Nature versus nurture is a question that long troubled students of human behaviour – the chicken-and-egg of the social sciences. The answer, in most cases, is always “a bit of both” and despite the best efforts of social constructivists to insist we are all blank slates when we are born – that our tastes, desires even genders are the products of our environments – it’s clear that we come pre-loaded with nature’s software.
Tens of thousands of years of natural selection have, slowly, imperceptibly, influenced our tastebuds, informed the ways we express friendship and love and our interactions with our communities. In turn, these have shaped the consumer marketplace and the goods and services we buy, whether for status, gratification or creating kinship bonds.
It’s these influences that concern Lebanese-Canadian evolutionary psychologist Gad Saad, professor in the John Molson School of Business at Concordia University, Canada. He is the leading proponent – not to say pioneer – in the field of understanding the relationship between evolution and consumption, which he lays out in his 2011 book, the Consuming Instinct.
Most recently, he published The Parasitic Mind, which examines how radical left-wing concepts haven taken hold on university campuses – and why humans are so receptive to ideas that maybe counterproductive to academia’s need for free inquiry.
The conversation touched on his work, how the space has evolved and what he thinks can be done to stop the spread of bad ideas.
(Source: ArabianBusiness YouTube channel)
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