>> c-span, your unfiltered view of government created by cable in 1979 and brought to you today by your television provider. [applause] thank you, hello to many friends in the audience. 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 focus is to give you an overview of the main finding in 12 minutes and professor conway's job, dalton's job if i may, is to put the conversation in any direction he wants and we will take it from there in the discussion. i wanted to write "human diversity" for many reasons but at the center is the facts, 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 societies, policies, 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 faradays in md is in the coming years. people need and dalton ought to be excited and in our case i think we both are but a lot of social scientists aren't. why? because for almost a century now the social sciences have been in the grip of an orthodoxy that is 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 have stated those tenants

very boldly. if you go to a university campus and chat privately with faculty members whose research touches on these issues you will find 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 with 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 numbers of academia to do their work. i probably overreaching in that goal. it is a way of framing the findings of the book, things that i think we really don't need to argue about anymore i set out 10 propositions. the quickest way to summarize the book is with those tenants propositions. the first four are about gender differences. consistent with current practice among a growing number

of specialists i dispense with the word gender and return to sex i also dispenser this folder because it's playing havoc with my ability to read my text, hang on a second. the first proposition is sex differences and personality consistent worldwide and tend to widen more gender the egalitarian cultures. consistency is quite marco. everywhere women are on average always stressed that word, talking about differences and means with big overlaps in the distributions. they are on average higher on measures of warmth toward others, ultra sequencer, sensitivity, sympathy and sociability. conversely, men are on average more reserved, utilitarian, unsentimental, and solitary. these tendencies hold true in every culture with virtually no

exception to the most traditional to the most advanced. furthermore, contrary to the expectations of sex as a social construct, those differences tend to widen in cultures that are more gender egalitarian. sex differences in personality are wider in a country like denmark than they are in 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 and 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 but males have a substantial advantage at the six extremes of mathematic ability.there is no net advantage to either sex in general factor, men and women just have distinctive cognitive profiles. proposition three, on average women worldwide are more

attracted to vocations centered on people and men to vocations centered on things. the people things dichotomy with men and women is a very old way of thinking about male and female differences.and is actually 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, hard sciences and you also see a very definite response by women during the 1970s as the proportions women going into those fields increased. but then the increases in these things associated occupations

leveled off and by the late 1980s a new equilibrium had been reached that was persistent through the decades. it has effectively been flat for the last three decades. i will add that the people things distinction also applies to within the scientific disciplines. women plopped into the sciences primarily biology and when they flocked into medicine it was primarily those specialties in medicine that a very patient intensive interactive interpersonal reactions. proposition four, many sex differences in the brain are coordinate with sex differences in personality, abilities, and social behavior. for me what's the most fascinating material in the book is also a very dense chapter i wish i could've made it easier but it's very

complicate itself. i wish i could at least give you a glimpse of what this fascinating material is but i have six more propositions to get through. maybe in the q&a we can come back to this. it's really cool. now we move to the propositions regarding race. once again, i'm going to follow contemporary practice among specialists i discard the word race and substitute for ancestral populations. this is not some silly politically ãchange. race is a word really has required a lot of cultural baggage and appropriate to substitute something else, talking about genetics. proposition number five, human populations are genetically distinctive in ways that correspond and self identify race and ethnicity. this point i don't need to make into a proposition of why is it you can send in some of your saliva to 23 and me and plus $100 and get back information

that you are 45 percent bavarian and 24 percent french and 31 percent polynesian. they can do that reflecting two decades of very sophisticated work that identified the kinds of genetic distinction in the 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 off non-coding bits of dna. they simply show distinctive patterns for different ethnicities. if a race and ethnicity were really exclusively social constructs that would be impossible it's actually a sure thing. proposition number six, evolutionary selection pressures and humans left africa as 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 too recently for significant evolutionary changes to fall. that's true if we are talking about if evolution through random mutation. in the last 15 years it's been found that evolution through changes in what is called standing variation can be and often has been rapid. such changes have been usually confined to one continent. proposition seven, i know i'm going to these things really fast but we did 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. over the last five years, hundreds of thousands of genetic variance have been

identified that are associated with traits such as abilities and personalities and social behavior. within continental populations, let's say we are comparing chinese and japanese, these differences in, trying to avoid the jargon, the differences in the ãbare very small. the correlations within continental populations of these variance is .98, .99, very close to absolutely perfect correlations. when on the other hand you start to compare east asians with europeans or east asians with africans or africans with europeans, those correlations drop remarkably. they are still high by the standards of social sciences ranging from about .5 to about .8 but even with correlations outside, you have lots of differences. and what is 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 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 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 we will be able

to argue about this one. parents hate this finding, me among them, says that our parenting in the schools we find for our kids in neighborhoods where we live doesn't make nearly as much difference in how our kids turn out as we like to think. this is old news for those who been paying attention do to parents just put it out to the general audience in 1998 and steve pinker made it famous in 2002 and the black slate. i will leave about that now. class structure is importantly based on differences and ability that have a biological component. the discussion amounts to a documentation of the premises of richard orenstein, my co-author in the bell curve first famously or notoriously stated in 1973 he has if difference as mental abilities are inherited and success requires those abilities and if earnings and prestige depend on success then social standing

will be based to some extent on inherited differences among people. the genomic era has already added a lot to our knowledge in these relationships as i described in the chapter involved. 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 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, can inspirational teacher change the trajectory of a 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. talking about programs that are

trying to change lots of people in a kind of cookie-cutter fashion. my reading of the evidence is 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 have seen my op-ed in the wall street journal yesterday lobbing the role apologetic scores in transforming social sciences, it's already attracted denunciations from several well-known scholars and i assume it's just 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. gender race and class are indeed partly social

constructs. the role of the environment and shaping personality and abilities and social behaviors is important. many aspects of the roles of both genes and environment will remain elusive for decades to come. we human beings build our lives with an abundance of unpredictability both genetic and environmental and we are not helpless to change our lives. i do not argue that biology will let certain groups of people sexes or races or classes into hierarchies that go from superior to inferior stop human beings are way too complicated for that. on the contrary, i explicitly reject such claims. i also explicitly reject claims that differences among groups that have any relevance to human worth our 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 books to read them. do i have a hidden agenda? i do sort of, the subtext of human diversity is that everybody should just calm down. i hope the book leaves readers understanding that biological differences among human groups are not scary or painstaking. there's no monsters in the closet snow drug doors we must fear opening. the other subtext of human diversity is that the doors will open whether we like it or not in the proper response to the discoveries to come is, that's interesting. i fear that the ãbgenetically grounded group differences in personality, abilities and social behavior cannot exist and ensures the discoveries initially will be created that way but they should be. thank you very much. [applause]

>> since i don't have formal maroon marks more series of publications i will speak from here if that's 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 genomics revolution for social science.but one of your assertions is that in 10 years, in 2030 will no longer be able to publish any flagship social science without having considered given good reason for why you are not controlling the floor that's holding constant in your fiscal model apologetics score for a particular trait such as civic participation and political science or educational attainment and sociology and so

forth. i pretty much agree with the proposition and think that agree that this is an incredibly exciting time in the social and behavioral sciences much like your metaphor of the physics and end of the 19th century. i think that that enthusiasm needs to be tempered for what the sciences right now. while i'm just stunned by your ability i think you said you started this book 3 years ago to come into a thicket of not just genetics were been spending a lot of time but also neuroscience which is above my pay grade and be able to not only assimilate a wide swath of literature but actually make a completely accessible to an educated lay audience is incredible to me.

the remainder of my remarks i wanted to divide into three sections one is this 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 so i'm happy we can have exchange and q&a were after my remarks but 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 particularly 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 for that matter. i think you kind of dispensed with it and say you're going to stick to talking about sex and

ancestry but there's a really good reason why social scientists or sociologists and anthropologists in particular want to preserve a distinction between gender, which is specifically about the social relationships that generally correlate with sex differences but not necessarily so and change across ethics of history. likewise, race as a social category which evolved 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. it's absolutely true that if we took a rudy in thisf we took

everybody in this room and to swabbed them we would probably predict with 98 percent accuracy what someone self identified race viewing the classical u.s. definitions of white non-hispanic, white or black hispanic, african-american or black and asian and others. however, that's a very particular moment in history and we are particularly diverse population in the u.s. that allows that to happen. there's other instances of race that are entirely diverse. take for example race in japan where the baraka mean our group comprised about 30% of the population and suffer from the same social and health disadvantages that native americans are african-american student 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 the majority of japanese and genetically distinguishable from the majority of japanese through really more like a social cast that resulted from the homeless people displaced are refugees displaced they just kind of collects and are discriminated against, parents prospective parents want to do research about their perspective daughter or son-in-law and make sure they don't have rock mean blood in them. it functions as we know races but yet there is no genetic basis. or take my wife's former homeland former yugoslavia where you can't imagine a more racially charged or ethnically charged conflict in the 1990s including genocide there are basically no, with a little bit of caveat, there's basically no

genetic distinctions between these groups that are literally murdering each other in the former yugoslavia. on the other hand, a place like rwanda where there is genocide at the same time, there are very distinct genetic signatures between tutsi and hutu populations. a lot of times there is a biological a very clear biological correlation of race but sometimes there's not. that's why want to preserve a social sciences that distinguish between ancestry and biology for several figure 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. i will try to explain what apologetics score is. if you member high school biology there are four bases of dna for possible two 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 duke to create apologetics form is ãbwe take a population and one of the papers that you are citing is apologetics score that predicts how far people go in school there was a people or i was involved in, series of papers we took 1.1 million people and each location about 3 million locations in the genome of common variation where you might have gg and that's why you're smarter than me and i have aa. we see that in the population level how much geez you have predicts a very slight increase in the likelihood you want to lookou went a little further

at school. we some those across the 3 million locations we get a symbol score and charles is probably ãbgreater than mine and we predict that he's gonna go further in school. we take that score and we take it to a new sample so it's not bias to any particular aspect of the sample we tested and developed in and retested and see how much variation a population in 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 is a real effect. 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 arrow looking for the single big jeans, the

apl e if you're familiar with alzheimer's or the baraka gene for breast cancer and were looking for the five or 10 genes for state educational attainment or iq or personality or noncognitive skills and it turns out there's no even a dozen genes, there's thousands if not maybe a million tiny effects all across the gino. if you're trying to discover those teeny effects you need massive sample sizes hence the 1.1 million person genome wide association study. the problem is, once you magnify those small effects in order to detect them, you are magnifying all sorts of biases as well. with the state of literature is low is the 10 to 13 to 14 percent we are predicting we realize now that because 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 frequencies on the north-south axis and east west access. you can probably just as we talked about predicting people self identified race here with 98 percent accuracy based on dna, in the netherlands you can probably locate people in which region of the netherlands they are in pretty darn well with their dna as well but that means the smaller frequency differences are associated with different environmental associations as well. even in the wisconsin longitudinal study he could think of one state in the united states, one 1958, the graduating class of 1958, yet you can see through the genetics you can separate

people geographically, this population structure means we are not picking up your genetic effects we are also sweeping up environmental differences. 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, history, culture and so forth. there is a cofounder we are all dealing with the literature now that's genetic nurture which you briefly mention the book as well. because i share 50% of my genes with my parents with each of my parents, my genes but i'm also getting partially the effect of those exact same genes and they

are structuring my environment, they are reading to me, by their genes. the whole nature-nurture dichotomy has crumbled a lot in the last few years with this discovery genetic nurture. i'm just raising that those issues to say that the science is far from settled. when i think in 2030 we will have apologetics scores as a routine control variable, it's not commute apologetics course of today it's committee apologetics scores based on a very different model, which i can discuss this more in q&a but basically identifies the effects of a within family differences. i don't know if you have a brother or sister but i have a sister and if i look at a job gg and she has ga that's unassociated with any ancestry,

we grew up in the same household, that's the nice experiment. that's where the literature is moving to family-based studies where we can be much more certain there's a genetic effect and not environment. unfortunately family-based studies aren't at 1.1 million individuals right now, the much smaller. kind of starting again and it will take a few years before we get to those good more pure estimates of genetic effects. >> that has a really important consequences for your conclusions and i forget which chapter it is but about these which proverb is proposition it is but human behavioral differences across continental ancestry groups or other groupings have a biological base. we simply don't know that. it's always a lame defense to say there's no evidence for that. rather than saying there's evidence against that. there's actually a paper that

just came out yesterday, i think coincidentally with your book. [laughter] that shows that those frequency differences on the education or iq promoting genes are just no bigger than if you picked a random alleles from african and asian populations. we know that all of the research has been done in european populations in an effort to ãband throwing out minority groups within the u.s. in australia and the uk when we do the research to try to limit the compounding genes and environment but then that means they only predict for europeans. to take a noncontroversial example, height, you take the best-performing height is currently the best performing apologetics or predicts an enormous amount of variation. probably because height is very genetic or heritable in nature.

if you take the best supporting apologetic score of height which is been trained on europeans and try to predict people with african descent you systematically predict them to be six inches shorter than they are. it does not work for biological for the very biological reasons i talk about that the frequencies are different, that what those ãbare taking in the genome are different. and we have a paper that's led by ãbthat shows that even with in an ethnically homogeneous group a white british whether you if you estimate on men and predicted women or vice versa or if you estimate in ãbwhere all that genetic stuff is held constant and the frequencies are the

same it's really just social differences, your prediction falls about john mica parts. we are not there yet to have the standard universal scores will be rank ordering across populations with really at the infancy of this science and am very excited about it as well. that leads to policy, before my reincarnation in genetics and i was doing more strict social policy is to point to losing ground as the best example of how fast you can go from ideas to policy. that i think of that was 1984 if i remember correctly you get welfare reform in 1996 elizabeth warren might have given you a run for your money now with the creation of the credit protection bureau after her own writing but those are two examples of basically otherwise i say, write your book and maybe when you are

dead you will have effective policy. >> that's always been my style. [laughter] >> when you speak, policymakers listen. you the ef hutton of the policy world. i'm wondering what is the policy goal here. what do we get by even if it were true to say that allele frequency differences across racial groups or let's stick with race did explain achievement gaps, what does that inform, how does that inform policy? you have a long take down a policy which i think focuses too much on policies like school reform or things that are directly trying to influence test scores and i'm probably almost as skeptical as

you about the scalability of the policies. but you ignore a lot of other policies, just the reduction of leaded gasoline has been incredible boom for all of our iqs. the reduction of particular matter in the air thanks to clean air act actually was one of the biggest factors in reducing the racial test score gap. when we want to think about policy for improving either reducing disparities or just improving everybody's cognitive and educational and productive potential, we don't need to have the ãbabout school or welfare policy, we can think very broadly about environmental policy and health policy where we know the real facts, all the criticisms we get from all these other kind of interventions. i could talk much more about the policy and i would love to hear what we get out of policy. i forgot one last thing about the race thing, i know i'm over

time. one other logical elision that happens is let's pause at allele difference we've solved the affordability of race across ãbwe don't know the mechanisms. if we showed that more african ancestry lead to lower test scores through more genetic african ancestry to lower test scores, the mechanism could entirely be through skintone, it could be that more african ancestry means you are darker skin of your darker skin needs you are treated differently in society. that could entirely be the mechanism even if we showed that. there's almost no way to falsify that possibility. stay tuned, i just want to say

that the model of using sibling comparisons when i do that i find there is no effect of how much african or european ancestry is sibling has compared to the other sibling in terms on the effective educational attainment or test scores. to me that's more of the ideal experiment and does not support the hypothesis that genetic differences are explaining racial differences and test score gaps. this not published yet, and making sure i have all my keys crossed and eyes darted but stay tuned. >> let me just respond directly as i can. in the first place, there is incredibly little that dalton said that i disagree with. very little. in the book or just in general. that the reason that this is exciting right now is because of its potential. i use the analysis and analogy

in the wall street journal and in the book slightly modified but the analogy in the wall street journal was that apologetic scores right now are ãbeight years later over the battlefields world war i hundreds of planes flying high and fast and shooting each other down. a great many of the legitimate issues i said won't that be fun to try to disentangle on that. point number one i agree with is the incredible complexity of it. i think there's a beautiful experiment had in his blog.

we want to see if the difference in ãbhas a genetic component. he says everybody's being reasonable not saying it's entirely genetic but he runs through this long list of ways in which it's very difficult to figure it out. i think adulting is more on both sides than on gramps. certainly more on my side then the congress school. it is a very well-known eminent psychologist behavior geneticist named eric durkheim or, he is joined by many others and he says ãbhe makes the case great detail he saying

something like divorce or marriage as an heritability we know that from twin studies it has substantial heritability. but not a specific genetic etiology and the way that the huntington's disease does. i'm of the view that bottom of a rapidly rising i was going to a conference in galapagos i think in 2014 and i wanted to find all the snips that have been associated with a specific trait or behavioral trait. that was six years ago.

that's extraordinary progress. a great deal of what dalton said that i thoroughly agree with and i'm just saying, it's a very exciting adventure and we don't know where it's going to take us. what good will this do is particularly if, you mentioned ray specifically, i would throw in gender with that because if you want to know the truth, i think in terms of making good policy it's much more important we identify genetic differences between males and females than it is to identify genetic differences among populations because right now we have all sorts of policies ranging from composition of sports teams in high school to selection of people for combat units which are explicitly predicated on the statement there are no relevant differences between males and females and that can

lead to terrible tech to errors. type ii errors are when you have the hypothesis and except it's true and it actually isn't true. i think lots and lots and i think the human damage done by this has been substantial. i think to give you four of the last 30 to 40 years i think it's getting better now but it was pretty bad in the 70s and 80s of women who chose not to have careers outside the home and chose to stay home with the family were stigmatized by upper-middle-class educated groups. i think that the sex is a

social construct, gender is a social construct, is really good example of where we took something that was partial truth and took it way too far. in taking it way too far we call the real social ãbartist tips i will give you a chance to come back. one of the policy implications, and with you, in terms of getting rid of lead in water and in the atmosphere that are harmful ways can the social manipulations we know how to do. i'm perfectly willing to accept the really useful things out there we can still do that were not doing. i still think that there is way too much we must make all the children above average in this country. i think it's driven by elites

who generally feel sorry, you really genuinely do things that equal iqs 30 points lower. i think that's toxic. i think that we need to shift policy and it's way too big of a topic to take it up so late. it's really important to have policies which focus on human defined at its broadest people with a wide range of abilities can have very satisfying lives. it's not necessary to be a princeton professor or aei scholar. you can do it and also the ways that i think the elites have with the best of intentions instead made it harder and harder and harder for people with wide range of abilities with satisfying lives.

>> i think i ate up a lot of the time. >> now that you have a sense of the incredible complexity of this material were to go to your questions. we have microphones in the room. who will be first. >> thank you so much for being here today. you mentioned a lot of elites have this attitude that people with low cognitive abilities are inferior and ãbthat if there were differences in cognitive ability, it might imply some kind of difference in moral worth the question is, why even view things they think that? >> because i've home ãbhung out with those people all my

life. [laughter] actually, i had what i thought was really clever experiment when i was working on the belt curve. i said, this can be great. i said okay, first i want you to think of someone who you are pretty sure has an iq of 20 or 30 points lower than yours. you feel kind of sorry for that person. because i assume that, and i found out, a lot of people will say, ãbnow think of somebody you know who has an iq 20 or 30 points higher than you do, do you feel inferior to that person? at an appalling proportion in the cases the answer was yes. this runs against why is it all of us think we have the right are high enough iq but

everybody is lower. to answer your question, look at the campaign, look at the look at people talking about flyover country, look at people the only ethnic slur you can still use in this country without getting pushback is "redneck". there are all sorts of indication that the elites in this country think the rest of the country ãbthat are inferior to them. i will assert that with no more than anecdotal data. >> can i jump in here? >> that last part of the book where you're making this argument of course resonates but i would argue that the results of sort of the free

market the unbridled free-market policies promoted by places like aei because with a focus on shareholder value and bottom-line to kind of dignity of work has disappeared. if you compare us to say france, use them examples in the book and blanking but in france being a waiter is a profession with dignity. >> i forgot to use that example but i've seen it elsewhere. >> that's a great example. >> with pride and a whole set of social expectations and very subtle behaviors you are expected to maintain and pass on if you're training somebody new. here being a waiter is seen as either something you are doing well you are trying to make it in hollywood or something that looked down upon on elites who only value something that's in the cognitive spirit to.

there's lots of other examples. america is literally the worst example of a place where noncognitive work is demeaned. there is a reason for that. it doesn't have to do with genetics of the elite, it has to do with social policies and deep historical roots and culture. that said, arguing that these differences are the result of innate biological differences can go one of two ways. in the 1990s when it was the first discovery of the gay gene by dean hayward, turned out not to replicate but very recently we've had what we jokingly called the gay loss with same-sex attraction published in science i was not involved. back in the 90s i thought, when i saw gay activists embracing

genetic differences in the volume of differences between gay men and straight men i thought, you guys are crazy. you are paving the road to auschwitz creating essentialist biological differences. historically known for genocide policies of illumination. yet i was wrong they were right, assuming a 25 years we've seen correlations of non-causation but we've seen an incredible flourishing with tolerance for nonheterosexual identity and behavior that has gone hand-in-hand with increasing recognition that there is biological or genetic elements of sexuality. i think it's an example you might bring up in the discussion because yet it doesn't work always like that.

i think we have to take it trade by trade basis. when you go to cognition and class and race that script may very well flip. just because something is environmentally influenced even the implications are complicated by phenotype. and by what grouping we are talking about. >> i simply have to go way back to the beginning when he said aei is an advocate of bridal catalyst. i'm thinking of the scholars robert nesbitt, irving kristol, ãband me for heaven sakes who wrote in pursuit.

i'm saying if you are looking for a place that is interested in human flourishing and dignity on basis of the unbridled capitalism is sitting in the right room. >> other questions? >> i think i will let you ãb next question over here?>>. >> i'm from the washington post and mica stand up because i'm nearsighted and needed to read my questions. first of all, the statement can be talked a little bit about the idea that elites feel as though we must make, they must make all children above average. i actually am not entirely sure that's true and i would like to push you a little bit on that. i think the problem many elites and non-elites would acknowledge that we haven't

made any children average can we have not actually gotten everyone to even the most meager baseline. one of the interesting things about gender expression is more gender equal societies, gender is expressed in even more diverse ways. that also notes that we are not in fact a gender equivalent society yet. wouldn't it be important to get to their first? before deciding that we are okay with some people falling behind or not able to express what percent they want to express and that leads to my actual question, you talk about human flourishing for all and that knowing more about these polygenic dimension and genetic differences will allow us to help people pursue human flourishing depending on where they fall for what their cognitive behavior cognitive

repertoire looks like, what is your idea of human flourishing? and how would that differ for people with differing cognitive repertoires? >> the way i see it, for example education in this country, until the last two years when there's been some improvement, it was everybody should go to college. that's very much saying everyone should be above average because a genuine college level education requires a level of cognitive ability that is accessible ãb a much smaller number than unprepared to say out loud because i don't want to have to defend it. it's a very small percentage. but should be the policy of the proper education policy any child should go through adulthood having discovered something they love to do and having learned how to do it well. to me that is a kind of policy

for educational human flourishing which can apply to people with any level of ability and that if we were saying of education, that's the way we are measuring success. we have a radically different education system from what we have now. >> i will give dalton and charles a final word and will go outside for session and charles will be signing books here. dalton, your final remarks? >> i think i've said enough. [laughter] >> i think i've said enough too . can i just say, this is been a real pleasure. thank you very much. >> you are watching booktv on c-span2, every weekend it's 48 hours of nonfiction authors and books, here are some of the programs you will see this weekend syndicated columnist cal thomas offers his thoughts on whether united states will remain a superpower. historian megan kate nelson

report on how the civil war impacted the american west and new york times finance editor david emrick takes a critical look at the history and current business practices of germany's dorsal back. check the program guide or visit book tv.org for more information. >> at the atlantic council in washington dc retired career foreign service officer ãb discussed american diplomacy in the middle east and his portion of the program he weighs in on the attack that killed iranian general qassim soleimani. >> this is at the end of the day a political assassination. >> what does that mean? >> it means you pick the personality and leadership position and thought that if you got rid of it you would improve matters. the fact is, you made matters worse by the end. one because removing a person as important as qassim soleimani was, doesn't change

the picture. iran is highly institutionalized. within seconds of his death, he was replaced. and they have a good counter of people who can run these organizations. for good or bad were not taking value judgment. were talking strategy and tactics. and what's the goal? if the goal is to change iran's behavior for the better, you've done the opposite by killing him. i think partly they didn't understand, your peace your point is well made in your peace on is an overrated general. but the fact is, for all his mistakes and all the bad things he's done, he is very very important culturally, to the people that we consider enemies now but that we want to somehow

fix the relationship. i don't think the president understands that and i doubt the people around him who gave him this option then later said we didn't think it would pick it. why put it as an option in the first place. i think there's a certain psychological element. i talked about the presence of american troops in baghdad. killing somebody like that who was, whether we like it or not, very important. almost had a halo around him. for people in lebanon and in iraq certainly in iran. that he should understand is going to generate hatred and it's going to generate acts of advantage and i don't think we've seen the end of that just the bombing of the base there i think that was just the token

here we go, fire off some rockets. i think we're going to see more acts of revenge. >> to watch the rest of this program visit our website booktv.org using the box at the top of the page. >> good evening everyone, welcome to los angeles ã [inaudible] i'm the chairman of the young professionals program here. we are very happy to welcome william wheeler tonight for discussion on el salvador. he has written a book published recently called "state of war" ms-13 and el salvador's world violence. it looks like this and it's a great book. it's amazing. but william is a po