Podcast Episode Details
Back to Podcast Episodes
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 w
Published on 1 year, 11 months ago