Well, hello, hello, welcome to Brokonomics. I am here today with Edward Dutton.

Hello. Evolutionary psychologist. Actually, you tell me what you are.

I suppose I'm an evolution psychologist.

Yeah, yes, but Professor Ed Dutton, a man who knows a thing or two about

intelligence because you know I've got this seeking suspicion that on Brokonomics

we are always talking about broken systems

things going wrong quite possibly there is a more fundamental cause to the ones that we've

been discussing up till now and that would be fun to get into.

So, so Ed, about 30 years ago I found myself in school and we were being taught that selective breeding

was a thing and that you know you could take dogs or sheep or cattle or whatever it is and you could breed in or out

certain characteristics that you wanted or get out ones that you didn't want.

Now one of the boys in the class he stuck his hand up and he said

does that apply to humans and he was told quite emphatically no and I sort of it was then me who sort of pushed back and said well surely it does because we're all animals and I was told emphatically no but I didn't get a good answer as to why so I've been waiting 30 years for an answer to that question.

In 1914 in Derbyshire, parents started withdrawing their kids from a school because they were concerned that the girls were being taught eugenics, and they thought this was too sexual

and now you're being told it doesn't exist. Of course it exists. We are animals,

we are an advanced form of ape and if you can breed dogs who are by the way very genetically similar to us in the overall scheme of things of course you can breed humans and the heritability of psychological traits on average is 0.5, which means it's 50, basically it means it's 50%

gene, 15% environment, and the heritability of intelligence, for example, is 0.8 in adults. of you can breed it. So 20% of my intelligence comes from my environment.

The big part of it is that you create it and why it's 0.8 in adulthood not childhood is that when

you're a child your parents are creating your environment for you and so they could be more

intelligent than you or less intelligent than you on average they're about the same but they could be more or less

what is there creating the environment or your school is creating the environment or whatever

whereas once you move away you an adult then you create an environment or whatever. Whereas once you move away, you're an adult,

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