Jason Hartman hosts Ed Dutton to discuss his books, At Our Wits End: Why We’re Becoming Less Intelligent and Churchill’s Headmaster: The ‘Sadist’ Who Nearly Saved the British Empire. The conversation centers around why society has become less intelligent and how there are cycles of intelligence. Dutton attributes this decline to genetic reasons giving examples of previous civilizations.
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Jason Hartman 0:59
It’s my pleasure to welcome Edward Dutton. He is the author of several books, including at our wits end, why we’re becoming less intelligent, and what it means for the future. He’s got a new book entitled Churchill’s headmaster, the sadist, who nearly saved the British Empire, and the silent rape epidemic, how the Finns are groomed to love their abusers. Fascinating and controversial stuff. Edward, it’s great to have you on the show. Let’s start with at our wits end a little bit. Are we on the verge of a societal disaster? It is really, you know, if we gotten too soft, what’s going on out there.
Ed Dutton 1:36
But that’s the thing with these kinds of changes. They’re kind of a salami tactic. And so you can’t say you’re on the verge of it, what will happen is it will happen very, very slowly. And once it happens, then nobody bought the stand quite how it happened. But yes, you could say, broadly speaking, we are on that verge, I would say it looks at the fact that we are becoming less intelligent. And we’re becoming less intelligent extremely quickly, we Marshall, myself and my colleague Mark would leave money market all of the growing body of evidence for this and we prove that it’s happening for genetic reasons. And we demonstrate that precisely the same process or very similar process happened in all previous civilizations, civilizations are under intense Darwinian selection in which there is 40% child mortality, and in which there is a strong relationship between how many surviving children you have, and how rich you are. And that and how rich you are correlates with your intelligence at about point 3.4.
Jason Hartman 2:29
So are you saying people that have more children are less intelligent or more intelligent
Ed Dutton 2:34
it now now less but it usually the other way round? Right, okay. Okay. In pre industrial times, child mortality was about 40%. But it was much higher among the, the less well off and much lower among the more well off, right. And we know this when we have wills, for example, from 16th and 17th century England, which show that if you take those that were testators, which made up about sort of 60% of the population, there’s testators, and divide them between the richer 50% and the poorer 50%. Then the richer 50% had a fertility advantage if their number of surviving children was 40%, higher than the poor or 50%. And so what this process was doing was bootstrapping the population meant that every generation, there’s the bottom, we were nobody had the lower intelligence, they died off, and those that were at the top had to move downwards to fill the places vacated by the bottom, we were becoming more intelligent. And we can trace this across time, with things like literacy getting higher numeracy getting higher, cruelty getting lower per capita genius getting higher, which implies the underlying population is more intelligent. And even head size, getting bigger head size correlates robustly with intelligence across time, and even the gene forms associated with intelligence increasing in the population. And then the Industrial Revolution happens. And everything changes with the Industrial Revolution, you have improved medicine, you have inoculations, you have improved conditions. And so what happens is the child mortality rate collapses from 40% in 1800, to about 10% in 1900, about 1%. Now, overwhelmingly, this means that those were surviving this sort of the less well off and whatever those that would have lower average IQ.
Jason Hartman 4:12
So we have a situation where and now this is interesting. It’s a term I, I coined many, many years ago, and I you know, you probably use it too. I would say we are in an era of either Darwin reversed, or Darwin repealed, right. That’s exactly what’s happening. It used to be that the smartest and the fittest survive, but with a welfare state. That has flipped that equation on its head, hasn’t it?
Ed Dutton 4:39
Yes. But it’s not just the welfare state. It’s a number of factors, one of which is the welfare state. Okay. As we industrialized, all developed civilizations tend to do this we become less stressed, we become more nice, as you say, we become less instinctive, but first of all, the key thing is contraception. So once you get contraception, it’s taken up by the higher classes, it trickles downwards, but contraception. Once it becomes reliable means that having a large family happens by accident, right?
Jason Hartman 5:04
You have large families, they can be ritual without having large families and all this kind of thing. And then would seem, it would seem that the more intelligent among us have more foresight, and they understand the consequences and the responsibilities of having children, where is the less intelligent, they kind of don’t care, they delegate a lot of that responsibility to the state. In fact, they’re incentivized by the US to have extra children,
Ed Dutton 5:29
indeed, also the foresight to use contraception. So if you take the pill, do you take it at exactly the same time every day, like you’re supposed to, or do not get back with a glass of red wine in the evening, when you remember, right. And obviously, these kinds of things have an effect. And what it means is that the people who are low IQ, of course, they’re either going to use contraception wrong, or they’re going to just not use a tool because they’re too impulsive. This has helped to cause this reversal, whereby the correlation between intelligence and how children have is now minus point one. So that means that the less intelligent have more children. A second factor, as you say, is the welfare state. This means that there is no financial disincentive. If you have low IQ, to basically not have children, there’s this quite generous safety net. Now, I don’t have the data for America. But there was a very interesting book by Adam Perkins from King’s College London called called the welfare trade. And he shows that if you look at the British data, and you take those where both parents are working, ie the most intelligent group, those where one parent is on welfare, and families where both parents are on welfare, only the families where both parents are on welfare, where you put it an average IQ of about 80 are breeding it above replacement fertility. Hmm. So welfare is clearly a factor in this. Another one is feminism. So you will notice perhaps when you were at school, that the less intelligent girl dropped out and about 16 has a series of children by a series of unsuitable men is becoming a grandmother by the time she’s in her mid 30s. And then you take the more intelligent girl, and she will have dedicated all of her 20s and maybe even the first half of her 30s to her career.
Ed Dutton 7:00
Yeah, she has children at all, she, they have one or two, she’s becoming a mother. Either time, the less intelligent girl, my grandmother, so she’s also got fewer generations and as well as fewer chill.
Jason Hartman 7:10
So that multiplier effect is a multiplier
Ed Dutton 7:12
effect. And so you have welfare you have, as I say, you have the contraception factor, you have the feminism factor. And then you have immigration from lower IQ societies as well. And these things together, I’ve created a snowball situation where there is now a minus point one relationship between fertility and intelligence.
Jason Hartman 7:30
It’s really quite amazing what’s happening. I mean, the falsity of political correctness and the way it obscures legitimate communication and facts is is absolutely astonishing. And you know, you can’t even talk about half of this stuff anymore. But just look at the number of countries that will literally be extinct. In a matter of decades. on the list, I would say Japan, Russia, Western Europe, not a country, but a region. These people have no fertility rate, they are becoming an extinct species. The environmentalist on the left, always they like to save the slogan, you know, extinction is forever. Well, what about people? I mean, don’t they care about them? They care about animals and bugs, but you know, it’s
Ed Dutton 8:15
like no, two things. First of all, we know that this change is happening on it for genetic reasons, because we know that in Iceland, we’ve got data showing that across the past three generations, the percentage of the population carrying aliens, which are associated with very high IQ has gone down. And also we know that on the IQ tests, the rise that the fall intelligence is definitely on G it’s on the more genetic aspect 80% genetic aspect of the IQ test, as feel calm about low fertility, that really brings me to something else, my second book, really based differences in ethnocentrism and the other book on Finland.
Jason Hartman 8:47
So let’s talk about that. But I want to make sure you cover all the points. So we talked about the welfare state feminism, you know, in the career ism, we’ll call that to what sort of feminism career ism, same concept. What else is there? Did you cover all those immigrate immigration and Islam
Ed Dutton 9:03
welfare, state contraception usage? Okay. So four things, these would be really the key factors that have flipped the situation. I mean, to a degree, you could argue that the decline of religion is relevant as well, but it’s one of the things that predicts facilities, as well as now being fought as well being low IQ is religiousness. So religious people have more children, because they believe God is telling them to or whatever, right, and may also be because they just have normal more genetically, in Darwinian terms, normal genes, they are the people that would have survived under conditions of Darwinian selection, because we were selected to be religious, and religious is about 40% genetic. So that may be an element where we were more religious, it would probably push up the fertility rate, as well. But yes, those are really the key factors. And the result of it is of course, that we know that intelligence is strongly correlated with all measures of civilization. Were also going down in terms of per capita genius. We can measure this across time. We are now at level in terms of per capita genius that we were in about a 1600 drove. So when Queen Elizabeth the first on the throne, in terms of high order word usage, you can do this by Google Ngram analyzing texts right on the high point for genius, about 1850. Now we’ve gone back down to about the level we were about 1600.
Jason Hartman 10:15
Okay, so just so just a question there. I mean, I would agree with you that good vocabulary is a sign of intelligence. But could you sort of chalk that concept up to we just live in a much more casual culture nowadays,
Ed Dutton 10:29
that is true vocabulary has got better, we have a larger vocabulary than we used to. But what we’re talking about is these very specific technical high order word, words off thinking tools were questionable. There’s a whole new marker of intelligence right now on that mark. Again, we’ve reached a peak in the text about 1850. And now we’ve got back to the level that we were in about 1750. In terms of reaction times reaction time, just how quickly you react, something called it was until about point four, we’ve got to be good at that, because of all the video games, right? Oh, well, I think so. These can be measured across time, we our reaction times are getting slower, or ROI. And based on that we have lost between 1880 in the year 2000, about 15 IQ points.
Jason Hartman 11:12
So reaction time is a concept in an IQ evaluation. Hmm. Well, yes,
Ed Dutton 11:16
it’s a robust correlate of intelligence. It’s a way of the problem with the IQ test is there’s cultural elements to those elements, which mean they’re not objective measures across time, because you can get better at IQ tests by being trained in them and things like this. But that’s more difficult when it comes to reaction times.
Jason Hartman 11:31
But how do you how do you know what the reaction time was in 1600? And 50?
Ed Dutton 11:36
Because we didn’t know that we do know what it was 1980 because we measured it then in about the same way we do now. Okay, and we can say that we’ve lost 15 IQ points, which is the difference between let’s say, an average person policeman office work wasn’t like that, and a school teacher for one account. Okay, so we’re definitely getting less intelligent, and it’s for genetic reasons. And the key factor basically, is people with the low IQ outbreeding those with higher IQ.
Jason Hartman 11:56
This is not good for the world. Is it?
Ed Dutton 11:59
Not the short term? No, it means we’re entering the winter of civilization and you know it all We look at in our book, we show that you have the same process in ancient Greece in ancient Rome, you can basically show that across time, the level of per capita innovations, we can mark we can measure that goes up, which is a peak, and then it goes down. As it goes down, the civilization collapses. And this tends to parallel contraception being invented it being taken up by the higher classes, and then people will learn like you having children, those with higher IQ, and the civilization is backwards, and being unable to do things we used to be able to do like we can’t now it seems we probably can’t go to the moon. We’re not intelligent enough anymore, right? Because for that to work, you’ve got to have lots and lots of clever people. And there’s lots of little things that might go wrong. And as the IQ of the society goes, and those little things can have knock on effects, one screw being loose, can bring everything down. Sure. And as you get less intelligent society, there’s greater and greater possibility of little things going wrong, such as the Challenger disaster, such as Concorde crashing, because a bit of metal jacket was wrong stuck on the back of the previous aircraft, right? Well, this is why India, which has some very high IQ people, of course, has trouble doing these kinds of big projects, because the IQ is only about 78. So yes, it would imply that we’re moving into the winter of civilization. And this is something that always seems to happen. But civilization,
Jason Hartman 13:14
this is a sad story. You were going to switch gears to your other book one of your other books, and I don’t know if you did that just in the conversation or not. But did you want to make a point about that?
Ed Dutton 13:24
Well, as the book is gonna make what you were asking you were talking about the declining fertility of European nation, right? There was a very interesting experiment that was done by john Calhoun at the University of Maryland in the late 60s, and he decided to create a mouse utopia. So he got all these mice and he freed, no predation, vets on hand all the time, no disease, you know, a utopia for mice. Basically, he heavily limited, he reversed, he stopped Darwinian selection. And what happened, first of all, the parallels what’s happened to our society, Erie. So what happened first of all, was a massive explosion in population. This just happened in the industrial revolution, with inoculations and all that kind of thing, huge explosion, right, then the population growth starts to slow down, then the population starts to plateau. Okay. And then the population starts to decline. And when that happens, they just as ours is declining, they start to notice unusual things. A lot of the males are interested in sex and actually have to be pestered by the females for sex, just as is happening in Japan. A lot of the females become more masculine and they start becoming more aggressive and like men basically in the US on the young, they do weird things like undermine the ability of the mice to become optimally adapted, such as throwing the mice, the babies out of their nest too young and things like this. And then they notice a cast of males that develops which they call the beautiful ones. And these are these autistic like males that have no interest in fighting no interest in getting terribly no interest in getting females have no scar tissue when they when they die, and they simply just drink water and eat and become fat and whatever it In equally, the females are very stressed and they start to miscarry and all this. And eventually it gets to a point where no more mice are
Jason Hartman 15:07
born. you’re describing the world today, at least in a world
Ed Dutton 15:10
where no where no more mice are born. Yeah. And then of course, the mouse utopia continues. And so consequently, the colony within about three years of starting just dies out. Wow. Now, this is very interesting, because of course, you can see the parallels with our own society that you have all these, this would have happened because of mutational load. There’s no evidence this was happening for environmental reasons, because the environment was huge area, they weren’t crowded, it was mutational load mutations would have been washed out every generation through predation. And whatever mutations of the body call it the mutations of the mind, because the mind is about 88% of the genome. So what was happening was that as these mutations of the body were building up, and they were becoming less physically healthy, they were becoming more mentally unhealthy as well. And they were having mental matter, spiteful adaptation, spiteful mutations, as my colleague calls them, which made an app in a maladaptive way. As you see with these aggressive mothers, or these artists that want sex, or these beautiful ones that don’t want anything to do with anybody else, they’re acting in a maladaptive way. And this gets worse because the mice are highly social species. So if you’re with a person who’s maladaptive that could mess up someone, even if they’re not the carrier of this mutation,
Jason Hartman 16:19
right, because it messes up the whole community, it pulls
Ed Dutton 16:22
the mice they use the mouse lives based on urine. So if they’re producing weird urine, that means that it’s not marketing things properly in the mice not work out what’s going on, that’s gonna make them stressed. And whatever, what an equivalent with humans will be humans with with maladaptive ideas that would have been destroyed you on the Darwinian conditions, such as anti Natal ism, such as believing that life is pointless, such as believing you should starve yourself to death, such as believing that it’s wrong to be in favor of your own ethnic interests, whatever. And so these ideas will affect the doctrine eatable of those who don’t even carry the spiteful mutation. Mm hmm. And you’d expect those ideas to be more prominent among higher class humans, because across time Gregory Clark has shown in his book, The Sun Also Rises that across many, many generations, heritability of social class is about 70%. So higher social classes would have entered a dis genic fertility basically earlier because of better conditions. So you’d expect more sparse mutations among them. And you’d expect the adaptive kind of ways of thinking, ethnocentrism, whatever, to be more preserved among the lower class. And you’d expect those that run the high class and some of them to have the spark mutations. And that’s influenced the whole society to be maladaptive, as you see with what it’s basically doing, which once you open up the floodgates to immigration from foreign countries damage, red ethnic interests, it’s like they think wild animals into a zoo. And it’s like letting wild mice into that mouse utopia, you’ve got these people, there is zoo, basically, that have no uptake anymore, to real life, and fighting, and to these things that they should be selected for. And they’re suddenly exposed to people who have been under Darwinian selection. Until more recently,
Jason Hartman 17:57
what is happening, as you described, it, seems to be so pervasive, and if you will, successful, you’d almost think it’s a coordinated thing in some way. I mean, if someone pulling the strings on this is their, you know, I would think that maybe the environmental agenda from the left to, you know, has this sort of, I think, misguided belief that you know, humans are evil, they don’t like people, they like animals, and I love animals. The concept being people are the scourge of the earth, right? We need to revive the planet of people because they are destroying the planet. When you know, the reality is people certainly do take a toll on the planet, but they also solve problems. And they are a resource, they come up with solutions and ideas and they clean the planet to I don’t know, I think people have the right to be here, just like animals. Animals pollute the planet to they produce waste,
Ed Dutton 18:54
yes, because we can say that, yes, naturally, we can say that there will be many examples of these that say, under Darwinian conditions, we will be selected to a certain optimum, which would probably basically be high intelligence, because that helps you to survive high corporative personality and high religiousness because there’s evidence that’s 40% genetic that it’s associated with fertility that elevates ethnocentrism and elevates cooperativeness. And therefore, it basically helps improve to survive. And the group that’s more religious tends to more ethnocentric and we showed them computer models, more often centric group tends to survive, so it’d be elevated to this optimum. And then as the mutational load will build up, you’d get more and more of these spiteful mutants that would deviate from this in directions, maladaptive, one of those with multiculturalism set putting the interest of foreigners by their own ethnic kin, another one, as you say, will be putting the interests of other animals above us. Yeah. And so yes, I would agree with it. I would think that a lot of these people who lead this movement or in heavily involved in it would be what we would call spiteful mutations. And this is demonstrated by the fact that if you look at all of them, they’re quite religious. They’re quite atheistic, and I did a study on this called the Newton says in his heart, there is no God and we found atheism correlates with all manner of indications that high mutational load, atheists are less, more asymmetrical bodies and features and hands than people that believe in God, they die younger, they get more ill, they’re less likely to recover from illness, they’re higher in mental illness, they have more asymmetrical fingers, they’re more like to be left handed. And only being left handed is associated with something having gone wrong with the brain and development, all kinds of ways in which they’re basically mutants. And that’s what I think these environmental risks are there. And they are directing it in the sense that they, you know, they are these spots, lesions, and they have this genetic deathwish, just as we have wished to live, and therefore, they will fight tooth and nail for what their genes are telling them to achieve, which is this genetic death wish for humanity,
Jason Hartman 20:42
what would be the rationale in nature that they would have a genetic deathwish I mean, that’s just don’t we all have the self provision, self preservation instinct, there’s never
Ed Dutton 20:51
enough knowledge in nature, you have Darwinian selection. Darwinian selection means that the child mortality rate is normally quite high. That means that children that have poor immune systems or whatever, normally don’t pass on their genes, people that have poor immune systems, these physical problems, these normally are comorbid, with mental problems, mental problems mounted patient of the mind are comorbid with malocclusions, the body, people who, for example, a PDF files, and maladaptation of the mind are more likely to have attached ealerts, for example, my mind? Well, yeah, so this means, as I look at it, my book, How to judge people by what they look like, you can read a great deal about a person from their face, and from their body, the mind correlates with the body. So if you have a maladaptive body, you would have been killed off on a Darwinian selection, and by your adaptive body being killed off your maladaptive mind with maladaptive ideas. Remember, the mind is 80% of the genome, it’s a massive target mutation would have been killed off that we have managed to take control of our society, we’ve limited Darwinian selection. And so these maladaptive things are not being purged. It’s not a matter of rationale. It’s simply the rationale of Darwinian selection has been heavily emitted.
Jason Hartman 22:04
Wow, this is incredible to hear this kind of thing. What else do you want people to know, just wrap it up with any closing thoughts, if you would,
Ed Dutton 22:12
back to this, basically, this civilizations all will move in these cycles, they tend to move in cycles of intelligence and cycles of health, they reach a top point, and then they collapse. It may well be the case that we can’t possibly go on getting more more intelligent forever, because there’s some evidence that high very high IQ correlates with autism and, and not wanting to have sex and allergies and whatever. And so we probably die out if we got too intelligent. So it may be in the nature of things that side there has to be this cycle of civilization, we will get out into the window civilization, but we can do things like old age, if you know you’re going to get old, do you just kill yourself now? No, you don’t you get old, but you plan for old age and you do things to make it better so that you slow down the inevitable we can do things that we can’t stop, I think the collapse of civilization back into Darwinian conditions, but we can slow it down by not having the welfare states huge or not having an immigration from this. And all the other things that we’ve looked at we can slow it down. And also we should not give up because basically what’s what’s going to happen clearly is that Darwinian conditions will be reintroduced as you get more immigration for example, ethnic diversity has been demonstrated by Putnam leads to ethnic conflict. ethnic conflict leads to stress and distinctiveness stress elevates religiousness, religious elevate ethnocentrism, its distinctiveness elevates ethnocentrism. So it’s likely that it’s not there won’t be a total destruction of Western civilization, Western civilization will eventually fight back once Darwinian conditions reassert themselves.
Jason Hartman 23:40
But that’s a losing proposition for the West. You know, I had pat buchanan on the show years ago, and he wrote a book called Death of the West. And you know, of course, nobody wanted to hear just simple statistics, you know, that it’s just crazy that you free speech is a total myth on a college campus or on the left, you really can take over a country simply by birth rate, yes, there’s no coming back from that.
Ed Dutton 24:07
But once the people are, like the Europeans in America are under sufficient pressure, feel excluded enough, feel stressed enough, they tend to become ethnocentric. Once again, Darwinian selection reintroduced itself, and then there’s a movement in the other direction.
Jason Hartman 24:21
It’s not a movement in terms of birth rate, though, isn’t it?
Ed Dutton 24:24
But that would that would be if they were put under Darwinian conditions again, at what point does that happen?
Jason Hartman 24:30
Say you take Europe now, right? And you see, you see all these attacks in France and and look at Belgium, you know, they want to institute Sharia law in Belgium and crazy stuff like this. Yeah. Well, what do you know, when At what point does everybody start to decide to, you know, start having having babies?
Ed Dutton 24:45
Well, I mean, put it this way, we wouldn’t have been here. Even if there was the internet to the same extent that there is now we wouldn’t have been having a conversation like this 20 years ago. You know, there’s a degree to which people are kind of gradually waking up to what’s going on, but certainly based on culture, trends 100 years hence, we will be back to the level of per capita innovation that we were in, in the dark ages. 100 years from now we’ll be back to the level that we were about 10 hundred, a wonderful, and that was when Islamic civilization was decadent, it was the European civilization that was under the selection pressure. And it was European civilization that displaced. So until I think certainly 100 years from now, we will have degenerated into Darwinian conditions and war, and thus a clear fight back. But I did i do think it’s already happening.
Jason Hartman 25:32
So suddenly, when all of the Europeans who built that great continent, do you know, all the scientific discoveries, all the music, all the art, all the fashion, all the food, all the greatness of Europe, right? They will be almost gone in 100 years, and the few of them that remain will start having children.
Ed Dutton 25:52
Again, the Europeans that are having babies are the low IQ Europeans and the religious Europeans, right, those two groups, so the future of Europe is low IQ people low IQ, and highly religious. And those two groups tend to be highly ethnocentric. That alone should tell you that’s what the future of European marriage is going to be. It’s going to be more like what Arabs or whatever are like now, which is highly ethnocentric. Because that’s your reading.
Jason Hartman 26:20
Wow. Yeah, this is, this is amazing. give out your website, tell people where they can find out more.
Ed Dutton 26:26
So I do a vlog once a week where I discuss it I do a video on whatever I’m thinking about in terms of my research that’s called the jolly heretic. You can go there if you’re really nice. You can give me a few dollars on subscribe star on Patreon or whatever but anyway, that my my videos have been watched. And then you can now have a look at my books. As I said, it’s at our wits end of the cover, listen to it and what it means to the future. ethnocentrism race differences in ethnocentrism, the silent reading Badenoch, on the one on Churchill that you mentioned. So there’s there’s very under those as well old ones. So if people are interested to read more about this, then they can sign up here then you do have a look. Edward Dutton. Thanks for joining us. pleasure. Thank you.
Jason Hartman 27:07
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