Cat is a researcher who focuses on the evolution of narrative and cognition. Her essays and poems have appeared in Scientific American, Mind, Science Magazine, and other publications. Her fascinating new book is Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution, and I highly recommend it.
You can listen to the episode right away in the audio player above (or on the right side of the player, click “Listen On” to add the Dishcast feed to your favorite podcast app). For two clips of our convo — on the combat that occurs within a pregnant woman between mother and child, and the magic of nipples while breastfeeding — pop over to our YouTube page.
Other topics: Cat growing up near the “Confederate Mount Rushmore”; her mom the pianist and her dad the research psychologist; Cat helping him in the laboratory he ran; why medical research has ignored female subjects; plastination and Body Worlds; studying the first lactating mammal, Morganucodon; the origins of sex bifurcation; how “binary” is now controversial; how your gut contains countless organisms; how the placenta protects a fetus from being attacked by the mom; the dangers of pregnancy and childbirth; preeclampsia; how human reproduction is much longer than other mammals’; postpartum depression; why the left breast is favored in breastfeeding; the maternal voice; Pinker’s The Language Instinct; humans as hyper-social animals; how women hunted and obtained just as much protein as men — in different ways; our omnivore flexibility; sexed voices; how even livers have a sex; the only reliable way to determine the sex of brains; how male cells can end up in a female brain; why women are more likely to wake during surgery; sexual pleasure; bird copulation; duck vaginas; the chimp’s “polka dot” penis; why the slower sex of humans was key to our evolution; my challenging of Cat’s claim that 20 percent of people are homosexual; and foreskin and boobs and clits, oh my.
On that “20 percent of humans are homosexual” question, which I challenged directly on the podcast, it turns out Bohannon made a mistake which she says she will correct in future editions. As often happens, she conflated the “LGBTQ+” category with homosexuality, and relied on a quirky outlier study rather than the more reliable and standard measurements from places like the Williams Institute or Gallup. Williams says 1.7 percent of Americans are homosexual, i.e. gay or lesbian. Gallup says it’s 2.4 percent. The trouble, of course, with the LGBTQIA+ category is that almost 60 percent are bisexual, and the “Queer” category can include heterosexuals as well. As a way of polling actual, same-sex attracted gays and lesbians, it’s useless. And designed to be useless.
Note too Gallup’s percentage of “LGBTQIA+” people who define themselves as “queer”. It’s 1.8 percent of us. And yet that word, which is offensive and triggering to many, and adopted by the tiniest fraction of actual homosexuals, is now regarded by the mainstream media as the right way to describe all of us. In the podcast, you can see that Cat simply assumes that “queer” is now used universally — because the activists and academics who form her environment have co-opted it. She readily sees how that could be the case, when we discussed it. I wish the MSM would do the same: stop defining all gays the way only 1.8 percent of the “LGBTQ+” “community” do. Of course they won’t. They’re far more interested in being woke than telling the truth.
Browse the Dishcast archive for another convo you might enjoy (the first 102 episodes are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: McKay Coppins on Romney and the GOP, Jennifer Burns on her new biography of Milton Friedman, Joe Klein with a year-end review, and Alexandra Hudson on civility. Please send any guest recs, dissent and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com. A listener writes:
Happy Thanksgiving! Thanks to you and Chris for all your work over the years. The Dish has helped keep me sane.
I don’t know how much of a hassle it is to post transcripts of the podcasts, but if it’s easy, could you make them available? I’m very much looking forward to reading or hearing the Matthew Crawford interview.
Transcripts are indeed a hassle to make accurately. But our listener is in luck; Substack just rolled out a feature that auto-transcribes each episode:
The transcript has its flaws — especially since it doesn’t distinguish between who’s speaking — but it’s certainly better than nothing. Big props to Substack for the useful feature.
Here’s a listener on last week’s chat with Matthew Crawford on antihumanism:
I loved this episode! So right on, and interesting, and just a great conversation —and a real conversation. Thank you for introducing me to Matthew Crawford.
It’s funny I have followed you for years and largely disagreed with you, but learned from you. I find now our thoughts are converging. I sometimes get there a bit differently than you do, but I am nearly at the same place as you. Life is strange.
Yes it is. Another adds, “I subscribed to the Dish because I was interested in the interview with Matthew Crawford.” We got several emails along those lines. The podcast portion of the Dish is driving most of the new subscriptions these days.
On to some substance:
As I began listening to your podcast with Matthew Crawford and your usual — and nearly always useful — opening inquiry about your guest’s background, I thought OMG, you’ve finally found someone I can’t listen to for an hour and a half. The ashram at age 9. His drawling tone of voice. His tendency to start comments with the word “so” (a current habit of too many people deemed brilliant). But I soldiered on, scotch in hand.
In the end, I thought the episode was perhaps the best podcast I had listened to since I became a subscriber. I found Crawford a giant dose of fresh air, and he drew some deeply felt thoughts out of you on themes you have often articulated before — e.g., your respect for English tradition and devotion to your Catholic faith from childhood on.
What particularly touched me was Crawford’s articulation of the current lack respect for — or interest in — manual labor. Now 83, I grew up the only Jewish kid of my generation in a small town in Eastern Pennsylvania. I had wonderful parents, of limited formal education, who were religiously non-observant. They, of course, had the principal impact on me. Yet as I matured, was educated and moved away, I have often said that I was “formed” in that town.
The local schools were “average,” but the teachers provided a decent secondary education to all, including the majority who were not going on to college. Most of the adults with whom I had contact were craftsmen, factory workers or, like my father and uncles, truly small businessmen. There wasn’t a stinker in the bunch. As a generality, they were Lutheran, Pennsylvania Dutch, patriotic, main-street Republicans — and Rotarians, Lions, Kiwanians, Elks, Moose, Legionnaires, etc. They made wonderful scoutmasters. I left the town, but the town never left me.
I went on to become a lawyer — able enough, successful enough, but always mindful of Keats’ misplaced self-epitaph that he was one whose name was writ on water. I regarded law practice as both a profession and a skilled craft. Given my “formation,” I always maintained respect for the manual crafts. I have either bored or amused generations of plumbers, electricians, carpenters, etc., with the same tired line: I promise not to practice X, if you’ll promise not to practice law.
Please continue to find reason to give a hurrah to those whose talents lie more in the physical than the intellectual. They are a lot of us, if not most.
Matt and Trey recently gave a hurrah to handymen:
Another listener sends a fantastic quote from John Gardner, who served as the Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare under LBJ:
The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy: neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.
A dissent over the episode:
I tried to keep an open mind, listening to Matthew Crawford, and I was successful for almost half of the interview. What finally derailed me was his ridiculous claim that there is very little consumer demand for driverless cars. What bizarro world does he live in? I would love to have my own personal chauffeur always on call to drive me anywhere I want to go. And if that personal chauffeur takes the form of a robot car, great.
The story of human civilization is inventing tools to do tedious tasks for us. If that’s dehumanizing, what other technological progress do you want to get rid of? Why have cars at all? For thousands and thousands of years, part of being human was to walk everywhere. Cars have denied us that aspect of being human. Surely we need to stop dis-valuing our legs and ban all cars, not just driverless ones.
But a March 2023 survey supports Crawford’s stance:
Americans remain skeptical of autonomous vehicle technologies. Some 68 percent of drivers surveyed by AAA said they were “afraid” of AVs, compared to 55 percent last year. The increase is largely attributed to high-profile incidents involving accidents affiliated with autonomous vehicle technologies or driver assistance features like Autopilot used by Tesla. […]
The AAA poll coincides with a new public opinion poll conducted by Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, which found strong majorities of drivers from all age groups “are concerned about sharing the roads with driverless cars,” according to the report. The concerns are not just related to the vehicles’ highway safety, but cybersecurity safety as well.
Driverless cars might be a good fit for seniors:
Here’s a listener on the episode with Judis and Teixeira on how to save the Democratic Party:
This was literally the best episode I have listened to in two years, despite some other great ones (Bari Weiss and Jonathan Haidt). Judis and Teixeira are refreshing and grounded in fact and pragmatism. Also, you let them speak at length, which you don’t always do.
The sting in the tail of that email! Another fan of the episode:
What an outstanding discussion, thank you. Among other things, it was a rumination of how smart people who start out with horrible ideas can course correct over time.
Another writes:
I’m old enough to remember Kevin P. Phillips’ The Emerging Republican Majority, which came out in 1969 shortly after Nixon’s election. Needless to say, it was many years, decades in fact, before that majority manifested itself in the election of George W. Bush and the first GOP trifecta in my lifetime. I immediately thought of this when you introduced your guests as the authors of The Emerging Democratic Majority.
Where this genre of political writing usually fails is in assuming that the world is static and that the trends they see will continue. But parties change when they observe that they are losing, and voters’ loyalties change as their circumstances change, often in ways that are unpredictable. And there are always unforced errors. No one in 1969 could foresee Watergate, which set the Republicans back at least a decade, probably more; or the rise of Trump who, is sui generis.
Another clip from the episode:
Another listener on “the superb interview with Judis and Teixeira”:
As center-right American, I found the conversation to be most illuminating and thought provoking. But I disagree with their assertion that Biden has a bit better than 50/50 chance of being re-elected.
In my opinion, if Biden doesn’t step aside, he will be crushed in the 2024 election, regardless of who is the Republican nominee. I firmly believe, however, that come November, neither Biden nor Trump will be on the ballot representing their respective political parties. I believe that Biden will indeed step aside and that Trump will find a way to cut a deal to avoid prison in exchange for dropping out of the race. The latter being a much longer shot than the former.
If, on the other hand, Biden and Trump both remain in the race, I’ll be voting for the No Labels candidate, whom I presume will be Joe Manchin. As you know, the No Labels convention will be held in April 2024 in Dallas. The single biggest donor to No Labels is Dallas billionaire Harlan Crow, Justice Thomas’ longtime friend.
As you can see from my main column this week, I also have minimal confidence that Biden will be re-elected. A guest rec:
Have you given more thought to having Garry Wills on the podcast? It would be great to hear the two of you (both deeply Catholic, both apostates from conservatism) talk about the Church and about your faith.
I don’t think I’m an apostate from conservatism, as Wills surely is. From what’s become of the conservative movement, sure. But to my mind that’s because they have abandoned conservatism as I understand it. I wrote a whole book on it! To be honest, I’d feel terribly inadequate debating anything with Wills. His intellect is astonishing. Another rec:
I love your podcast and newsletter and recently joined the paid subscribers side, and wish your views were more mainstream. I’d say I’m a centrist (Never Trumper) who leans right, so I was troubled with a lot of the BLM narratives that narrowed complex situations into “racist” and “good person.”
One excellent case in point that encapsulates this reality, was wonderfully detailed in a recent book by Joe Sexton called The Lost Sons of Omaha: Two Young Men in an American Tragedy, about an incident that didn’t really make many national headlines, but occurred in the summer of 2020. It was a huge story in Omaha, where I live. After the white man in this story, Jake Gardner, shot a black man, James Scurlock, in self-defense, the white man was painted as a racist bigot, and ultimately killed himself.
Sexton, who worked for the NYT and Pro Publica, did a masterful job painting both main characters in great detail, along with their families and their experiences. He also goes in depth on how social media especially played a devastating role in everything, and he investigates those people who did the most damage to Gardner online, not letting them off the hook. Sexton is not an advocate for either man, which makes the book so powerful. He also shows many of the flaws in the criminal justice system.
Given what I hope will be the attention paid to the new crowdfunded documentary, The Fall of Minneapolis, I figured perhaps this would be an excellent time for an interview on this topic.
Thanks! Related to the theme of this week’s column, here’s a “long-time reader and subscriber/Dishhead”:
I thought you might find the following alert from the UK newsworthy: “Migration fueling ‘cavernous’ housing deficit, says CPS.” Would you please give some coverage to the studiously-avoided topic of how the migration crisis is fueling the crushing housing crisis across the Western world? This strikes me as one of those sacred cows of the smug Left that really needs some high-profile skewering, especially since the people most directly squeezed out of their homes are primarily poor and working-class renters — while young people, even with good incomes, continue to find it more and more difficult to rent apartments, purchase homes, or (by extension) form families.
We simply don’t have enough housing units for the people who are arriving. And land-use policies make it nearly impossible to build our way out of this in the near term. As an urban planner, I would love to write more about this. I’ve seen it coming for a long time, but the politics of working in the NYC professional world make it too freighted of a subject to engage with it candidly.
While this article comes from the UK, I believe the situation in New York illustrates how a similar phenomenon is happening in parts of the US (and presumably in cities throughout the West), as the public is continually lectured about how any desire to get control of our borders is mere racism. Perhaps if mass migration were better understood as a factor in the generational housing crisis that is crippling the West (and especially its most vulnerable and younger populations), the liberal case for addressing this fiasco would be more salient.
London has become impossibly expensive to live in for exactly these reasons.
We still have many great unaired emails on the episode with Graeme Wood. A dissent:
I was somewhat troubled by your take on Israel’s position in the current unrest. Here are some various points:
- Netanyahu formed a government with the far-right parties NOT because Likud is of the far right, but because the more centrist parties refused to do business with Netanyahu due to his inclination to lie to his political partners. His government was not about an extreme move to the right (he didn’t care much about judicial reform; he rather cared about peace with the Saudis); it was instead about political expediency, since he could not gather support to his left to form a government.
- Israel has a history of making peace with parties that do not threaten its security: Egypt, Jordan, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco. These peace treaties tend to be lasting.
- The Abraham Accords did ignore the Arabs of Gaza and the West Bank (the Arabs of Israel who are also “Palestinian” are most likely not interested in moving to an independent Palestinian state, for obvious reasons). This is principally because the Arabs of Gaza and the West Bank lack any agency. They are ruled on the one hand by a murderous group of extreme Islamists, and on the other hand by a failed party of Arab nationalists now seeking to line their pockets at the expense of their constituents.
- Further to point 3, Israel is waiting to negotiate with a group that represents the Arabs of Gaza and the West Bank (again, the Arabs of Israel are represented by Ra’am, which actually participated in the previous government). Go back to Sharon’s negotiations with Arafat during the Clinton administration. There was a deal on the table that Arafat could not accept, as it would expose him too much to his Hamas rivals. The same with discussions between Olmert and Abbas during Bush II. Olmert was desperate for a peace agreement, but Abbas could not take the chance given the extremists in Hamas.
- Your concern about the settlements is misguided. Sharon cleared settlers out of Gaza. Olmert was ready to do the same in the West Bank. (Elliott Abrams wrote an interesting book —-somewhat self-serving — on this entire period: Tested by Zion. It isn’t definitive history, but provides a useful chronology.) As Graeme Wood noted, some of the bedroom communities will remain in Israel after a two-state solution is reached, but many will be returned. Olmert’s proposal was to give the new Palestinian state land from Israel proper to compensate for settlements retained.
- The problem is how to ensure Israel’s security. Sharon and subsequent governments believed that sealing off the Gaza border was the answer. While it provided 17 years of relative peace and the ability to create the “Start-Up Nation,” October 7 proved it is not a long-term solution.
- The question is how do the Arabs of Gaza and the West Bank and any in Israel who prefer living in an independent Palestine create the civic institutions that would both represent the interests of the citizens of such a state AND be able to provide Israel with the security it demands.
- Further to point 3, the Arab states that have made peace with Israel were partners to what you claim is Jared Kushner’s goal of ethnic-cleansing. Why do you think this is? A few reasons: first, they view Iran and the creation of an Islamic Caliphate as a big risk to their continuing existences; second, they view both economic AND military partnership with Israel as in the best interests of themselves and their people; and third, they ultimately were fed up with intransigence on the parts of Hamas and Fatah/PA and refused to permit the cause of the Palestinians and Palestinian intransigence to obstruct broader improvement in the lives of the people of their countries.
- With respect to your views on the inability of the US government to influence Israeli politics, a few thoughts. (A) read Mearsheimer’s The Israel Lobby and please recognize it for the anti-Semitic garbage that it is. (B) read Walter Russell Mead’s The Arc of a Covenant, which soundly refutes the trope of the Israel Lobby’s power. (C) read Martin Indyk’s Master of the Game outlining exactly how Nixon and Kissinger pushed the Israelis to make a deal with Egypt and Syria. One lesson that you will get from that history is that peace requires leaders like Sadat. You tend not to find them as readily these days as the fatality rate on both sides of the ledger (Rabin was assassinated, too) is quite high.
- Consider inviting Dan Senor onto your podcast. He is pushing a new book, so he should look for opportunities to speak. He is extremely thoughtful and intelligent on contemporary Israel, and I would love to hear his reactions to your read on the Israeli right and the path you fear they are taking to an ethnically cleansed Jewish state.
- Read or reread Dara Horn’s People Love Dead Jews. I am rereading it now. It makes a strong but indirect case for the need for Jewish agency. Your issue with the inability of the US government to influence Israeli policy is both overdone and reeks of people hating Jews with agency. In this regard, the best thing I have heard since October 7 is Amare Stoudemire’s emotional message in the aftermath of October 7. (He’s the retired NBA basketball player and converted observant Jew.) I feel it in an incredibly visceral way:
I’ve been fed versions of this line — the total innocence of Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians — countless times. But the idea that the Israeli government includes bigots and extremists because the left forced it on poor Bibi is a new one to me. I’m happy to have this view aired — it isn’t without some good points — but I’m done engaging with people whose identitarian worldview is as Manichean and as crude as the neocons’.
Another listener on Israel:
Love the way you publish dissents, some of which are genuinely thoughtful. But there’s another approach to the Israel issue that seems to get no airtime: Legal Zionism. That is, if you want land, pay for it. That’s the way it was up until 1948. Those early kibbutzim — nobody can say that they are not the legal property of their owners. But then we had the Nakba and something like 750,000 people were robbed of their property. Note: this is not focusing on national borders, but rather on legal title. Israel isn’t going away, but it should “virtually” retreat to its legal borders of 1967. There will be no “right of return” — sorry, but that would be suicide for the Jews and everybody knows it. But there should be just compensation for the expropriated.
Another view:
One thing neither mentioned in the excellent interview with Graeme Wood, nor the reader responses, is the issue of riparian rights. Who controls the water has long been THE issue which has made the two-state solution so challenging. All negotiations have foundered on this point. Here’s a very useful explanation of this issue by Franklin “Chuck” Spinney, an American former military analyst for the Pentagon. In previous proposals the Israelis have made, no matter how “generous” they have appeared in terms of land mass, they have never included a genuine sharing of the water rights.
One more email for the week:
I feel that I owe you an apology. When you write a column I disagree with, I send a scathing reply. But when I agree with you, I nod my head, say to myself, “Andrew made some good points today,” and that’s it. Assuming that most other readers are like me, this means you end up barraged with harsh dissents and not with praise for everything you do well. Such is the life of a pundit on Substack, I suppose.
Still, I wanted to tell you: I agree with pretty much everything you wrote over the past several weeks: Hamas is evil; Israel has the right to defend itself; the death of innocent civilians on both sides is a tragedy; Biden is old and flawed but vastly superior to the alternative; the GOP is a clown car/horror show; and Agent Orange returning to the White House would be an unthinkable disaster. You are right about all those things.
This is a much more boring email than what I normally write to you, but I just wanted to say I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving and thank you for all your work. I look forward to your column every Friday.
The funny thing about me is that I’m more comfortable being yelled at than applauded. It may be my Catholicism, or just my own deep self-loathing and self-criticism as a gay man of my generation — but no one has sent me a harsh review that I haven’t already come up with myself. Each week, I feel I’ve failed. My sometimes crippling lack of self-esteem, along with my deep introversion, has defined much of my life. I know most of you won’t believe that, but it’s true. So thanks for the love. Maybe one day I’ll feel worthy of it.
And keep the dissents and non-dissents coming: dish@andrewsullivan.com.
