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In this episode of Heterodox Out Loud, John Tomasi speaks with Carole Hooven, Ph.D., Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and Fellow at Harvard Psychology. We talk with Carole about Sex & Gender, her cancellation story, and the role of scientists in fostering a free speech culture.

Episode Transcript

John Tomasi: Today on Heterodox Out Loud, we'll be talking with Carole Hooven, an evolutionary biologist. Let's see what Carole has to say about these things. Carole Hooven, welcome to Heterodox Out Loud.

Carole Hooven: Thank you so much for having me.

John Tomasi: It's lovely to have you here. I know it's a struggle finding your way around the city this morning.

Carole Hooven: The GPS doesn't work on the tall buildings.

John Tomasi: Which you ran.

Carole Hooven: I did. Well, I ran before.

John Tomasi: Yeah. Very impressive.

Carole Hooven: Not on the way.

John Tomasi: Very impressive. Going back even further into your life before this morning.

Carole Hooven: Yeah.

John Tomasi: So, you went to Antioch College in Ohio?

Carole Hooven: Yeah.

John Tomasi: Are you from Ohio?

Carole Hooven: No, I'm from the Boston area.

John Tomasi: Oh, really?

Carole Hooven: Yeah.

John Tomasi: So, you went out and then you came back.

Carole Hooven: I went out and I should say one of the cool things about Antioch. So, my parents met at Antioch and they ended up canceling me, I should just mention.

John Tomasi: Wow, you're right off the bat. Here we go.

Carole Hooven: Here we go. Yeah, they changed a lot. But it was amazing.

John Tomasi: You mean your parents canceled you or Antioch canceled you?

Carole Hooven: Antioch canceled me, my talk that I was supposed to give to an alumni group. But I went to Antioch. I went to college at Antioch because, first of all, I didn't have a high school diploma. And that was one of the places that would let me in within one, without one. Sorry.

John Tomasi: Why should I not have a high school diploma?

Carole Hooven: I blew off most of my senior year.

John Tomasi: Oh, my God. So did I.

Carole Hooven: Really?

John Tomasi: I was allowed to graduate from high school only because I agreed to sweep the whole gym floor on the morning of graduation.

Carole Hooven: Wait a second. I was allowed to come back and get my diploma after I passed. I flunked English in gym. And so I was allowed to get my diploma once I passed my first English class at Antioch. And if I did this awesome 10-day, I decided I had a bunch of options of how I could fulfill my gym requirement. I did a 10-day canoe trip on the Algonquin River before, you know, with a bunch of freshmen. And that was amazing. And then I could go back to Weston High and get my diploma.

John Tomasi: That is hilarious. You blew off high school for the most part?

Carole Hooven: Yeah, almost entirely.

John Tomasi: Wait, what were you doing?

Carole Hooven: I was playing sports.

John Tomasi: Well, that's healthy. I was not engaging in healthy activities, shall we say. At Antioch, where did you study?

Carole Hooven: So Antioch had a co-op program, has a co-op program. I was a psych major. But what really I was really excited about was that half of the year I could go have interesting jobs. So I taught autistic kids. I worked with schizophrenic adults. I lived on a kibbutz in Israel. I worked at a government agency in DC. So I had all these amazing jobs. And all the students there had these kind of interesting jobs. So when we'd come back into the classroom, people had all this real life experience. And that's part of what really helped develop my thirst for travel and curiosity about the rest of the world, basically. And that's what ultimately all that travel brought me to an evolutionary point of view to understand human nature.

John Tomasi: So how did you how did you end up going to Harvard?

Carole Hooven: Without a high school diploma?

John Tomasi: Yes. Yes.

Carole Hooven: So, yeah, it's an interesting trajectory, obviously. I worked for 10 years in financial software, technical support, basically. And that was...

John Tomasi: Where was that?

Carole Hooven: That was around...

John Tomasi: Cambridge. Okay.

Carole Hooven: And that was really... I was into computers. So this was... I graduated from college in 88. And I was excited about computers and just wanted to do something with computers. So this is the job I got. But really, that was 10 years for me to kind of try to get my shit together. And I didn't completely... I don't think any of us do. But I came a long way. You know, I had an apartment and I had a job and learned what I wanted to do. And it was not just have a regular job. I wanted to learn about the world and human nature. And so I applied... I read this book by Richard Wrangham about the origins of male violence. And he used an evolutionary perspective to focus on that question and to try to answer that question. And I also read Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. And I read a lot and ultimately decided I wanted to use an evolutionary perspective to understand how we came to be who we are and to understand ecological and cultural diversity. Interesting. That's what I learned from... was exposed to in all the traveling. And so I applied to Harvard and got rejected.

John Tomasi: And... You said no high school degree, so...

Carole Hooven: Well, no, because I had the Antioch...

John Tomasi: Right. ...thing. That was an attempt at a joke.

Carole Hooven: Yes. Sorry. So, I mean, I did well at Antioch. I was really turned on. And so that helped. But I didn't have any experience. So I didn't have any research experience. So once I got rejected, I went up to Harvard, which I lived pretty close to, met with a bunch of people. And I just said, and I had already quit my job. And I was like, you don't understand. I quit my job. This is what I want to do. What do I have to do? What do I have to do to get in? So Richard Wrangham offered me a job out in Uganda, managing the Kibale Chimpanzee Project and studying, and at the same time, doing research on wild chimps out there. So that is what... So I did that. I loved it. Became really interested in sex differences because there were so many parallels to humans in the chimpanzees. And so I reapplied from Uganda and ended up getting in. So what was your dissertation about? So I've been thinking a lot about my dissertation lately. I just want to give a plug for an article I just wrote for Quillette, which is now being edited. So Jonathan Kay, now you have to publish it. So he's editing it right now. It's on sex differences in chess. Nice. And this is related to my dissertation. So there are huge sex differences in chess. And there is now a... And there is a female category where women can win titles like women's champion at much lower rankings and much lower ratings than men. Interesting. And there's like 10% of players are women. Anyway, I'm bringing this up. So I was exploring the reasons why this is the case. My dissertation was on sex differences in cognitive ability and the relationship to testosterone and looking at this from an evolutionary perspective. And that field is called behavioral endocrinology. So that exact question is... I was actually doing my research in cognitive neuropsychology. So I was in the psychology department. I started out in biological anthropology. That department is now human evolutionary biology. But it is looking at the relationship between hormones and behavior. So that is part of behavioral endocrinology. But it's also psychology. So the dissertation ended up being on mental rotation. So the dissertation ended up being on mental rotation, which is a fundamental aspect of human cognition.

John Tomasi: And it's called mental rotation. I just said it sounds like something Heterodox Academy would want to do, like turning our minds in different ways.

Carole Hooven: Yes. Yes. No, that's part of what it is. So it's actually fascinating. It sounds boring. But it's the largest cognitive sex difference there is. And no one knows about it. And most people do not appreciate how important spatial ability, which mental rotation is an important component of spatial ability.

John Tomasi: So what is mental rotation?

Carole Hooven: So first, let me say something about spatial ability. So you've got spatial ability and verbal ability, say. These are two fundamental aspects of human cognition. So I got totally lost coming here. And that's navigation skill, which I didn't.

John Tomasi: I would say that's a lack of navigation skill.

Carole Hooven: Yeah. Well, that's poor navigation skill.

John Tomasi: You could have excellent navigation skill.

Carole Hooven: But nonetheless, it is navigation skill. It's just bad on my part. Usually, I'm very good at navigation. But I was relying on the GPS, which doesn't work, as I mentioned earlier.

John Tomasi: I'm aware. I'm aware. We were emailing.

Carole Hooven: Yeah, because I've told you that now about 50 times. So that's one component of spatial ability, is you just take it for granted that when you walk from your office back home, say, you have a mental map of where to go and you know where to go. And if there were to be construction somewhere, you'd have to figure out how to navigate. And that's spatial ability. And we use it all the time. And that's just part of it. So mental rotation is something that we also use often. So I'm just going to hold this cup up. If you were to imagine what this would look like upside down, where would the handle be pointing? So what you likely do in your head is you do – this is fascinating, actually – you don't regenerate an image of the object at the new angle. You actually imagine rotating it through space unless you're highly unusual.

John Tomasi: So why would you do that?

Carole Hooven: One interesting thing about mental rotation is you're relying on the same cognitive processes that you would to do it physically.

John Tomasi: Interesting.

Carole Hooven: And that's interesting. So that's sort of an efficient economical adaptation, in a sense. And so mental rotation is the ability to manipulate objects in your head and sort of imagine what they would look like from other angles. And this is important for all kinds of reasons. But men consistently, males, boys and men, do in fact blow women away at this specific task. So it wasn't the basis of my dissertation. I could go on and on about it, and you don't want me to. But that's what I did for my dissertation. So back to the chess thing. So let me show you.

John Tomasi: So in the dissertation, you're thinking about cognitive – sorry, mental rotation. And testosterone.

Carole Hooven: So I measured – I took saliva samples and measured testosterone.

John Tomasi: So you're looking at – were you looking at sex – you were talking about sex differences even then.

Carole Hooven: Yes.

John Tomasi: Those are controversial ideas even when you were doing them back then.

Carole Hooven: Well, yes.

John Tomasi: Were you aware that these are controversial questions you're asking? I mean – Or was it kind of like, I'm just a curious person.

Carole Hooven: I was a curious person. I became excruciatingly aware, shall we say, once the Larry Summers controversy happened, which was right as I finished – I think I just defended my dissertation. And this was when he made public statements about sex differences in cognitive ability, possibly contributing to the underrepresentation of women in certain STEM fields, which – At the tail end or at the high end, right? Yeah, that's right.

John Tomasi: And – Because there's more variations among males than there is among females, so there could be a tail end differentiator.

Carole Hooven: Yeah, so this is something I discussed in the chess article, and this is the idea that for many male traits, I think most male traits – and I'm not 100% sure about that, but I believe it's most male traits. The variation or the sort of – if there were to be a bell curve, the bell curve would be flatter than the female bell curve, so there's more variation around the mean for male traits, meaning you have more males at the high end of performance or ability and more at the low end. So you have more cognitive and behavioral and other kinds of issues, and also you have more geniuses and more males who score very well or are more apparently capable in, like, theoretical physics. You know, there are large sex differences out on those tails. And, of course, Harvard, MIT, et cetera, are picking from that extremely – because they can – that extreme end of the high end of the distribution. So there is a sex difference out on that high end, even if there isn't a sex difference in the mean, which often there isn't. Often there is a difference in the mean. But the point is it is – and there are interesting reasons why males tend to be more variable in all of these traits. But that's what Larry Summers was talking about. He got into big trouble for that. But I supported him, and I supported him publicly, not in total agreement, but basically in agreement. But that's not – wasn't relevant. I just thought, look, this is a totally reasonable idea. It's got to be – if you want to understand how to fix a problem, if it is a problem, you need to understand the causes. And so I supported him. And then I heard it from a few senior faculty members, not in any kind of really harsh way, but I definitely got the idea that this was the wrong opinion, which made me more interested in pursuing my research.

John Tomasi: Let me just go back a little bit. So you graduated from high school successfully eventually, went to college, got a PhD from Harvard. You started teaching at Harvard as a lecturer.

Carole Hooven: Yeah.

John Tomasi: Do you remember your first class?

Carole Hooven: Yes.

John Tomasi: What was it?

Carole Hooven: Evolution of Human Sex Differences.

John Tomasi: Wow. Right from the beginning. You walked – so you walked onto campus and did this.

Carole Hooven: Well, I was on campus because I just got my PhD, and I had been teaching as a graduate student, and I loved – I loved it. Loved it.

John Tomasi: So say the name of the course again.

Carole Hooven: Evolution of Human Sex Differences.

John Tomasi: Wow.

Carole Hooven: And the course I had spent the most time as a teaching fellow in was sex. Now, I can't remember the real name of it. It was B29, co-taught by Richard Wrangham and Marc Hauser, but I cannot know. It was like Evolution of Human Behavior or something. They say that one-word course titles have this ability to draw people. Sex probably is one of the higher – Well, yeah, that's just what the students called it. But I loved it. I taught that for years. I taught a bunch of different courses.

John Tomasi: What was your experience like teaching in the early years?

Carole Hooven: I'm going to start crying.

John Tomasi: Do you remember teaching your first class?

Carole Hooven: Well, I remember teaching the first – yes, the Evolution of Human Behavior because I had over 100 people come to take a 12-person course.

John Tomasi: Wow.

Carole Hooven: Partly because Larry Summers had just blown everything up at Harvard and people were interested in sex differences, and I had already had this course prepared. And it's looking – because I'm not teaching anymore. We were talking about that this morning, and that makes me sad. It's just such a tremendous privilege, and it is fun. It is interesting, and it's fun. You're a guide, you know, you get to guide people in how to think clearly and entertain different kinds of ideas and learn the facts and how to apply them and figure out what they mean and talk to each other. And, yeah, I loved it. I loved it.

John Tomasi: I'm going to read something you wrote about this. It's about your teaching and about – I mean, you know, I'll just share with our audience who may not know that Carole was an extremely highly regarded teacher at Harvard, one of the best – one of the most popular and successful teachers. But this is something you said. I was going to quote you about your experience with some students. He said, quote, student after student has told me about how learning about this topic, behavioral endocrinology, has helped them personally. Gay students who've gained the confidence to come out to their families. Trans students armed with knowledge about how hormones shape behavior and impact gender transitions. And students with differences, disorders, variations on sexual development who can make better decisions about treatments. Students also tell me that learning about the science of sex and gender has increased their understanding and empathy, especially towards those who are different in terms of sexuality, biology, and gender expression. Close quote. So you've had those experiences, you know, with learning – this topic, this difficult set of issues that you have been devoting your career towards working on has had a lot of positive effects. Among your students, as you describe it. And I've heard that independently from friends of mine who've taken classes with you or colleagues of yours.

Carole Hooven: Oh, I didn't know that. You're going to tell me about that.

John Tomasi: Yeah. So it's – you know, this is something that you're known for having had that effect on a lot of young people at Harvard. In 2021, you published your book, Tea, The Story of Testosterone, The Hormone That Dominates and Divides Us. I love the subtitle.

Carole Hooven: I should have called it balls. I wish I'd called it balls.

John Tomasi: That goes with your sex class. Can you say a bit about that book, about it dominates and divides us? What does that mean?

Carole Hooven: So first of all, I want to say that quote. So behavioral endocrinology is about the interaction between the endocrine system, which is basically all of our hormones, and the nervous system. So there's a lot there. There's like oxytocin and trust. There's cortisol and stress. There's testosterone and estrogen and sex and reproduction. There's a whole suite of hormones that have different effects, and I'm interested in all of it. But I focused, I spent a lot of time on sex and gender, and I just want to say those kids that I described want the truth. They really do want it, and they might push back, and they might be offended, but ultimately, they're smart, curious, good kids, and they really do appreciate when people tell them the truth and encourage them to do that.

John Tomasi: But does that mean that when you started teaching, were students not walking on eggshells in those days?

Carole Hooven: Oh, no, no.

John Tomasi: Were they always walking on eggshells for these topics?

Carole Hooven: No.

John Tomasi: So you saw some changes?

Carole Hooven: Yes.

John Tomasi: How many years have you taught at Harvard?

Carole Hooven: I started teaching in 01, I think, as a grad student.

John Tomasi: So 20 years?

Carole Hooven: Yeah.

John Tomasi: And you saw changes in those 20 years?

Carole Hooven: Yes.

John Tomasi: Do you want to say more about that?

Carole Hooven: Yes. Sure. And it's, I don't, yeah, I guess it was around 2015 that I started feeling, what was happening was I had a lot of students, sorry, women, gender, and sexuality, but I had a lot of students who were in women, gender, and sexuality as a concentration or a secondary field or who had adopted this particular way of thinking. And these, there are a lot of, I'll just say, gender diverse students or gender minority kids who are attracted to that kind of concentration because it gives them a home and a feeling, a real feeling of community, and they're able to focus on issues that are of particular importance to them. So I understand it, but the narrative was that sex and sex roles, et cetera, are purely social constructions. But they also wanted to understand something about the science or at least hear what was being said about it. So I had more students like that who I, and I really did enjoy having them because I enjoy the pushback and I think it's good for everybody to be exposed to, but there was more of that. And then students, a few students, a small number started complaining about the papers I was assigning, that there would be term, I got one student was very upset that one of the papers they read that could have been seen by her roommate used the word risk to describe something. The sentence was like risk of being transgender, blah, blah. And so there was a lot of upset about that.

John Tomasi: I was told- As though there was something pathological about that.

Carole Hooven: Yes. But risk is also just a statistical term. I understand. Yes. And then I was also told by some of these same students who belong to various undergraduate clubs that have the same kind of theme that they could instruct me about the appropriate language to use in the classroom. I also teach about individuals who have conditions that might give them some masculine characteristics, but they are in fact female. And part of understanding endocrinology is knowing that this is a female person who is masculinized, so I'm using the pronoun she, and someone was extremely upset that I had misgendered this person who was the subject of a scientific paper who had been masculinized, so that kind of thing. And I had never heard any of that before, I think, 2015. But this was useful to have in the classroom, but things were changing.

John Tomasi: So I think something really important happened just in that period you're talking about. I want to see if you can find out a little bit more about what it was. So this fields of study start to arise, women, gender, gender and sexuality studies, for example. And I gather that those fields of study provide a platform for people to start asking new questions and to push back on some established science, perhaps. So for example, you said earlier in this conversation that it's well known that there's more distribution among males than among women, but according to females, but according on what dimension of evaluation? So if we're saying there's more variation among males always on every dimension of human behavior or on some measures that some dimensions of human behavior that, let's say, male researchers picked out as being the most relevant. So you have this idea about this new field of study to say, we're going to be a platform now to improve our understanding about distributions across sex differences.

Carole Hooven: Yeah, to critically analyze the research. So it begins, I think it begins.

John Tomasi: It's like a feminist criticism.

Carole Hooven: That's right.

John Tomasi: I hope and I like to think that those fields begin in that kind of a way of like searching for truth.

Carole Hooven: Yes.

John Tomasi: And then something happened, right, where it starts, you said, you used the term, I think the narrative was, and describe a narrative that people would bring with it to your class. Classrooms, they would be critically, they'd be now looking out for objections to some paradigm or some set of truths they already held walking into the class, rather than bringing with them new questions to enrich the conversation.

Carole Hooven: Something like that, I've experienced that too. So you said looking for the truth, and I would like to believe that that is true, but I don't. I think it is what I have experienced is looking to, for alternatives to the idea that what we are observing has biological underpinnings. So that there is a bias that motivates, in my view, that motivates a lot of this feminist criticism is a resistance to that framing. And that is, you know, to some extent, that's healthy if we are in the field not questioning our findings as we should, or we're not looking at alternative explanations as we should, or appreciating. And I think, you know, it's important to appreciate how culture and genes interact to produce behavior, right? That's the most important thing, and if that is not being done in an explicit way, then that does need to improve, and I think it has improved, and I think that's one benefit of this feminist criticism. But there is an assumption that if something like human sex differences have strong biological underpinnings, then they will be more resistant to change, then this suggests that they're good, and that they're sort of fixed. And both of those things are false. So I think, and also, what we want in science is the truth. It doesn't, it's not relevant to our discovery whether the implications are, you know, someone, some would think they're positive, some might think they're negative for society. That's not the point of science. But we're moving towards a direction where we're only allowed to research and publish and teach science that some people think is good for society, or at least doesn't, quote, harm the dignity of marginalized groups. And that's a form of science that relies on the ideological idea that human variability, that humans are extremely flexible in our identities and the way we can be in the world. And it resists the idea that there might be a biological, I'm not sure. Well, those two things are not intention. There can be biological underpinnings, but extreme, and extreme flexibility. And that is my view. And that's what I try to explain in the book that I wrote is that there are different, something like predispositions. I don't want to, that's not a perfect term. Definitely natures is, I would like to say something like different natures on average, but I get a lot of criticism for that. But the book is about these differences on average that do have genetic underpinnings ultimately.

John Tomasi: Good, good. Yeah, so there's a, I'm a political, I do political philosophy, and there's a big distinction that philosophers often use. You can divide all the political philosophy into these two big branches. Thomas Sowell talks about this in his book, The Unconstrained Vision. And he says on one side, there's the constrained vision, which says that political philosophy and political ideals are constrained by a fairly fixed understanding of what human nature is like, that it's fairly, fairly inflexible. Yeah. And it has a selfishness, for example, built into it, and you can't overcome that. On the other big branch, what he calls the unconstrained vision, human nature is considered to be highly flexible, highly malleable.

Carole Hooven: That's my vision. Well, and so that's an issue. That's an evolution, that's what, how, what an evolutionary framework would predict.

John Tomasi: So I like what you're doing is you're, you're just reminding me that biology goes beneath all that.

Carole Hooven: Yeah.

John Tomasi: And says biology could be, could, could, biological facts could yield either of those views about the way human nature is.

Carole Hooven: It depends on the environment, social and ecological and all kinds of interactions.

John Tomasi: And so you just, you just, you just said a minute ago that your view is more that human nature is, is quite variable. Although the average is that differences between males and females, but in terms of the variability, it's going to be very large.

Carole Hooven: That's right.

John Tomasi: Which is usually considered.

Carole Hooven: It depends on what kind of traits you're looking at, but culture has such an enormous influence on the expression, on how these sex differences are manifested. So there's, you know, laws and social norms, which are, you know, so tightly linked with our, inherited biology and religions. All of this, you know, deeply, deeply affects, not just individual behaviors, but the way that the sex differences sort of appear in any given culture. But we always see men have higher sex drives, men want more sexual partners, men are more physically aggressive. Like the direction of the sex difference in these large and deep differences doesn't change, but the nature of the sort of aggression or the way that sexuality is expressed might change. And the size of the sex difference change, usually because male behavior changes, not female, interestingly.

John Tomasi: So, so I want to talk more about that to some extent. Well, we'll, we'll return to that. I think, which is just briefly tell us, tell us about the chronology of what, what events transpired after T came out. What just, I mean, I know it's a long, complicated chronology, but just what, what's the core of what, of what happened?

Carole Hooven: I wrote a great book, it's gotten great reviews. It's like, it's, it's, I've heard so many positive things about it and I'm really proud of it. And I had to take a year off unpaid and I was just a lecturer. And so I'm proud of it. And I thought I would, I taught all through COVID and I worked my butt off and I won a teaching award. So I thought.

John Tomasi: And I, I'll just interrupt to say that I, I know that Harvard has been encouraging instructors to produce more research. They're starting to search for, for, for instructors, not simply on the, on the dimension of excellent teaching, which you obviously had, but also encouraging. Lecturers to contribute to the intellectual life and the profound advancement of research, which you also did with this book. Okay. So I just want to, I just want to mention that.

Carole Hooven: Thank you. So I thought, okay, I'm going to be going back after two years away. So one year writing the book, one year during COVID, I'm going to be coming back. I had a new big office and I was so excited to have that. I had my book and you're moving on. Yeah.

John Tomasi: Moving on up.

Carole Hooven: And, but like weeks before, just a couple of weeks before I was to come back, I had gone. I did my first, I think it was my first TV appearance on Fox and friends and made some comments about sex, that it's binary. It's based on the kinds of gametes that animals are designed to produce. There are male and female, and this is totally consistent with respecting everybody's gender identity and using preferred pronouns. And these are just the facts of nature, facts of nature, which I was commenting on an article about how medical school professors are backing away from saying women and saying male and female because they're getting pressure from their undergrads. And so I said, this is not what should be going on. As science instructors, we should teach what we believe to be true. And we shouldn't back away from using certain terms and relying on certain concepts because people are offended by them. I just said, this is a disaster or something. And then I said, people are getting fired for saying this kind of thing. So I didn't get fired. I want to make that clear. I did not get fired. However, I was made totally miserable, like completely miserable. And a graduate student who held a certain position at the university launched a complaint or started a campaign. Well, so she was in my own department. I knew her and she happened to be, not happened, but this is important. This is an important piece of this story here. She held a role. She held a role as the director of the diversity, inclusion and belonging or diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging. I can't remember. Now, she was the director of that task force within our department. So she saw this thing on Fox News, tweeted it out and said that as said in the tweet, as the director of at Harvard's HEB, human evolutionary biology, diverse as the director of this diversity, inclusion and belonging task force. Of course, I am appalled and frustrated by the transphobic and dangerous was in there somewhere comments made by me. And the comics were specifically that there are two sexes.

John Tomasi: Yes.

Carole Hooven: Oh, and I also did say that the ideology seems to be that sex, something like sex is what you believe, that your sex is what you believe it is. But it's something that's a material, you know, in essence, a material reality and in your body.

John Tomasi: And I just want to mention also in your book, you repeatedly point out that genetic differences between the sexes are not necessarily deterministic. There's all kinds of, and you said it a minute ago as well, there's lots of room for all kinds of variability and decision making and norms. And being sex roles. I mean, that's the big things, you know, how you feel psychologically and how you express yourself in terms of your social role.

Carole Hooven: Any, like, in my view, anything goes. And so that we, the way to, I mean, my basic feeling is that if we want to solve problems of discrimination, et cetera, the way to do that isn't to twist the facts because that is going to fail. And it will turn people against the group that needs support here. And that is, in fact, what's happening. You want to stick to reality and then discuss the implications of reality in ways that can actually benefit people in terms of understanding their conditions and educating the public about various conditions. Increasing empathy and communication and sharing language and concepts, I think, is really important.

John Tomasi: Are you saying that science and understanding always improves the condition at the least well often the marginalized?

Carole Hooven: No, no, no.

John Tomasi: You sounded like you were getting close to that a minute ago.

Carole Hooven: What, no, what we need, this is a great question because there are different ways of, we could, religion is one vehicle or belief system that you could say improves people's lives, which in my view is not based on truth. So that's an interesting discussion. So since I'm not religious, I, and I am a scientist, my first priority is to get to the truth. It is what we do with that that matters. And in order for us to come together as a liberal democracy, this really gets me very, I'm kind of depressed about what's going on. people need facts. They need shared language. And just because I was on Fox news, like I want conservative religious Republicans to have the facts. Everybody's saying you can't go on Fox news because you're going to give them the facts and they're going to do the wrong things with it. I want to give them the facts and I want to do what I can to say we can have, these facts are real, but we can still be compassionate. We can still be caring human beings and we can, you know, this is my view, because. We're in a democracy. I disagree maybe with some of those conservative Republicans about a lot of things, but I want to be able to have conversations. And I think that is the only way that that is how science I think will ultimately move us forward in terms of social progress. It's not easy. It's not a straight line, but we're not going about it the right way right now, which is trying to suppress the truth or the science.

John Tomasi: And about your decision to speak on Fox and Friends, we had, I had Musa al-Gharbi, my colleague here at Heterodox Academy on the podcast recently. And Musa similarly said that if he wants to convince people, he wants to convince people who don't agree with him.

Carole Hooven: Right.

John Tomasi: Because it would be strange to be trying to convince people who already agree with you. Obviously, by definition, practically, you want to reach out to people and give them the facts and hope they'll use them in certain ways. Lots of stuff happened to you.

Carole Hooven: I should say that's not the only there was another major event that happened at Harvard that was perpetrated by the chair of another department where I was publicly accused of transphobia. But I don't want to go into that. But that was another that was that was the last awful part.

John Tomasi: And do you want to just do you want to characterize what your situation is now regarding Harvard?

Carole Hooven: So I went on leave from my co-director of undergraduate studies position, which was like really running the undergraduate program. I was unable in my last semester to teach my class, my big lecture class, because none of the graduate students, they took out a petition. The graduate student union took out a petition against me. And then none of them would agree to act as my teaching fellows for my class and I couldn't teach my class.

John Tomasi: So I just to be sure, just to be sure I understand that that moment. So graduate students, in my understanding, are often assigned a class to teach. If they choose not to teach the class, don't they just not, aren't they not paid? Don't they leave the program? Why do they get to decide?

Carole Hooven: They want, I didn't have a research lab. I was a teacher, an instructor and had this big administrative job, which was very demanding job. So I didn't have a lab. And if you have a lab and you're some big Harvard professor, you have a bunch of graduate students and they want to be your teaching fellows because they want to get in your good graces. And they can maybe do research with you or, you know, it's, and plus they don't have any choice. If you're in that person's lab, you have to do that. But I.

John Tomasi: Because they control, the lab director controls the funding so they can make the decision.

Carole Hooven: Well, the funding, it's complicated, but I don't, I didn't have any real power in the department.

John Tomasi: I'm just wondering how students could effectively boycott, graduate students could decide not to TA your class. My understanding is that graduate students are, as I said, are assigned a class.

Carole Hooven: Not in our department. They generally, yeah, not, I don't know if it's Harvard or just my department, but that's not how it works. But that's another little.

John Tomasi: They have some choice.

Carole Hooven: But if you're a graduate student in a particular lab by default, you just will TF for your professor. But I always had, you know, plenty of people available generally. And now I had none for the first time ever. So I taught a seminar. So everything had already come out in public. I mean, it got a lot of international press. And now I'm transphobic. So I felt very uncomfortable on campus. I felt extremely uncomfortable in my department. I was quite, became quite depressed and went through some sort of existential crisis. I'm sorry. And it was good for me. It needed to happen. I did a lot of soul searching. But, and I taught this seminar. So I didn't have any TFs. It was, I think, the best, most satisfying course I've ever taken. Because I shared with my students what was going on. I had them read about transitioning and, like, different views on, like, the affirmative model of transgender care versus the sort of watch and wait model. So we, I was like, well, let's just get right into it. And I had them do presentations and have debates and sing songs.

John Tomasi: You did a seminar because you couldn't have TAs. So it's going to be a small class now.

Carole Hooven: Yeah.

John Tomasi: So what were you, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you. You were singing, they were singing songs. What was that about?

Carole Hooven: We had, this was the greatest group of students. And, yeah, I had students before their presentations. I was like, what's your talent? What do you like? And we, they would sing. They would tell, say, poetry. They did all kinds of different things. Because it warmed, it created a community in the classroom so that we had this trust. So that when we got into these controversial issues, everybody was, we were working as a team and we trusted each other. And it was so great. And then I had them all over to my house and we did these great final presentations and we just had the best time. They were all seniors. And it was so effective and productive for all of us. It was like life-changing, I think, for everybody. And these are students who chose to take this class in the eye of the storm. They wanted to take my big hormones and behavior lecture. They couldn't. I had to, you know, reject a huge or a lot of people. And then I chose seniors.

John Tomasi: Fascinating.

Carole Hooven: And we had, yeah, we had a great time.

John Tomasi: So this, undergrads still are, you know, really eager for that kind of experience.

Carole Hooven: But the grad students thought this is dangerous. I am dangerous.

John Tomasi: At Heterodox Academy, we do big national surveys of a bunch of different dimensions. We call it the Campus Expression Survey. And one of our consistent findings is that the cohort and the academic hierarchy that are least likely to, that are least open-minded about some of these academic freedom issues are the graduate students.

Carole Hooven: And I should say, it wasn't all of them. But I think most, a lot of them felt they had to go along with whatever the leadership of the grad student union or the head of the DEI in my department.

John Tomasi: So you taught that class. Is that the last class you taught at Harvard?

Carole Hooven: Yeah.

John Tomasi: And in 2023, you wrote this fabulous article that I just absolutely love.

Carole Hooven: Thank you.

John Tomasi: It's called Academic Freedom is Social. Academic Freedom is Social Justice, Sex, Gender, and Cancel Culture. It was in the Archives of Sexual Behavior. I think it was a special issue on cancel culture. Is that right?

Carole Hooven: It was one of, I think, four articles on cancel culture. So scientists. And science in particular. I've only read your piece like three times. It doesn't matter. Yes. I think all in the sciences and who had experiences being, quote, canceled in some form for their views on sex and gender.

John Tomasi: So in that piece, which I highly recommend to all of you, it tells Carole's story, but it also just dives into some of the underlying issues in a way that is philosophically sophisticated and also just teaches some biology as well. So it's a fantastic piece in a bunch of different ways.

Carole Hooven: Thank you.

John Tomasi: In that piece, you open up by talking about an op-ed written by an undergraduate, I believe, at Harvard, who wrote this piece saying that academic justice is more important than academic freedom.

Carole Hooven: Sandra Korn.

John Tomasi: Sandra Korn.

Carole Hooven: Sandra Korn.

John Tomasi: Sandra Korn, right. And tell us, what is academic justice?

Carole Hooven: So this is interesting because this was, what year was it?

John Tomasi: It's 2003. Well, her art, that article. I'm sorry, your piece was published in the spring of 2000.

Carole Hooven: Mine was 23, her, or yeah, 23, right?

John Tomasi: Yours was finally accepted in November 2022 and it came out in 2023.

Carole Hooven: All right. Thank you.

John Tomasi: I know your piece.

Carole Hooven: Thank you.

John Tomasi: I know your piece.

Carole Hooven: You know it better than I do. And Sandra Korn was an undergrad and I think hers was what, like 2009 or something? And she, and this neuro, so she was a, what, was she a woman, gender and sexuality student? I can't remember. And then Derek Lamb wrote a response and he was, he was philosophy and neuroscience.

John Tomasi: Korn's piece came out in 2014.

Carole Hooven: Oh, 2000, oh, that's perfect. Okay. Around the time.

John Tomasi: 2014. So she argued. We keep hearing that date, that those, those, those couple of years.

Carole Hooven: Yes.

John Tomasi: A number of my, a number of my guests have said, you know, things that around 2014, 2015. Jonathan Haidt has.

Carole Hooven: Yeah, Jonathan said as well.

John Tomasi: Talked about this time period. And. So this, this person says there's something about, called academic justice, which is more important than academic freedom. Can you say, what is that, what is that idea?

Carole Hooven: As far as I understand it, it is, reflects exactly what is happening today in science, in academic, in science, in the science journals and in other areas of life where the idea is that the truth, first of all, there is no objective truth. It seems that's redundant, but truth is this sort of questionable concept. Facts are, they're alternative facts. But the idea.

John Tomasi: Speak, speak, speak your truth, like this localized conception.

Carole Hooven: Yes. And so you.

John Tomasi: Which is a view. It's a philosophical view among others. But yes.

Carole Hooven: You asked me before, can, does science and discovery lead to something like social justice? And the answer is no, it just doesn't. We have to make that happen. People, but people have different ideas, of course, about what social justice is. And to me, part of justice is people having facts and having access to the truth. But the idea here is that there are certain facts that would be harmful to, quote, marginalized groups who, different kinds of minorities or people who are high on the victim. I mean, there are some real, actual, real victims. And then there are, like, pretend victims who wave their victim flags all over the place. But.

John Tomasi: But the, but the, but the, but the steel man, that, that position there, that the view is that there are some, well, I'm going to try it this way.

Carole Hooven: No, do, because I'm not.

John Tomasi: That there are some questions in science, some scientific questions should not be asked. Because.

Carole Hooven: Or you can't publish them. You can't publish your work if you get the wrong answers. So you shouldn't ask certain questions and you can only have the right kind of findings that, for instance, you know, if you found some racial group has a lower IQ than whites, you can't, that cannot be published. And there I might, there I think you do, there is something to talk about. So I shouldn't use that.

John Tomasi: Well, I want to ask you about some of those edge cases in a moment, but let me, let me try to formulate that better than I, than I just did. No, I did it badly. So there's some idea that there are certain scientific questions that we don't want to have asked because they undercut the idea of equality among citizens or that the results might undercut the equality of citizens. Is that the right way to say it? I'm thinking about your work, for example.

Carole Hooven: You're right. There's so, yes.

John Tomasi: If there are two sexes, the claim against you was that for you to say that for you publicly to say that there are two sexes would undercut the dignity, the self-respect of certain members of our population.

Carole Hooven: The idea is that would be harmful to trans-identified people.

John Tomasi: Right. So that's, that's, that's, that's, that's the example sort of on the table as it were. And so this person who says that academic freedom is less important than academic justice, that view would say, what, that it must be wrong that there are two sexes because that fact would undercut the dignity of certain people and dignity comes first. There's some tension between science and dignity, right? Where there's a priority relationship that maybe the basic, maybe the crux is a different view about where we start. Do we start with the protecting dignity and anything allowable by science?

Carole Hooven: Yes.

John Tomasi: Is that what it is?

Carole Hooven: Yes. So you, yes, dignity and respect is what has to be defended at all costs. And so if there is research that.

John Tomasi: Do you disagree with that?

Carole Hooven: A hundred percent. Because what is dignity and respect? First of all, people disagree about that. You, there's no disagreement. Like the truth is the truth. It exists no matter what we think about it. Dignity and respect is something that the, however we define it, it's going to be imposed by a certain group of people or a certain individual. So there I have a problem. So that's one problem. And the second problem is that if that is the priority, then we are unable to discover how the world works because some facts probably are threatening to people's dignity and we have to deal with that. So my view is discover what is true, communicate it as sensitively as possible, but give people the, you know, teach critical thinking, teach respect, teach understanding how people are different from you are and what their life experiences might be like and where they're coming from and why they hold their particular views and teach people how to have conversations. And that's what you are doing here, which is exactly what we need. So, yeah, I disagree that dignity and respect is, takes precedence over finding and communicating the truth.

John Tomasi: In your book and also in this article, one of the things I really admire about the work is that you describe, it's kind of an arresting vision of there being scientific facts that we need to know. And then there being, there being all this uncertainty and all this opportunity and responsibility to build the world we want to live in.

Carole Hooven: Yes.

John Tomasi: And you don't see that science and studying these things scientifically are undercutting the ideals, the ambition to be idealistic. On the contrary, science is kind of a, is a platform from which we now decide, we decide what true, what do we want to make of this world? What do we do with these facts? You're tearing up.

Carole Hooven: Well, you're just stating it beautifully. You're stating my views very elegantly.

John Tomasi: Well, you state them, you state them really elegantly yourself. In the same article, you say that many people, instead of reacting to the world, acting to statements that they find offensive with data and facts, instead of doing that, they respond with character assault and moral outrage. I wonder, I just, I wonder about the, I'm aware of that phenomenon. We, you know, we're all familiar with that across the academy, unfortunately these days. But, you know, we're at HxA, we're really interested in solutions to things, trying to diagnose the problem, not for the sake of complaining so much as diagnosing their problems for the, for the sake of trying to decide how to find out, how do we make our institutions better. Now, one of the things that I, I, when I read about your case and think about the things that happened with you and talk to my friends at Harvard and other places who've been following it, there seems to be- Dying to know who you're talking to. There seems to be, there, there, there's, there's, there's, there's something like an institutional failure. There's, there should be someone who, I don't want to see an adult in the room, but there should be some institutional role for someone to play. It shouldn't be you defending yourself or the, but there should be some third party, it seems like, at these, maybe a free speech on butts person or something like that, but someone who would be saying, wait a minute, people, this unruly conversation we're having on campus, which we like, is turned a corner now in the way that we're actually closing down the kind of thing we're trying to do. But there often seems to be no one in that role. And in your case, you, one hopes the department chair will stand up and make a certain kind of a statement. I think in the same article, you talk about the Bob, the Bob Zimmer reaction to Dorian Abbott, when Dorian Abbott, a professor at Chicago was under a petition assault by a bunch of students who didn't like something he said about admissions, his meritocratic conception of admissions and Bob Zimmer in response to this incident, as you report, simply posted the ideals of academic freedom. That's all he did without comment.

Carole Hooven: So that was, that was neutrality. It was a Kalven principle.

John Tomasi: Yeah. A different dimension of that. Can you say anything more about that? I'm not asking you to point fingers at people, but isn't there, we're trying to think.

Carole Hooven: I would love to, but I've been restrained.

John Tomasi: I don't know if you've been restrained. That's interesting.

Carole Hooven: Well, in terms of naming any individuals.

John Tomasi: So is there, is there, is there some institutional solution for this kind of situation?

Carole Hooven: Was there, please, please. So I just want to, I've been thinking about this because what happened at Chicago to Dorian Abbott was there was an uprising from undergrads, which is fine. They can protest. They did not like what he said. That's okay. They were making certain demands. Fine. Rejected. And it wasn't the, I had people who represented my institution make public comments about me, not just about my views, saying these views are wrong, which I think also would not have been okay for people in administrative positions to do, but calling me names, saying I'm basically, I'm a bad, dangerous person.

John Tomasi: And they were, and just to get this clear, they were speaking in their roles, as you mentioned that one student in the role as.

Carole Hooven: And the chair of another biology department.

John Tomasi: Which means speaking for the university.

Carole Hooven: Yes.

John Tomasi: And that principle neutrality, the Kalven report for Chicago that you just mentioned, that's a report that says the university is the home and sponsor of critics. It is not itself the critic of social norms. And that the unit of criticism is the individual, not the institution, which means not the university president, not the department chair. And in this case, we're, we're, you're being, your work's being attacked by people in official roles.

Carole Hooven: Yes. I would have been happy for other faculty or students to come along and say, hey, you've got your facts wrong, blah, blah, blah. That's exactly what we want. That is not what happened at all.

John Tomasi: Let me just pause on that point to be sure we, we get that. So you're imagining a university in which you published your book, you go on Fox News, and people push back against it. They come to you, they write you letters, they send you emails, they, they argue with you. They could say, I'm upset and offended by what you said. And they push you and you push back in conversation, using debates, using reason, using evidence. That's a university. One would hope that's what Harvard is all about. But as we know. And so that you're, so you're open to that, but what happened wasn't that. What happened was, so there was nothing about the officialness of the statements and the condemnation of you. Is that right? Because there's also just personal nasty.

Carole Hooven: Also, these are people I, that people who know me and know what, who I am and what my teaching is and what my beliefs are, didn't do anything.

John Tomasi: Right.

Carole Hooven: Not only did they not do anything, I was told specifically by a high ranking person in my department who I had worked with closely and been friends with for a long time, not to have any response, essentially to keep my mouth shut. And this, this was the devastating thing is that the people I expected, I just thought, of course, I'm going to get support from these people. The problem is, and this is why we have institutional failure, because people who would want to do the right thing are scared. The chair who sent this email around, which happened to be from a trans woman graduate student who said that what I was doing was transphobic, et cetera. This is the person in the DEI role, whatever. Well, it's complicated. This is the chair of the other department who sent an email around with complaints with her, and she had, had a forward to it. These people are scared. It's not that they don't like me. It's not that they disagree with me. That's not the motivation. The motivation is, oh my God, if I don't support this trans person, if I don't support this graduate student who says people are victimized, I will come out as the transphobe or as the person who doesn't care about social justice, because we get emails, we are constantly bombarded with DEI propaganda from the administration every day, pretty much every day. There's posters everywhere. There's, you know, we're supposed to go to trainings and, you know, everyone I think knows what I'm talking about, this is the messaging we get that we don't want to offend people. We, we want to protect vulnerable communities and respect everybody's dignity, but it's a university. So the, we're not getting emails every day on do your best research and search for the truth and hire people who are the best at doing that. Make your case with evidence and so forth. That's not what we're educated to do. The minute you step foot on Harvard, you're at Harvard's campus. You are getting the message that we are about diversity and inclusion, not truth seeking. And even though Veritas is all over the place, what is more, salient on campus is diversity inclusion initiatives. So that when something like what happened in my case happens, we had no, there's no, nothing for people to turn to, to say, okay, what do I do in this situation? Like there is at Chicago. So that's part of why we formed the council on academic freedom at Harvard. So this is a big group now of faculty. I'm very actively involved in it. Cause I still, Steven Pinker gave me a, position in his lab in the psychology department. That's an unpaid associate position, but I have an office. I'm there. I get to interact with people there. so this council is trying to figure out how to answer your questions. How can we create an environment where we, where students are expected to sometimes be offended and understand that that's part of learning and growing and how to engage with each other. And this became very interesting and somewhat of an emergency when the Hamas Israel crisis erupted, because now we have all these questions about what is the line between academic freedom and like hate speech or what's the role of the administration. So these are open questions, but that we're working on. And there's also questions about, academic freedom for students. What are their responsibilities? What are their protections? What are their obligations? Can they be doxed? Are they responsible? All that sort of thing. And, and the people at that, on the council, as you know, are HxA leading HxA members like Steve Pinker and Jeffrey Flier, who's an HxA board member. Who are both incredible. And, and they were both, that happens that the, the two of them were huge, a huge help and support to me as I was going through all of this. But I think what we have to do first is understand human nature. People behave in the way that they're, that the environmental incentives, or in this case, the university incentives would predict. The incentives are protect offended students. And that's what they felt they had to do. They were scared. So these big shot professors at Harvard have a long way to fall. They have a lot riding on, you know, their reputation is incredibly important to them. They want to get elected into this society and that they don't want to screw it up. I am dispensable, unfortunately. And that's what I learned. And that's why this is sort of devastating. There was nobody who had the balls, I will say, to stand up publicly for me and do the right thing. And that's disappointing. What can I say? Except, you know, people like Steve and Jeff were trying, but they're not in administrative positions. They're not in my department, but they provided a huge amount of support and we're happy to do so publicly. And there are some people, there are, I think a lot of people like that.

John Tomasi: So the culture of academic freedom had been eroded to such a point that people's incentives are no longer aligned with doing the right thing to protect a person like you exploring ideas. I mean, I don't know if those incentives ever were aligned. I don't know enough, I think, about the history of these kinds of issues at Harvard.

Carole Hooven: But I imagine that- Well, we both were saying that 2014, 2015, something started changing in some ways.

John Tomasi: Yeah, I mean like deep, yeah, deep history.

Carole Hooven: And that's the deeper history.

John Tomasi: Yeah. I know some of that, but the more recent history, there was something about a change in the culture that happened around that time. I want to go back, we're coming toward the end, but I want to go back around to this idea of other scientific questions that should not be asked. And so there is that idea that science should, the academic justice paradigm, which I guess says something like, protect the vulnerable first, and they know what the vulnerable are, and they know what protection means in advance somehow. And science should always be in service to this set of beliefs we have about the world.

Carole Hooven: That's right.

John Tomasi: And the other view says something like, do science, let curiosity be king. I'm not sure exactly what the boundaries here are going to be, but then we'll decide, we'll make the world that we will, knowing the facts, we'll then decide what world we ought to make and what obligations we have. But I want to ask you about the boundary is, do you think it's true that curiosity is king? Should any question, are there questions that should not be asked? For example, you know, work by Charles Murray and others about racial groups and IQ, possible IQ variation. Should those questions be asked?

Carole Hooven: Yeah, I think they should. Very, very carefully. Every scientific question should be asked carefully, even though some sort of special care. So I do, yes, yes, definitely. Because here I do think that certain kinds of findings could so easily be used to persecute a group of people who already have a certain set of very challenging issues.

John Tomasi: Okay. So, you know, you know what I'm thinking?

Carole Hooven: Yeah.

John Tomasi: That same statement that those questions should be asked with special care probably apply to questions about sex and gender.

Carole Hooven: See, there I disagree because...

John Tomasi: Tell me why.

Carole Hooven: Because... If there are statistical... Yeah, no, this is a very interesting question. So there are areas where women are just not as good at stuff as men. And there are areas where men just aren't as good at stuff as women. And that I think there are probably biological underpinnings and maybe certain kinds of limitations that are biological. And those questions are worth exploring. Even if we find that women's... So there's some research now showing that females actually do have lower IQs than men. And I've been interested in this because I just don't buy that we always come out at 100. And I thought... People who know a lot more about this aren't going to like the way I'm talking about it. But... So I'm not an expert here. But I have been very curious about whether and how the tests are constructed to ensure that men and women have... Males and females come out equal. I find that hard to believe because when females have cognitive advantages, they're relatively small. And the mental rotation thing and spatial ability is a large difference. So I'm not sure how everything just happens to work out to be equal. It may, it may not. If women have lower IQs on average by some... I think what the research is showing, like two or three points or something, that's really interesting. But if we do the science right, and the same would apply to race and IQ, I think, if we do it right and we teach it right, the implications are obviously, you don't know anything about any individual. And there are ways to increase IQ with environmental conditions. And it would seem like a very important fact to understand. But if we don't do it right, I think there can be very pernicious consequences. So it's a complicated question. I'm not 100% sure about the race and IQ thing. I am 100% sure. I think because I'm a woman and I'm the one who, you know, usually...

John Tomasi: Well, men too.

Carole Hooven: I mean, in terms of sex differences, it's not great to have everybody say that you're the more aggressive one. So, but these are things we have to understand. And I know the science well enough to know it doesn't threaten anyone of either sex. I think it enriches us. The race issue, again, it's not my area. So I think it's harder for me to be so confident in saying what Charles Murray probably thinks. Because I don't think he's a bad person. I don't think he has bad motives. I think he has excellent motives. And that he probably believes about race and IQ when I believe about sex differences.

John Tomasi: It's so difficult. And it's because that a vision that you describe so eloquently in your work about there being scientific facts, and then this separate question about the world we want to make, the world we ought to make. That division is very powerful, and we've talked about it a few minutes ago. And yet, scientific facts can be used in support of visions of the world that are inegalitarian, that are...

Carole Hooven: Of course, and they have.

John Tomasi: And they have. I'm thinking, for example, about a scientific question.

Carole Hooven: They have curiosity as king.

John Tomasi: Well, what if curiosity is not king, but rather there's politically motivated, explicitly politically motivated scientific research experiments? So the Nazis send their researchers up to the Himalayas, searching for proof of Aryan superiority, and they do all this research, and they come back with, yes, guess what? Our phrenology shows this.

Carole Hooven: So that's agenda-driven science.

John Tomasi: That's right. But it's also...

Carole Hooven: So it might be bad science. Maybe agenda-driven science is, by definition, bad science. I'm not sure. But what's your alternative to curiosity as king?

John Tomasi: What is the alternative? Well, I like the idea of curiosity as king, but I'm not sure it actually means much of anything because curiosity happens within a framework of institutions where there's funding for certain kinds of projects, not for other kinds of projects. There's teaching and training, but not for other kinds of projects. So we get kind of in this, once we're in the world of... Once we're in the idea of the world of our own creation, all these questions of what scientific facts are and what science, what the priority of science is, start to become harder to hold on to because...

Carole Hooven: Can you see that last sentence again?

John Tomasi: Well, that we're in a world of our own creation.

Carole Hooven: You mean where we're unlimited, which we never are. You mean sort of mentally don't have the constraints we have, but we always have cultural biases and constraints that are operating on some level.

John Tomasi: That's right. But I think, well, I'm not... And this is the biology is so difficult, isn't it? I'm trying to think is there's... Well, I'll just say what I'm thinking rather than I put it in too complicated of a way. I wonder about... I was struck by the point you made about people being worried that you went on Fox and Friends and made a comment about there being two different sexes, that some people might seize upon that statement, especially a person working at Harvard, and use it against certain justice ideals that you also might share yourself, that they would distort these things within a democracy. And I think people worry about that more generally, that perhaps within a democracy in particular, the role of science has to be scrutinized in some way, perhaps. I'm just trying this on.

Carole Hooven: Yeah.

John Tomasi: Because there is this possibility that people take the facts and use them for the creation of a world of... That's not an egalitarian world. That doesn't...

Carole Hooven: But who's not an egalitarian according to who? So say a bunch of conservative Republicans take the facts and try to outlaw gender transition, saying, look, you're either male or female, you can't change sex, and this is garbage, and we're going to outlaw any kind of medicalization of kids in terms of gender transitions. So do you think that... So I'm not... I don't agree with that kind of policy, but why do they not have the right to take those facts and use them to advance policies that they believe make sense for the world, given what they know, which might be just as much as I know.

John Tomasi: That's great. So my own personal view is that, in some sense, curiosity is king. And it's scientific questions that stir in people's minds are worth pursuing because they stirred in their minds. They're not going to all be equally interesting. They're not all going to lead to equally interesting research pathways. Some would be dead end. Some would just be mistaken premises, and they'll be proven wrong. But I think... I tend to think that there are not questions that should not be asked. In fact, any question that a human seriously wants to ask should be askable. Again, it doesn't mean that they're going to get traction and become big research projects. But I think we need to have people asking questions, stating facts as they find them.

Carole Hooven: Okay, but what about people... So this is the concern that universities have because we're almost entirely liberal, you know, faculty and administration. So if some conservative who's religious, say, takes the facts and wants to do something very different with them, that is why academic institutions want to stop the production of these kinds of facts because they don't agree with people who don't hold their political values. That is complete BS to me. I respect that someone is a conservative Catholic and has certain values and that this is what they think is right. They're a citizen of this country too.

John Tomasi: Right.

Carole Hooven: So I want to have a discussion with them. I want to try to persuade them that that view doesn't make sense for X, Y, Z reasons. But we can't even have the discussion if we can't produce the facts. They're going to get the facts some other way, just via their intuition. So to prevent the production and dissemination and discussion of those facts is a total disaster. And that's what we're seeing right now. It's a disaster. We're in some sort of disaster.

John Tomasi: Yeah, I agree with that. And I sort of wonder whether maybe part of this...

Carole Hooven: Sorry, that was a bit of a rant.

John Tomasi: No, I love that. I thought that was fabulous. I thought that was absolutely fabulous.

Carole Hooven: I always say I'm going to be totally calm when I come on and talk about this stuff and think more carefully and speak slowly.

John Tomasi: There might be something about why we have a division of labor within the university. There's science that's working on the scientific facts. And then there's all these fields like political philosophy and history that try to think, well, now, what are our norms and what are our values? That's the world of our creation and that side of creation.

Carole Hooven: Right.

John Tomasi: It's been so nice having you on the show. Before I leave, I just want to ask you, what's next for you? What projects are you working on now? You have a piece coming on, we hope it's coming out.

Carole Hooven: Well, I think it is coming. I hope so. It was way too long, so he's got to cut it down. So, yeah, I'm excited about this chess piece. This was a lot of fun and a lot of work to write, but I found it absolutely fascinating. Make it brief or so they have to publish it. Well, he's going to chop it up, which is always like my baby.

John Tomasi: So that's the piece you're working on.

Carole Hooven: So that's done. But I've been doing a lot of traveling, a lot of conferences, and most of that is over now. But I'm working on the proposal for my next book. Max, I will call you soon, I promise. And it's way overdue. And that has to do with what we're talking about. And so after writing Tea and talking to a lot of people about it and getting a lot of feedback, especially from men, a lot of feedback. Yeah, here's why I always tear up. And that's how I knew I had to write this book, because this issue really gets me. I got a lot of feedback from men saying, thank you for seeing me. Thank you for not shaming who I am as a man and shaming masculinity. And this really affected me. This is half of the population are males. And men are facing a lot of problems right now that have gotten a lot of press, especially Richard Reeves wrote a book describing what's going on.

John Tomasi: People describe the war on boys, for example.

Carole Hooven: Yes, yes. And so, and Christina Hoff Sommers, of course, initially. And yeah, she talked about this ages ago, and it's just getting worse. And what I really don't like, I have a 14-year-old son, and it breaks my heart to see young men in particular who are going through adolescence to feel shame about what they're feeling and what they're experiencing. So the denial of biology that is happening now that we're talking about, I think, is extremely damaging. We're telling young boys that they're toxic and that sex is a social construction and what they're feeling is some sort of social construction. No, it's not. It's biological. And when you say it's a social construction and it's damaging, I think this causes young boys to grow up with this sense of not understanding culturally how to express themselves. And that, to me, is a result of biology denial. It's a lack of social support. We're not doing the science that we need to do anymore. And so I want to address that phase of life in some sort of way. And I have a lot of work to do around the cultural part of that. I want to focus on the evolutionary biology of that period.

John Tomasi: And this would be a book.

Carole Hooven: Yes.

John Tomasi: So this would be a book. Do you have a working title?

Carole Hooven: No. If I can squeeze balls in there, I will.

John Tomasi: I want to use that title. I think that might be a good title for you.

Carole Hooven: Yeah.

John Tomasi: We can end on the squeeze in balls. Carole Hooven, thank you so much for being on Heterodox Out Loud.

Carole Hooven: Thank you so much, John. This is a lot of fun. It's been a pleasure.