Rationally Speaking #216 - Diana Fleischman on "Being a transhumanist evolutionary psychologist"

Rationally Speaking Podcast

New York City Skeptics

Society & Culture, Skepticism, Science, Philosophy

4.6 • 787 Ratings

🗓️ 3 September 2018

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

On this episode of Rationally Speaking, professor Diana Fleischman makes the case for transhumanist evolutionary psychology: understanding our evolved drives, so that we can better overcome them. Diana and Julia discuss sexual preferences, jealousy, and other drives -- how immutable are they? How do we know? And how would it change society, if we could change the distribution of people we find attractive, or normalize new relationship structures such as polyamory?

Transcript

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0:00.0	This episode of Rationally Speaking is brought to you by Stripe.
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0:25.8	Learn more at Stripe.com.
0:45.6	Welcome to Rally speaking, the podcast where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense.
0:50.5	I'm your host, Julia Galef, and I'm here with today's guest, Professor Diana Fleischman.
1:08.8	Diana is an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Portsmouth, where her research focuses on hormones, sexuality, disgust, and she's recently been working on a book about how we evolved to train each other with rewards and punishments and how to make the best use of that. Diana, welcome to rationally speaking.
1:11.7	Thanks for having me on, Julia. So one thing that I find refreshingly unusual about you in the field of evolutionary psychology
1:18.2	is that you are what you call a transhumanist evolutionary psychologist.
1:23.0	Can you explain what that means, why you use that label?
1:26.2	Sure. So when I was reading Nick Bostrom,
1:30.4	he says something to the effect that if we were going to, if somebody was going to do an
1:36.3	experiment where they were going to do the process of evolution, where those that didn't have
1:41.6	the right adaptations were going to die, and those that did were going to survive,
1:45.2	it would never pass any kind of ethical scrutiny.
1:47.8	And I think that we are machines.
1:50.2	We are machines that are intended.
1:52.7	Our psychology and our physiology have adaptations for us to survive and reproduce.
	...

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