Interview with Razib Khan

On genetics, political extremism and how we talk

In the above clip, population genetics expert

Razib Khan

discusses how the rise of illiberalism and intolerance on the political left may be attributable to a redistribution of men and women along the left-right political spectrum.

Men are becoming more conservative. High school boys are now twice as likely to identify as conservative than liberal while high school girls are nearly three times as likely to identify as liberal than conservative.

It’s not just high schoolers either. A Pew Research survey published in 2014 found that across all 50 U.S. states the percentage of liberals who are men is less than half. There were only three exceptions—Missouri and New Jersey, where the distribution was a 50/50 split, and Colorado, where 52% of liberals are men.

Since 2014, much has changed. The culture wars have intensified, wokeness has transformed the American political landscape and free speech supporters have been pushed to the right. Free speech is a traditionally liberal value and, I would argue, the most fundamental one of all. But as noted above, men tend to be more tolerant of a broader ranger of speech. The 2022 College Free Speech Rankings survey—24,511 female students, 18,922 male students and 398 nonbinary students—found that females are more likely to favor censorship for a variety of speech types.

For instance, if a speaker wants to argue that transgender identity is a mental disorder, 85% of female students would oppose that speaker being able to talk on campus, compared to only 58% of male students and 82% of nonbinary students. It’s interesting that female students are even more censorious on this issue than nonbinary students, who are themselves members of the queer community.

If a speaker wants to argue that the 2020 election was stolen, 77% of female students would oppose that speaker being able to talk on campus compared to just 56% of male students. If a speaker wants to argue that abortion should be illegal, 72% of female students would oppose such a speaker compared to 43% of male students.

As Khan explains in the clip above, women are better communicators who generally tend to be higher in neuroticism and agreeableness, two of the Big Five personality traits, and this leads to less tolerance of speech that is considered offensive. This is true among female friend groups as well as in political spheres. On the contrary, men traditionally have higher tolerance for offensive speech and even use it quite aggressively within their own social circles. Most guys can attest to this.

Khan is a Bangladeshi-American writer and expert on population genetics. He received his bachelor’s degree in biochemistry from the University of Oregon and did graduate work at the University of California at Davis. In 2014, Khan made headlines after he sequenced his own son’s genome in utero, making his son the first healthy person to have his entire genome sequenced before being born.

Here’s his website. He also has a show, “Unsupervised Learning,” and here are a few episodes:

• Steven Pinker: The Blank Slate 20+ years later

• Glenn Lowry: four decades in economics

• Colin Wright: Wasps, new atheism and sex

Khan and I also talked about how social media has contributed to the rise of populism, the way that collectivism has overtaken both sides of the political spectrum, how this has impeded our ability to confront important challenges such as the Covid-19 pandemic, our hopes for the future and more. You can watch the full interview (1 hour 8 minutes) below.