Mark Changizi

speaker

236 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Nov 2024 last heard Nov 2024

Mark Changizi’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

No recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast · 502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi · 28 Nov 2024 podcast

Thank you.

Yeah, I mean, so, you know, my background is sort of mathematics, and I went into cognitive science, and I was really more of an evolutionary biologist. And so one of the areas that I've worked and have a bunch of discoveries happens to be vision.

So I have other things in other areas of sort of evolutionary biology, why we have as many fingers and why animals have as many limbs as they do, why you get pruney fingers when you're wet. They're actually optimized to be rain treads so that when you You don't want a hydroplane. So they suddenly have the optimal pattern so that you can channel the water out as quickly as possible.

So these are the sorts of things that I was always dealing with.

That's right. So always I was interested not in the specific mechanisms by which our brains work, but on the ultimate sort of design questions for why it would have evolved that way. So functional. Yeah. It's all about function.

And strangely, I mean, this is more on the political side, strangely, even though the biological world claims to believe in Darwin, when you're actually there in the evolutionary biology world, almost nobody believes in natural selection.

They nod to it, but if you actually do a paper that argues, here's why it evolved to be this way, here's the functional reason for why it's this way, they'll say, you're doing a just-so story. You're not allowed to make hypotheses about evolution. Design, that's a just-so story. That's teleology. I was like, you're missing the entire point of natural selection.

Darwin's discovery is that, yes, there's design. That's not an issue.

Well, I mean, sexual selection has things that are not leading to perfect natural selection design. But let's set that aside for the moment. The whole point is not that there's not design. The whole point is that there need not be a master designer. That is, you can explain all this design, all the seeming teleology, without a designer. That's the whole point, right?

But what they want to reject is not just a designer, but they want to reject design itself. And so there's an immense...

Reject teleology. No, like my eyes.

It's bizarre, right? And so it's a very small community and it becomes across this, you know, they attack sociobiology, you know, we also in the same kind of basis.

You start wanting to be, it happens not just when you enter into human behavior and human psychology, it happens even generally when you're talking about even rain treads, you know, rain tread, you know, pruning fingers like I did or any of the stuff that I do. That is a just so story and it is not allowed, right? Now, it's true that you can't study design the way that you study mechanisms.

You can't do a lab experiment in quite the same way. You have to ask it in different kinds of ways. You have to say, if this is really designed for what I'm claiming it's designed for, let's say, you know, if the pruney fingers are designed to be rain treads, well, then here's, let's derive what the optimal morphology would be. What should the wrinkles actually look like?

So that's one kind of prediction, looking at the morphology of the shape. Another might be if it's really the case that it's for design, well, it should only occur in animals that, you know, have wet, dewy conditions. Whereas certain kinds of animals that are never in wet, dewy conditions shouldn't have this, you know, this morphological feature shouldn't appear.

There's different kinds of predictions you can make, but they're often phylogenetic predictions, morphological predictions. Sometimes you can do behavioral, do they actually behave, perform better in wet conditions when they're wrinkly versus when they're not wrinkly and all the kind of combinations of these things. You can't typically do the mechanism kinds of experiments.

It's just a whole different kind of thing. So you have to do it differently. But the strange, weird thing in incredibly far-left communities as they are is that they somehow have thrown Darwin out entirely, and you can't talk about natural selection, which was an incredibly bizarre thing.

I mean, I, I, my pet assumption has been that, uh, their, um, hair stands on end or they get the, you know, if they feel backed up against the wall, when you get to human behavior, uh, this, you know, Steven Pinker and blank slate arguing this as well. Um,

The idea that there's any notion of instinct or a human nature is against something – they really want to push back on that because they want to think of us as infinitely malleable and subject to socialism and whatever policies that they have. They can shape us however they wish. And so even when we're in things like pruning fingers, it's as if they've taken –

that kind of prohibition of human psychology and push it into any realm at all and have a general admonition not to do any kind of design or research that concerns the design of animals themselves. So I'm not sure what else it could be, but at any rate, it's a bizarre thing because the only way that- Well, there's something else too there.

Showing 1–20 of 236 · page 1 of 12