{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"You Must Be Some Kind of Therapist","title":"87. Heather Heying on What Makes Us Human: Culture, Consciousness, Campfire, and Chesterton’s Fences","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":6111,"description":"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...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/7R2fJL6ksh0-aqhZGIKVghpF0n5-RelfaD139dcIBCQ/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS9zaG93/LzI1NzQ0LzE2NDQy/NzA3NjktYXJ0d29y/ay5qcGc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}