Name: Why Carole Hooven Wanted to Study Testosterone
Uploaded: 2021-06-10T17:33:55.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Why Carole Hooven Wanted to Study Testosterone' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-06-10. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Why Carole Hooven Wanted to Study Testosterone' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-06-10. Transcript available.

The Joe Rogan Experience. What made you want to write about testosterone? What
was
the motivation behind this? So I'll give you the short story first and then
later
I can give you the longer story. The longer story involves chimpanzees so
that's kind of fun. One of my favorite subjects. But the short story is that I
teach at Harvard about hormones. I teach a course behavioral, well it's on
behavioral endocrinology. It's called hormones and behavior. And I've taught
that for a long time now. And I got my PhD at Harvard studying testosterone and
behavior, studying sex differences in the way we think and process information.
And I just love the topic. I love how much understanding testosterone helps me
understand the world, understand men. I'm not a man. I don't really understand
men
or how they work, but understanding this hormone really has helped me a lot.
And
then in teaching about endocrinology and specifically testosterone, I get so
much
feedback from students about how it changes their lives, changes how they
understand themselves personally, how they understand their relationships, how
they
understand the world. And it's empowering for them and it's been empowering for
me.
And so I've just always had this natural intellectual enthusiasm for this topic.
And but I'd say in the
last five years, I felt like the science was coming under attack. And there's
been kind of a program
to dismantle the science of testosterone and how it shapes behavior,
particularly the evolutionary basis of
behavior has kind of come under attack. The idea that there that sex
differences are grounded in biology.
And I know that testosterone is a really important part of that. And there's a
movement to kind of discredit that
science or downplay the importance of biology and specifically testosterone in
our lives and especially in sex differences.
And I'm fascinated by sex differences. And I'm fascinated by how evolution
shapes sex differences across
different species and how it works. And so that's ultimately why I wrote the
book, because I kind of want to
get all the science out there and kind of push back against what I see as an
attack on really good
science. There's nothing wrong with understanding who we are from a biological
point of view.
And I think we should all be open to that and learn as much as we can about who
we are and
how we work. Yeah, I agree with you. But I also think it's fascinating when I
watch the attack on the
science of biology, the science of how if you like, I think that if we were an
objective observer, like
something other than human, and we're watching human beings, we would be really
interested in the sex
differences between the male and the females. And what's why are there, there's
like this real clear
pattern of behavior on both sides. Obviously, there's a spectrum in that
pattern. But depending
upon the levels of hormones and the genetic variants, there's a lot of like
consistency and what is
causing this and what is, you know, what is it about male behavior that leads
to this and female
behavior that leads to that. But then you get into this weird thing, where
ideology has somehow or
another overtaken science with a lot of human beings today. So they're willing
to abandon science,
if it's inconvenient for their ideology. And it's very strange, because you see
really intelligent people
doing this. Yes, yes. Which is where it's really spooky, because they're scared
of being chastised and
attacked on Twitter. They're scared of being canceled. So they're scared of
going against the mainstream,
which is ideologically based instead of scientifically based. That's right. And
I think the fear is that
the science is getting in the way of the ideology. So we I agree with most of
the goals of the people who
are ideologically motivated, we want to reduce human suffering, we want to have
make sure that we have
equal human rights for people who have all kinds of differences. And so I agree
with all that. But I
don't think that if science tells us that some of these differences are
grounded in biology, that means
that a these traits that may be like extreme male aggression, that doesn't mean
that that's immutable. I mean,
we have tons of evidence that it's not immutable. Humans have control over
their behavior. It depends
heavily on the culture. So denying the importance of, say, testosterone in male
aggression, isn't going
to change the way that sort of differences in our natures or the impetus for
males to feel
more than females that they want to be physically aggressive or to respond
aggressively in certain
situations. And I like that you said that there's you implied that there's lots
of overlap in behavior
between males and females and the degree to which that is grounded in biology.
So the point
isn't and I just want to make it really clear at the beginning. It's not that
females are like this and
males are like that in humans or in other species. And especially, you know,
culture plays such a huge
role in how we develop and how we express ourselves. But even apart from
culture, there are differences
on average. So there are some females who are highly physically aggressive and
there are many males who
are really emotional and sensitive and totally peaceful. Can I say that you
just said you tear up
sometimes? I cry all the time. I cry mostly for happy things. Okay. So yeah, no,
and I just cry when I'm
moved or passionate. I cry a lot. And I actually talk about that in the book
because there's a relationship
with testosterone there that we can talk about later, which is really
interesting. But the point is that,
you know, my book T is not about not trying to explain why males are one way
and females are another way,
but why we're different on average, why we have somewhat different natures. And
testosterone is to me the most
powerful way to understand those differences in our natures, you know, from an
evolutionary point of view
and looking at how we as animals, as mammals, try to maximize our reproductive
success, right? And that's so
that's what testosterone does is it helps males maximize basically the number
of offspring they have through
increasing mating opportunities. It doesn't mean that males are only interested
in having tons of sex and tons of sex partners,
but they're definitely more interested in that than females in humans and in
many other species where increasing the number of mates,
you know, yields reproductive benefits for males, but not females. And that's
what sex hormones do and estrogen, you know,
and progesterone do similar things in women, but it doesn't motivate us to
fight aggressively for mates.
Right. Clearly, if we were looking at this again, as an objective observer, we
would see all this that would be without there wouldn't be any debate.
It'd be like, this is fascinating. Well, this is why they've only been around
for a couple hundred thousand years. And for a long time,
they were eaten by jaguars. And so they had to make as many babies as possible
in order to ensure survival of the species.
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