Evolutionary Theory & Behavioral Science an Interview with Gad Saad

Episode 103 – Evolutionary Theory & Behavioral Science An Interview with Gad Saad

Aired on September 6, 2018

[Intro Music]

[00:34] Haley: We're here with the Ninth International Conference on Complex Systems and we had a second to sit down with Gad Saad, very excited about this. Gad is an evolutionary behavioral scientist who's known for applying evolutionary psychology to marketing and consumer behavior. He's also a professor of marketing at Concordia University and a public intellect. We find him online as the Gadfather. Thank you for joining us.

[01:00] Gad: Thank you so much for having me.

[01:02] Haley: Would you just start off by telling us a little more about yourself and the work that you do in case our listeners are unfamiliar.

[01:07] Gad: Sure. I basically apply evolutionary theory to understand the human mind and then I look for places to apply that. So, it could be that I'm housed in a business school, one of the things that interest me is our consummatory nature. What are some of our biological vestiges that manifest themselves in a modern environment? So, I look at things like, how do hormones affect women’s behaviors, gift-giving practices, and how these might be related to gift-giving and other species. So, I look at all of the ways by which our consuming instinct manifests itself.

[01:44] Haley: Very cool. As a marketing major, I love your work.

[01:47] Gad: Oh great.

[01:49] Haley: I'm a marketing background but I love the psychology side of it, I find it fascinating and I just happen to fall into the complexity realm through a mentor who funds the podcast, so it's interesting to see you here at this conference. Can you tell us how you ended up here?

[02:06] Gad: Right, I was contacted by Jo Norman the gentleman who's organizing the workshop who I guess follows my work. I'll be talking about this notion of consilience. Consilience is a term that was re-introduced into the lexicon by E.O. Wilson, the Harvard biologist. Consilience refers to the unity of knowledge, so some fields are inherently more organized than others. Physics is more organized than sociology, chemistry is more organized than marketing, not because physicists are

smarter than sociologists but because physicists work within certain organized frameworks.

So, what I'll be talking about at today's session is how do you build an argument to prove that something is an adaptation. If you want to say, for example, that risk-taking is a sexually selected trait, how would you demonstrate that? If you want to prove that the hourglass figure that men so desire in women around the world is an adaptation, how would you go about proving that? And you do so by looking for evidence across many, many different disciplines, across many different time periods, and across many different cultures. You slowly build enough evidence that it becomes unassailable, that the argument that you're making is vertical, so that's what I'll be talking about.

[03:20] Haley: Wow, fascinating. So, you're going to be talking in a group with Nassim and I see some parallels in what you guys talk about. Can you describe how your work aligns with his? He talks about skin in the game and risk taking.

[03:38] Gad: Sure. There's a phenomenon in biology called costly signaling. For example, if you take the peacock's tail, the peacock's tail could not have evolved due to survival because, if anything having, a big tail reduces your survivability. Instead, it arises because of female mate choice. It's an honest signal of the males’ genotypic quality. It's basically saying, "look, despite the fact that I'm carrying this burdensome tail, this tail that makes it more difficult for me to avoid predators, I'm here and I've survived. Choose me." It's an honest signal. For a signal to be honest, it has to be costly.

One of the things that I think that we admired in one another, Nassim and I, is that we are both irreverent to orthodoxy. We speak our minds, something that, regrettably, is very, very rare in academia. You would think that academia people would be at the forefront of making bold statements, most are regrettably suffer from herd mentality. So, I think more than anything, what unites us is our desire to promote people who have skin in the game.

[04:42] Haley: Yeah, definitely. It's interesting how you're in academia and you go online to be a public figurehead and talk about these intellectual topics. So, it takes a lot of courage and I'm wondering if maybe you went to the public because you weren't able to discuss these in academia or you felt like you needed to take another route.

[05:01] Gad: You know, as soon as I discovered all of the benefits that are yielded via all of these social media tools, as an academic, I'm in the business of creating knowledge and then disseminating knowledge. There are many ways by which I could disseminate the knowledge. I could teach in a classroom, I could publish in peer-reviewed journals, which are typically only going to be read by other academics, and I could appear on the Joe Rogan show and by the end of that show ten million people might become excited about evolutionary psychology.

I think the problem with many academics, again not to bash my colleagues, but many of them suffer from an ivory tower complex. If I'm a serious academic I should not be speaking to Joe

Rogan, that's beneath me. That’s baloney. Joe Rogan has more influence than CNN, CBS, and CBC, all the different stations you can think of, so it's all about reach. For me, it's a very pragmatic reason that I decided to be in the public. I'm interested in discussing ideas and I will use any and all possible ways to achieve that goal.

[06:05] Haley: We were talking about the podcast platform and how you can have these really long nuanced conversations that you don't see in the regular media platforms. Why do you think that's so important to have these deeper conversations where you can touch on many different areas?

[06:21] Gad: I think because it really does create this incredible sense of intimacy when people are afforded the opportunity to be flies on the wall listening to two people really dig into each other's ideas for an hour or two. It's not usually on my show; I don't spend as much as say, Joe Rogan does about three-hour shows.

My shows are about maybe an hour to seventy-five minutes but that's still enough time for people to really dig into some solid ideas. You give the person an opportunity to expand on whatever they're thinking. Whereas when you appear in the typical sort of mainstream media you have two, three, five minutes, so you have a very little snippet to make a point. It's artificial, it's fake, and it doesn't allow you to expand. That's why I think most people really appreciate that. If I look at all my shows on my channel, almost all of the ones that have been the most viewed are the long format conversations. You would think that the three-minute snippets would be the ones that would go viral. No, it's the one-hour, two-hour chats that become the most popular ones.

[07:19] Haley: Yes. We were playing with the length of our episodes for a while and with complexity podcasts, it's really hard to talk about complexity in a 20-minute spot but you want to be conscious of people's time and feel out how the conversation is going to go but I think that forty-five minute, one hour window is a good length of time to really dig in with somebody. That's what we've learned anyway after a couple years of doing this.

[07:42] Gad: How many have you done so far?

[07:43] Haley: We've done- I think this is ninety-five.

[07:47] Gad: Okay, very nice. Congrats, you're almost at a hundred?

[07:49] Haley: Yes, we're getting there. So, I wanted to talk a little bit about your book and dig in a little deeper to the topics that you touch on, evolutionary consumption, evolutionary psychology. Why is that so important to talk about?

[08:04] Gad: So, if you want to be a good marketer, you're basically, someone who understands human nature. You can't be a good marketer and go against human nature. You

could have a six billion advertising budget but you're not going to convince people to eat or drink grass juice because that's not something that is consistent with our evolved gustatory preferences. Just to give you one or two other examples, there's a company a few years ago, I can't remember the exact name of the company, they wanted to create a new line of romance novels where the male archetype would be more gentle, more sensitive and so on. Guess what happened to that line?

[08:36] Haley: It didn't do so well?

[08:37] Gad: Didn't do so well because across the world when women read romance novels it's the exact same male archetype. He's tall, he's a prince and he's a neurosurgeon, he wrestles alligators on his six-pack, he's reckless except for this woman who could tame his wild side. It's the exact same male archetype because that's the fantasy that that particular product is appealing to.

So, from a practical perspective, if you want to understand marketing, you have to understand human nature. What's human nature? It is driven by a shared biological heritage and scientifically speaking, the reason I'm interested in this problem of applying biology to study behavior is that it might surprise you that most social sciences remain very reticent of the idea that humans in general and consumers particular are shaped by biology. They usually argue that what makes us human is that we transcend our biology. Biology is relevant for the mosquito, for your dog, for the zebra but not consumers; consumers are above biology. Well, that's ridiculous, that's idiotic and so both scientifically and from a practical perspective, trying to understand the fundamental biological drivers of consumer behavior is a beautiful thing to study.

[09:44] Haley: Yes, absolutely. It's interesting because it's like this feedback loop that if you are being told that that's the kind of material that you are into, or when your child, for instance, is on the Disney Channel and you have the princess and then the knight that comes to rescue the princess, and the story that's played over and over again for little girls and then we continue down that path into adulthood looking for that hero or that kind of archetype. So, is it a cycle that is all about biology or is it a mixture of what we're also being told?

[10:18] Gad: So, nurture exists in its form because of nature, so the idea that there's a dichotomy between nature and nurture is a false dichotomy. Evolutionary psychologists such as myself don't argue that socialization is not important. Socialization is important, but socialization exists in its form across endless cultures precisely because of biology.

There is no religion that's ever been devised, unless you think it is divine, where it is men who are told to be chaste. In every single religion where there is a statement about sexuality, it is usually very concerned with female chastity. There are very clear biological reasons why men would be terrified of female sexuality and therefore they try to tame it, so yes, women are socialized, for example, through religion to be sexually chaste but there are biological reasons

for that. Everything, whether it be nurture or nature, is due to biology.

[11:10] Haley: This has got my wheels spinning now. So, the patterns obviously they overlap; it's not one or the other. Our role in marketing is really, really important and we can be manipulative with biology when we also have the knowledge of it. How do we go forward with that ethical lens?

[11:25] Gad: Look, for example, we all have a desire for fatty foods, high caloric foods because we've evolved in an environment of caloric scarcity and caloric uncertainty. The fact that McDonald's and Burger King tell us, hey, come into our store and buy our fatty french fries, is not really unethical. They're really catering to an evolved pension. The only thing that they're doing is that the next time that your blood sugar level is down, please have us be top of mind, don't go to McDonald's come to Burger King. It is very rare that marketers will come up with a product that is so manipulative that is outside of our biological norm of reactions. You see what I mean?

[12:00] Haley: Yes.

[12:01] Gad: We also have the evolved ability for moral restraint, right? For example, when I explain to people that, look, we've evolved a desire to both be pair-bonded, to being monogamous unions, but we're also evolved to stray. So, then people get very upset, they say, oh, you're offering a scientific justification for cheating, which of course I'm not because we've also evolved the moral compass to allow us to not stray. There are these multiple Darwinian pulls that are pulling us in different directions and each person will decide what the right tradeoff is for him or her.

[12:31] Haley: It sounds like it's more important for individuals to have that awareness so that they can navigate the world in an empowered, informed way because marketers are just- their job is to sell and...

[12:45] Gad: And to provide information and then it's up to you to act on it or not. I'll give you an example of your empowerment point. I did a study with one of my former graduate student where we looked at the effects of the menstrual cycle on women's behaviors. One of the things that we looked at was food-related behaviors across the menstrual cycle. Imagine that a woman is now trying to go on a diet, now she probably already knows what we found just by virtue of having lived as a woman, there are certain times in your menstrual cycle where you're likely to be more attracted to high-calorie foods or less so. Now, having that knowledge scientifically validated could ultimately help you be aware of the pitfalls, of where it might be more or less difficult for you to keep track with your diet. So, ultimately as a professor of behavioral science, if you like, I don't care about how my work is ultimately applied or misapplied. All I try to do is understand the human condition, how people ultimately apply it is up to them.

[13:38] Haley: Yes, that's a great way to look at it. I think it's interesting the studies that you do, I'm wondering if there are other elements that you stack on top like you said with the menstrual cycles and how certain foods have certain behavioral traits because of that. In that study is there other layers that came out of that or other ah-has that were connected to that cycle?

[13:54] Gad: We looked at two sets of behaviors. One is related to survival. One is related to mating. So, the survival part was the food-related behavior. We also looked at mating-related behavior, specifically beautification practices. So, when are women most likely to engage a beautification, wear sexy clothes, be scantily clad, wear more makeup, and wear stilettos? And not surprisingly that's most likely to happen during the maximally fertile phase of their cycle, during the ovulatory phase.

Now, often times people will say, oh, but what do you mean? You think people are sitting there and checking their menstrual cycles? Of course not. The proximate mechanisms are automatic, I feel more sexy when I'm in the maxima, I feel less bloated, I feel more sexually desired, or I'd like to be more desired. For something to be an adaptive mechanism, it doesn't have to be conscious, right? Breathing is an adaptation, yet I don't know the exact genes by which breathing is coded but I know it's an adaptation. So, there are a slew of detractors of evolutionary psychology that really, frankly, pisses me off because they consistently gave the same gargantuan stupidity and in doing so they only ever demonstrate that they know nothing about evolutionary psychology. If you'd like, I can talk about some of those detractors.

[15:05] Haley: Yes. Well, why not?

[15:06] Gad: Sure. Okay. Most of the detractors are usually very ideologically driven. If I'm a radical feminist I hate evolutionary psychology because, what do you mean? You're saying that there are innate sex differences? That's heretical. If I am a postmodernist, what do you mean? You're saying that there are universal truths? As a postmodernist, there are no universal truths. How could there be biological truths? If I am a religious person, so if all this is explained through evolution, where does God fit in? All sorts of people hate evolutionary psychology, not for scientific reasons but because it attacks their ideological edifice.

The few quotes, scientific criticisms of evolutionary psychology are just as idiotic. For example, one argument is, well evolutionary psychologists’ sort of sit around smoking a pipe and constructing post hoc stories. They come up with post hoc stories about why this happened. Nothing could be further from the truth as a matter of fact, in today's session I will be explaining the mechanism by which you build evidence for an adaptation. This is something called nomological networks of cumulative evidence. You very, very slowly build an extraordinary amount of evidence that perfectly demonstrates that this is an adaptation.

That's exactly what Charles Darwin had done in 1859 in his book, Origin of Species. He collected data from several decades from many, many different sources to prove that natural

selection was the means by which species evolve and so those who argue that we just sit around making up stories are only demonstrating that they are perfectly idiotic about what evolutionary psychologists do.

[16:34] Haley: Do you think of that as mostly based off of a lack of education? Because with your presentation, it's not just your voice, it's not just storytelling but you have more to go off, more to talk about and the research itself.

[16:45] Gad: There are several reasons why these guys keep aping those criticisms. I think evolutionary psychology really shakes the foundation of people. People don't like to hear that their personhood is ultimately a product of this cold mechanism of evolution, right? If you explain to me why love has evolved, somehow, it's no longer as magical, but that's not true.

[17:07] Haley: I feel like it's more magical.

[17:08] Gad: There you go. There are all sorts of reasons why people are jarred by evolutionary psychology but really, I don't have an ulterior motive by being an evolutionary psychologist. I simply want to better understand human nature. I'll give you maybe one or two other quick examples. Oftentimes people think that if you explain a phenomenon using evolutionary theory you're justifying the phenomenon, so if you explain why child abuse happens from an evolutionary perspective, so let me ask you if you can guess this. Do you know, what is the number one best predictor of there being child abuse in a home?

[17:41] Haley: I do actually

[17:42] Gad: What is it?

[17:42] Haley: There's a step-parent in the family.

[17:44] Gad: Look at you. Look at you. It's actually a hundredfold.

[17:48] Haley: Yes, it's huge, huge.

[17:50] Gad: Usually in medicine, for example, or in any science, an odds ratio, if something has a 20% chance more likelihood, while that's a powerful effect, this is a hundredfold more. The reason for that is very simple. We are a heavily invested parental species and therefore most people don't really appreciate investing in children of others. Therefore, to the extent that you're going to have child abuse, that's going to come from a non-biological parent.

Now, when you explain that you're not saying that it's okay to abuse children, you're saying that if you truly want to understand this dreadful reality, identify the proper causes. If you want to understand rape, there are evolutionary reasons for rape. That doesn't mean that you're saying rape is okay. To the contrary, you're saying if you want to understand the dreadful, horrific

crime of rape look for the real causes. If you want to understand why people cheat on their partners you're not justifying it. Usually, the retort that I give people is, this is like arguing that if you're an oncologist who studies cancer, you are for cancer; you're justifying cancer. That's the type of nonsense that I consistently have to fight. To go back to your earlier question, why do I go to the public? It's because that gives me a much bigger platform to fight the tsunami of idiocy.

[18:57] Haley: Yes, it definitely does. I feel like people don't like to realize that we're mammals.

[19:02] Gad: We're animals.

[19:03] Haley: Yes. We're not above it; we're a part of it; that eco versus ego. I don't think people like to hear that we really do have these innate traits in our biology because then we have to realize that kind of shifts our entire paradigm. We're not above the planet and the animals and the other ecosystems that we coexist with.

[19:25] Gad: And to that point, I think that when you come from an evolutionary perspective you realize, if you want to get green, that we really are part of one big tree of life. The dog is my evolutionary cousin. As someone who loves dogs, once in a while, I see some animal behaviors come out with a study saying, discovery, dogs have feelings, and then I think, have you ever interacted with a dog? Have you ever seen a dog? So, of course, they are our cousins. So, to use Peter Senge’s argument to increase the moral circle, once you are an evolutionist you realize that all living forms are intricately linked and it's a beautiful message.

[20:00] Haley: Yes. I know you sometimes are, on the internet, portrayed as anti-religion. I have a perspective that they can co-exist, and I do think that there could be a God that allowed the evolutionary process to take place and that God Himself would evolve because, why would you create a system that was stagnant? It doesn't really make sense. I think holding space for paradigms like that, which is a huge paradigm shift, allows you to really open up to other perspectives, other ideas and explore those with a truly open mind. Not to say that you have to believe one way or the other, but to live in that land of paradox and embrace it and realize we all don't know. We don't know what's going on here. We're just a part of it.

[20:42] Gad: To add to what you just said, I had on my show, Jerry Coyne, who is an evolutionary biologist at University of Chicago and he wrote a book, I hope I don't botch it, I think it's called Faith vs. Fact where he was specifically looking at this idea of whether science and religion can coexist.

The position that you took is what Stephen Jay Gould, the late Harvard paleontologist, referred to as the NOMA principle, Non-overlapping Magisteria. He's what's called an accommodationist. He's trying to accommodate both the religious and the scientific. He's basically saying, hey look, both deal with separate spheres and why can't they coexist. Some more ardent scientists don't buy into this accommodationist thing precisely because they argue, and I think I'm in that group,

I'm saying that very gently given what you said. There is nothing that religion offers that is outside the purview of science. For example, morality is typically the realm where religious folks say, but how do you explain our moral sense? Well, there are only about thirteen trillion studies that have been conducted looking at the evolution of morality, but then again, I appreciate that religion is probably never going to go away because ultimately we are, I think the only animal that is endowed with the recognition that we are here on a finite party and eventually we're going to die. If I have high cholesterol, I go see my physician and he gives me Lipitor and boom, my cholesterol is good, but there's this one problem that I can't solve and that's called my mortality and to the extent that religion 'solves' that problem for me, religion will always be with us.

[22:16] Haley: Yes, I think that there's elements of it that are really great and powerful traditions, the culture, and history within it tells us the story of our humanity in a lot of ways and that's also really powerful. I feel like people are born with the human spirit, everyone has the human spirit, everyone is born with a moral compass and there's not any sort of hierarchy in that and that's where it becomes really dangerous when you tell me I have to go through somebody else or go through an establishment to get to God, I don't buy that.

[22:41] Gad: So, you think that it's a personal relationship?

[22:43] Haley: Yes, it's interesting that the scientific world we are exploring why we're here, what's happening, and I think that spirituality is a huge component of that, but if they were put together then there could be some extra elements as far as how we figure that stuff out.

[22:58] Gad: There is a foundation called the Templeton Foundation which seeks to exactly fund research regarding what you just said. They try to, if you'd like, fund scientists who ultimately are going to find common grounds between religion and science. Now, again if you're an accommodationist you'd love that foundation. If you're a hardcore scientist who believes that religion has no place at the table then you're not happy with that foundation, so it depends which outlook you have.

[23:24] Haley: Yes, yes. Absolutely. I'm curious to see where that goes in the coming years because we've also spoken with an Institute in California, the IONS Institute, and they study human consciousness. So, they were founded by an astronaut, Edgar Mitchell. So, he goes into space and he has this out of body experience looking down on the earth and he's like, we are all interconnected. It's like this overpowering feeling of love and inner connection and so he came back down to earth and he was like, we need to study that, we need to know what that is, that consciousness piece, and he started the Institute of Noetic Sciences. It's really amazing research, they back everything with hard science. They do experiments...

[24:02] Gad: That are published in real journals?

[24:04] Haley: Yes. It's pretty fascinating. I'm curious to see where that goes and I know that

evolutionary psychology is a piece of that. I think everyone's story is important so that's just holding space for that. So, I don't want to take up too much of your time, it's such a privilege to sit down with you.

[24:20] Gad: Thank you for having me.

[24:23] Haley: We had this really funny interaction when we first met you and Stephen Wolfram was on our booth.

[24:27] Gad: That's right.

[24:28] Haley: That was cool, to be a fly on the wall for that.

[24:31] Gad: Yes, we've since connected via email

[24:32] Haley: You have?

[24:32] Gad: Yes, we've gone back and forth, so let's see if we keep that conversation going. He seems like a very interesting guy.

[24:37] Haley: Yes, he's a whole other level computing genius, so holding a conversation with him for 45 minutes was interesting.

[24:43] Gad: Yes. I think you had him on the show the day that we met, right?

[24:45] Haley: Yes, that night, that was a lot of fun. He did a lot of storytelling and stuff. Yeah, I'm so glad you're here at this conference and our paths met and that you're giving a talk here. Is there anything that you'd like to share with our listeners before we let you go? Is there anything in the works for you or coming up?

[24:59] Gad: My next book I'm working on is a book looking at, so let me just step back a sec. There are these biological pathogens, these brain parasites that will parasitize an organism rendering it maladaptive. For example, there's a parasite that when it goes inside a mouse, the mouse loses its innate fear of cats, which is not a good thing. There's another kind of brain parasite that when it goes into ungulates, elk, moose, deer, they will start engaging a circling behavior. They just start going in a circle and even if the predators are coming they can't extricate themselves from that circle.

I take this idea of brain parasites and I then apply it to what I call idea pathogens, idea parasites. In the same way that actual, physical worms can parasitize your brain, I argue that bad ideas can parasitize your brain rendering you maladaptive. These idea pathogens, I argue, have evolved, regrettably, in the ecosystem called the university that has spread these dreadful ideas postmodernism, radical feminism, identity politics, political correctness, cultural relativism,

so you put this mélange of bullshit and you end up with really maladaptive thinking and so what I do is, I trace the origins of this idea pathogens through the university, some of the negative consequences as a result of these bad parasites, and then, how do we inoculate ourselves against these bad ideas? How do you actually develop good thinking hygiene? So, that's my next book, I'm currently writing it, be on the lookout for it.

[26:25] Haley: Very cool. Yes, I definitely would love to have you back on the show after your book comes out.

[26:29] Gad: I would love to. I would be happy to.

[26:30] Haley: Thank you so much for joining us Gad, the Gadfather, thank you.

[26:33] Gad: Cheers

[Outro Music]

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*DISCLAIMER: Humans transcribed this content. Please keep in mind, there could be some human error.