Edward Dutton & The Naked Classroom

Professor Edward Dutton joins my wife Simone and I to discuss his theories on where our education system has gone wrong. We talk about the lack of teaching useful logic and reasoning, why science and math are made boring, the feminization of teaching, evolutionary mismatches in education, and more from his book "The Naked Classroom."

We also discuss the genetics and psychology of religiosity, why some people have dramatic conversions, the two types of religious people, and implications for fertility and mental health.

Edward Dutton: [00:00:00] I suspect that what has happened with those, so there's, there's two kinds of, I mean, it's simplistic to say it, but there's two kinds of religiosity, William James. I think it's the snail on the head with, with, with that. I like that phrase. It's the snail. Yeah. And that is the religion of healthy mindedness and the religion of the sick soul.

And those two and those two sets of religiously are quite qualitatively different. And the religion of healthy mindedness tends to be, you know, that you, you're normally born into it and you believe all of the, the. the different ideas and whatever and that's associated with being a high in agreeableness with high, high in conscientiousness and and low in mental instability.

So highly mentally stable and those associations, at least the association between religiosity sorry. And, and mental health seems to be genetic in nature. There was a study by a guy called Koenig, and they could find no environmental reason why this was the case. Now, the religion of the sick soul, that's quite different.

That's the religion of the convert. And that is associated with relatively the opposite [00:01:00] personality profile, basically, and in particular with high neuroticism.

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone. It is wonderful to have you here today. And today we have a very special guest, the jolly heretic, or Ed Dutton, or Professor Dutton. I'm sure I would guess 80 percent of our followers probably also follow you or know broadly your work.

He's very well known for controversial, much more controversial than us, mind you takes within the field of human genetics. And human evolution, but today we're going to be talking about another shared interest, which is the failure of the education system.

I'm going to try to do the, I can only count to four song. Which our

Simone Collins: son is obsessed with.

Edward Dutton: Wait, have you seen this? No, sorry, no. It's [00:02:00] a

Malcolm Collins: song where they redid bodies hit the floor. Yeah, let the bodies hit the floor, but it's Sesame Street,

Malcolm Collins: But I want to hear your thesis on where the educational system has gone wrong and sort of the thesis that you lay out in this recent book that you laid out while also giving the title of the book and where listeners can find it.

Edward Dutton: So the book is called The Naked Classroom, The Evolutionary Psychology of Your Time at School.

I published it on Amazon KDP. It's quite a short book. Basically, I suppose it's a sort of introduction to based science. And I was, that's what someone suggested I should do. And as you know, I don't have a formal science qualification. I I'm an honorary professor of psychology of various places, but I don't, I was always at school, a [00:03:00] humanities person.

I very quickly came to to the conclusion that science is boring. I could see no benefit in science. You know, history. I could look around England. I lived near Hampton Court Palace and I could imagine the kings and queens of England walking there and their ghosts that haunt the place at night. You know, English literature.

If you wanted to go back in time and know how they spoke, you could read, I don't know, the works of Thomas Hardy. And there you are immersed in the 19th century, even geography, you know, how a river's formed or whatever, but how flowers have sex. Or even when I was at school, how humans have sex was not really of interest to me.

And I, I just thought, I just, I just thought it was, it was terribly, terribly badly taught. And so, and I think that that's the fundamental problem that you quite quickly divide between being a humanities person and a science person at school. And when you do that, then the ignorance of science and scientific concepts and scientific thinking among, and mathematical thinking among humanity's people can be quite staggering.

So, for example, I there was a video I [00:04:00] did recently that British Members of Parliament, more than half of British Members of Parliament thought the probability, if you toss a coin, of getting heads, or rather than tails, It's half, but if you toss it twice, they also thought it was half.

I thought I'd offer some clarification on what he meant by that statement. Because it's so dumb, you wouldn't expect it to mean what it actually means. Which is, they were asked, if you flip a coin, what's the probability it turns out on head? And then they were asked, if you flip a coin twice, what is the probability it comes up on heads twice?

These people thought that there was a 50 percent probability that it came up on heads twice, and a 50 percent probability that it came up on heads individually.

Edward Dutton: Now, that's obviously wrong.

And and that, it's so obviously wrong. And somebody gave me an example today. They said, well, that's not a sign of stupidity. I've got a friend who's got a PhD in whatever, and she got that wrong. I'm like, [00:05:00] no, right, that's the problem. So science is Science is not, is not integrated into the curriculum.

It's not taught in an interesting way. And it struck me, everything was based in science, because it should be. I mean, ultimately there's this idea of of E. O. Wilson, consilience, the idea that every. If you make an assertion in sociology, it has to be reducible to psychology. If you make it in psychology, it has to be reducible to biology.

If you make it in biology, it has to be reducible to chemistry. That's, and so if, if it was taught in that way, then first of all a lot of questions that are unanswered in humanity's subjects would be parsimoniously answered. For example, I always thought to myself when I was younger, Well, why was it that people in World War I were prepared to lay down their lives for their country and die, but were not prepared to now?

What's, what's changed? Why is, what, what, what, why is it that people

Malcolm Collins: That's an interesting question!

Edward Dutton: Right, why is it that you get these people that would be prepared to burn, be burnt at the stake? For their, what possible have they gone [00:06:00] mad? You know, that wasn't answered, you just learn the information, and then you write your essay and you get your A and whatever.

But first of all, I think it should be reduced down, all these questions need to be answered in a scientific way. And secondly, the other thing I thought was, well, think of all the questions that you ask when you're at school. All the things that are going to occur to you when you're at school. Like, why are so many of the teachers women?

Why, why, why, why do, why do some boys give women the ick and they find them disgusting? Why, why, why, why is, why, why is why are some people having sex with the teacher? Why are the side of teachers often male? Why are teachers so left wing? Why are so many male teachers gay? Why, you know, frankly when I was at school, when a lot of people went to school, why were there some teachers, male teachers that were a bit, you know, Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: even if you had done