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The Good Fight

Steve Stewart-Williams on Nature vs Nurture

The Good Fight

Yascha Mounk

News

4.6907 Ratings

🗓️ 28 May 2025

⏱️ 68 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Steve Stewart-Williams is a professor of psychology at the University of Nottingham Malaysia, and author of The Ape That Understood the Universe (2018), Darwin, God and the Meaning of Life (2010), and The Nature-Nurture-Nietzsche Newsletter on Substack.  In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Steve Stewart-Williams explore the nature vs nurture debate within psychology, how much impact IQ has on an individual’s success in life, and whether evolutionary psychology can explain politics. Podcast production by Mickey Freeland and Leonora Barclay. Connect with us! Spotify | Apple | Google X: @Yascha_Mounk & @JoinPersuasion YouTube: Yascha Mounk, Persuasion LinkedIn: Persuasion Community Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

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0:02.0

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0:21.5

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0:30.8

Maybe 10, 20 years ago, you would see a lot of headlines that were saying,

0:33.8

okay, we've discovered an IQ gene or a gay gene or a warrior gene, longevity

0:41.2

gene, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And the vast majority of those have failed to replicate. So they

0:46.7

were false positives due to studies that had samples that were too small, basically. But what

0:53.4

does seem to be replicating now is that

0:56.0

just hundreds of thousands of genes, pantry return almost every complex trait that you can imagine.

1:03.0

And now the Good Fight with Yasha Monk.

1:19.6

One of the fields of social science that I don't have any formal training in and didn't do a lot in my formal studies, but that I've become increasingly interested in is psychology.

1:25.6

There are just fundamental questions about human beings, about the social world, and about politics,

1:33.3

but I think are best answered from a psychological point of view.

1:40.3

And that's one sub-stack that I've been reading with great pleasure on psychological questions.

1:47.8

It is called the Nature, Nurture Nietzsche newsletter written by Steve Stewart Williams,

1:55.7

who is a professor at the University of Nottingham in Kuala Lumpur. And so I invited him to a podcast to talk about

2:03.6

all of the big questions in psychology. Questions like, what really explains our universal

...

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