Evolutionary Psychology (the podcast)

A lot of people ask me how I write blog posts—where I get my ideas from. They’re often surprised when I give them a precise, step-by-step answer. Here’s my patented ® formula for writing Everything Is Bullshit content:

1. I look at a story we tell ourselves. Maybe it’s the pursuit of happiness or the meaning of life. Maybe it’s our desire to change people’s minds or make the world a better place. Maybe it’s the idea that we don’t care what others think.

2. I ask myself if the story makes any evolutionary sense.

3. If the answer is no, I think about what might be going on beneath the surface—something that would make evolutionary sense.

4. I call the story we tell ourselves “bullshit.”

5. I write about what’s likely going on beneath the surface.

6. I link to a lot of technical papers in evolutionary psychology that nobody clicks on.

The most important part of this formula is step 3—the part about what does or doesn’t “make evolutionary sense.” This step is rarely taken by anyone who thinks about humans. It’s as if the human psyche emerged from a bolt of lightning and not from millions of years of natural selection. When people talk about why Bob voted for Trump or Jane can’t find a date or Otto is depressed, they rarely reflect on the fact that Bob, Jane, and Otto are animals, and so are they. Whenever people do reflect on their evolutionary origins, they usually aren’t very reflective about it. They think about cavemen hitting each other with clubs or David Attenborough doing a voiceover while a bird performs a mating display.

There's a lot of bad evolutionary psychology out there. Most of it comes from amateurs. Some of it comes from subpar professionals because not everyone can be Ed Hagen. Some of it comes from otherwise thoughtful professionals who transform into edgelords on social media like werewolves during a full moon.

And yet, there’s so much evolutionary psychology out there that’s good—beautiful, rigorous, insightful scholarship on the most important aspects of the human condition. Most of it languishes in obscurity, unknown to the general public. People come to dislike the field, not because they know what it is, but because they’ve seen a few bad popularizations of it.

There is no legit evolutionary psychology podcast. There is no podcast that interviews leading experts in the field and shines a light on the important work they’re doing. There is no podcast that dispels the many misunderstandings out there, or that wades through controversy with care and good faith. There is no podcast that lives and breathes this powerful way of thinking.

Until now. I’m excited to announce the beginning of Evolutionary Psychology (the Podcast), co-hosted by myself and Dave Pietraszewski, a professor of evolutionary psychology at the University of California Santa Barbara and one of the most brilliant scientists I know. We’ll hash it out every week, either with each other or with a top-notch scholar, in our effort to better understand who we are as naturally selected organisms.

In the first episode, Dave interviews me. We get into my origin story, status games, intergroup violence, and even capitalism. You can check it out here. Enjoy.