Charlie Kirk & The Psychology of Evolution (#350)

Religion on the Mind

Religion, Spirituality, Religion & Spirituality

4.7 • 542 Ratings

🗓️ 18 September 2025

⏱️ 60 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this week’s Top of Mind segment, I address the Charlie Kirk assassination through cognitive distortions, calling out the all-or-nothing thinking that's turning him into either a blessed martyr or democracy's destroyer when the reality is more nuanced. I also push back against the dangerous idea that speech equals violence, pointing out that Kirk's murder serves as a stark reminder that actual bullets—not words—constitute real violence. For this week’s main episode, I’m going solo. I start by sharing how my own faith deconstruction included grappling with evolution. From questioning young earth creationism to eventually embracing evolutionary theory by my late twenties, and how evolution informs my therapeutic practice. Then, I go into how psychology has fully embraced evolutionary explanations across five key areas: attachment theory (which appears across species and helped our ancestors survive through bonding), shame (as an evolved social conscience that keeps us aligned with group norms), sexual jealousy (as mate-guarding behavior found throughout the animal kingdom), anxiety (as an overactive alarm system that kept our ancestors alive through hypervigilance), and depression (as either energy conservation during adverse conditions or analytical rumination for solving complex problems.) These evolutionary frameworks help reduce client shame by showing that their struggles aren't personal defects but rather ancient survival systems that are now mismatched to our modern world. In the Patreon-only portion, I dive deeper into attachment research with macaques, the neuroscience of shame and anxiety across species, mate-guarding behaviors from chimpanzees to humans, and two competing theories of depression—the hibernation model and analytical rumination hypothesis. Episodes Mentioned: Episode with Adrian Wyard | To Accept Theistic Evolution (#2) To Trust Science (#28) Evolution Myths & Long Lifespans in Genesis (#36) Who’s Afraid of Evolutionary Psychology? (#47) ___________________________________________ Follow Dan on IG: www.instagram.com/dancoke/ Or Twitter: twitter.com/DanKoch Faith deconstruction resources: www.soyouredeconstructing.com/ Join the Patreon for exclusive episodes (and more) every month: patreon.com/dankoch Email about the "sliding scale" for the Patreon: youhavepermissionpodcast@gmail.com YHP Patron-only FB group: tinyurl.com/ycvbbf98 Website: www.dankochwords.com/yhp.html Join Dan's email list: www.dankochwords.com/ Artwork by sprungle.co/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey everybody, here I am Wednesday morning the day before this comes out.
0:09.6	You can probably hear in my voice that I've got a significant cold.
0:13.1	It's definitely impacting the sound of my voice and impacting my energy level and mood and sort of, as I'm sure it does for most people,
0:26.6	it affects my cognitive abilities as well. But I have had some specific requests to address
0:33.8	the Charlie Kirk assassination from some listeners. And I want to try and do a little bit of
0:41.6	that, and I'm going to try and keep it to some psychology stuff. In fact, I'm going to mostly
0:46.5	just frame this around the concept of cognitive distortions or thinking errors that I talk about
0:52.7	every once in a while on the show.
0:55.0	Before I get into that, though, I don't always talk about political violence.
0:59.5	Like, this is not a politics podcast.
1:02.3	That's something that I am happy about.
1:04.9	I don't want it to become a politics podcast.
1:06.8	We talk about politics on Generation Gap Culture Hour with Josh and Tony.
1:11.0	That seems like the place to do it.
1:13.7	And for those who don't really want to hear the three of us discuss those politics,
1:18.3	you know, you can skip those and not have to be sort of bombarded with politics all the time
1:23.7	on this show.
1:24.4	I try and focus more on psychology, religion, and spirituality. And I'm happy
1:29.4	to do that. So I'm not talking about this just because it's an incident of political violence or a big
1:37.1	political event. I think it is. It may turn out to be quite a quite an important, you know, sort of moment in American politics. I don't know.
1:47.4	I don't have a crystal ball. Speaking of cognitive distortions, I am not a fortune teller.
1:52.1	I cannot predict the future. I don't know the future. A lot of people are, you know, acting like they do in a situation like this.
	...

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