Nicholas Wade

That was a wonderful natural experiment.

So the founders who decided in Israel they would not just start anew, but they would build a whole new world based on a new kind of person who would be a good, unselfish person.

It's a very dangerous system when you don't reward people on the basis of their merit.

This is one of the big problems of not taking human nature seriously, not accepting the fact that we have certain behaviors written into our genome by evolution because of our survival values.

Our instinct is entirely warlike.

I mean, we have genocide written into our genes.

Thanks for having me.

Well, I grew up in England and I worked for Nature, the scientific journal, who sent me out to Washington to be their Washington correspondent.

And after a year, I was asked by our big rival, science, to join them.

So I worked for science for 10 years.

And then I joined the New York Times as an editorial writer covering scientific environmental subjects.

And I worked for the Times once.

I guess, right before 30, 40 years.

Wow.

That's it.

Very brief biography.

That was a wonderful natural experiment.

So the founders who were

of fleeing the anti-Semitism in their homelands, decided in Israel they would not just start anew, but they would build a whole new world based on a new kind of person who would be a good, unselfish person.

So it was a really great and noble ideal, but it required doing things that run right against the grain of human nature.