The Listening Tube with Bob Woodley Rocks, Science and Women; the demise of newspapers

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This is The Listening Tube.

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Hello, and thank you for putting your ear to the listening tube. I'm your host, Bob Woodley. On this episode, I'll have a conversation with Professor Mark Devont about rocks, science, and women.

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But first, not the headlines.

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Something we're likely to hear more and more often in America's biggest cities is funny thing happened on the way to the newsstand this morning. I got there and it was gone. The Atlanta Journal Constitution, the largest in the Metro, ceased publishing a print version to ring in the new year. After peddling papers for 157 years, the final edition asked a question: What is the future of local media in Atlanta? Once the world headquarters of CNN, the first 24-hour news channel, a turning point in journalism, Atlanta wonders aloud about the future of journalism. Local journalism, to be specific. While CNN covered the world, the Atlanta Journal Constitution was happy to be Atlanta's hometown newspaper and had plenty of readers to support their efforts. One of my former guests on the listening tube, Ronnie Robbins, author of Hands of Gold, also writes for the AJC. Four months prior to the switch, the publisher was quoted by CBS News at the time as writing, When I arrived in Atlanta, I knew about the AJC's journalistic legacy. What I didn't fully appreciate was how deeply the paper is wrapped up in the fabric of the city. Okay, the obvious question for me is, how can a newspaper publisher not know that? After a brief reflection, I realized it's because he's not a newspaper publisher, but something else entirely. As a result, the Atlanta Journal Constitution is now entirely digital. That saves a lot of money on print costs. As a former pressman of twenty years at places like the Oxnard Press Courier, the Leavenworth Times, the Lewistown Sentinel, and the William Sports Sun Gazette, among others, the cost of printing a newspaper, actually tens of thousands of them, isn't cheap. The cost of blank rolls of newsprint is second only to the cost of the employees' wages. Plus, you have to buy ink and grease and oil and fountain solution and cutting rubbers and all kinds of rollers and cylinders and whatnot to keep the press running, and that's just creating the final product. Plates for the press have to be made, a brand new set for every day. Then there's the matter of putting in the inserts with sales and special offers depending upon the day of the week. People need to sort and bundle and distribute printed newspapers far and wide using fuel and costing time. Newspapers are doing what they can to consolidate production facilities to save money on getting a printed product out the door. But if everybody wants to print a daily paper at the same press room, somebody's going to have to wait. Deadlines have to be altered. Papers need to be trucked from the production facility back to the cities where they'll be distributed. If the press breaks down, entire production runs will be delayed or canceled or transferred to other printing plants. Either way, it's a nightmare for everyone involved, right up to the person at home waiting for their morning paper. When you consider how much money a newspaper saves by not printing it, it makes me wonder why they still charge $100 a year for it. But once again, after brief pondering, it may be because when people look at the paper on their computer or phone, they don't see the advertisements in the same way that they did before. The whole dynamic of newspaper advertising has also changed with the move to digital delivery. Unless the only option is to page through each page as it would have been printed, the advertisements won't have the same impact or value as they once did. Newspapers are losing advertising dollars to digital advertising, but they're not doing their advertisers any favors by using a digital format that readers can peruse without being exposed to the advertising. So instead of being a public service supported by local advertising, digital newspapers will primarily be supported by the readers. What most of us don't realize is that the number of pages in your local newspaper isn't determined by how much news there is, but by how much advertising space has been sold. For example, the publisher might see that six pages worth of advertising has been sold for that day. If two-thirds of every page is news, then six pages of advertising will support an 18-page newspaper that day. By removing the print element, that equation is tossed to the wayside. The struggle digital-only news products will have is the same problem they created for themselves when they first entered the digital landscape. They still haven't figured out how to monetize it. When newspapers first went digital, they cut their own throats by offering it for free. Then they had to backtrack and charge for it. Then they found themselves needing to print fewer and fewer physical papers while still not figuring out how to make money from the digital version. It was a fatal mistake. The Atlanta Journal Constitution is trying to make themselves profitable again while it's still relevant. As for the question of the future of local media in Atlanta, who knows?

SPEAKER_01 6:18

And if that wasn't enough.

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For another American city, the answer to that question is a bit more clear. The Pittsburgh Post Gazette announced recently that they too will end the print version. Granted, they had already cut back the print version to two days a week, Thursday and Sunday, but they didn't stop there. Having just gone through one of the longest labor strikes ever, losing a Supreme Court decision on health insurance coverage for union workers, and losing $350 million over the past 20 years, the owners of the paper announced it would cease publication in May. Not just the print version, but all of it. Much like the late show with Stephen Colbert, it's just gonna disappear. Published since 1786, the demise of the Pittsburgh Post Gazette will leave Pittsburgh the largest U.S. city without a conventional daily newsgathering source of information. Someone or some business or organization will try to fill the void, but it won't be printed, you can be sure of that. We'll see in May if the Pittsburgh Post Gazette has a parting question for its readers. Assuming there's anyone left in the newsroom to write the final headline. There should be, though, and I'll tell you why. I've been through the closure of a newspaper before. The Oxnard Press Courier was in operation for 95 years. I worked there for about five years. It was my first job as a pressman, an occupation I proudly did for 15 years following. One Monday, the publisher calls a meeting for all employees. He announces that Thursday will be our last day at work. Some of us scrambled to find a new job right away. Most of us were too shocked to react very quickly. We were all there on Thursday and Thursday night to write, edit, headline, compose, produce, and print the last edition of the Oxnard Press Courier. But it wasn't like any ordinary night at work. I was pulling double duty in both the composing and press departments. Beer and wine were flowing as we prepared for the final run of the press. A mariachi band played around the office and other departments as we went about our work. Before the press fired up for the final edition, a man in a kilt played Amazing Grace on the bagpipes. It was a goosebump-producing hair on the back of your neck raising experience nobody there will ever forget. The headline of the final edition of the Oxnard Press Courier was Last Rights, spelled W-R-I-T-E-S. I still have a copy of it. It was a compilation of history and thoughts from the reporters and editors. That was in June of 1994. The history of newspapers in America has been fluid since the beginning. The speed of media today is changing the way we consume news and the speed and degree to which we desire it. Newspapers have had a hard time keeping up with the smaller and quicker to adapt independent gatherers of news, and an even harder time trying to monetize what used to be paid for by advertisers and supplemented by subscribers. The new media landscape flips the script on that dynamic. Radio and its consolidation efforts should learn all it can from the mistakes newspapers made that led to the instability of its business model. But that's another story. And you won't find it in your local newspaper.

SPEAKER_01 10:18

Let's go back through the listening tube for this week in history.

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This week in 1724, the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences was founded by Peter the Great and implemented by Senate Decree. It is called the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences for more than 200 years until 1917. Why? What happened in 1917? I'm going to look that up.

SPEAKER_01 10:54

He's gonna look it up. He's really gonna do it.

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You can't handle the truth.

SPEAKER_00 11:06

That's when it became the Russian Academy of Sciences. But it's a good thing they got rid of the St. Petersburg part of the name because in 1924, this week, Petrograd, Russia, is renamed Leningrad in honor of Vladimir Lenin, the guy who read a book on Marx, as documented in the Don McLean song American Pie. So you know it's true. The name was changed for two reasons, really. One, the new communist government wanted to eliminate references to religion. Recognizing a saint by naming a city after him was no longer allowed. Second, the suffix burg isn't Russian-sounding enough, so it was replaced with the term grad, which is derived from the Slavic word for city or town, according to various references. Today, St. Petersburg is once again called St. Petersburg, following the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. It had been called St. Petersburg since 1703, prior to being changed to Petrograd in 1914, which lasted only 10 years, then Leningrad, which lasted until 1991. Stalingrad suffered similar identity crises and is now called Volgograd, if anybody cares. The changing of place names isn't unique to Russia. The city where I grew up once had a different name than it does now. Another place that was once called State Line Nevada is now called Prim. There's some fun stuff to do there. That name change happened in 1996, so it's fairly recent by historical standards. Back in ancient Egypt, a pharaoh would build a city and name it after himself. More recently, if a place name is changed, it's agreed to by the citizens and is often a posthumous honor. Perhaps to recognize a contemporary saint or military leader or somewhere in between. Personally, I wouldn't want a city named after me. Hey, where are you from? Bob. It might sound different depending on where it is. Bob, Bob, or a Bab. Or if it's a place where a lot of sheep live, it could be Bob. I guess if my name wasn't Bob, I would be honored to have a city named after me someday. Even New York City had a different name once. Originally called New Amsterdam, the name was changed when the English took control of the city from the Dutch. Now that New York City is under communist rule, perhaps it will be the next city to undergo a name change.

SPEAKER_02 14:04

Hmm.

SPEAKER_00 14:06

I'm not sure if they'll go with Mom Donigrad or Mom Donny Stan. Or perhaps people will recall the name on the buildings. What was it? Ah, yes, the man who brought peace to the rest of the world while New York City fell to communist ideals that had failed in Leningrad and Stalingrad. Someday, I predict, what is now New York City will be renamed in honor of the man who created unity on a worldwide scale, even when there was none in his hometown. A peacemaker, visionary, and realist who taught the rest of the world how America will use its power to create a better world wherever it can without sacrificing its own interests. And teaching Americans that we have the wherewithal to do so and still be as generous as we want. The only fitting title for a place like that is Trumpestangrad Burr.

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The listening tube will return at the speed of sound. Send email to thelising tube at outlook.com.

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Follow the listening tube at thelisteningtube.com. My guest today is a professor at the University of South Florida. Dr. Mark DeFont has spent a lifetime studying the planet and half of that examining the people on it. He's a man of science, author of Voyage of Discovery from the Big Bang to the Ice Age. But science isn't just about rocks in space, or even rocks at all. You've expanded your disciplines quite a bit, from the solid science of geology to the more fluid subject matter of psychology and social research. And I want to talk to you about that. But first, I want to ask you about the type of volcanic rock that you discovered called Adachite.

SPEAKER_03 16:11

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 16:11

In layman's terms, if you can, what makes Adachite different from the other rocks around it?

SPEAKER_03 16:19

Well, it's a great question. I I haven't gotten that question very often. Um thanks for doing your research. Uh uhite is uh is a very unique rock in modern volcanoes. It has a chemical characteristic which looks like it was derived from oceanic crust. And in subduction zones where I work, where one plate's going down underneath another, the ocean floor is being taken down below the continental crust. Usually the only place you have basalts in continent in oceanic crust is when the slab's going down. So I suggested that adakite was potentially a slab melt. It's also true that that that matches with the continental crust. If you go back in time and look at at crustarock exposed, it's very old, 2 billion, 3 billion years old, and it has the same chemical characteristics as ADACite. So we're suggesting that Adachite is a modern uh example of what happened on Earth a long time ago. Maybe it may be the the an example of how ocean or how continental crust is formed in these large areas uh of what we call the cratons. Too technical, I'm sorry if I am.

SPEAKER_00 17:47

And why did you name it Atakite?

SPEAKER_03 17:49

It was the rock type was first discovered in Adak Island in Alaska. And so we went with that.

SPEAKER_00 17:57

One more question about your geology studies. I'd like to know what it was like working in the former Soviet Union as part of a team representing the National Science Foundation in cooperation with the former St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences.

SPEAKER_03 18:15

I saw a paper done, it was in an obscure Russian journal, actually, uh, on talking about ADACHITES in Kamchatka, Russia. Well, this is when the Soviet Union existed, and it was very hard to communicate. I had to send telegrams, and then I got telegrams back. It was the only way we could communicate. It took me about a month to get a response. But uh basically the the idea was, and this was during perestroika, where the Soviet Union was beginning to open up a little bit. So they agreed that we would submit a joint proposal, try to get funding from NSF, and the Soviets would then furnish the field vehicles and work in the field. So we got funded, and in 1990, I think it was 1991, we took off and went to the Kamchatka in the Soviet Union. No planes flew in directly, so I had to go all the way to Moscow and then fly out on Aeroflot, which wow, you that was an experience in itself. Uh Aeroflot that came by with, mind you, this is an eight or nine-hour flight. We got a cookie and we got uh a boiled egg and tea on the way out. That was our dinner, so it kind of tells you how uh the Soviet system worked. Wow. Or didn't work.

SPEAKER_00 19:36

You've since uh begun studying and writing about social issues, specifically psychology and gender research.

SPEAKER_03 19:46

Right.

SPEAKER_00 19:47

What caught your attention enough to divert you down that path?

SPEAKER_03 19:52

I used to teach an honors, science honors course in the 1990s at USF. Got a lot of great students in the course, and I had read a book uh in about 1994 called The Moral Animal by Robert Wright. And uh it went into evolutionary psychology, and it was the first time I was exposed to evolutionary psychology. And I got excited because it explained a lot of the things that I'd always been confused about. Why, for example, do men have less discrimination on having sex than women do? Women tend in all cultures to be very reluctant to have sex. So those were uh, you know, kind of curiosities, and evolutionary psychology seemed to be explaining the way we behaved. So I got so interested in it that I started reading everything I could get my hands on and over the last 20, 25 years and and finally began to develop the confidence to be able to write some papers in that field. Most recently uh I found that uh the that feminists were denying evolutionary psychology. And as far as I could tell, the only reason they were denying it was because it didn't fit into their ideology, which doesn't seem to me to be something we want on university campuses if you're trying to develop an ideology and denying science in the process. I thought it it wasn't a good thing. So I I did a paper on that, and I've done some papers on the patriarchy and also the gender pay gap, which is used by feminists to suggest that you know men are trying to uh suppress women, and I'm not finding that at all. Uh where patriarchy has probably developed, if there is such a thing, it's probably developed uh from uh our natural evolution in hunter gatherer society, and uh not due to a bunch of men trying to suppress women. In fact, women women choose men for various reasons, and men compete with each other uh for women. So It it uh it would be very unusual to see men trying to, you know, oppress women. And I see things like that and I I get upset because I think a lot of young men uh believe this nonsense and uh are are being uh impacted uh badly by it. So I'm speaking out about it.

SPEAKER_00 22:19

Is there a gender pay gap?

SPEAKER_03 22:21

There is a gender pay gap. Uh it is it is real, but it's not due to the suppression of men, and and I'm not doing this research. I went back and looked at uh at all of the economic journals uh where people, mostly women, were publishing on the gender pay gap. And those women, one of them being a Nobel Prize laureate at Harvard, uh uh Claudia Golden, and they're all showing that the gender pay gap is uh due to choices made by women. Primarily, women are are uh less uh risk adverse than they they are risk-adverse compared to men. So uh they don't go into jobs where they're expected to work 80 hours a week, or if they do, they certainly tend not to want to work like that. So their their jobs are impacted, their salaries are impacted. Also, they they take off time to raise children, or you know, not surprisingly. And so I don't see uh any evidence. I I'm sure there's discrimination, but on a massive scale, no, I don't I don't think so. I don't see any evidence for that. Neither do the uh the female uh economists.

SPEAKER_00 23:30

One of my goals in life was to have a wife who makes more money than me. Is is that sexist, or or is that becoming maybe seen more and more often?

SPEAKER_03 23:44

Well, uh no, actually, uh there are a lot of women out there that are making more money than men now with the opening, but it's caused some problems. For example, women, because I haven't gotten into evolutionary psychology much with you, but because in uh hunter-gatherer society, men were the resource. Uh they they were basically chosen by women on how much they could supply resource. Remember, when a baby is born, it is amazingly helpless. So it's not surprising that among humans, this is kind of rare in the animal kingdom. So, women, when they had these helpless babies, they sought help uh in the raising of the baby. And as a consequence, um, they chose men that were able to supply resources. And so we kind of have leftover hunter-gatherer society mentality because we haven't been able to, uh, it's been such a short time since civilization has existed that uh you know our genes haven't changed due to selection by men or women. So I think what we're seeing here is that you get women still looking for men that can supply resources. And women tend to uh in marriages, we find that men who don't make more than their women or then than their wives tend to have problems in marriage. Now, maybe your wife understands completely, uh, you know, and and accepts that, and that's great, but in a lot of marriages it causes problems. One of the one of the highest reasons for divorce now is due to the fact that the women's women's making more money. And women tend not to, when they are making money, they tend not to choose, you know, garbage collectors as husbands. They tend to want men that are more successful than they are. There are obviously uh statistical differences out there. There are men now that are raising children while women work. So everything's a go in our society today.

SPEAKER_00 25:50

When you say that the the marriages tend to break up more often because the woman makes more money than the man, is that because of this the the woman suddenly realizes that she has a new independence that she never anticipated having and wants to take advantage of that? Or uh does she feel that maybe the man is holding her back?

SPEAKER_03 26:13

I don't know enough about this field to tell you, so I'm just gonna admit my ignorance on it. Um, I would suspect um that there's a lot of things involved in that. Okay. Um, that's fine.

SPEAKER_00 26:26

Um, the Supreme Court in the United States recently heard arguments about gender and its relationship to athletic competition. There seems to be a small but significant portion of the population that has an unconventional opinion about it. And by that I mean having uh males compete against females in in sports competitions. Are they right or have they misinterpreted the science, or are they simply ignoring the science altogether?

SPEAKER_03 27:00

Well, I have a tendency to believe that if a man's saying he's a woman, then I think they're kind of ignoring the biology at some extent, uh, the science. Uh but I I swear we live in a crazy world right now. I mean, I'm maybe I'm just too old, but the idea that uh a person can claim they're a man or claim, I'm sorry, that they're a woman, and then uh expect to compete against women seems like an idea, you know, just out of beyond reality. Uh however, there's no doubt in my mind, and I've read a great deal of literature on this, that men have huge advantages over women physically. In fact, we're our our skin color is slightly darker because we carry so much more blood than women for our muscles. So there's all kinds of evidence uh to make my point that men have physical advantages over women. And most people understand this completely from a personal standpoint and what I know about the science. I just can't understand why there are men that want to compete with women. This seems very unfair to women, in my opinion. Interestingly enough, if you look at the feminist take on this, they're not saying much about this.

SPEAKER_00 28:16

No, you we don't hear a peep out of them.

SPEAKER_03 28:19

And so uh you would think they'd be defending uh women's sports, but they're not. And I think that's because they want to push the idea that men and women are equal. And they kind of ignore or brush over the physical differences between men and women. But as an evolutionary psychologist, I'm saying, hey, there are all kinds of not only physical, but mental and emotional differences between men and women. And this gets in, this opens up the whole field of, you know, uh the American Psychological Association has attempted to say that we're all socially constructed. We're born with blank slates, we come into the world, and culture then makes us the way we are. And this is just unbelievably wrong uh from from the scientist uh from a scientific aspect. I a whole field uh in the social sciences has been radically impacted by this. So it's got me pulling my hair out, and they're siding now with the feminists. So it goes to show you how how powerful the feminist movement is in this country. And those psychologists are saying that there's such things as toxic masculinity, and we have to, on in therapy, we have to uh treat men that are, you know, if you withhold your emotions or you're not expressing yourself in the way women think you should express yourself, then you must be a toxic masculine man. And I think we're hurting a lot of boys and men that seek therapy because we've got this whole idea wrong. Social construction doesn't impact us that way. Evolutionary psychology says, look, uh, we have a lot of differences between men and women, mental and emotional, not just physical.

SPEAKER_00 30:01

I think we but we would both agree that our environment certainly plays a major role in the way we change and evolve as a as an individual, but certainly the building blocks that we began with uh are aren't changeable.

SPEAKER_03 30:17

Well, Bob, if I could just address that for a minute, because I think you're you're absolutely 100% right. I mean, no one that's an evolutionary psychologist says culture doesn't impact us. I mean, just look at money. Money is socially constructed, it doesn't have any value unless we accept the value of it as a society. So, sure, we're impacted by social constructionism. There are certain things that are socially constructed, money being one of them. Our humans, very little, I think. Now, I always bring up to my students that there have been some cases where children, you know, have been put in a closet and raised that way, throwing food into them, but don't get any impact with other adults. They're called feral children. They're very rare, as you might imagine, uh, but they grow up to be, you know, basically animals and are very, very hard uh to get back to any semblance of normal normalcy, even after psychologists work with them. I believe culture is important, and so do evolutionary psychologists. Don't deny that at all.

SPEAKER_00 31:22

When we were kids, we always trusted the science. We trusted the vaccinations, we trusted our teachers when they taught us science, even if we didn't understand it. How has the use of science in forming public policy or public opinion become a tool?

SPEAKER_03 31:43

Well, uh I think we're failing to a certain extent because people who are scientists are working in laboratories. I mean, good lord, I I was totally unaware of what was going on in feminist studies for a long time until you know I started seeing criticism of evolutionary psychology and began to start questioning what the heck's going on here. Yeah, I would agree with you. It used to be science had a pretty strong position in society, but then we have had this movement in the social sciences and social sociology where we started drifting towards relativism, where people were teaching their students that everything was relative, that science didn't have a unique position on what was taking place. And I've had students come in and say, well, you know, gosh, science, you know, is just the creation myth of uh, you know, of Western culture. And of course, I pull my hair out when I hear things like that, because I can take you out and I can tell you if I if I do, for example, gravity, I can show you that there is a physical reality to gravity. I wouldn't be flying in planes if I thought the gravity could change wherever the plane flew. And I think most people accept that, but there are people out there that are pushing this relativism, which is grass, you know, a lot of students have kind of latched onto that, and and uh I think wrongly so. So we we may have to take certain steps as scientists, and this is one of the reasons I got involved in writing some of this evolutionary psychology stuff because relativists were being taken seriously.

SPEAKER_00 33:26

No, I I think inherently we want to trust the science. That's why we have scientists. I understand that science also covers a lot of territory. Are there types of sciences that may not be seeking the truth?

SPEAKER_03 33:43

Um I I used to believe that there wasn't, but um I'm not so sure. There are some areas where ideology seems to have taken over. For example, in climate science. Um I've done a lot of work looking at the uh at the literature in climate, and and I'm really inclined uh to believe that we're being misled. That I think it may be the interpretation of the science rather than scientists, you know, uh trying to mislead the public. But I think when people say something about the climate, oftentimes that's misinterpreted or it's extrapolated to, oh my gosh, we should be in a panic over this. And uh that disturbs me a great deal. We we have taken some crazy actions, like for example, we're the number one producer of oil and gas in the world, and yet the country wants to stop using oil, or at least a certain segment of the company or the country wants to stop using oil and gas and uh potentially destroy our economy by doing that. I mean, Biden wanted to get rid of oil completely. And you know, if you've got something to go to, that might not be a bad idea, but from all I can tell, um solar and wind, uh, first of all, wind is very destructive, it's killing millions of birds. And solar, you can't possibly use solar because you can't store the energy that builds up during the day for nighttime use, at least uh not economically. Uh and where are we going to get you know all of the infrastructure to support if everybody went from gas-powered vehicles to you know electric vehicles? We, you know, we have to charge those batteries, and we certainly couldn't do it with the infrastructure we have now. And there was no effort by the Biden administration to attempt to, and I don't mean to get political here, but there seemed to be an effort to get us to use electric vehicles, but there wasn't the infrastructure for it yet. So there's a real problems there. And what is science responsible for any of that? Well, I don't know. You know, I think I think there's some truth to uh scientists making sure they get funding and therefore saying things that will get them funding. So maybe we have kind of the politics driving the science rather than the science driving the politics now.

SPEAKER_00 36:15

Now, as a geologist, I'm sure through your years of work you have seen physical evidence of the way the earth's climate has changed over the eons. Are you concerned about where our climate is heading now?

SPEAKER_03 36:34

Just a flag here. I you I spent three years of my life working in the oil industry, uh, a couple years with Shell Oil, another year with Slumberjay. Um, and I but I don't think I'm biased by that experience. So I just feel like I have a little bit of background um in it. I'm cautious here. I've written a lot about the climate. Uh I have a paper coming out uh in Skeptic where I talk about how we've been constantly bombarded with these uh scenarios of the end of the world is coming. And I what I do is I document all in this article, I document all those cases of where people were saying the sky is falling, the sky's falling, and then it turns out the sky's not falling. So I'm really dubious now, and it's my nature to be skeptical, but I'm really dubious about some of the things that people are saying, like you know, the end of the world by 2100. And the idea that we would uh threaten our economy based on projections used of uh these uh supercomputers seems insane to me. I uh supercomputers have trouble uh predicting the past, much less the future.

SPEAKER_00 37:45

Science is often used to advance a policy agenda in the form of statistics. First, do you consider statistics to be a science?

SPEAKER_03 38:00

I never thought about it. Um I I can s I use a lot of statistics. I I consider it a way to enhance my science so that I can get people who are scientifically inclined to understand what the range is and how much I can say about something statistically. So when I'm out sampling volcanic rocks on volcanoes and I bring them back and I analyze the geochemistry, I want to make uh sure that scientists understand how much variability there is in each one of those analyses. And I can do that through statistics. I can verify then whether I'm getting good data or bad data because we use blanks, uh, we use standards, and we can compare our data to that. And there are other ways of using statistics too. So I don't know whether I would call it a science or not. I don't want to get statisticians mad at me. But uh I I certainly do use statistics, and I I find that it's immensely uh helpful for supporting data with with uh mathematics.

SPEAKER_00 39:06

Well, see, that's why I asked, because uh statistics are probably the one portion uh of the the science and the information that we have that can be easily manipulated. You can use statistics to pretty much make them say anything you want. So my question is is the science being manipulated or just the way the minutiae is presented to us?

SPEAKER_03 39:34

That's a great question. And I uh I think um from my experience, what I see with the feminist movement isn't so much their mis um well, misusing statistics, it's more or less misusing the data. For example, the feminists have been very powerful in their movement that says, oh, the gender pay gap is uh discrimination by men and suppression by men to subjugate women. And um so I can't tell you how many times I heard Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris say that uh during their runs for presidency. So um that's a manipulation. It's not a manipulation using statistics, it's a manipulation of data. Uh yes, we have a gender pay gap, but does it mean that men are suppressing women? No, it doesn't. And and even the feminists or the female economists are telling us that it doesn't. So I think that yes, statistics can be uh misleading, they can they can be misrepresented. Uh, and I think sometimes we need math people to uh interpret things correctly for us, or scientists that are steeped in statistics.

SPEAKER_00 40:52

Mark, I love women. I don't apologize for that. I love the way they look, the way they laugh, the way just all of it. Equal to my admiration for them is my respect of them. I just want to point that out. Now, you say there's a difference between sexual attraction and psychological objectification. And now that you've pointed it out, I'm not sure where I fall on that scale. Can you help me narrow it down?

SPEAKER_03 41:27

Yeah, it's a great question. By the way, you're very easy to talk to. Good questions. Um I I've got a wife, I've got a sister, I had a mother, I've got a daughter who's wonderful. I love women also. Um, always loved women. But I don't like women who misrepresent science. And that's what this is about. This is not an attack on women, it's an attack on the misuse of science. And I'm ultimately a scientist. I'm ultimately looking at the data and saying we have to miss we have to understand the data correctly, no matter where it takes us. So let's get back to your uh your your great point. If you go back and you and you look at evolutionary psychology, the question is, what are men attracted to in women? And the overwhelming if you look at it across culture, and there's been you know studies that have 60,000 people from all over the world um asking questions of men and women, and we find that virtually, well, all cultures get the same answer from males, and that is that men are looking for beauty in women. That's another their number one characteristic. And so what's what's that substituting for? Is there anything or men just shallow looking for something called beauty? Well, first of all, beauty tends to be uh the same across cultures. So if I find a woman attractive in Bali, uh, for example, or in the Philippines or Russia, uh probably the men living in those cultures will also find that woman beautiful, or they'll find a woman beautiful in our culture the same way I would. So we know then that beauty crosses culture, so it's not probably a cultural phenomenon. And if you look at beauty uh from that aspect, then you have to start asking, well, what does beauty then represent? What are men really uh choosing for here when they use beauty? And there's been a lot of research on this, and it shows overwhelmingly that beauty is a substitute for health and youth. So, what are men really looking for? They're really looking for women that are young and healthy. That's all. And in fact, uh beauty tends to be an average uh, not supermodels, but an average of most women. So we find uh women to be beautiful that that are more average in the society. There's selection reasons for that because men are not trying to choose people on the edges uh of the bell curve, they're trying to Choose women in that middle range, but less chance of them being unhealthy, less chance of them being outliers. And of course, men, because of their choosing uh health and youth, uh they also can have more babies. We forget that women in in hunter-gatherer societies were basically either lactating or raising children, uh, having children. Uh, so uh it was very important uh when when we were selecting women to make sure that women uh could have lots of babies so they pass on uh genes uh for both the woman and the man. So that's been a misinterpreted today. Uh by the way, women are looking for something that's that they don't look at uh at you know beauty in men the way men look at beauty. But that doesn't mean they're not looking for something, and they are. And what is it? We talked about it later. Virtually every cult, well, all cultures, I mean, women uh say that they're looking for men uh with either resources or the ability to obtain high amounts of resources. So uh there again is a huge difference between what men and women stand for or what they're looking for. And we don't criticize very much. I mean, we I guess we do maybe, um, if we say a woman is out for a man's money. Uh there's a lot of snickering and jokes made about that. But I mean, I've I find it kind of, oh, this is a great understanding. I know why women tend to be out looking for men with resources. They want help in raising uh their children, and that's a good way uh to make sure that a man will we call it a male parental investment where a man is investing in the child. So we're not objectifying women when we say, you know, gee, we want a woman uh that has beauty and has youth, or health is really the way to say it. Uh we're really looking subconsciously for women that have good health and youth. And not such a bad thing to look for. A lot of a lot of evidence supporting that, by the way, uh, from biology.

SPEAKER_00 46:07

Okay. Well, I I'm still not sure where I stand on the scale, but I I'm I'm absolutely positive I'm a heterosexual. Me too. Mr. DeFont, thank you so much for spending some time with me in the listening tube today. I do really appreciate it. I I enjoyed the conversation. I did too. Great questions. You can learn more about Dr. Mark Defunt at markdefont.com. That's M-A-R-C D-E-F-A-N-T.com. Thanks again to Mark for spending some time in the listening tube. The listening tube is written and produced by yours truly, copyright 2026. Shout out to some new places checking in. Minneapolis, Minnesota, College Grove, Tennessee, and Hackney. Thank you for putting your ear to the listening tube. Follow the listening tube and comment at thelistening tube dot com. I'm your host, Bob Woodley. It's the worst thing to happen to old people. For thou add infinitum.