87. Heather Heying on What Makes Us Human: Culture, Consciousness, Campfire, and Chesterton’s Fences

Today’s guest is very meaningful to me and probably requires no introduction. Dr. Heather Heying is the reason I know about detransitioners and am doing half the things I’m doing. An evolutionary biologist and animal behaviorist, world traveler, podcast co-host, writer, mentor to many, mother of two, agreeable contrarian, and all-around interesting person, Dr. Heying can easily be considered one of the greatest thinkers of our time.

It was tough to narrow down what to focus on in a conversation with someone so influential, so I selected a few of the recurring themes that form the foundational principles for much of her work. We discuss the concepts of culture and consciousness, and how they shape our understandings of progress and tradition, liberalism and conservatism. 

We delve into the metaphorical idea of Chesterton's fence, which represents the importance of understanding the purpose and value of something before discarding it. And we examine several “Chesterton’s fences” in modern life that have been impacted by what Heather often calls “hyper-novelty.” What do we lose when we stop sitting around a campfire together, telling stories and making music?

Heather Heying is an evolutionary biologist who earned her PhD in Biology from the University of Michigan, has been a visiting Fellow at Princeton University, and was a tenured professor at The Evergreen State College. She has been invited to speak about science, higher ed, the evolution of sex and consciousness, and the culture wars, in venues as varied as the U.S. Department of Justice, the Krishnamurti Institute, Joe Rogan, and Oxford University.

 

Her first book, Antipode, is based on her life in Madagascar while studying the sex lives of poison frogs. Her second book, co-authored with husband Bret Weinstein, is A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life. A New York Times best-seller, the book provides an evolutionary toolkit for living a good and honorable life as a modern ape. She also writes Natural Selections on Substack, the Field Notes column for County Highway, and co-hosts with Bret a popular weekly livestream on the DarkHorse podcast.

Natural Selections blog

DarkHorse Podcast

X @HeatherEHeying

Heather's books are available in my bookshop or via the embedded Amazon affiliate links. Thank you for purchases that support the show!

Bands mentioned:

Blanco White 

Dead Can Dance 

00:00 Start

02:10 Detransitioners

04:46 Detransitioners and cognitive dissonance

07:39 Losing friends, gaining friends

11:10 Consciousness and culture

17:38 Seeking a mix

19:05 New ideas and adaptation

24:39 Chesterton's fence

28:13 Chesterton's breast milk

32:21 The role of fire in our humanity

36:40 Music around the campfire

40:34 Participating in a foreign culture

44:58 Cultural appreciation vs. cultural appropriation

49:05 Online culture and low context communication

52:19 Writing a book

57:39 What is actually real

01:00:23 Human interactions behind barriers

01:04:29 Mentorship and its changing dynamics

01:07:43 Mentorship in the trades

01:11:40 Changing the culture and connection

01:16:24 Cats as pets and toxoplasmosis

01:22:05 The crazy cat lady trope

01:24:38 Endocrine-disrupting chemicals and gender dysphoria

01:30:05 Endocrine disruption in water supply

01:32:21 Fixing exposures and finding answers

01:37:02 Transhumanism and its subsets

01:41:33 Wrap up

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