booktv continues now on c-span2, television for serious readers. [applause] >> thank you, hello to many friends in the audience and thanks to don't and calmly 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 book in 12 minutes and

professor conway'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 genetics and neuroscience are giving us new tools that will enable us to take giant strides in understanding human behavior, human ãpolicies and economies. we are like physicists, i like to say at the outset of the 19th century poised at a moment in history that would produce ã ãpeople like me and dalton ought to be excited but a lot of social scientists are like, why? because for almost a century now the social sciences have

been in the grip of the orthodoxies scared stiff of biology. at the moment it takes the form of three widely and loudly proclaimed truths, gender is a social construct, race is a social construct. class is a function of privilege. i stated those tenets very boldly. if you go to university campus and chat privately with faculty members whose research on these issues you will find that many of them have a much more nuanced view than that, they acknowledge that biology plays a role but only a few of them are 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 the work. i probably overreaching in that

goal. as a way of framing the findings of the book, things you think we don't need to argue about anymore i set out 10 propositions. the quickest way to summarize the book is with those 10 propositions. the first four are about gender differences. consistent with current practice among going double growing number of specialist, i dispense with the word gender and turned to sets. i'm going to give spencer this folder because it's playing havoc with my ability to read text. the first proposition is, such differences in personality are consistent in worldwide and widen in more gender like alien cultures. the consistency is quite remarkable. everywhere women are on average always ãbdifferences and needs with big overlaps in distributions. they are on average hires on ã

ãsensitivity, sympathy and sociability. conversely, men are on average more reserved, utilitarian, unsentimental, dispassionate and solitary. these tendencies hold true in every culture with prematurely no exception for the most traditional's and most advanced. furthermore, contrary to the expectations of sex and social construct. those differences tend to wipe in cultures that are more gender alone carried. sex differences in personality are wider in a country in denmark than uganda. a very interesting phenomenon i hope we have a chance to talk about. second proposition, on average females worldwide have advantages and verbal ability add social cognition also many forms of memory while males have advantages in visual spatial abilities. within the normal range, mathematical ability is about the same in both sexes but

males have a substantial advantage at the extremes of mathematical abilities. there is no net advantage to either sex in g general malefactor men and women just have distinctive cognitive profiles.proposition three, on average women worldwide are more attracted to locations centered on people and men to locations centered on things. the people things dichotomy with men and women is a very old way of thinking about male-female differences and is widely accepted by a lot of people. it certainly holds true for personality and cognitive strengths as i just described. it also holds true for women's vocational choices. here we 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

you also see a very deep response from woman in the 1970s as the proportions of women going into those fields increased. but then the increases in these associated occupations leveled off and by the late 1980s a new equilibrium had been reached that has persisted for three decades. it has effectively been flat for the last three decades. i will add that the people things extension should applies within the scientific disciplines. so when women plop into the sciences it was primarily biology and when they plopped into medicine it was primarily those specialties in medicine that are very patient intensive in terms of interpersonal reactions. proposition four is that many sex differences in the brain

are coordinate with sex differences in personality abilities and social behavior. for me this is the most fascinating material in the book, it's also a very dense chapter, i wish i could've made it easier but it's very collocated self and i wish i could at least give you a glimpse of what this fascinating material is but i got six more propositions to get through. maybe in the q&a we can come back to this. it's really cool. now he moved to the propositions regarding race. i'm going to follow contemporary practice among specialists i discard the word race and substitute for ancestral populations. this is not some said silly political 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. proposition number five, human populations are genetically distinctive in ways that

correspond to self identified race and ãb at this point i don't need to make it into a proposition. why is it you can send in some of your saliva to 23 and me plus $100 and get back information that you are 45 percent bavarian and 24 percent alsatian french and 31 percent polynesian?they can do that reflecting two decades of very sophisticated work that identified the kinds of genetic distinction and characterize populations around the world. 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 based on what are called non-coding bits of dna. they are simply show distinctive patterns for different ethnicities.

if race and ethnicity were really exclusively social constructs, that would be impossible, it's actually a sure thing. proposition number six, evolutionary selection pressures since she humans left africa has been extensive and mostly local. the linchpin of the race as a social construct position advanced most famously by stephen jay gould is that humans left africa in two recently for significant evolutionary changes to a wall. that's true if we are talking about evolution through random mutation. in the last 15 years since the genome was sequenced it has been found that evolution through changes in what is called statin variation can be and often has been rapid. such changes have been usually confined to one continent. in proposition seven, i know i'm going through these fast but we didn't want to spend 45 minutes presenting the content of the book.

proposition seven continental population differences in variance associated with personality, abilities, and social behavior are common. a over the last five years hundreds of thousands of variance have been identified that are associated with traits such as abilities and personality and social behavior. within continental populations, what say we are comparing chinese with japanese, the use our differences in trying to avoid the jargon, differences in the legal frequencies i will just have to spit it out, are very small. the correlations within continental populations of these variances are .97, .98, .99, very close to absolutely perfect correlations. when, on the other hand, you compare east asians with europeans or africans with europeans, those correlations drop markedly. they are still high but by the

standards of social sciences ranging from .5 to about .8 but even with correlations that size you got lots of differences. in alleles that are known to be affecting important traits. we know very very little about any more than i just said. for a variety of reasons. first place is technically very complicated, secondly you need to have very large samples 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'm 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 as a social construct.

the next three propositions are related to the biological component of socioeconomic class. proposition number eight, the shared environment usually plays a minor role in explaining personality abilities and social behavior. i'm pretty sure dalton and i will be able to argue about this. parents hate this finding, by the way. me among them. it says that our parenting and the schools we find for our kids and neighborhood where we lived doesn't make nearly as much difference in how our kids turn out as we would like to think. this is old news for those who have been paying attention due to ãband steve pinker made it famous in 2002 and the black slate. i will leave it at that now. proposition nine, class structure is importantly based on differences and ability that have a biological component. the discussion amounts to a documentation of the premises of the richard orenstein my

co-author in the ãfirst famously or notoriously stated in 1973 ãbif differences in mental abilities are inherited attic success requires those abilities, and earnings and prestige depend on success than social standing will be based to some extent on inherited differences among people. the economic era has already added a lot to our knowledge of these relationships as i describe in the chapter involved. the final proposition outside interventions are inherently constrained and the effects they can have on personality abilities and social behavior. probably this will be the most fiercely contested of the 10 propositions, people hate the idea that we are quite limited in our ability to change personalities, abilities, or social behavior for the better in large numbers of people by design. crucial distinction.

an inspirational teacher change the trajectory of a board on the students, absolutely. confront intervening with another friend who has a coke 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. my reading of the evidence is that we can change lives on a retail basis occasionally but not wholesale. the book concludes with two chapters about the shape of the coming revolution in the social sciences can attach propositions to these because so much is still up for grabs. some of you have may seen my op-ed in the wall street journal yesterday lauding the role of ãbscores in transporting social sciences. it's already attracted denunciations from several well-known scholars and i assume it's just the beginning.

because the discussion of many things 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. gender race and class are indeed partly social constructs. the role of the environment is shaping personality and abilities and social behavior is important is that many aspects of the roles of both genes and environment will remain elusive, for decades to come. we human beings built our life with an abundance of unpredictability both genetic and environmental and we are not helpless to change our own lives. i do not argue that biology will let us sort groups of people be sexes or races or classes into hierarchies that go from superior to inferior. things are way too completed for that.on the contrary, i explicitly reject such claims.

i also explicitly reject claims that differences among groups have any relevance to human work or 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 write about my looks to read them.do i have a hidden agenda? i do sort of. the subtext of human diversity is everybody should just calm down. i hope the book leaves readers understanding that biological differences among human groups are not scary or earthshaking. there are no monsters in the closet, no drug doors we must fear opening. the other subtext of human diversity is that doors will open whether we like it or not in the proper response to the discoveries to come is, that's interesting, i feel that the

orthodox is frantic insistent that genetically grounded group differences in personality and abilities and social behavior cannot exist ensures discoveries initially won't be treated that way but they should be. thank you very much. [applause] since i don't have formal remarks, i will speak from here if that's okay. first of all, thank you very much for having me. i think you picked the right sociologist in terms of sharing your enthusiasm about the role of the genomics revolution for social science but it's not quite a proposition but one of your assertions is that in 10 years and 2030 will no longer be able to publish any flagship social science ãwithout at least having considered or given good reason for why you are not controlling, that is

hauling constant in yours model apologetic score for a particular trait such as civic participation and political science or educational attainment in sociology and so forth. and pretty much agree with that proposition and think that i agree that this is an incredibly exciting time in social and behavioral sciences much like your metaphor of physics in the end of the 19th century. i think that the enthusiasm needs to be tempered for where the sciences right now. and while i'm just stunned by your ability, i think you said you started the book 3 years ago, to come into a thicket of not just kinetics but also neuroscience which is above my pay grade. and be able to not only

assimilate a wide swath of literature but make it completely accessible and it's incredible to me. the remainder of my remarks i wanted to divide into three sections, one is the notion of what i will say is a strong man about social construction of race, i'm going to focus on race and class because i'm not an expert on gender and i'm not an expert on neuroscience. i'm happy we can have an exchange in the q&a or after my remarks if you'd like. i have some thoughts. really that's not my wheelhouse. i will talk about the other two areas. what is race? what is its relationship to ancestral populations? the second thing i will talk about is what do we know about biological differences between these population groupings and in particular for social and behavioral traits and then

thirdly, what are the policy implications of all this? let's start with the social construction of race and gender. i think you dispense with it and say that you're going to stick to talking about sex and ancestry but there's a really good reason why social sciences or anthropologist in particular watch preserve a distinction reviewed between gender, which is specifically about the social relationships that generally correlate with the sex differences but not necessarily so in change across place and epics of history likewise race as a social category, which evolves and changes over across time and place that as you point out, in our current moment in our current country, can be very well predicted by a drop of

saliva but is not the same thing. for example, it's absolutely true that if we took everybody in this room and got their dna from their saliva and sent it to 23 and me or ancestry.com, we would probably be able to predict with about 98 percent accuracy what somebody self identified braces using classical u.s. definitions of ã ãhowever, that's a very particular moment in history when and particular mix diverse population the u.s. allows that to happen. for other instances of race that are entirely divorced from genetics. take for example race in japan where the baraka mean our group comprised about three percent

of the population and suffer from all the same social and health disadvantages that native americans are african americans do in the united states. lower test scores, lower life expectancy, higher rates of diabetes and other outcomes we read about minority populations in our country yet they are physically indistinguishable from majority of japanese engine radically it indistinguishable from the majority of japanese. more like a social past that resulted from the homeless people that were displaced or refugees displaced. they just kind of collect and are discriminated against, parents prospective parents will do research about their perspective daughter or son in law and make sure they don't have ãbblood in them. it functions as we know races but there's no genetic basis. or take my wife's former homeland the former yugoslavia

where you can't imagine a more racially charged or ethnically charged conflict in the 1990s including genocide but there are basically no there is no genetic distinctions between those groups that are literally merging during each other in the form of yugoslavia. on the other hand, a place like rwanda where there is genocide at the same time, there are very distinct genetic signatures between the tutsi and hutu populations there. a lot of times there is a biological a very clear biological correlate of race but sometimes there is not. i don't think you would disagree majorly with that. i think the bigger issue is what do we make of those differences and here we get

into a lot of complicated science. i will try to explain there's four bases of dna or possible to go with two and the other two go with the other two. there is variation across the genome in which base individuals might have in a particular location. what we do to create apologetic score which is the powerful new tool we are both excited about is that we take a population in one of the papers that you are citing is apologetics predicting how far people go in school and the people i was involved in a series of papers we took 1.1 million people in each location about 3 million locations in the genome weathers common variation where you might have gg and that's

why you are smarter than me and i have aa and we see that in the population level with how many gees you have predicts a very slight increase in the likelihood you went a little further in school. this is a gross oversimplification then we summed those across 3 million locations and we get a simple score and charles is is probably to variations. greater than mine and then we predict 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 by any particular aspect of the sample we tested it we developed it in and we tested and see how how much variation in the population the new sample we can predict. currently the best predicting score for something like educational attainment is about 13 percent of the 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 10 or 15 years of genetic is that almost all human traits that we care about are extremely apologetic. we started this era looking for the single big genes the ato e if you're familiar with alzheimer's or the baraka gene for breast cancer we are looking for the five or 10 genes for say educational entertainment or iq or personality or noncognitive skills it turns out there is no even a dozen genes, there's thousands if not maybe a million effects across the genome if you're trying to discover those teeny effects you need massive sample sizes hence our 1.1 million person genome wide association study. the problem is that once you magnify those small effects in order to detect them your magnify them all sorts of biases as well. where the state of lecture is

now is that actually 10 to 13 to 14 percent that we are predicting we now realize it's actually wrong. part of it is sweeping up a lot of environmental variation that is people forget about east asia and europe and africa just in the netherlands there are different allele frequencies on the north-south access and beeswax access was that he could probably just like we talked about predicting people's self defined race here with 98 percent accuracy based on dna the netherlands he could probably locate people in which region of the netherlands they are in pretty darn well with their dna as well but that means that these small frequency differences are associated with different environmental conditions as well. going up in the north of england or the south of england even in the wisconsin longitudinal study you couldn't

think of a one state in the united states is one birth cohort 1958, the graduating class of 1958. yet you can see that through the genetics he can see he could separate people geographically in the state and therefore their environments are also different. this population structure means we are not picking up your genetic effects we are also sweeping up environmental differences and the greater the differences in the populations like even far western europeans and eastern europeans let alone asians and europeans. you are necessarily also sweeping up much more differences in environment and history and culture. there's a second kind of compounder that we are all dealing with in the literature right now that's called genetic literature which you briefly mentioned in the book as well. because i share 50% of my genes

with my parents, which is that with each of my parents, i have getting the direct effect of my body and my development of my genes but i'm also getting partially the effect of those exact same genes in my parents and their structure in my environment. their reading to me, they are reading near whatever they are doing. it's partly motivated by their genes. the whole nature-nurture dichotomy has crumbled a lot in the last few years with this discovery of genetic merger. i'm just raising those issues the science is far from settled. i think in 2030 we are going to apologetic scores of the routine control variable is not enemies apologetics of today it's gonna be apologetic scores based on a very different model which i can discuss this more in q&a but basically identifies

the effects off of what in family differences. ....... >> we can be much more certaint. unfortunately, family -based studies are 1.1 million individuals right now are much smaller. were starting again kind of and it will take a few years before we get to those good actually more pure, estimates of genetic effects. >> really important consequential consequences for your conclusion. which proposition it is, the human behavioral differences across either continental

ancestry groups or other groupings have a biological basis. we simply don't know that. it's always a lame defense to say there is no evidence for that rather than saying there's evidence against that. there's actually a paper that just came out yesterday, i think it coincidently with your book. [laughter]. it shows that the differences on the sort of education or iq promoting genes, or just no bigger than if you'd have random from african and asian populations for example. we know that all of the research is been done in european populations, in an effort to and throwing out minority groups within the u.s. and australia and within the uk. when we do this research to try to limit the giant genes and environment but then that means there was predict for europeans.

you take a noncontroversial example, height, you take the best-performing, apologetic score. it predicts an enormous amount of variation. partly because height is very generic or inheritable. if you take the best performing apologetic score which a site, trained on europeans and try to predict people of african descent, is systematically predict them to be 6 inches shorter than they are. it does not work for biological, reasons that you talk about, the frequencies are different, what those are taking in the genome. they are different. and we have a paper, that shows even with ethnically groups of

white british, if you estimate on men, and you predicted women and vice a versa. or if you estimated high cs and then in low cs and then vice versa. all that genetic stuff is held constant. it is really just social differences. your prediction falls apart. we are not there yet to have these kind of universal scores and were going to be ranked across populations with. we are really at the infancy of the science. i am very excited about it as well. that leads to policy. before might reincarnation and genetics, and i was doing more straight social policies, i used to .2 losing grounds as the best example of how fast you can go from ideas to policy. i think it was 1984 if i remember correctly. you get will for reform in 1996.

elisabeth warren have given you a run for your money, with the creation of the credit protection bureau after her own running. but those two examples are basically, write your book and maybe when you're dead, you'll have effective policy. >> is always been my style. [laughter]. charlesyou are the ef hutton of. i am wondering what is the policy goal here. what do we get even if it were true, to say that a frequency difference, across racial groups or lipstick with race. it did explain achievement gaps. how does that inform policy. because you have a long take on a policy which i think focuses

too much on policies like school reform or things that are directly trying to influence test scores for example. i am probably almost as skeptical as you about the policies. you ignore a lot of of the policies just the reduction for all of our iqs. the reduction of clean air act, actually was one of the biggest factors in reducing racial test scores. when we to think about policy for improving even in reducing disparities for improving everybody's cognitive and educational productive potential, we don't need to have these blinders about school raven welfare policy. we think very broadly about environmental policy and health because he is so forth.

we know there are real effects there. there's not paid out. that is my thing. but i would love to hear what we get out of policy. i forgot one less thing about the race thing. i know i am overtime. >> i think i did too. >> one other kind of logical thing that happens is again because, with some of the portability across race problems. we know the effects. we don't know the mechanisms. so could entirely, if i showed that african-americans ancestry, led to lower test scores through more genetic ancestry, the mechanism could entirely be through skin tone. it could be that more african ancestry means that your darker

skin and darker skin means you are treated differently in society. that could entirely be the mechanism. even if we show that. there's almost no way to falsify that possibility. stated, i just want to say that model of using sibling comparisons, when i do that, i find there is no effect of how much african or european ancestry at the sibling has compared to another sibling. in terms on educational and test scores. to me that is more the ideal experiment. and it does not support the hypothesis that genetic differences are explaining racial differences and test score gaps. it's not published yet. i'm making sure that i have all of my tees crossed and eyes dotted. but stay tuned. >> let me just respond as directly as i can.

in the first place, there is incredibly little than dalton said that i disagree with. charles murrathereason that thig right now is because of the potential. dalton conley used. and i use the analysis slightly modified but the analogy the wall street journal was that apologetic scores right now are where aviation was in 19 oh eight and the best airplane in the world was the right flyer. eight years later, over the battlefields of world war i, hundreds of planes were buying high and fast. and so, a great many of the legitimate issues that dalton raised, will that be fun to try to disentangle all of that.

point number one i agree with is the incredible complexity of it. there is a beautiful thought experiment that koop had in this blog. he's a geneticist and he said that most, we want to see if the difference in tea and coffee drinking habits between the british and french as a genetic component. he says that everybody is being reasonable but nothing is entirely genetic. and he runs through this long list of ways of which it is very difficult to figure it out. i think dalton is more my side than on grams. although i'm just finding out about that. and certainly on my side than what i will call a school. there is a fair very well known psychology geneticist. he's joined by many others.

and he says, the apologetic scores don't tell us one damn thing that we don't know already. and they never will. is not saying there's not a lot of convocations that have to be unraveled. he makes the case, he is saying something like divorce, or marriage has an heritability. we know that from twin studies. he has substantial in heritability but it does not have a specific genetic etiology. in the way that disease does. and it does make a difference how long we look, we are never going to understand the pathways. whereas i am of the view that we are 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 all of the

organisms that have been associated with a specific behavioral trade or personality trait. i can find eight. charles murray did. now the numbers are in the hundreds of thousands. that is extraordinary progress. so a great deal of what dawson said, i thoroughly agree with it. and i am just saying it is a very exciting adventure and we don't know where is going to take us. of what good will this do us particularly, you mentioned recent specifically that i would throw in gender without because if you want to know the truth, i think in terms of making good policy, and is much more important that we identify genetic differences between males and females that is we tend to find many differences in

ancestry population. because right now we have all source of policies, from the composition of sports teams in high school to the selection of people for combat units. they are specifically predicated on the statement there are no relevant inferences between males and females. and that leads to terrible type to errors. and type two errors are when you have hypothesis that you've accepted as true that ashley is not true. i think are lots and lots and by the way, human damage by done by this. it has been substantial. i think the just to give you an example. for the last 30 or 40 years, i think it's getting better now but it was pretty bad in the 70s and 80s, women chose not to have careers outside of the home, chose to stay at home with family. they were stigmatized. i'm talking about upper middle class, educated groups. it is wrong.

you shouldn't stigmatized women as we formally did. did go out into the labor force and had careers. neither should we stigmatize those did not. i think the social construct is a really good example of where we took something as a partial truth and we took it way too far. and taking it way too far week called or caused real social harm. i will give you a chance to come back but one of the things we raised about one of the policy applications. i am with you in terms of getting rid of lead in water. in particular, the atmosphere there are armfuls way more effective in the kinds of social manipulations that we know how to deal with and i'm perfectly willing to accept there are really useful things out there that we can still do that we are not doing.

i still think that there is way too much, we missed make all of the children above average in this country. i think it is driven by elite who genuinely do feel sorry, really genuinely do think that people with iqs 30 points lower than theirs are inferior to them. i think that is toxic. i think we need to shift policy and this is way too big of a topic or me to take it so late. it is really important to have policies which focus on human flourishing. defined in its broadest. people with a wide range of abilities can have very satisfying lives thank you very much. it is not necessary to be

princeton professor or an aei scholar to have a satisfying life. you can do it in all sorts of ways but i think the elites have with the best of intentions, instead made it harder and harder for people with a wide range of abilities. i would like to move in a direction that counterbalances that. sorry, i think i ate up a lot more time. >> now that you all have a sense of the complexity of this material, we will answer your questions. guest: thank you so much for being here today. you mentioned that a lot of elites have this attitude that people with lower cognitive abilities are inferior in certain many critics in the book seem to believe that. if there were differences in

cognitive ability, and might imply some kind of difference in moral worth. my question is why do you think that they think that. charles: because i hung out with those people all my life. [laughter]. actually, i had what i thought was really clever thought experiment but i was working on the bell curve. this is going to be great. i said okay, first i want you to think of someone we are pretty sure has an iq of 20 or 30 points lower than yours. you feel kind of sorry for that person to you. because i assume and i found out, that a lot of people when they learn it, attended to. here's would be my brilliant stroke, now finds a buddy you know who is not cute 20 or 30 points higher than you do. do you feel inferior to that

person. and in appalling proportions the answer was yes. they did feel inferior. anatomy is just runs against, why is it that we all have high enough iq, but everybody has too low an iq of the lower than ours. to answer your question, look at the campaign, look at people talking about flyover country. the only ethnic slur the even still use in this country without getting pushback, is redneck. we can sometimes get it preferring to it in religious group. they're all sort of indication that the elites in the country think the rest of the country is inhabited by stupid yokels. i will assert that. with no more than anecdotal data.

dalton: cannot jump in here pretty so that last part of the book where you're making this argument, of course resonates but i would argue the best result, the free market, the unbridled free market policies promoted by places like aei because with a focus on shareholder value and bottom lines. this kind of dignity of work, disappeared. you can compare us to say france, uses some examples in the book, i'm liking on it. in france, being a waiter is a profession with dignity. i forgot used that example. i seen that elsewhere. with pride, and will set of social expectations and very subtle behaviors they are expected to maintain and pass on if you're training someone new. here, being a waiter is seen as

either something or doing while you are trying to make it in hollywood, or something that is looked down upon violates who only value something that is in cognitive sphere. there's a lot of other examples. americans, then literally the worst example, a place where noncognitive work is demeaned. there is a reason for that. it doesn't have to do with genetics of the elites, the it has to do with social policies in a deep historical recent culture. that said, arguing that these differences are the result of innate biological differences, can go one of two ways. in the 1990s when there was the first discovery of the gay gene by hammer turned out to not replicate very recently we have

turned out to find the the gay lot. his attraction that was published in science. i was not involved in this. back in the '90s when i saw gay activists embracing the genetic differences in the hypothalamus difference between game and instrument, i thought you guys are crazy. this like your paving the road to out yourself. in training essential biological differences. the first step for historically, genocide, and for very radical policies of elimination. yet i was wrong. they were right. ensuing 25 years, when we seen. correlations not causation but we have seen an incredible flourish of power for nonheterosexual identity and behavior that is gone hand-in-hand with an increasing recognition that there is a

biological or genetic element to sexuality. i think it is actually, an example you might bring up in your book and discussion, yet it doesn't work always like that. i think we have to take in a trade by trade basis. i think when you go to cognition in class and you go to race, that script may very well flip. it is very different by what it is. if you get a mental illness, and you see schizophrenia, people are more empathetic and tolerant of psychopathic behavior and they are if they think it's choice. even though just because something is environmentally influence, or choice. even the implications are complicated. and by what grouping we are talking about. charles: i just simply have to go way

back to aei. i am thinking of the scholars robert irving, crystal, goldberg, and made for heaven sakes who wrote, in pursuit. i am saying if you're looking for a place that is interested in human flourishing and dignity, on bases other than unbridled capitalism. you're sitting correctly. host: other questions. there's a question over here. guest: height. i'm from the washington post. i'm going to remove question. so actually first of all, a statement. you talked a little bit about this idea that elites feel as though we must make or they rather must make all children of

above average. i actually am not entirely sure that is true. i would like to push you a little bit on that. i think the problem that many elites and on elites, would acknowledge that we haven't made any children average. we have not actually gotten everyone up to even the most maker at baseline. i think one of the interesting things about gender especially noted that a more gender equal societies, generous expressed an even more divergent ways. but that also notes that we are not in fact, a gender equivalent society yet. so would it be important to get to there first. before deciding they were okay with some people, say falling behind in their not able to express. and that will lead to my actual question. you talk about human flourishing for all.

and that knowing more about the apologetic dimensions, genetic differences, will allow us to help people pursue human flourishing depending on sort of where they fall or whether cognitive behavior and repertoire looks like. so what is your idea of human flourishing and how without differ for people with differing cognitive repertoires. charles: i'll give a real brief answer. the way i see for example, education in this country. until the last few years when it's actually been some improvement, it was everybody should go to college. all that is very much saying that everybody should be above average because a genuine college education requires a level of cognitive ability that's accessible. well it's a much smaller number that i'm prepared to say out loud is i don't want to have to

defend it. it's a very small percentage. it should be the policy the education policy every child to go to adulthood having discovered something they love to do and having learned how to do it well. to me that is the kind of policy for educational human flourishing. that can apply to people with any level of ability and that if we were saying that education that is a waiter measuring success. we have a radically different education system. from the one we have now. i will leave it at that. host: other questions. if not, i will give both dalton and charles a final word then we will go outside and charles will be signing books here. dalton a few final remarks. dalton: i think of said enough. guests

have a chance to ask a question as well. kent garrett and jeanne ellsworth are with us today courtesy of tom and margaret morse. mr. garrett graduated from harvard in 1963. he has had a 30-year emmy and peabody award-winning career in television news and documentaries. jeanne ellsworth has a ph.d. in social foundations of education from the university of buffalo and has devoted her life to teaching from elementary school to prisons, to