Evolutionary Psychology & Pronatalism with Dr. Geoffrey Miller

In this thought-provoking episode, Malcolm and Simone sit down with Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary psychologist and author, to discuss the complex interplay between evolutionary instincts, modern technology, and pronatalism. Geoffrey shares insights on how evolved drives for social status and relationships can be short-circuited by digital distractions, leading to reduced fertility. The conversation delves into the potential paths forward for humanity, including traditionalist and cognitive strategies, the role of moral disgust in shaping technophobic conservatism, and the challenges of raising children in a rapidly changing world. They also explore the pronatalist potential of polyamory, the risks and benefits of genetic engineering, and the ethical considerations surrounding AI development and human enhancement.

Geoffrey Miller: [00:00:00] polyamory can be a legitimate way to run your relationships so the antinatalist version of polyamory would be, you should simply be maximizing your sexual network and your sexual pleasure and your little highly open minded adventures and, and, you know, organizing your, your gangbangs and threesomes and going to Burning Man and, and having kids as sort of secondary.

And then there's a pronatalist version of polyamory that says, Hey, why don't you consider maybe a group living situation, which might make it easier to raise kids collectively with your little trusted polycule, right?

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: Hello. This is Malcolm and Simone. We are here with a special guest today, Jeffrey Miller. We actually had his partner on in one of the early episodes a couple of times. Yeah. Name again. Sorry. I'm Diana. Diana Fleishman. Diana Fleishman. Yes. And He, I've respected him since [00:01:00] before we wrote our sexuality book on like sexuality and human evolution because this is a topic that he is both an expert on and the type of outspoken expert that gets him in trouble with university departments and stuff at times which is of course the experts who we like talking to most.

fun topic for this episode because you know, Diana has also been, you know, a core leader in the pronatalist movement in terms of pronatalist thought and stuff like that. And, and so if you I don't know if it's an extension of that, but, but in addition to that is to apply your deep understanding of the evolutionary conditions that sort of led to modern human sexuality and how those are interacting with.

This new environment that we're in with, with ways that they can be shorted out and how that might lead to changes in humanity going forwards. So go,

Geoffrey Miller: yeah, I work in this field called evolutionary psychology and we try to understand human nature and we do it through mostly applying evolutionary biology [00:02:00] theory.

To human prehistory and trying to analyze the challenges that our ancestors faced in terms of surviving and reproducing and raising kids and living in groups, right? So that's my kind of framework. A key insight, I think, from evolutionary psychology is we did not really evolve directly to try to maximize baby count, right?

To try to maximize fitness in a direct way. Instead what we did through thousands of generations. Of ancestral history was do the things that tended statistically to lead to babies. Even though we might not be consciously maximizing number of offspring or building a dynasty or whatever, right? So what tends to lead to babies being sexually attracted to good high quality partners, falling in love with them, [00:03:00] developing relationships with them, right?

All of that stuff tends to lead to babies. What's another thing that tends to lead to babies ancestrally? Achieving social status, right? And prestige and influence and being valued in your group. Now the problem is you can short circuit both of those. You can fall in love, have a great sex life, use contraception, no babies.

Yeah. Right. Chase social status and prestige and influence and never really cash that out in terms of maybe. Either having relationships or having babies. So the vulnerability that we face as evolved brains running around the world is that you can short circuit all these ways that tended to lead to having kids in prehistory and that don't necessarily do that anymore.

So that's, I think this, the central issue that pronatalism needs to [00:04:00] address, but that civilization itself needs to address.

Malcolm Collins: So I want to pull on one of the things you said here, because one, I think is intuitive to people. The ways. That people can sort of masturbate, literally masturbate the desire to sleep with attractive people.

That is a, that is one that, you know, obviously there's like a clear pathway there. But one of the things that's changed really recently is the ability to masturbate feelings of community and social hierarchy especially In a Skinner box like fashion that is likely to lead to addiction of these dopamine, dopaminergic pathways.

And what we are seeing with this generation that's growing up now is like really quickly dropping rates of sex. Like, and I suspect from what you're saying here is that it's actually these communities like TikTok and stuff like that that's causing this because you can, you can play in these social.

[00:05:00] environments in a way that engaging through Facebook didn't feel like true social connection. Can you, can you talk to why things like Facebook did this worse or were better or like didn't lead to as many people dropping out of in person social direction as this new wave of, of online apps?

Geoffrey Miller: I mean, social media companies have just gotten better and better and better at. Hacking the America, the, the, the evolved social instincts of people, right. To keep them engaged in this pseudo sort of pseudo status, right? So if you're on Twitter or X, right, people pay a lot of attention to follower count, likes, engagements impressions, et cetera.

If you're on Tik TOK, which I'm not, I don't know what the metrics are, but it's also highly engaging and addictive. And what tends to happen is you're getting a lot of cues, right? That I'm popular. Influential, respected, but it's not [00:06:00] actually cashing out into in real life relationships, whether it's friendships or collaborations at work or sexual, intimate, romantic relationships.

And of course, it's going to get even worse once you get augmented reality and virtual reality, and people will be able to go fully online and have their avatars and interact with other people and have this sort of whole sex life or, or whatever you want to call it. That is purely simulated social status, right?

And, and interaction. Now, of course, the real people possibly on the other end of it, or maybe it's just AI bots that you're interacting with, but apparently Gen Z has kind of forgotten how to connect the dots between that kind of online status and any kind of real life relationships and sex and reproduction.

Malcolm Collins: So this brings me to a really [00:07:00] interesting, if you're, if you're looking at the current evolutionary pressures that we're going through, because the old evolutionary instincts aren't getting us through this, it's like there's going to be two dominant strategies. One strategy is to have new. instincts selected for an individuals that somehow get around the way that these masturbatory pathways are being blocked, i.

e. they just don't get as much social status from online environments or whatever. The other pathway is the sort of dominance of our sort of psychological mindset. I guess what I'd say like, like our cognition. over our pre evolved intuition combined with a culture that values its continued survival.

Can you, do yo