Why Carole Hooven Wanted to Study Testosterone

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. Can you give me the longer story? The longer story involves chimpanzees, so that's kind of fun. Oh, one of my favorite subjects. But the short story is that I teach at Harvard about hormones. I teach a course, 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 and the way we think and process information. And I love, 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. 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 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 on it, but I also think it's fascinating when I watch the attack on the science of biology, the science of how... 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 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 variance, there's a lot of consistency. And what is causing this? And what is it about male behavior that leads to this and female behavior that leads to that? 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. It's very strange because you see really intelligent people doing it. 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 I agree with most of the goals of the people who are ideologically motivated. We want to reduce human suffering. We want to 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. Okay. 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 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 yields reproductive benefits for males, but not females. And that's what sex hormones do and estrogen 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. All this makes sense. Catch new episodes of the Joe Rogan Experience for free only on Spotify. Watch back catalog JRE videos on Spotify, including clips, easily, seamlessly switch between video and audio experience. On Spotify, you can listen to the JRE in the background while using other apps and can download episodes to save on data costs all for free. Spotify is absolutely free. You don't have to have a premium account to watch new JRE episodes. You just need to search for the JRE on your Spotify app. Go to Spotify now to get this full episode of the Joe Rogan Experience.