypothesis that you accept as true without actually isn't, and i think there are lots and lots and by the way the damage done by this has been substantial. ik think just to give you an instance the last 30 or 40 years it's getting better now but it was pretty bad in the 70s and 80s women who chose not to have careers out of the home and chose to stay at home is stigmatized. i'm talking about the upper-middle-class educated groupsu .

you shouldn't stigmatized as we formerly dated in the labor force. i think that it's a social construct in a real example of where we took something that was a partial truth and we took it way too far and it does cause social harm. i will give you a chance to come back to one other thing that you raised about the policy implications. i am with you in terms of gettingd rid of lead in water ad in the atmosphere it was way more effective than the social manipulations that we know how to do. i'm perfectly willingll to accet the useful things out there.

ii still think that there is way too much driven by elites who generally do feel sorry -- i saw you get up there and i know what that means, who generally do things that people with iq or ae inferior to them and i think that's toxic and we need to shift policy, and this is way too big a topic for me to take up so late. it's important to have policies that focus on human flourishing defined at its broadest people with a wide range of abilities to have very satisfying lives, thank you very much. it isn't necessary to be a professor or aei scholar.

in all sorts of ways but i think that the elites with the best of intentions it's decimated harder and harder for people with satisfying lives so i would like to move in a direction that counterbalances that. sorry i think i ate up a lot of the time. >> now that you have a sense of the incredible material we will go to your questions. we have microphones in the room. who will be first? question right back there. >> first of all, thank you so much for being here today. you mentioned that a lot have this attitude of the cotton coge ability believe that if there were differences in cognitive

ability it might imply some kind of my difference in worth. my question is why do you think they think that? >> lebecause i've hung out with those people all my life. actually, i had what i thought was a clever thought experiment when i was working on the bell curve. i said this is going to be great. first, i want you to think of someone that you are pretty sure has an iq 20 or 30 points lower than o yours and you feel kind f sorry for that person, because i assume as i found out with a lot of people they said yes they kind of do. but here too now think of somebody you know what an iq 20 or 30 points higher do you feel inferior to that person, and an appalling proportion the answer

was yes. waughter] they did. but that to me runs against why is it all of us think we have exactly the right, many of us think we have a high iq with buy of us are lower. look at the campaign, look at people talking about the flyover country. the only ethnic slur you can use without getting pushback is redneck or you can sometimes get into a religious group, there's all sorts of indications that the elite of the country think llthe rest of the country [inaudible] i will assert that with no moreo anecdotal data.

>> that last part of the book where you are making this argument of course precipitate, but i would argue that is the result of sort of the free market, the sort of unbridled free-market policy promoted by aei because with a focus on shareholder value and bottom line, the kind of dignity of work has disappeared. if you compare us to say france, being a waiter is a profession with dignity. i forgot you used that example that i'veot seen it elsewhere ad with pride and a whole set of social expectations and subtle behaviors that you are expected to maintain and pass on its seen as something you are doing while

you are trying to make it in hollywood or something that looked down upon the elites that only value something in the cognitive sphere. america is literally the worst example of a place where no one nonpositive work is demeaned. there is a reason for that, and they all have to do with genetics of the elite i don't think it has to do with social policies and/or deep historical roots and culture. with that said, arguing that these differences are the result of the innate biological differences can go one of two ways. when there was the first discovery it turned out not to replicate but very recently we had what we called [inaudible]

the attraction that was published in science back in the '90s i thought when i saw gay activists embracing the differences between gay and straight men i thought they were crazy. like you are paving the road to auschwitz, predating the difference is the first step that were radical policies of elimination and that i was wrong and theyli were right in assumig 25 years what do we see, having the correlation, not causation but an incredible flourishing of tolerance for the nonheterosexual identity and behavior that's gone hand in hand with an increasing harecognition that there is a biological or genetic element to

sexuality, and i think it is an example that youu might bring up in the discussion doesn't always work like that. we have to take it on a trade by niade basis and go to the cognition and cost and race, that may very well split and it's very different if you go to mental illness and seen that it's a large basis, people are more empathetic and tolerant of these behaviors than they are in for a quote on quote choice, just because someone is environmentally influenced doesn't mean it is more or less of a choice. even the implications are complicated by type and what group we are talking about. >> i have to go way back to what you said as the advocate of the unbridled capitalist and i'm

thinking of the scholars that irving kristol, jonah goldberg, and me for heaven sake is that road in pursuit. if you are looking for a place that is interested in human flourishing and dignity on the basis of an unbridled capitalism, you are sitting on the right. >> other questions. >> there is a question over here. i am from the washington post. first of all with statement you talked about the idea they feel as though we must make all children above average.

i actually am not entirely sure that is true and i would like to push you a little bit on that. we would acknowledge we haven't made any children average. we haven't actually gotten iveryone up to even the most meager baseline. one of the interesting things about gender expression that you noted in more gender equal society's commissioners expressed in even more divergent ways, but that also notes that we are not in fact a gender and society at so what didn' would e important to get there first before deciding we are okay with someid people say following behd or not able i to express what person they want to express, and that leads to my actual question. you talk about human flourishing for all and that knowing more

about these will allow us to help people pursue human flourishing depending on sort of where they fall or what their cognitive behavior looks like. so, what is your idea of human flourishing and how would that differ for people with different repertoires? >> the way i see it for example, education in this country, up until the last few years when there's been some improvement, it was everybody should go to college. well, that is very much saying everybody should be above saverage because what how much the education requires a level of cognitive abilities that is accessible. it's a much smaller number than i am prepared to say out loud toause i don't want to have defend it. it is a very small percentage.

but it should be that the policy every child should go into adulthood having discovered something they love to do and having learned to do it well. to me, that is the kind of policy for the educational human flourishing which can apply to people with any level of ability. and ift we are saying of education that is the way we are measuring success, we would have a radically different education system from the one we have now and i will just leave it at that. >> i will give both a final word and then we will go outside for a reception and charles will be signing books here. dalton, a few final remarks? >> i think i'v >> i think i've said enough already. [laughter] i might just say this has been a real pleasure. thank you very much.

i noticed my white counterparts never questioned their own confidence. they assumed that they belonged. they always assumed that they belonged. and yet, when you begin to look at the actual numbers of who gets hired and who doesn't, and we are talking about is obviously in sports over the nfl coaching how frustrating it's almost like a full discipline but the coaches are having right now where they are recognizing no matter how much time we put

in or how much experience we havhave, they don't want us. we are not getting the chance, we are not going to get the opportunity, yet you see all these other folks had opportunities but they are not getting. and i want to talk about this concept of the assumption of confidence. and what that meant and how when you are in the business the confidence of your counterparts they assumed their own and they know they are good and even when they don't get jobs, they may be upset that they don't get jobs, but they don't assume the people that got the job didn't deserve it, they just didn't get the job whereas when somebody black advances, obviously they didn't deserve what they got it you are seeing this now with so many at the college level and admissions and you are seeing this idea once more that when it comes to african-americans in so many ways there is this inherent belief that somehow you have not burned what you have.

you don't belong and you are constantly fighting to prove that you do.

erika lee teaches history at the university of minnesota where she is a professor, disdain list university professor, the rudolph j. chair and immigration history and the director of the immigration history research center. the author of three award-winning books in u.s. immigration. american history at america's gate, chinese immigration during the era 1882-1943, angel island and the great gateway to america and the makingf